The Libyan Bedlam: General Hifter, the CIA and the Unfinished Coup
25 February 2014
By Ramzy Baroud
On Friday, Feb 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their
prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. 19 of them were
eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in
clashes with the guards. It was just another daily
episode highlighting the utter chaos which has
engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi
in 2011.
Much of this is often reported with cliché
explanations as in the country's ‘security vacuum', or
Libya's lack of a true national identity. Indeed,
tribe and region seem to supersede any other
affiliation, but it is hardly that simple.
On that same Friday, Feb 14, Maj. Gen. Khalifa Hifter
announced a coup in Libya. "The national command of
the Libyan Army is declaring a movement for a new road
map" (to rescue the country), Hifter declared through
a video post. Oddly enough, little followed by way of
a major military deployment in any part of the
country. The country's Prime Minister Ali Zeidan
described the attempted coup as "ridiculous".
Others in the military called it a "lie." One of those
who attended a meeting with Hifter prior to the
announcement told Al Jazeera that they simply
attempted to enforce the national agenda of bringing
order, not staging a coup.
Hifter's efforts were a farce. It generated nothing
but more attention to Libya's fractious reality,
following NATO's war, branded a humanitarian
intervention to prevent imminent massacres in Benghazi
and elsewhere. "Libya is stable," Zeidan told Reuters.
"(The parliament) is doing its work, and so is the
government."
But Zedian is not correct. His assessment is a clear
contradiction to reality, where hundreds of militias
rule the country with an iron fist. In fact, the prime
minister was himself kidnapped by one militia last
October. Hours later, he was released by another
militia. Although both, like the rest of the militias,
are operating outside government confines, many are
directly or loosely affiliated with government
officials. In Libya, to have sway over a militia is to
have influence over local, regional or national
agendas. Unfortunate as it may be, this is the ‘new
Libya.'
Some will find most convenient ways to explain the
chaos: ‘East Libya is inherently unruly', some would
say; ‘it took a strong leader like Ghaddafi to
maintain the national cohesion of a country made of
tribes, not citizens,' others would opine. But the
truth is oftentimes inconvenient and requires more
than mere platitudes.
Libya is in a state of chaos, not because of some
intrinsic tendency to shun order. Libyans, like people
all over the world, seek security and stability in
their lives. However, other parties, Arab and western,
are desperate to ensure that the ‘new Libya' is
consistent with their own interests, even if such
interests are obtained at the expense of millions of
people.
The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick reported on the
coup from Cairo. In his report, "In Libya, a Coup. Or
Perhaps Not," he drew similarities between Libya and
Egypt; in the case of Egypt, the military succeeded in
consolidating its powers starting on July 3, whereas
in Libya a strong military institution never existed
in the first place, even during Ghaddafi's rule. In
order for Hifter to stage a coup, he would need to
rely on more than a weak and splintered military.
Nonetheless, it is quite interesting that the NYT
chose to place Hifter's ‘ridiculous' coup within an
Egyptian context, while there is a more immediate and
far more relevant context at hand, one of which the
newspaper and its veteran correspondents should know
very well. It is no secret that Hifter has had strong
backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
for nearly three decades.
The man has been branded and rebranded throughout his
colorful and sometimes mysterious history more times
than one can summarize in a single article. He fought
as an officer in the Chadian-Libyan conflict, and was
captured alongside his entire unit of 600 men. During
his time in prison, Chad experienced a regime change
(both regimes were backed by French and US
intelligence) and Hifter and his men were released per
US request to another African country, then a third.
While some chose to return home, others knew well what
would await them in Libya, for reasons explained by
the Times on May 17, 1991.
"For two years, United States officials have been
shopping around for a home for about 350 Libyan
soldiers who cannot return to their country because
American intelligence officials had mobilized them
into a commando force to overthrow Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader," NYT reported. "Now,
the Administration has given up trying to find another
country that will accept the Libyans and has decided
to bring them to the United States."
Hifter was then relocated to a Virginia suburb in the
early 1990's and settled there. The news is murky
about his exact activities living near Washington
D.C., except for his ties to Libyan opposition forces,
which of course, operated within a US agenda.
In his thorough report, published in the Business
Insider, Russ Baker traced much of Hifter's activities
since his split from Ghaddafi and adoption by the CIA.
"A Congressional Research Service report of December
1996 named Hifter as the head of the NFSL's military
wing, the Libyan National Army. After he joined the
exile group, the CRS report added, Hifter began
‘preparing an army to march on Libya'. The NFSL, the
CSR said, is in exile ‘with many of its members in the
United States."
It took nearly 15 years for Hifter to march on Libya.
It also took a massive war that was purported to
support a popular uprising. Hifter, as Baker
described, is the Libyan equivalent of Iraq's Ahmed
Chalabi, a discredited figure with strong allies in
Washington D.C. Chalabi was sent to post-Saddam Iraq
to lead the ‘democratization' process. Instead, he
helped set the stage of the calamity underway in that
Arab country.
It is no wonder why Hifter's return was a major source
of controversy. Since the news of his CIA affiliation
was no big secret, his return to Libya to join the
rebels in March caused much confusion. Almost
immediately, he was announced by a military spokesman
as the rebels' new commander, only for the
announcement to be dismissed by the National
Transitional Council as false. The NTC was largely a
composition of mysterious characters that had little
presence within Libya's national consciousness. Hifter
found himself as the third man in the military ladder,
which he accepted but apparently grudgingly so.
Despite the coup failure, Libya will subsist on
uncertainty. Arab and Western media speak of illegal
shipments of weapons arriving into various Libyan
airports. The militias are growing in size. The
central government is growing irrelevant. Jail breaks
are reported regularly. And Libyans find safety in
holding on tighter to their tribal and clan
affiliations. What future awaits Libya is hard to
predict, but with western and Arab intelligence
fingerprints found all over the Libyan bedlam, the
future is uninviting.
- Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated
columnist, a media consultant and the editor of
PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father
Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto
Press, London).
©
EsinIslam.Com
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