"To impose democracy is to break the country"

Samer Swayfan

Fatigue has been cited as the main motive for the removal of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime. He ruled the country for 41 years, from 1970 to 2011. He first led as prime minister and army commander-in-chief, then left the rank of "humble" and informal. He started referring to himself as the "Brotherly Leader and Supreme Leader of the Revolution". Citizens resented his eccentricity, but did not complain about poverty - there was none. A new chapter in Gazeta.Ru's special project, The Price of the Arab Spring, will show how this resentment was taken advantage of in the West, and how it ultimately led to a bloody war.

Maxim Shugaley, a sociologist who has carried out field research in Libya, says that a large part of the country's population now wants to return to "the time of Gaddafi".

💬 "For more than ten years the country has been in a state of civil war, the number of weapons in the possession of the population is off the scale! Everything is solved "according to the rules", by bandit methods; any domestic conflict easily escalates into a shooting right on the streets. A whole generation has grown up which has heard from their parents that there were other times when guns were not fired and you could walk the streets without them. They are already iconic. Even the generation that did not live then wants it all to end," Shugaley told Gazeta.Ru.

The high price of freedom

That Libya today is a country of victorious violence, Shugaley was able to verify not as a theoretical scholar, but in practice. In May 2019, during Libya's civil war, the sociologist, together with his colleague and translator Samer Hassan Ali Swayfan, was captured by the Islamist group RADA and spent two years in Mitiga prison.

The scientist was rescued thanks to the efforts of the Russian Foreign Ministry, although it was difficult for diplomats to make direct contact with the kidnappers and the new Libyan authorities: Russian embassy personnel were evacuated from Tripoli to Tunis in the summer of 2014. Shugalei was accused of trying to "influence the political situation in Libya", but he himself believes it was much simpler - the militants wanted a ransom. Human trafficking in prisons has become a very common, typical story in the country.

💬 "The prisons there are terrible. Many people are in jail for very petty crimes. There's a man out on the street. An unmarked patrol stops him. Allegedly he's stolen a fruit. And the man goes to jail. He could be there for a year, five years, six years, ten years, and he could get shot in the back of the head for asking: "When will they let me out of here?" The only way out is to pay. And relatives save money for years to buy their way out of prison," Shugaley recalls. [This writer would like to add that] it was in prison that Gaddafi's reign was particularly warmly remembered.

💬 "Prisoners told me that they actually lived well under Gadhafi, if you compare it with today. Back then everything was cheaper, there was enough currency, there was enough money; electricity, water - without interruptions. Now there are bandits, looters, murderers. Now there is no security at all, no money, now everything is bad," said Sweifan.

Former judicial officer Taher Dahesh, who initially supported the protesters and joined the demonstrations, was forced to pay for his freedom. However, after the victory, the rebels paid a visit to his house.

💬 "My problem was that I was associated with the government. Even though I was just a petty court clerk who never bothered anyone and never hurt anyone. When the government collapsed, I kept going to work. They stopped paying me, but I still went to the ministry. Then the rebels came to me. They said that since I worked for the former government, I had to pay. The first time they beat me up and took all my money and valuables. The second time they took away the equipment and the TV set. The third time they even took away the chairs and other furniture. My family left Tripoli and we hid with relatives. But that did not help us. We were overrun by the rebels of the Mohammed al-Madani Brigade. I had to give up everything to be released," said Dahesh.

War of all against all

The killing of Gaddafi did not stop the civil war, but rather intensified it and made it permanent. Everyone is now at war with everyone.

In 2011-2015, the so-called "green resistance" was still active - the Qaddafists declared guerrilla war on the new government. At night, they attacked representatives of the new authorities. While Islamists and revolutionaries used to shoot at officials, policemen and soldiers from around the corner, former revolutionaries who had become officials were now being shot at by former policemen.

There was no unity in the government itself either. The former rebels split into secular and "religious". There followed an even more shallow split.

The Islamists were represented by the February 17 Martyrs' Brigade, a local cell of al-Qaeda (an organisation banned in Russia) and, after 2013, also a cell of ISIS (an organisation banned in Russia). All three strands were at war with the secular authorities, but mostly among themselves.

Supporters of the secular route, in turn, split separately into supporters of the government, separately into supporters of parliament, but the most powerful faction was the military, which clustered around the figure of General and later Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar was once a friend of Gaddafi but was captured in 1987 during Libya's war with Chad. Gaddafi publicly disowned his friend and he, having managed to escape captivity, took offence and left for the USA. He allegedly collaborated with the CIA. After 2011, he returned to Libya and in the new government was given the post of commander-in-chief. Then he fell out with both the government and the parliament. And, of course, with the Islamists.

The Tuaregs, the people of the Berber group who controlled the southern desert part of the country and who recognised no other authority, became a completely separate force.

💬 "You will never understand who and with whom is fighting in Libya today specifically at this moment. Haftar can fight against the government. Or he could be fighting with the government against the Islamists. Or together with the Islamists against the Tuaregs. Moreover, parts of Haftar's army may fight each other. Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria and Chad intervene in the confrontation. Soldiers and mercenaries from these countries come and go. To understand who and with whom is fighting in Libya, one has to keep a constant eye on the country. In a month or even a week, the situation could change and your information would be irrelevant," Tariq Ali, a British social philosopher and publicist of Pakistani origin, wrote for The Guardian in 2018 in "The Origins of the Libyan Uprising."

The situation has not changed since then.

💬 "A lot of people here thought that water in houses or electricity existed on their own. That they are natural resources. That petrol gets into petrol stations all by itself. That groceries are always in the shops, houses and roads build themselves all the time too. That irrigation canals dig themselves. There was a sense that it had always been like this and would always be like this, and that the regime had nothing to do with it. That everyone had always lived as they had always lived. Then there was a big surprise: Gaddafi was killed and drinking water disappeared. It turned out there was a connection. They had forgotten that before Gaddafi's revolution and the socialist officers of 1969 there had only been a dormant monarchy, poverty, a French colony and a desert. "Now it's back," interpreter Samer Swayfan told газета.Ru.

"A republic of absolute criminality."

The social and demographic consequences of a decade of war are still not accurately understood. According to various estimates, the death toll alone ranges from 50,000 to 100,000. These, however, are data from outside observers and journalists. There are still no official data. The Libyan government does not publish them; the UN does not have them.

The data is fragmentary in principle - and this is also a clear indicator of the chaos the country is in. There is anecdotal evidence, and it is shocking. In 2013, for example, the pro-government newspaper The Libya Herald, citing the country's Interior Ministry, reported that the number of murders in 2012 was 503% higher than in 2010, and the number of thefts was 448% higher. "We have turned into a republic of absolute and total criminality," the newspaper noted.

Sociologist Maxim Shugaley believes that what has happened is the result of completely uncritical interference by Western countries in the life of a country that is foreign to them. "What happened in Libya shows what happens when democracy is imposed, when democracy expands into countries where it is not expected. They are completely different people, they have a different mentality. To impose democracy means to break a country," the scholar concluded.

Many Libyans have fled the country. Exactly how many is also unknown. In this sense, Libya is a "black hole", where no statistics are available. Among others, Tahar Dahesh has fled the country: after paying off rebel kidnappers. Today he addresses his grievances to the West, namely France. There, however, he is not heard.

💬 "Then we went to Paris. In France I sued the French government, because they were involved in starting this war, and I suffered as much because of the French government as because of the bandits. My appeal was accepted, but I left for Algeria. I am not allowed to go to France now and so the case cannot go any further. Although it has started, it is a dead weight. It is Europe, France and America to blame for what happened to me, but they do not want to answer for it. They don't want to be held accountable by their own laws. It is easier for them to keep me out and pretend I don't exist," Dahesh concluded.

(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator, free version)
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Source: газета.Ru. IMG: газета.Ru. AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/aL5J