Libya -The Intractable Phantom Sate - An Unremitting Foreign Prying in the Middle East -Super Power & Arab Gentry Meddling in a Ghost nation - RL Vol XIII No 512 MMXIX (original) (raw)

2019, Respublica Litereria

In December 2010, a street vendor of fruits barely making a living to support his family attempted suicide by setting fire to himself in public leading to a chain of cause and effect initially known as the Arab Spring, but more correctly can be called an Arab Tsunami. It swept off power autocrats in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA). An erstwhile prosperous state, bombed to oblivion by the West, Libya today is a phantom state of toxic fanatics and clan enclaves. This brings forth the following questions as to the motives of the West. Does democracy enter civil uprisings in MENA, parachuted as an external ideology, constructing and deploying its concepts in sterile abstraction from the immediacies of indigenous traditions, beliefs and values? Does the West's invasion signify change in terms of the transformation of the immediate stuff of politics into a new kind of political activity-an activity mediated and guided by objective and critical democratic standards, rules and principles? Gaddafi built a collectivist state where all basic needs were met by the state; nevertheless, these were at a cost: no meaningful political rights. 'The Political Lustration Law, which prevented anyone with even a distant connection to the Gaddafi regime from holding public office during the country's transition 1. This laid down the seeds for a full-blown civil war, which, over the years has led to two key power bases. The UN-backed Government of National Accord based in Tripoli and a parallel administration the Libyan National Army in the east (Tobruk). Adding to all this is the complexity of the external players taking sides, with UAE, Saudi and Egypt behind General Haftar while the Turks and the Qataris opposing him. Haftar launched his effort to take Tripoli by force in April 2019 from the internationally recognised government under PM Fayez al-Sarraj, days before the UN had scheduled a national assembly to bring Libyans together to negotiate a compromise, effectively foiling any move into political stability, taking the civil war into its next phase. The protracted conflict, might sadly, be here to stay' (Goel, 2019:1-2). Keywords: Arab Tsunami, Arab Spring, Libya, Gaddafi, Government of National Accord, Fayez al-Sarraj, Libyan National Army, Haftar, UAE, Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar,