Charlotte Leslie: Libya’s return to authoritarianism is the responsibility of the West. We cannot let it fail again.

Charlotte Leslie is Director of the Conservative Middle East Council, a former MP for Bristol North West and a Global Ambassador for President Zelensky’s ‘Grain from Ukraine’ initiative. She writes in a personal capacity.

In 2011, with the so-called Arab Spring in full swing, David Cameron asked parliament to make an unenviable decision: whether or not to take military action in Libya.

The choice was between allowing the horrific slaughter of the people of Benghazi by the authoritarian regime of Muammar Gaddafi, or intervening and risking a repeat of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq: carnage, misery and poverty at the hands of a violent dictator, replaced by carnage, misery, poverty and instability by the less recognizable forces of chaos.

I am not proud to admit that, faced with such a difficult choice, I abstained. I could not vote against an intervention to save a population from violent slaughter. But I also felt unable to vote for what was initially presented as a limited life-saving intervention, but which I was certain would end up as a well-intentioned push for regime change.

But a push for change based on a limited understanding of Libya’s tribal, tripartite nature, and no plan for what would follow, other than the optimism that Libya could easily be rebuilt as a democracy that worked for its people, supported by some of the most reassuring abstract nouns the West offers.

The decision was made that Britain would intervene. And the rest, as the popular podcasts would say, is both politics and history. Libya did not settle into a functioning democracy after the fall of its violent and dangerous tyrant. Predictably, tribalism and chaos followed.

Islamism was on the rise, and the number of migrants crossing Libya exploded, while criminal gangs flourished in the chaos. The abstract nouns of the West proved remarkably ineffective in state-building. By then, the focus of British foreign policy had already shifted.

Today, corruption is endemic in Libya. It is a country torn apart by military rulers in the east who have seized territory and politicians who have clung to power. The situation in Libya is not just a domestic problem. It has had serious consequences for neighbouring countries in the region, such as Mali and Egypt’s Sudan, and the criminal migrant trafficking industry has been a defining feature of European politics since 2011.

Now the chaos and corruption in Libya are beginning to destabilize the oil markets and also the international order.

Currently, the UN-backed government under Abdul Debeibeh holds Tripoli, the capital, in the west. This is opposed by General Haftar, a warlord, and his sons who now control much of the eastern part of the country and have the backing of Russia. There has been a fragile truce since 2020, when Haftar tried and failed to take Tripoli. The growing dysfunctionality in Libya threatens a new civil war.

Only this month we saw the forced closure of El Sharara, Libya’s largest oil field, by Haftar’s so-called Libyan National Army. This not only took a key Libyan asset offline, but also exposed the Tripoli government’s weakness in responding to these military threats to the Libyan economy. These weaknesses have now been further exposed as most of the country’s oil fields are now under the control of Haftar’s forces, cutting off key finances that the Tripoli government relies on for its survival and skewing global markets.

The Tripoli government has not responded with a well-organized, unified counteroffensive, but with political infighting to protect positions and remove perceived internal opposition. The result is a precarious situation.

At the heart of the situation is the National Oil Corporation (NOC) under Ferhat Bengdara, which has repeatedly faced allegations of corruption in its handling of the country’s oil supplies. Bengdara’s current “free for all” within the NOC, which reverses his predecessor’s dogged attempt to introduce accountability and transparency into the sector, has created a climate of impunity in which Bengdara can distort the NOC’s finances as he sees fit.

This competition for coercive control over Libya’s financial institutions is destabilizing the country at an alarming rate. US Africa Command General Hadley met with Haftar this week to create further diplomacy with the US that may have been aimed at finding ways forward but has done little to improve morale, unity and political authority in Tripoli.

The lack of determined, sustained, realistic diplomatic engagement and support from Western countries since our intervention in 2011 has resulted in a Libya torn in two, with corruption, criminality and violence uniting elites on both sides. States hostile to the West have also seized the opportunity.

Much has happened since 2011 and Haftar’s subsequent attempt to come to power. As in Syria in 2013, Russia saw a gap in the West’s resolve, direction and attention and capitalized. Now Russia unequivocally has its man in Libya – General Haftar. It is not clear whether the same can be said of the West and the government it supports in Tripoli.

“The West broke it, but they didn’t stay to fix it,” is the sentiment I hear most often from the region when it comes to Libya. This is not only bad for our international reputation, it is also bad for our self-interest.

It is bad for the competitiveness of establishing powerful, reliable allies in the country that can rival Russia’s influence. It is also bad for building the capacity and credibility to tackle the toxic corruption that is not only ravaging the lives of Libya’s people but is now seeping into global oil markets and global politics at a time when the world can least afford it.