17 March 2022 12:14
Where’s the money? In April 1980 this question prompted Army Sergeant Samuel Doe and sixteen other military personnel inside Liberia’s presidential palace. Doe wanted to ask for the soldiers’ back wages. However, encountering no safety devices, he killed President William Tolbert and in a murderous frenzy rounded up ministers and politicians and lynched them on the beach. Doe, a low-ranking and poorly educated soldier, put an end to a century of domination by a political oligarchy with his hands, ushering in an even more cruel dictatorship. Among his first decisions was to appoint some members of his ethnic group to key administration roles and to raise the soldiers’ salaries from $ 80 to $ 250. Doe managed to stay in power for ten years, for several reasons, but mostly because he quickly answered two important questions: where is the money? And who do you have to pay?
These questions are still relevant today, not only in Liberia but also in Libya, a country that for the third time in eight years finds itself with two governments. In the short term, the militias on the ground will determine who will remain in power. If there is one thing that Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbaibah, head of the government of Tripoli, knows very well it is where the money is and who you have to pay.
It all started when the parliament based in eastern Libya, with the blessing of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, appointed Fathi Bashagha as prime minister, considering the government of national unity led by Dbaibah to have fallen. The executive failed to organize the elections within the time frame set by the political agreement signed under the aegis of the United Nations. For his part, Dbaibah refuses to step aside and claims he wants to hand over power only to a government elected by regular vote.
Bashagha’s government is made up of forty ministers, an unprecedented number, from which it can be understood that a quota system was used to satisfy all parties involved. Bashagha’s political appointments deepen the suspicions of his intention to keep this government in the service of the political elites for a long time.
Two prime ministers, one city
Dbaibah and Bashagha are both from Misrata, the city where the most powerful and influential armed groups in the west of the country come from. Almost all the governments that have emerged over the years in western Libya have gone to great lengths to enlist the support of the Misrata militias, to seize and maintain power. After the postponement of the elections and the worsening of political divisions, several armed factions of the west gathered in two opposing camps, in support of the two prime ministers.
Bashagha was counting on the fact that the situation would not degenerate. He had assured his supporters that he would be able to settle in Tripoli quickly and without clashes, but things did not go that way. The allied armed forces of Dbaibah arrested some ministers of the Bashagha government and closed the airspace to all internal flights, citing the sighting of “low-altitude drones on Tripoli’s Mitiga airport” as an excuse.
Bashagha’s alliance with eastern Libya’s politicians and meeting with Haftar damaged his popularity
Even though the media overestimated the size of the forces supporting Bashagha, the number of fighters loyal to him has never been high enough to change that. Bashagha’s alliance with eastern Libya’s politicians and meeting Haftar damaged the popularity he had achieved in 2019, when he played a leading role in repelling Haftar’s attack on Tripoli. For this reason, when a convoy of vehicles following Bashagha aimed at the capital to open the way, the tension reached very high levels. The convoy was besieged and, after a night of negotiations, agreed to turn back.
Where is the money
Beyond its growing popularity, Dbaibah has won the support of some armed groups only because they reject Bashagha, considered a kind of Trojan horse that Haftar is using to enter Tripoli. This is the case of Salah Badi, the commander of the Al Samoud brigade in Misrata.
Other important personalities remain close to Dbaibah due to old ties and shared economic interests. Some Libyan journalists have gone so far as to say that some wealthy warlords are behind Dbaibah. Probably one of them is Mohamed Essa, commander of the Al Bunyan al Marsous militia, who has behind him accusations of corruption and abuse of power to control money smuggling and for persecuting opponents. In 2017 Mohamed Essa was part of a delegation that left Misrata for Moscow. The group was led by Dbaibah, who has close ties to Russia. In the Russian capital, the delegation met several important figures and then headed to Grozny, to join the controversial Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
Dbaibah brought back people long absent from the Libyan political landscape, such as Colonel Mahmoud al Zakal, who was appointed commander of the Constitution and Election Support Force. In 2017 Al Zakal led the National Guard forces and was one of the leaders of the Libyan Dawn operation in 2014.
Dbaibah dispenses money with great generosity. Among the forces close to him, two in particular are distinguished: the Joint Operational Force of Misrata and the Stabilization Support Brigade, which recently received respectively 100 million and 130 million Libyan dinars (19.6 and 25.5 million euros). The Misrata Joint Task Force is led by Omar Abu Ghadada, a former intelligence officer who worked in a radio after 2011. The armed group, created in 2014, according to local sources was supported and trained by the United States in order to create an elite corps against terrorism. Over the years he has been involved in violence and crimes, the latest of which was the murder of blogger and activist Tayeb al Shariri in Misrata on 7 March. Video from the surveillance cameras of one of the neighboring houses captured the murder, which took place in front of his house and under the eyes of his mother. The group previously arrested and tortured Al Shariri for 25 days for criticizing Dbaibah. After being released, the activist wrote a post in which he revealed the abuses suffered and renewed the criticism of Dbaibah.
Instead, the Stabilization Support Force is led by Ghnewa, a notorious militia commander in the Abu Salim neighborhood of Tripoli. He was seen walking with Dbaibah through the streets of the capital, passing from one bar to another, with a crowd of bodyguards.
Oil and Russian support
The United Nations mission in Libya (Unimisl) and the international community have remained neutral with respect to the two prime ministers, perhaps in order not to risk worsening the situation. The UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser for Libya, Stephanie Williams, only intervened to ask for the resumption of oil production when an armed group closed two large oil plants in the west and south of the country. Oil production has resumed after Dbaibah urged his family to resolve the crisis, but a serious concern remains, as some tribes loyal to Haftar have again called for a stop to production, a tactic that has already been used several times in the past.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow, the decision to turn oil into a weapon to be used in Libya’s internal power struggle could have repercussions around the world and be a boon to the country. Russia. Maxim Shugalei, a man linked to the Wagner private security company and the Russian “troll factories”, expressed his support for Bashagha and his “radical actions to protect the unity of the country and the interests of its citizens, going as far as to the blockade of oil production. The only way to stop the looting of Libya is to stop the financial flows ”. Shugalei added that Bashagha justifies the blockade of Libyan oil production as a response to the attitude of Williams, who would like to “decide who should govern Libya and who should leave”.
There are reports of a US mediation between the two prime ministers and a possible planned summit in Istanbul for a peace agreement and a mechanism to transfer power. On the ground the situation is tense and nothing is certain, even if the wind seems to blow in Dbaibah’s favor.
In the 1980s, the first to congratulate on the success of the “Liberian revolution” was Gaddafi, who offered financial support and invited Doe to Tripoli. The United States was not ready to cede an important port like Monrovia to the opposite camp in the middle of the Cold War, so it immediately sent $ 10 million in cash to Doe, requiring him to break off relations with Gaddafi. For ten years, the United States continued to pay more than $ 500 million to the Doe regime, allowing it to stay in power. When it didn’t help, the money stopped.
Gaddafi armed and trained Charles Taylor and his men in Tripoli, who eventually overthrew Doe. Doe’s last moments of life were captured in a video that still circulates on YouTube. If you’re not a weak stomach, you can watch it: rebels are seen torturing Doe with extreme brutality and cutting off his ear while Charles Taylor drinks a beer, and hammers Doe with an endlessly repeated question: “Where’s the money?” .
(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)