Middle East Children’s Alliance

deal-making is now put in question. The system that worked a century ago based on consensual political deals between a few political leaders is no longer viable. Failure to build real state institutions and to foster a political culture with genuine political parties, public policies, and representative elections has caught up with the country’s elites.

The post-civil war efforts to rebuild wartorn Lebanon in the ’90s witnessed excessive borrowing and conversion of public debts into high interest-rate treasury bonds, while offering extraordinary interest rates on deposits in Lebanese Pounds. This encouraged people to deposit their money instead of investing it, hence inducing sluggish growth, and giving the banks a stronger sway in the economy. The decades of borrowing money were offset by foreign remittances from Lebanese expatriates, a newly-imposed value-added tax and income from tourism, foreign investment, real estate and the telecom industry as Lebanon was attempting to regain its spot as a haven of tourism, banking and services. But then the winds did not blow in the direction of the Lebanese ship.

In 2006, Israel waged a war on Lebanon which wrought destruction in the billions of dollars; in 2008, following the global financial meltdown, most of the foreign income upon which Lebanon relied, shrunk significantly. In 2011, Syria, Lebanon’s main trading partner and supply route, descended into war, severely interrupting economic activity.

All the while, lack of accountability, impunity and corruption were rampant; the economy produced nothing of significance; and the basic services such as electricity, water, roads and internet remained backward and barely available. The electricity sector alone cost the Lebanese treasury an excess of $43 billion in waste and mismanagement over the past three decades. That figure is equivalent to more than 40 percent of the country’s entire debt.

Lousy and expensive public services, a rise in poverty and inequality, unprecedented rates of pollution and excessive corruption sent people to the streets on October 17, 2019. The most serious street demonstrations Lebanon had seen since prewar time, the 17 October movement, which united all Lebanese, brought down the government and ushered in a cabinet of quasi-independent professionals hoping to save the country and the economy.

But it was too little too late. By then, the banking sector—built on a pyramid scheme of deposits in exchange for high interests— had collapsed. People’s deposits were trapped, and foreign currency reserves depleted, sending the Lebanese Pound into free fall. At the time of writing the local currency had lost close to 60 percent of its value; poverty and unemployment doubled, and a massive number of businesses and retail shops have shut down.

The situation is so alarming that the American University of Beirut, a 150-yearold beacon of learning in the region, is facing an unprecedented financial crisis and is about to lay off thousands of employees—a first in its history of existence.

Today, under pressure by unprecedented protests and reeling from an economic catastrophe with no end in sight, along with dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Lebanon is paying the price of decades of negligence, corruption and political failure.

Caught in the middle of a regional confrontation between Iran and the United States, there seems to be no light at the end of the country’s long and arduous economic tunnel. The United States accuses the current government of being a Hezbollah puppet and supports an undeclared embargo on any financial aid to the country, lest it be used as a lifeline to save the current government and prolong Hezbollah’s hold. Hezbollah, in return, refutes the allegations and accuses the U.S. of deliberately bankrupting the country by sabotaging an IMF bailout deal and pressuring its allies in the Gulf and Europe not to provide assistance, in the hope of bringing the Party of God to its knees.

Lebanon’s entire political system is now under threat and, short of a miracle that extends its life, it is due for a major shake-up. Many Lebanese see a rare opportunity today to reinvent the political system on a cleaner slate of established political institutions and a genuine rule of law that would deliver a truly democratic political practice. In fact, any economic bailout for the country would extend the reign of a defunct political elite that many Lebanese want to do away with. They would like to see them replaced by a new brand of politicians capable of lifting the country out of its current morass.

As it faces its most serious existential threat in its century-long history, Lebanon is ripe for fundamental changes to its identity, make-up and foundations. The question remains as to how and in what new form of governance the country will re-emerge from the current political nadir it has found itself in, especially since, at the moment, there are no credible political alternatives to the existing ruling class. ■

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A P oject ofr en’Middle East Childr s Alliance

Turkey’s Libyan Return

By Jonathan Gorvett

A view of a damaged house in Salahaddin province, 6.2 miles from Tripoli’s city center as the Turkish army’s bomb disposal units defuse explosives planted by Khalifa Haftar in the region, thus enabling the safe return of civilians, June 16, 2020.

OVER A CENTURY AGO, the founder of modern, secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, fought some of his first battles in the wadis and vilayets of north-eastern Libya.

Now, the forces of the would-be founder of a new, pro-Islamist, neo-Ottoman Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are also fighting across that same terrain, in one of the Turkish leader’s most important overseas ventures.

Indeed, for Ankara, much more than the future of Libya is at stake here. The future shape of the Eastern Mediterranean is also on the table, with Erdogan seeing the conflict as a way to leverage wider changes to regional maritime boundaries and to Turkey’s standing as the pre-eminent power in the Levant.

For Libya, however, this also means that its fate is now increasingly bound up in ongoing disputes between Turkey and its neighbors, Greece and Cyprus, and between the Turkish-Qatari alliance and its Arab world foes, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Jonathan Gorvett is a free-lance writer specializing on European and Middle Eastern affairs. SETTING BOUNDARIES

Post-Ataturk, it was not until relatively recently that Turkey had much of a profile in Libya. In the latter years of the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, however, Turkish construction companies established a sizeable presence there. However, as a result of the violence of the 2011 revolution, Turkish companies were left with around $1.6 billion in unpaid debts, while their building sites were looted and workers hastily evacuated.

After years of Libyan civil conflict, two rival authorities emerged in the country. In the northwest, Prime Minister Fayez Al Sarraj’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) was set up in Tripoli. The GNA rules via a patchwork of militias, ranging from secular to jihadist, along with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

In the northeast and south, the administration of the former Libyan House of Representatives, located in Tobruk and led by Aguila Saleh Issa, took control. Loyal to this Tobruk authority is the largely secular Libyan National Army (LNA), led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar also enjoys Egyptian support, as his anti-Islamist forces control the long, highly porous border between the two countries,

sealing it to potential jihadi infiltration. He is also supported by Russia, France, and the UAE for a variety of reasons, ranging from his effectiveness as a barrier to illegal migration from Libya to Europe, which appeals to France, to his opposition to the MB, appealing to the UAE. Russia, meanwhile, has an interest in establishing its presence in North Africa, as it seeks to return to regional, and global, great power status.

The GNA, meanwhile, has the support of Italy, which imports natural gas from a GNA-controlled complex at Mellitah, in the northwest. Rome also has many construction deals with the Tripoli government, including for the city’s new airport. Turkey has also long-supported the GNA, with Ankara supportive of the MB, a position that has also placed it in the opposite corner to Egypt and the UAE, post-Arab Spring; a position deepened by its support for Qatar in the ongoing Saudi and UAE-led blockade.

“Turkey’s involvement is part of its broader geo-political ambitions to stop the encroachment of the UAE axis in North Africa,” says Claudia Gazzini, Libya analyst for the International Crisis Group. “Turkey’s second objective is to redraw Turkey’s maritime boundaries, with the GNA’s help.”

Thus, in November 2019, Ankara signed two agreements with the GNA—one, to give it military support, and the second to agree to a maritime boundary between Libya and Turkey that grants the latter a long corridor of sea from the southwestern Turkish coast all the way past Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete to the waters off eastern, LNA-controlled Libya.

The military aspect of this was crucial for the GNA, as, in April 2019, Haftar had broken an uneasy status quo and attacked deep into GNA territory, reaching right into the suburbs of Tripoli itself. Under the agreement, a major Turkish military intervention was initiated, backing up GNA militias with Syrian rebel fighters, recruited and equipped by Turkey from the areas of Syria it has occupied during the current Syrian conflict. “There is no doubt that this shifted the military balance in favor of the GNA,” adds Gazzini.

In late May-early June, the LNA was thus pushed out of Tripoli and forced to withdraw south and east, with the frontline just a few miles west of the Mediterranean coastal town of Sirte, at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, Turkey has also sent oil and gas survey and drilling ships, with naval escorts, into its new maritime territory—a zone that overlaps completely with waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus.

“Libya is widely thought to have more oil and gas offshore than is currently being exploited,” says Calvin Harrison, editorial manager for Frontier MEA and the Libya Monitor. “But it’s hard to say if this is really what interests Turkey. Perhaps more crucial is that this maritime zone has proximity to Cyprus and Greece.” Indeed, the zone cuts right across the path of the planned 1,180- mile undersea EastMed gas pipeline, a proposal by Greece, Cyprus and Israel, to take natural gas from Cypriot and Israeli offshore fields to Europe.

The zone also passes close to Crete, causing alarm in Athens, which has no agreed maritime boundaries with Turkey. This has long been a cause of friction in the Aegean Sea, with the new Turkish zone effectively opening a new front, and pressure point, in this long-standing dispute.

“Even though Turkey is a huge country with a huge population and the longest seacoast on the Mediterranean, it is being squeezed into a very small and unjust sea area,” says Altug Gunal, from the Department of International Relations at Turkey’s Ege University in Izmir.

Turkey argues that current maritime boundaries claimed by Greece and Cyprus grant them so much of the Aegean and Mediterranean that maritime access to Turkey itself is effectively blocked.

“Not only the current government of Turkey, but any other one would do its best to break these walls,” Gunal adds.

Cyprus and Greece, backed up by the European Union, naturally disagree with this position, arguing that their maritime boundaries are those settled by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. These countries—and pro-Haftar France in particular—have strongly protested Turkey’s new maritime zone.

Italy also initially protested the boundaries, then also signed an agreement with Greece outlining maritime zones that contradict the Turkey-GNA deal. The response to this was not long in coming, however.

In early June, a Turkish-backed Libyan militia attacked the Italian gas complex at Mellitah, temporarily closing the pipeline running from there to the Italian island of Sicily. The warning will not have been lost on Rome.

DANGEROUS ENTANGLEMENTS

The conflagration of conflicts in and around Libya is already having a significant impact on wider Mediterranean disputes. Turkey is the link in all the rising tensions, and operating from a position of power that it has, indeed, not held for generations. In this, it has also been able to exploit diverging interests between European Union and NATO members, France and Italy.

There is also a perception that Russia has been weakened by the recent collapse in the price of its primary income—oil— while President Vladimir Putin is under unusual pressure at home from his unpopular handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

As for the U.S., “If it can get Russia out of Libya, then Washington is fine with Turkey’s plans,” says Gazzini. “The U.S. has made some effort to bring the parties together, but hasn’t really sent any strong message about this.”

Turkey’s strategy is not without its risks, however. After all, the Italian invaders Ataturk once battled spent decades trying to establish control over the country.

As Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, recently asked, “What are we doing in Libya? Do we want to make our troops legionaries?” ■

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