Sarkozy and Libya: how UN resolution was hijacked

TheThe controversy surrounding former president Nicolas Sarkozy and his involvement with the late Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is not just confined to money and election financing. There is also the issue of the military conflict that the French president helped unleash on Libya in 2011, resulting in the Libyan's leader's death and which sparked regional instability at the hands of armed jihadist groups and fanatics which is still with us today.

During questioning by anti-corruption detectives on March 20th and 21st, the former president sought to explain himself in relation to the issue of Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign. Will he one day also accept responsibility for his role in the military intervention in Libya four years later which has led to disastrous consequences across a large section of Africa? These seems little sign of this at the moment.

Despite disquieting information about the circumstances in which France was able to persuade the United Kingdom and then the United States, the Arab league and NATO to take part in this dubious intervention, neither the United Nations – whose resolution was flouted – nor the French Parliament which did not stand in the way of the then president's wishes have felt it necessary to conduct any investigation into the affair.

The party currently with a majority in Parliament – President Emmanuel Macron's La République En Marche – seems no more curious to know the truth. Yet it would be justified in feeling encouraged, even compelled to find out more following comments by President Macron himself. On two occasions, in June 2017 and then in February 2018, he has made it clear he disagreed with the principle of the war and the way it was conducted. So far only the British Parliament's Foreign Affairs committee has probed into the details of the failure of the 2011 military intervention and its September 2016 report makes grim reading for France and its role as leader of the pack.

Yet with the perspective of time, the facts now available reveal a saga that is full of anomalies, lies, 'alternative truths', manipulations and propaganda of all types.

The first surprise dates back to January 2011 when, following revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya itself saw a popular revolt against dictatorship, the lack of rule of law and corruption. Immediately Nicolas Sarkozy took the side of the regime's opponents. This was despite the fact that back in July 2007, amid circumstances that remain disquieting, he had obtained from Muammar Gaddafi the release of Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been held in Libya for eight years, and had then appeared to reward the Libyan dictator by promising him help to build a nuclear power station and allowing him to set up his tent in the grounds of the state-owned Hôtel de Marigny, opposite the Élysée, during an official visit.

This was despite the fact, too, that among Gaddafi's opponents were men such as Abdelhakim Belhadj and other members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who were linked to Al Qaeda. French and other Western secret service agencies knew that many Libyans who had fought for the jihadist cause in Afghanistan and Iraq had returned home and were ready to seize the opportunity to resume their struggle. There was a real risk that Libyans who genuinely wanted freedom and democracy would be sidelined and even manipulated by jihadists.

Instead Sarkozy was apparently convinced by members of the Libyan diaspora in France and their representatives in the business world and media-friendly intellectuals such as Bernard Henri-Lévy to follow their line, in order to buttress his stance. They insisted that Libyan civilians were in mortal danger from the regime's repressive response to the uprising and that the West had to intervene to avoid a new Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs massacred around 8,000 Muslims in July 1995.

It was a line that the French president used on fellow leaders to convince them to take part in a joint rescue operation with France. His arguments seemed to work. On February 21st, 2011, just as Al Jazeera television station – owned by the Emir of Qatar who was himself on bad terms with Gaddafi – announced that the Libyan air force was bombing people in Tripoli who had taken to the streets to support fellow protesters in Benghazi, Sarkozy, British prime minister David Cameron and US president Barack Obama declared separately that Gaddafi was not fit to govern his country as he was attacking his own people. A consensus had apparently emerged between Paris, Washington and London about the need to save Libyan protesters and end the dictatorship.

The problem, as former Doctors Without Borders president Rony Brauman notes in his latest book on humanitarian wars, was that this bombing of civilians in Tripoli never took place. Indeed, this was confirmed just nine days later by the then US defence secretary Robert Gates, who wanted to spare his country from getting bogged down in a new Afghanistan-style conflict.

But this crude propaganda stunt, which also had its supporters in the US where Libyan immigrants have their own business lobby, did not deter Nicolas Sarkozy from pressing ahead with his diplomacy. By officially receiving members of Libya's National Transitional Council at the Élysée on March 10th, 2011, he became the first head of state in the world to recognise this group as the sole representatives of Libya. Then, in what was presented as a response to the requests of his new Libyan friends, Sarkozy put forward a plan to create a no-fly zone in Libya to fellow European leaders in Brussels.

British PM Cameron supported France's initiative but German Chancellor Angela Merkel was against and she won over most other European leaders. This closed the door to any joint European intervention. It was then that Sarkozy played the Arab card. He knew that the then Saudi leader Abdullah bin Abdulaziz royally detested Gaddafi, whom he suspected of having been involved in a past plot to have him assassinated. With the help of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, Saudi Arabia got the Arab League to demand the establishment of an “air exclusion zone” over Libya.

Foreign minister warned of dangers of being 'too late'

To get a clear majority on the UN Security Council and avoid a veto by China or Russia, Paris decided to team up with the African Union and emerging countries behind India. “This diplomatic configuration was unprecedented in the annals of the Security Council,” says Bertrand Badie, professor of international relations at Sciences-Po university in Paris. “The consensus that was finally reached was the fruition of a sophisticated compromise, based on several essential circumstances. To get the support of the countries concerned, the resolution proposed by France, Lebanon and the United Kingdom had to exclude the presence of any foreign troops on the ground, it had to limit itself strictly to the protection of civilians and not include measures leading to regime change.”
But why was Nicolas Sarkozy so determined and insistent on this issue? A conversation between the French secret services and Sydney Blumenthal, at the time one of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's advisors and analysts, produces some possible answers.

The conversation was made available under US freedom of information laws and suggests the French president's motivation boiled down to five main concerns:

a) to obtain a bigger share of Libyan oil production;
b) to extend France's influence in North Africa;
c) to improve his own political position in France;
d) to give the French military an opportunity to reaffirm their place in the world;
e) to respond to concerns from his advisors about Gaddafi's long-term plans for Libya to replace France as the dominant power in French-speaking Africa.

It is noteworthy that neither security issues nor the well-being of the Libyan people, nor also the dictatorial nature of the regime, are mentioned among the reasons to intervene. “The sum of four of the five factors identified by Sidney Blumenthal equated to the French national interest. The fifth factor was President Sarkozy’s political self-interest,” wrote the British foreign affairs committee in their report.

On March 17th, when the French foreign minister Alain Juppé presented the planned resolution to the Security Council, it was clearly not the above arguments that he relied on. Instead he seemed to base his approach on the figures highlighted two weeks earlier in Paris by the secretary general of Libya's new human rights league, who said that 6,000 people had already been killed by the regime, including 3,000 in Tripoli and 2,000 in Benghazi.

Alain Juppé certainly painted an apocalyptic scene. “The situation on the ground is more alarming than ever,” he insisted. “As I speak to you Colonel Gaddafi's troops are continuing the violent reconquest of towns and territories that had been freed. We can't let the warmongers get away with this. We can't abandon civilians who are victims of a brutal repression to their fate. We can't let international legality and morality be flouted. ...We have no time left. It's a question of days, it's perhaps a question of hours. Each day, each hour that passes tightens the noose of the forces of repression around the civilian populations who crave liberty, and in particular the people of Benghazi,” said Juppé, insisting that soldiers loyal to Gaddafi were advancing on the city. “Each day, each hour that passes increases the weight of responsibility that rests on our shoulders. We must make sure we're not too late.”

The scene was not far removed from the one in February 2003 when US Secretary of State Colin Powell brandished a model vial of anthrax to convince the Security Council that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. For the figures advanced by the Libyan human rights league bore little relation to reality; Amnesty International later established that the truer figure for that period was around 300 deaths. This does not make Gaddafi a peaceful and respectable democrat, nor the privileged partner presented by Sarkozy just four years earlier, but it does establish the true level of his crimes.

Meanwhile the claims concerning the “violent reconquest of towns” made by Alain Juppé were questioned in the report by British MPs. It established that the fighting at Misrata in north-west Libya in February and March 2011 led to 257 deaths, including 22 women and eight children, and left 949 wounded. The British MPs cited UN figures in pointing out that the morgues in Tripoli received 200 bodies after the fighting in February, including the corpses of two women. These figures are far removed from those claimed by the Libyan opposition, which were endorsed by those supporting the military intervention without any checks or concern about their veracity. “The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians,” wrote the British MPs. “More widely, Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.”

However, such concerns counted for little faced with the Western diplomatic steamroller that was in operation, aided by the Arab League and the African Union. On March 17th, 2011, UN resolution 1973 was adopted. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal and South Africa voted for it, as did the three Western permanent members of the Security Council, France, the US and the UK. Brazil, India, Germany and the other two permanent Security Council members, Russia and China, abstained, persuaded not to veto the resolution by the promise from its sponsors that there would be no troops on the ground and that they would not seek to overthrow Gaddafi.

The text, which also banned nine key Libyan figures from travelling and froze their assets abroad, established a “a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians”. It then authorised “Member States that have notified the Secretary-General and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights...”

This led to the deployment of a massive military force around Libya and in the Mediterranean, with some 250 planes and 30 ships by mid-April, coming from around 20 countries; from Canada to Qatar, from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan to Norway and Turkey. France alone committed around ten ships and 72 aircraft including Rafale jet fighters from the French air force and navy operating from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.
On the orders of the Élysée it was French jets that were first in action, called in to stop a column of 20 or so tanks heading towards Benghazi. These tanks and the thousand or so men with them, which were presented as a major threat to the city, had been spotted some while earlier in the arid lands of Cyrenaica on the eastern coastal strip by Western surveillance aircraft already operating in the area. In the circumstances the tanks' presence was more a show of bravado than a strategic assault.

Nor was it as if Benghazi was a small settlement that could be taken by a handful of tanks; it was a city with a population of a million, spread over 300 square kilometres and defended by well-armed rebel groups. Some had even recently obtained French-made Milan anti-tank missiles from Qatar and had already shown they knew how to use them.

On March 19th, as Gaddafi announced a ceasefire, closed Libyan air space in conformity with the UN resolution and made an offer to the rebels in Benghazi that they could lay down their arms and return to their normal lives, Mirage 2000 and Rafale jets destroyed several of the tanks heading towards the city, using guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles. The others quickly turned around and by the next day were some 60km from Benghazi.

Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the European Council in triumph, as if Benghazi had been saved from being wiped off the map. “If Gaddafi had entered Bengahzi we'd have had a massacre much worse than that at Srebrenica,” he said. On the evening of March 19th the British and Americans joined the military action. More than 120 American Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from submarines and surface ships took out communication centres, air defence systems and tank and aircraft bases.

'From protecting civilians to regime change'

Could any credence have been given to Gaddafi's offer to the people of Benghazi that they should surrender and face no reprisals, and that negotiations should begin with the opposition? Given Gaddafi's terrible reputation and the cruel way he had dealt with opposition in the past it seems a curious idea.

Yet in their report the British MPs note that after Libyan forces re-took Ajdabiya in north-east Libya in February 2011 the civilian population had suffered no repression. And that before sending troops to Benghazi Gaddafi had promised he would grant the city development funding.

The Libyan dictator had not overnight become a man of dialogue open to calls for reform. But, doubtless influenced by the strength of forces ranged against him, he seemed ready to make concessions to the opposition, as he had done for 40 years with regional chiefs in Libya. Questioned by British MPs, the Middle East and North Africa specialist Alison Pargeter from the Royal United Services Institute, said that the British government had become involved in the intervention without having the necessary information on the “history and regional complexities” of Libya, including the significance of regional and tribal factors. She concluded that in February 2011 there was no “real evidence at that time that Gaddafi was preparing to launch a massacre against his own civilians”.

Yet the attacks had begun and were to continue for seven months, until the death of the 'Supreme Guide' as Gaddafi was known. From March 31st NATO entered the fray, taking over the military coordination of the intervention under the name of Operation Unified Protector.

Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, had been against NATO involvement. Academic Bertrand Badie explains: “For him it was catastrophic for the UN mandate to be transferred to NATO, that an operation of the international community should be handed to a regional defence pact, especially taking into account the part taken in the operations by the Arab League states.” Nicolas Sarkozy could not oppose this change which had Washington's backing. However, he was able to keep political control of the French forces involved and their operational command was retained by France's military chief of staff. All of which makes more amusing Sarkozy's comments about his leading role in the operation.

As the attacks continued it became harder and harder to distinguish between interventions to help protect civilians and those designed to weaken Libya's military infrastructure and, as a result, support rebel groups who wanted to bring down the dictator and effect regime change. These groups were helped on the ground by foreign military 'advisors'.

For though the negotiations ahead of resolution 1973 had expressly ruled out foreign troops on the ground at least five countries – the UK, France, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE – employed special forces to fight alongside the rebels. In France's case it was the Commandement des Opérations Spéciales or Special Operations Command who intervened.

So had an operation to protect civilians, for which Paris and its allies had received a UN mandate, been quietly turned into an operation to support regime change, in breach of the undertakings given? Yes, says Bertrand Badie. “And the turning point came publicly on April 15th with the joint letter by Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama, published by Le Figaro, the International Herald Tribune, The Times and [the Arabic newspaper] Al-Hayat in which the three leaders said that 'Gaddafi must go'.” When British MPs asked Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, who had been Britain's Chief of the Defence Staff in 2011, whether the mission had been about protecting civilians or regime change he said that “one thing morphed almost ineluctably into the other” as the campaign developed its own momentum.

“We in fact witnessed an unprecedented event,” says former French ambassador Yves Aubin de La Messuzière, who from 1999 to 2002 was director of the North Africa and Middle East department at the French Foreign Ministry. “The de facto hijacking of a United Nations mandate with no regard for the commitments undertaken and in violation of a Security Council resolution. The decision was even more regrettable as it placed us in a very difficult situation, faced with those who had voted with us, and above all faced with those who, like Russia, had agreed to abstain, who felt swindled and who have not missed any opportunity to tell us so, particularly in relation to Syria.”

With all the assurance of a fairground peddler, Nicolas Sarkozy willingly claims a role as leader in the international operation which led to the removal of the dictator in Libya and the end of his regime there. He did so again in his television appearance on TF1 on March 22nd, 2018. But he is wrong to do so.

One reason is that the exact circumstances in which Gaddafi was killed, having been found in a large drainage pipe where he had taken refuge west of the city of Sirte, remain unclear. Did the pilots of the planes who attacked his convoy as it fled south know that he was in one of the vehicles? Were foreign soldiers, who were hidden among the group that lynched Gaddafi, involved in his killing? Why did the coalition not try to capture him so he could be tried for his crimes? Doubts still remain over these issues.

It also seems strange, even shocking, for a former head of state to claim openly that he hijacked a mandate he had received from the UN, and even more so when the result was not to see Libya move from dictatorship to democracy but to plunge into chaos.

For after Gaddafi and his regime collapsed, including its administrative structures, the result was not a new state with new democratic institutions but a resurgence of old rural, tribal and clan structures. Added to these was the emergence of local and regional militia and war lords. All of which is in theory ruled over by two official or semi-official governments, who are seen by the world as the country's representatives. The one based in Tripoli is the only government officially recognised by the international community, while the one in Tobruk has some legitimacy in the eyes of a few nations, including France, because of its military capacity.

Nicolas Sarkozy cannot be unaware of or seek to profit from the fact that this chaos in Libya is responsible for, in part at least, the expansion of jihadism in the whole of the Sahel, the region of Africa just below the Sahara and which includes Mali. One reason is that the fall of Gaddafi allowed thousands of militant Islamists to arm themselves from the many weapons depots that the paranoid and oil-rich leader located around the country.

Another is that the international intervention drove the Libyan jihadists who had returned form Iraq and Afghanistan out into the desert. Here they brought their experience and ideology to military gangs and traffickers in the region. These are the new groups, some affiliated to Al Qaeda or Islamic State, who nearly seized control of Mali and whose destabilising presence has forced the deployment of tens of thousands of African and foreign troops – especially French – from Mauretania to Chad.

So today Libya, which in the words of one Libyan academic in exile is a country “flooded with weapons and drowning in militia”, was plunged into chaos thanks to the intervention of international leaders including Nicolas Sarkozy. They were either unaware of or showed disdain for the old military adage that you do not start a war without knowing how to end it.

The result of this breach of the mandate these leaders had got from the UN was the dismantling of a state and the distress suffered by a people who have swapped one dictator for several. And the lasting destabilisation of around half a dozen states in the Sahel. As Emmanuel Macron says, the war in Libya was indeed a “major error”. The time has now come to find out why and how. And to discover the precise responsibility of Nicolas Sarkozy in this disaster.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter