The recent apparent success of German diplomacy in negotiating a peace process (and possibly aid) for civil war-torn Libya looks like a success story of the kind of diplomacy that the United States, France, Italy and Russia are not capable of (any more):
Five rounds of diligent and patient negotiations with all important stakeholders without provoking much public attention, largely with a non-partisan 'honest broker' reputation and behaviour. Almost all parties agreed on a long list of promises (Greece and Saudis were not invited to the final conference and did thus not sign the promises as far as I know).
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| Map of approx. territorial control in Libya, source Ali Zifan / Wikipedia |
We'll see how much good that does in the next five years or so, but we already know that it exceeds what the French and Italians (both considered to be partisans in the conflict) achieved in their earlier effort.
I wish this diplomatic effort much success - especially as such diplomacy might find ways out of seemingly ever-lasting conflicts more often in the future.
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The only obvious downside to Germany is that there's much talk about a need for German blue helmets for Libya. Personally, I don't see at all why a diplomatic 'honest broker' would be obliged to send blue helmet troops. This strikes me as thinking typical of those people who wouldn't come up with 'honest broker diplomacy' as their first idea for addressing such a conflict at all. Why would their opinion deserve much weight in this case? How would an 'honest broker' stay non-partisan for when violence flares up and requires further negotiations if it's involved with fighting troops? Don't those reporters and pundits think before writing? Is 'we must deploy troops into crisis region' some kind of reflex? And don't get me started on whether deploying troops into Libya is helpful at all. There's little supporting evidence for such a notion - but reporters and pundits appear to think of it as self-evidently true.
The African Union, Pakistan and Jordan would be fine candidates for providing troops for a blue helmet mission. To let them help Libya get back to functioning is more promising (on the psychological level) than to insist on Europeans or even Americans meddling there.
There's the ubiquitous concern about how willing such forces would be to use force against organised armed resistance and about their proneness to corruption and human rights abuses, of course. Let's face it; Western troops deployed to Libya wouldn't necessarily be exemplary, either. American and French troops in particular have a deserved reputation for 'rough' behaviour towards no-name civilians and German troops would inevitably have extremely restrictive rules of engagement forced by our politicians, which would limit their utility to providing local security. I don't see them as a force that would forcibly disarm a warlord army, for example.
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There are benefits in non-partisanship in international diplomacy. The Swiss understand this intuitively, and I have a hunch that Western great powers in particular lost sight of this. The serious international conflicts that exist today exist because there are opposing factions that cannot finish off the conflict through overwhelming power. The worst cases (such as Syria) are multi-polar, where the partisan powers being 'friendly' and 'opposing' does not produce a clear-cut two sides of a conflict; the enemy of an enemy may both be your enemy or your friend in such a conflict. Such conflicts are terribly complicated and crying out loud for a non-partisan 'honest broker diplomacy' effort.
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I doubt that anything remotely resembling stability in Lybia will come out of this.
ReplyDeleteAs for Syria, I doubt that the Israelis pet will ever let go of it.
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ReplyDeleteThe conflict between greece and turkey and the alliance between some libyan parties with turkey in this conflict make an sustainable european diplomatic solution very unlikely in my opinion. That greece was not present (not invited) make this even more likely. The failed tribal society of liby is unstable and rotten to the core and libya is and will be an failed state, especially as many parties in libya have an high interest in this kind instability as this makes them prosper and gives them more profites for them own. A peaceful solution is not the interest of most power blocks in libya, only to gaffer german moeney as much as possible and to exploit the german greenness as much as possible.
ReplyDeleteEspecially for this it does make any sense to send german troops to libya. The only use would be if such troops would hunt down the smugglers and traffickers to reduce the stream of refugees and exploit such an mission for an in truth complete different target. So sending german troops officially to help maintaining the peace but in reality to get control over the coast and to reduce the stream of refugees. That would be interesting perhaps. But anything more will not work as the social structure and the social culture of the people in the former territory of libya will make any peaceful sustainable solution impossible.
https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/libyen-waffenembargo-verstoss-105.html
ReplyDeleteTranslation of the most important parts:
"The ceasefire for the North African crisis country negotiated at the Berlin Libya conference a week ago is apparently broken."
"The militias fighting against Haftar on the part of the internationally recognized government also spoke of a break in the ceasefire. Haftar's troops advanced to the strategically important city of Misrata in the west of the country."
"According to the UN, the arms embargo agreed at the Libya conference is also not being observed. In the past ten days, several planes had landed at airports in western and eastern Libya, bringing weapons, armored vehicles, fighters and advisers into the country. The United Nations Libya Mission (UNSMIL) said that several of the countries responsible for this had participated in the Berlin conference."
The German hubris is as naive as it is ridiculous.
I suppose nobody expected a flawless execution right away. It was communicated as a peace process, not as a final peace treaty and domestic power sharing settlement.
DeleteThat's why this process includes an astonishingly tight and frequent schedule of meetings - to work out the implementation.
BTW, you sound a bit like stuck in a black/white TV set.
In principle, this is a good move, and I agree with pretty much the whole piece. In practice the Germans are just now, 8 years later, starting to make good their cowardice in supporting the Franco-British-US axis of Chaos in "humanitarian bombing" of Libya. The Germans cannot be a neutral "honest broker" until they break with their allies, and accept their financial coup against my admittedly unlovely but democratic government in 2011 (Berlusconi IV). Or have you managed to conveniently sweep from your mind the engineered "spread crisis", the "Monti technical government" and other such lovely German and French mandated wonders? We don't forget and won't forgive, Herr Ortmann.
ReplyDelete(Admitted, likely undercounted) sortie statistics: 26.500 flown, 9.650 strike sorties, 200+ cruise missiles, thousands of PGM's released against a small, underdeveloped, coastal country with a population of 6M and a regular army of 40,000. Assuming that each strike sortie released ammunition (it didn't, but confirmed PGM consumption shows a very large percentage did) how many casualties per strike sortie? 10? Then that's 100,000 killed and wounded (purely from the air) in 5-6 months in a sanctioned and isolated African coastal country, rounding up - around 2% of the population killed or wounded in 5-6 months. Total German military population losses in WW1 roughly 8-9% killed and wounded.
A strike of the same magnitude scaled to Germany's 2011 population (but not, of course infrastructure - hence very crude comparison, drastically under-scaled) would mean: 2.600+ cruise missiles strikes, 130.000 strike sorties, 344,500 total sorties - delivered over 5-6 months.
As another measurement yardstick: RAF Bomber Command flew a total of 364,000 sorties against Germany over the whole! war.
Until the German government accepts partial responsibility for this heinous crime, then all talk of "honest brokership" is just so much ricepaper-thin propaganda. Merkel is still in power is she not? You can't even claim discontinuity of government! Germans shouldn't try to pretend that their criminal government is better and more moderate, nor hide behind the EU, "but it was consensus" and other such bullshit.
??? Italians elect their government, not Germans.
DeleteYour 2011 casualties estimate is baseless.
There's no comprehensive count to be found, but analogies suggest that the average lethality of a PGM is nowhere near 10 killed people. HRW picked eight cases for a report and found an average lethality of nine per strike with this cherrypicking.
The bombings may have killed 10,000 to at most 30,000 people - including thousands or ten thousands of combatants.
There's hardly a way to blame Germany, as it did not participate. Italy participated.
I have repeatedly argued that we should get tougher on aggressive allies (as aggressiveness is a violation of the North Atlantic Treaty, among others and the 1914 tragedy was primarily about giving a blank cheque to an aggressive ally).
Yet the Libya intervention of 2011 was largely covered by UNSCR 1973. There were violence excesses (which is typical for war and utterly predictable), but there was also a legal basis for the intervention.
The Libya intervention of 2011 was covered by abusing UNSCR 1973 to it's breaking point, and involved making up loads of rubbish about Gaddafi militias which "surprise" turned out faked afterwards.
DeleteI estimated 10 casualties, not killed. And my point is that "only" 10-30,000 people in such a small country is disproportionate, equivalent to magnitude larger in Germany purely demographically and much larger impact in reality given the peculiar coastal and underdeveloped nature of Libya. Also in a very short time horizon.
Italy participated, certainly, after the Germans were instrumental in pressuring our government to resign. The Germans then provided key logistical support while carefully keeping away from direct bombing.
Btw, I agree that the violent excesses were both predictable and inevitable. The problem is that the war was carried out anyway. And without political and military support from abroad, and direct foreign military intervention e.g. French special forces embedding (training, controlling) the southern tribes, the conflict would have been "a flash in the pan" not the disaster still going on today. Worse, to conduct the operation, the Franco-German axis meddled in inter EU politics very high-handedly, and this is bad precedent. Do you want Italy to secede from the EU as the northern states did the HRE? Right now there is no majority for Italexit, nor the macroeconomic basis, nor (yet!) a legitimate reason for doing so. But give it another 30 years of such imperial behaviour and we may reconsider. And a key step in restoring inter-EU harmony is to accept responsibility for these disasters (who btw. is looking after most of the refugees from Africa?) and treat the rest of us fairly. You can't get away with it by simply increasing the anti-Italian propaganda on your TV channels, nor can you simply whitewash it over with a hastily thrown together "Berlin peace conference".
ReplyDeleteFrankly, you're delving into hyperbole. To blame Germany for the Libya war when it never participated or to blame Germany for doing diplomacy in the EU is nonsense.
DeleteAnd frankly, Italy should get its act together and start having stable governments that actually achieve something. Its problems are not from a supposedly 'imperial' Germany - they're in the neglect of problems at home.
And judging by our TV, Italy barely exists. Salvini gets a little coverage, and that's about it until the next earthquake.
Ok, I exaggerated. I still think that fixing underlying issues should come first: conferences don't solve anything if the basic trust is lost, if they're ad-hoc. Regarding the TV, I suppose I don't watch it enough to have a good baseline, and was unfortunate enough about 7 months ago or so to get a bad week.
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