Still reeling from a civil war that toppled long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi, minsters from Libya’s new interim government continue to unveil new members to assist in leading the North African country to elections in seven months’ time.
At the onset of the NATO intervention, I had the pleasure of interviewing News Central Asia editor, Tariq Saeedi to get an analyst’s opinion of what was at stake in Libya.
Here’s a bit of that discussion:
NATO has intervened under the guise of protecting civilians, although that mandate is rapidly expanding, but before Libya was set to position itself as a major player in the global market. What are your thoughts on this?
On the question of Libya, the knee jerk response of a conspiracy theorists and the calm and measured opinion of a seasoned analyst would be virtually the same thing.
In other words, whatever is being said about the western designs on Libya is more or less true.
There are several elements to the Libyan mess.
The Nubian Sandstone Aquifers untapped groundwater is greatly needed for thirsty countries like Egypt, Chad, Libya and Sudan.
As the “Gateway to Africa”, the combination of water and oil was placing Libya in a good position to play an increasingly influential role in the global economy. Both the UK, France and Italy were still making deals with Gaddafi so why intervene to foster his ouster?
One of them is certainly water.
Instead of commenting directly on the Nubian Sandstone Aquifers sweet water reserves (NSAS) and the role it may have played in attracting the NATO forces, I would highlight the issue by quoting similar situations in South and Central Asia.
Kashmir is understood to be the cause of rift between India and Pakistan but actually it is the waters of three rivers – Ravi, Sutlej and Biyas – that originate from the upper Kashmir that is the sources of dispute. Had these rivers originated from elsewhere, the Kashmir question would have been solved long ago. In fact, there would have been no Kashmir question.
The Amudarya River that starts from Afghanistan and criss crosses between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before terminating at Aral Sea is another example. The ability of this river to trigger a conflict in Central Asia will rise proportionally with the ability of Afghanistan to use more water from Amudarya for its own use.
As I see it, the same forces and countries that have INVADED Libya are also considering various models to intervene in Central Asia when the water question becomes sufficiently hot.
On the other hand, Russia, together with Kazakhstan, is planning a permanent hold on the jugular of Central Asia by creating a manmade river to channel Siberian waters to the agrarian economies of Central Asia.
One doesn’t need to be a genius to predict that probably within the next 20 years or so the major source of conflict and war would be water, not oil and gas. Just look at the situation of San’aa that is likely to be a waterless place within a decade.
In a nutshell, whoever controls NSAS, controls the economies, foreign policies and destinies of several countries in the region, not just northeastern Africa.
Geopolitically, what countries would be interested in halting the kind of economic independence track Libya seemed to be creating?
Gaddafi, a lone operator by nature, angered the entire Arab street and by extension the western world by taking some crucial steps in the recent past.
His short-lived honeymoon with the west came to an abrupt end when he realized that the openness he offered was being used to introduce regime change elements in Libya. He retaliated forcefully.
On 21 February 2011, Qaddafi announced the plans to privatise the oil wealth of Libya. He created a fund with initial layout of US $ 32 billion for 2011, from which every Libyan citizen was to get US $ 21000. The idea was to give the ownership of oil directly to the population and ask them to stop expecting the facilities they were receiving through the ministries of healthcare, education, and transport.
It was a plan that would have uprooted every sitting regime in the Arab world, most notably Saudi Arabia.
The two basic components of this plan i.e. transferring the oil wealth directly to the population, and the privatization of healthcare, education and transport, would have cut the roots of every autocratic regime in the region and beyond. It was an example no one wanted to see in action.
He was also going to decentralize the governmental power, something that would have attracted similar demands in the Gulf region, mostly in UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia where the US and NATO are heavily dependent on the goodwill of the sitting governments to maintain their presence.
What I have gathered in my conversations with some high officials in the Arab world, it is the most odious combination of fear and greed that brings together the Western Europe, the USA and the Arab kings to remove the man who was going to be the major game-changer in the region.
There is also the need to look at the composition of the so-called Interim Transitional National Council. —– Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Abdel Hafiz Ghogha, Mahmood Jibril, Ali Al Issawi, Omar Al Hariri, Fathi Turbel, and Abdel Fattah Younis.
Except for Omar Al Hariri, all of them remained close allies of Qaddafi and occupied top positions in his regime till recently. If they were champions of democracy as they claim, how would they explain their complicity in whatever crimes Qaddafi committed?
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