Who could have foreseen that Libya, within just one year of Muammar
Gaddafi’s death, would join the community of democratic nations?
Virtually everyone predicted that the Islamist tide would sweep through
Tripoli as it had done through Tunis and Cairo. But it was not to be.
Instead, the Libyan people made fools of us all.
To our surprise and delight, it was the moderate National
Forces Alliance (NFA), not the radical Justice & Construction Party
(JCP), which swept to victory in last year’s elections for Libya’s
General National Congress. And, when the Congress convened to elect a
new Prime Minister, the NFA’s Mahmoud Jibril utterly trounced the JCP’s Awad Barasi, who failed even to scrape his way into the second round of voting. In the end, it was Ali Zidan, a liberal, who took up the premiership.
How did this happen? How was it that, of all countries, Gaddafi’s Libya – described as the “Worst of the Worst” by Freedom House – could become the success story of the Arab Spring?
Firstly, military intervention by the West significantly
reduced the dependence of the Libyan opposition on pro-Islamist Qatar.
Although Doha did its best to influence the outcome of the revolution
by supplying vast quantities
of guns and cash to Islamist militias fighting Gaddafi’s regime, the
eight-month uprising was simply too short for Qatar-backed radicals to
build up the necessary momentum. Indeed, Libyans regarded Abdel Hakim
Belhaj and Sheikh Ali Salabi – both prominent oppositionists heavily supported by Qatar
– with such indifference that their Homeland Party failed to win even a
single seat in post-Gaddafi elections to the General National
Congress.
Secondly, the West’s formal recognition of the
Transitional National Council as a “legitimate representative” of the
Libyan people did much to deprive Islamist factions of the leadership
role to which they aspired. The Council – formed not in exile, but by
local activists in Benghazi – gave Libyans crucial ownership of their
revolution. By recognising the legitimacy of this endogenous body, the
West sent a clear message to the world that Libya’s future was not up
for grabs by foreign-backed opportunists.
Turning now to Syria, it is through analyzing the success
of the Libyan Revolution that we can begin to determine why the Syrian
Revolution is, and will be, such a catastrophic failure.
Unlike in Libya, there has been no Western military
intervention in Syria. As a result, more than two years of bloody civil
war have now passed without the slightest prospect of relief for
Syria’s beleaguered population. But Syria’s loss is the Islamists’
gain; as the conflict has dragged on, the once-marginal radicals have
grown in strength, to the point where they now effectively control the armed opposition. Consequently, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is no longer an army of would-be liberators, but of oppressors-in-waiting.
As for the Syrian National Council, it is fundamentally
unlike the Transitional National Council. Formed by exiles in Turkey
and dominated by Islamists from its inception, the Council was almost
totally irrelevant to those who were actually risking their lives to
overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad; when asked in mid-2012 to name
a Syrian opposition group, only two percent of Syrians gave the Council as their answer. By contrast, the FSA was named by eighty-three percent of those surveyed.
Although Western states have now withdrawn their
endorsement from the Council, the damage, regrettably, is already done.
When the European Union embraced the group as a “legitimate representative” in February 2012, the Council’s president thanked
the EU for “giv[ing] us added momentum,” and called for “all other
Syrian opposition groups to work with the SNC.” Not at all
coincidentally, the FSA – until then largely secular – announced
soon afterwards that it would team up with the Council to form a joint
civilian-military command. By conferring undue legitimacy upon the
Syrian National Council, the West had empowered the Islamists to hijack
the Syrian Revolution.
For these reasons, it is doubtful that Syria will surprise
us in the way that Libya did. We can only hope, therefore, that an
important lesson has been learned. It is not enough for Western leaders
to speak wishfully about democracy taking root in the Arab world;
rather, democracy requires action.
al gemeiner.
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