Tripoli: No end is in sight to the worst
disruption to Libya’s oil industry since the civil war in 2011 as armed
groups, security guards and oil workers with tribal loyalties shut down
pipelines and oil ports across the country.
Libya’s oil production has
fallen to just over 10 per cent of capacity due to a month-long
disruption by armed security guards who shut the main export ports in
the east and centre over pay demands.
Central state power is
already tenuous and separatist groups are exploiting the stoppages, but
the government risks bloody clashes with tribal militias if it sends
ill-equipped nascent army units to capture oil terminals held by armed
groups.
“These militias are
intoxicated with power,” said a senior Libyan official, adding that
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s strategy was to appease oil workers and
apply tribal mediation with caveats and incentives to end the standoff.
Zeidan, accused of allowing
corruption to flourish, can ill afford to prolong a crisis that the
government says has already cost more than $2 billion (Dh7.34 billion),
threatening Libya’s healthy foreign currency reserves, power supply and
remnants of law and order.
In the past week the strikes
have spread to the western coastal ports and armed groups have also
closed taps on pipelines from major oil fields, threatening the major
north African oil producer with economic paralysis.
“It’s a
tribal war to terminate the political process. They want a body that
represents the tribes,” Noman Benotman, president of Quilliam, a
counter-terrorism think tank, said.
“Practically the government is dead, technically it is still there.”
Calls for federal rule have
become stronger since Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011, fuelled by complaints
in the east that it has not been given a fair share of Libya’s wealth,
and the weakness of the central government.
Any military move by Tripoli
to deploy troops to retake control of the port terminals would be
“considered a declaration of war”, federalist Ebrahim Al Jathran told
cheering crowds gathered in the eastern coastal town of Ajdabiyah on
Monday.
Al Jathran, ousted this month
as chief of the Petroleum Facilities Guards in the eastern region for
leading strikers, is head of a self-governing political council
announced in the oil town of Ras Lanuf on August 17.
The federalists say they are not separatists and only want a bigger role and better distribution of wealth.
Despite tough talk of bombing
any tankers that tried to ship oil bought independently of the state,
Zeidan has steered away from any mention of sending the army to capture
the oil fields, saying he sought a peaceful end to the stand-off.
“Those who expect the
government to resolve the security situation overnight are not seeing
the situation clearly,” he said on Wednesday.
Industry executives give
countless examples of how armed groups and tribal militias disrupt work
in oil fields as far away as Al Feel and Essharara in the southwest to
Sarir, Amal, and Nafoora in the southeast.
Some demands are purely monetary.
In the giant Al Feel field in
the deep southwest, local and foreign workers are confined to camp as
militias from the desert area negotiate in the town of Zintan, around
136km southwest of Tripoli, with a government-backed military council on
how much they must get to end a siege of the pipelines, a Western based
oil company executive said.
Bentoman said central power
stretched only to Misrata in the east and Janzour in the West. “Outside,
they have no power without authorisation of local leaders. The southern
part of Libya is the wild west. There is no presence of government.”
Even on the outskirts of
Tripoli, the country manager of a supplier of oil equipment said it was
forced to enlist members of a militia to guard the company.
“You don’t need to call all
the staff to get a strike, just five disgruntled people can disrupt
work,” he said, on condition of anonymity.
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