(Reuters) – 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.
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, threatening Libya’s healthy foreign currency reserves, power
supply and remnants of law and order.
Libya’s oil production has fallen to just over 10 percent 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.
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.”
“DECLARATION OF WAR”
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 Ibrahim al Jathran told cheering crowds gathered in the
eastern coastal town of Ajdabiyah on Monday.
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 Aug. 17.
The federalists say they are not separatists and only want a bigger role and better distribution of wealth.
Most of Libya’s oil is in the east, separated from the more populous
west by a vast desert. The federalists are consolidating control over
the east, steeled by the conviction that Tripoli let them down in the
fight against Gaddafi.
Karim al-Barase, a federalist activist, said federalists were
planning to set up a new oil company in the east to handle the region’s
oil exports transparently and ensure they were not stolen “by a corrupt
elite that was no better than Gaddafi”.
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 standoff.
“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 El 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 136 km (85 miles) 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.
WIDER DISAFFECTION
Protesters are tapping into widespread disenchantment with Libya’s
new rulers, saying little has materialised in improved living conditions
despite the country’s oil wealth.
“The first enemy is corruption with the continued corruption that
state institutions are practising,” said Abu al-Qassem al-Mashay, chief
researcher at a government think-tank.
Critics have accused corrupt officials of loading crude at export
terminals without using meters and strikers openly accuse top officials
of squandering the country’s wealth.
Oil Minister Abdelbari al-Arusi denied the allegations and said the
prime minister had set up a judicial commission to investigate. He
blamed federalists for the oil crisis.
“They have force and by force they have prevented vessels from
loading and brought tankers that are outside the state’s legitimacy and
wanted to transfer these funds to their private accounts,” he said.
Industry executives say the tribal protesters have been emboldened by
neighbouring Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood to attack its
Libyan ideological ally, the Party of Justice and Construction, the
second largest bloc in parliament.
The party opposes federalism and many of the rebels accuse it of expanding their influence in the oil sector.
“Our movement has shaken the crowns of the oppressors who have
exploited Libya’s wealth. The Brotherhood have hijacked the state and
parliament and this group has seized control of all aspects of the
Libyan state. They have infiltrated the oil ministry with their armed
groups,” Jathran said.
Analysts say months of successive sieges of government buildings and
sits-in by former anti-Gaddafi fighters claiming benefits that forced
officials to cave in to their demands had encouraged workers in the oil
industry to follow suit.
“At the moment you have a bunch of opponents of the government who
are taking this action for different reasons, whether for jobs in a
refinery or whatever… It’s not concerted, but it’s adding up to a major
problem,” said one Western diplomat.
Paralysis in government is growing with senior posts unfilled due to
factional squabbling involving liberal forces aligning themselves with
former Gaddafi supporters against the Justice and Construction Party.
With the crumbling authority of Zeidan’s government, many fear
militias allied to the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Shields will
clash with tribal militias led by former Gaddafi supporters and now
backed by the secularists and liberals.
“The government is in a very weak position,” said Geoffrey Howard
from Control Risks. “They don’t have a monopoly on the use of force and
it’s very unlikely that they will do anytime soon … Many armed groups
have forces that are equal or stronger to the government.”