Libyan Unity Government Holds Tenuous Peace // FAI ONLINE

Libya’s new Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibeh meets community elders in Sirte, Libya, March 10, 2021. (Reuters, via thearabweekly.com)

After a decade of revolution, anarchy and civil war, a new UN-sanctioned unity government was sworn into power in the North African nation of Libya in March. The milestone agreement comes after seven years of political division between rival governments in Tripoli and Tubruk, which were each backed by different foreign powers. Abdulhamid Dbeibeh was confirmed as interim Prime Minister by the 200 member Libyan Parliament (called the House of Representatives) along with a 3-member Presidential Council, after a UN-brokered reconciliation process between rival governments last year brought the Second Libyan Civil War to an end. A second round of elections for a permanent government are scheduled for December 24.

Dbeibeh’s surprising ascendency comes after a controversial career in business and politics. Born in the revolutionary hotbed of Misrata, Libya, he was educated in Canada before returning to Libya to run a construction company. His success caught the eye of then-dictator Mu'ammar Gaddafi ī in 2007, when Dbeibeh was tapped to lead the Libyan Investment and Development Company (LIDCO), responsible for many of Libya’s public works projects. He is described as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The presidential council is made up of three co-chairs appointed from Libya’s three main regions: Tripolitania in the West, Cyrenaica in the East, and Fezzan in the southwest.

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After the Libyan Revolution began in 2011, Gadaffi’s regime was overthrown and the strongman was assassinated. An interim parliament was elected in 2012 and provisional constitution adopted, but Libyan society fractured into secular and Islamist factions. After highly-controversial elections for a parliamentary body in 2014, the provisional government refused to dissolve, creating two competing governments. Islamist militias drove the more secular new House of Representatives out of the capital of Tripoli, after which Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the secular-leaning Libyan National Army led a campaign against the Tripoli government with backing from Egypt, the UAE and Russia, in what became the Second Libyan Civil War. The Islamist-leaning, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) received assistance from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, halting Haftar’s forces on the outskirts of Tripoli with drones and Syrian mercenaries. The war locked into a stalemate last year, followed by the United Nations reconciliation process. Despite the UN’s success in negotiating an end to the conflict, and in facilitating the new unity government, there are still approximately 20,000 foreign fighters in Libya, including Russian mercenaries and Syrian Islamist militia sponsored by Turkey.

We would ask the Maranatha global family to pray for the people of Libya. Although we are thankful that the war has ended and the political reconciliation process has been successful, we are concerned about the establishment of a government with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and its greatest patron, Turkish President Erdogan. We pray that all foreign fighters would be withdrawn, that Turkish influence over Libya would be diminished in the coming elections, and that the Father would send laborers into the fields of Libya to sow and reap.

Maranatha.