Libya looks certain to be the next flashpoint in the “war on terror” – with a crucial political deadline approaching today. As RAF jets are already over desert skies and President Obama is telling the Pentagon to look at military options, it seems that the west is ready to take on the 6,000 Islamic State fightersin the vast, oil-rich sands of north Africa.
Tunisia is so worried by the build-up of Islamists on its doorstep that it has begun to build an anti-terror barrier along its border with Libya – a desperate attempt to protect itself from terrorism. In the ever spiralling war against terror, Libya now matters to everyone. But the effort to address the threat is being impeded by the body that should be leading the response: the United Nations. Foreign forces would have to be invited in by a Libyan government. The problem is not that there isn’t such a government. The problem is that there are three.
To the administrations in Tripoli and Tobruk, the United Nations added a third – a “unity government” in Tunisia: one so fractured that three of its nine-member presidential council reportedly came to blows recently.
Endorsed by the UN in December, the administration has said it will come up with a list of ministers that everyone can agree on by tonight. To make matters worse, everything the UN does now is tainted by Libyan concerns about its credibility.
Much of that concern relates to the role of the former UN peace envoy, Bernardino Léon. Léon, a former Spanish foreign minister, spent weeks last summer completing the proposed agreement between the two sides to form a power-sharing unity government. Those talks were meant to put to rest the intense, but largely hidden, competition between regional players such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar and their client states over influence in Libya, whose oil and gas reserves make the nation a valuable piece of global real estate.
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