Tarek Megerisi is a senior policy fellow with the North Africa and Middle East program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
In January, the Italian government helped a notorious Libyan torturer escape an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Osama Njeem, a senior militia leader who commands Libya's judicial police, was detained in Turin, in northern Italy, under an ICC warrant for suspected crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against detainees at Mitiga prison, which he oversaw in Libya's capitol, Tripoli. But soon after his arrest, Njeem was unexpectedly freed by Italian authorities on what they claimed was "a legal technicality" and flown on an official Italian state aircraft back to Libya, where he received a hero's welcome from his fellow militiamen.
The ICC made clear that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's far-right government had not consulted the court before defying the warrant for Njeem's arrest. Helping Njeem escape the docket in The Hague was an act of sabotage against the international order, universal justice and multilateralism itself—from a founding member of the ICC, no less. Under the Rome Statute that established the ICC, Italy is required to hand over wanted individuals to the court for trial in The Hague.
In the chaotic aftermath of outraged recriminations, Italian ministers claimed their hands were tied by improperly filed paperwork, before being trumped by their own prime minister in a fiery sermon on social media. Facing investigation from Italian prosecutors for her actions, Meloni claimed she had no regrets about doing what was necessary to protect her country from this supposed lone threat (in fact, an unarmed, overweight, already detained individual). "I can't be blackmailed, I can't be intimidated," she declared, casting the investigation against her as desperation by political rivals who don't want to see "Italy change, to become better."
Meloni then doubled down on the subterfuge, dispatching Italy's spy chief, Giovanni Caravelli, to Tripoli to brief Libya's deeply unpopular, increasingly repressive government on who else was under sealed indictment from the ICC. According to Italian media, Caravelli assured Libyan leaders that none of the motley crew of 86 accused war criminals in Libya reportedly on the ICC's list would be arrested on Italian soil, in order to avoid any embarrassing replays of the Njeem affair.
Meloni's calculation is as simple as it is cynical. Since she came to power on an anti-immigrant platform, promising to close Italy's borders to migrants and asylum-seekers, she depends on these torturers, criminals and militias in Libya to "manage" migration flows to Italy, which have already gone up 33 percent from this time last year. Meloni's commitment is not to international law and the ICC, but instead to a shadowy agreement with Libya to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. Had she allowed international justice to take its course, with Njeem and other torturers under arrest in The Hague, Meloni probably feared that the migrant agreement with Libya would collapse. In a callous act of revenge, Libyan officials may even have emptied their infamous migrant dungeons, sponsored by the European Union, in Italy's direction.
Each year, the state that Libyans dreamed of gets farther away, and the Pandora's box that Libya has become gets harder to keep shut.
- Tarek Megerisi
This entire episode exposes who European countries are partnering with to "curb" or "manage" migration from North Africa, undermining any stated commitment to human rights. But it is also perhaps the most glaring example yet of how international actors are sabotaging the prospects for change in Libya and the chance that Libyans might finally realize the hopes of their revolution in 2011. It is a tale of the myopia and short-term imperatives of outside powers that don't have any strategic plan or policy in Libya, instead only what now amounts to extortion rackets. They are consumed by trying to contain what once may have been considered the revolution's fallout, but is increasingly the fallout of their own failed policies since the end of Moammar Gadhafi's regime. The result is that each year, the state that Libyans dreamed of gets farther away, and the Pandora's box that Libya has become gets harder to keep shut.
This time it was Italy, but they're far from the only ones trading their values and their interests for ever-smaller and ever-shorter gains. Libya is where international law has risen and fallen, like a phoenix in reverse. In 2011, Libya's revolution—and Gadhafi's violent response, calling on his soldiers to "cleanse" Libya "house by house"—sparked fears of impending massacres that led to the one-and-only armed intervention on the grounds of the international humanitarian principle of "responsibility-to-protect," or R2P. When the United Nations Security Council authorized NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Gadhafi's forces, it was seen by advocates of R2P as the crowning achievement of international law.
But Libya today is a wasteland of international law, the state effectively split into two rival territories. Whether in western Libya under its internationally recognized but failed and kleptocratic government, or in eastern Libya under the breakaway authoritarian regime of Gadhafi-era general Khalifa Haftar, there is no international law in action, only misguided games of realpolitik.
Just a week after the Njeem debacle, a U.S. diplomatic and military delegation posed smiling with Saddam Haftar, the filial heir apparent of eastern Libya's dictator. It was a curiously timed display of legitimizing support, given that it coincided with the publication of a report by a U.N. panel of experts highlighting Saddam Haftar's role as cocaine baron, smuggler-in-chief and prolific violator of the U.N. arms embargo on Libya. The U.S. goal in its dealings with Haftar is even more ethereal and quixotic than Meloni's. Washington's vain hope is drawing the Haftar family away from its ever-deepening relationship with Russia, their key financial and military patron, through shallow meet-and-greets and other empty gestures like participation in training exercises.
A few months earlier, Saddam Haftar had also been briefly detained in Italy, as part of a Spanish investigation into his attempts to illegally import military drones to Libya. The younger Haftar was predictably outraged. He is used to sharing in his father's absolute impunity, which even involves visiting British and European ambassadors watching his forces parade their collection of weaponry obtained in violation of the U.N. arms embargo. Saddam Haftar's response was to shut down Libya's largest oil field, co-operated by a conglomerate of European oil companies, of which Spain's Repsol is the most prominent.
Libya's recent history has been an utterly predictable demonstration of cause and effect. Europe and the U.S. have not been the drivers of Libya's decline, but they have been its sentinels, watching over, protecting and easing every deleterious step, believing it was in their interests to do so. But whether that interest lays in migration, geopolitics, energy or even some general but nebulous "stability," those pillars have all degraded along with the position, power and influence of these Western sentinels.
Europe and the U.S. have not been the drivers of Libya's decline, but they have been its sentinels, watching over, protecting and easing every deleterious step.
- Tarek Megerisi
Nothing symbolizes this decline better than Italy's Meloni breaking the law to protect Libyan warlords and their people-smuggling gangs. This, almost ten years on from Italy's first foray to co-opt Libya's human-trafficking militias into becoming Europe's counter-smuggling "partners."
The same pattern applies to all these other Western interests in Libya. Desperation to stop Libya's civil war spinning completely out of control in 2020 pushed Western states to collectively bless a deeply flawed cease-fire plan originating from Moscow. The same desperation led to hushing Libyan demands for accountability for Haftar's numerous war crimes and for assurances that Libya's key military bases and oil installations would be demilitarized under government control. Today, Libya is the linchpin of Russia's Africa operations and, according to the U.N., "armed groups in Libya have achieved an unprecedented level of influence over state institutions," including vital oil infrastructure.
Libyan oil, as Libyans had warned, was shut off in 2022 in another collaboration between Haftar and Vladimir Putin that had two aims: to politically strengthen Haftar and help Moscow torch international energy markets after invading Ukraine. President Joe Biden's desperation to lower global oil prices enabled a shady deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates—Haftar's other key patron—to restart Libyan oil production in exchange for effectively handing Libya's oil governance over to armed groups. As a result, Libya's vast oil wealth has been diverted to Haftar's so-called Libyan National Army and mercenaries from Russia's Wagner Group, helping Russia escape Western sanctions over Ukraine and fueling other African conflicts like the civil war in Sudan. Meanwhile, the Libyan state tumbles into ever deeper financial crisis.
As egregious as Meloni's recent depredations are, they are merely symptomatic of a long trend of Western policymakers letting desperation lead when strategy should, trading their policy pillars for the equivalent of magic beans. The continuous result is watching the Western world, supposedly committed to the international rules-based order, dismantle the international laws, frameworks and mechanisms that not only uphold that order around the world, but protect their interests in Libya and represent their vehicle to finally stabilizing the country post-2011. With every piece of leverage the U.S. or Europe give up, with every tool of influence they destroy, they become more dependent on the arsonists who promised they would stop lighting fires once they were sure they wouldn't be threatened with water.
Libyans, Libya's neighbors and Europe have always been in this together, as they all suffer at the same hands. The only way out of this inferno is to shepherd Libya toward elections that replace the current crew of arsonists in power. That requires using what outside leverage remains to strengthen accountability that can restrain these arsonists and establish transparency over Libya's oil industry and revenue, to help cut off their fuel. The fate of Libya, and of the international order itself, depends on it.
