Libya, From Positive Precedent to Collective Frustration

Notes internacionals CIDOB, núm. 37

As the Security Council set about approving resolutions 1970 and 1973, the French Ambassador to the UN proclaimed, “The world is changing for the better.” His words reflected western diplomacy’s deep satisfaction about the negotiations that had led, for the first time, to the inclusion of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in a resolution that would then give way to an international military intervention. The international community was thus behaving without discernible divisions or suspicions of hidden agendas. Two days later, the great powers and the countries in the region would intervene together to halt what appeared to be an imminent massacre in Benghazi. Everything seemed to indicate that, after the rifts caused by Kosovo and Iraq, a positive precedent for future international military interventions under the principle of R2P was being set.

But the reality has been otherwise. Four months after the start of the mission, with more than 15,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons, few appear satisfied with the uncertain results of the military intervention in Libya. For the United Kingdom and France, the countries most involved in the mission, and for the Libyan rebels themselves, the frustration rises from the fact that the U.S. and a few European allies are not sufficient involved militarily to achieve the only end that, according to them, could guarantee the protection of the Libyans; the fall of Gaddafi.

On the other hand, for many other countries and observers who initially supported the mission, the mandate to protect civilians has been extended inappropriately to the objective of achieving the end of the Gaddafi regime. For them, added to the sense of failure is a sense of deceit. They are asking themselves how, once the possible slaughter of civilians in Benghazi has been averted, NATO forces can justify continuing the increasingly intense bombardments in Libya and that France has even provided the rebels with arms in clear violation of the embargo decreed by the UN.

This evolution of the mission has poisoned what was initially, following the approval of the Security Council and regional support for a military intervention under R2P (only possible in the context of the successful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt) a positive precedent. But to abuse a limited mandate that ruled out the use of land forces or the delivery of weapons (fruit of a consensus among countries with different sensibilities) in order to hasten the fall of the Gaddafi regime (an objective not considered in the resolution) has undermined the legitimacy of the mission for some.

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