Bearing Witness to Libya’s Human Rights Tragedy
- Stephanie Williams
- Jul 1, 2024
- 30 min read
Updated: Jul 6
The 2011 Western and Arab intervention in Libya was born of the lessons learned (or, as the case may be, not learned) from the international community’s previous two decades of responding to the outbreak of conflict and commission of gross violations of human rights in various contexts. More precisely, the Libyan case was informed by the international community’s previous failure to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda and to halt what had been up to that point the largest mass killing on European soil, in Srebrenica, since the Second World War.
During those anxious months in the late winter and early spring of 2011 as observers watched events unfolding in Libya, these lessons ‘weighed heavily on the decision-makers in Washington, London, Paris and beyond’.[1] The world was monitoring a domestic Libyan uprising which was being met, particularly in the city of Benghazi, by the excessive use of force by units under the command of Muammar Qaddafi. The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine was invoked by some international figures to push for the ultimate passage of UNSCR 1973 on the premise of preventing potential crimes against humanity and indeed the resolution contains language pertaining to R2P.[2] This UN resolution paved the way for the NATO and Arab intervention in Libya, which morphed from a protection mission to one of regime change, leading to Qaddafi’s downfall.
Ian Martin, the first UN Special Representative in Libya, in his meticulously documented book All Necessary Measures? has detailed the initial international decisions taken on Libya in 2011-12. While questioning whether R2P indeed played a seminal role in international decision-making, Martin notes: ‘the Libya experience has done such damage to the limited international consensus there was around the R2P doctrine’.[3]
Whether or not R2P was central to the passage of UNSCR 1973, the lack of serious international investment in the Libya that emerged after Qaddafi regime’s demise was a singular failure on the part of the world’s leading powers especially given the legacy of Qaddafi’s four-decade plus quixotic, chaotic, and terrorizing reign. The international clarity and vision that were applied before the passage of UNSCR 1973 have seldom been in evidence since Qaddafi’s downfall.
As the world has turned its gaze away from Libya, Qaddafi’s successors have spent the past decade quarrelling—often violently—over the shallow legitimacy of the country’s institutions instead of working together to build a functioning state. As a consequence, the ordinary Libyan citizen has been left materially less secure and too often prey to abuse at the hands of the thugs (both home-grown and imported), while some of the victims of Qaddafi’s abuses themselves became victimizers.
