Arab League Wavering On Libya

By Hasan Abu Nimah

This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 30/03/2011 

 

For once, the Arab League was able to take a decisive stance on February 23, when it suspended Libya’s membership in response to Muammar Qadhafi regime’s violent crackdown on protests against his four-decade long rule. Three weeks later, the Arab League strongly supported a UN decision to impose a no-fly zone and authorise “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya - in other words, a licence for an open-ended military intervention.

Amidst sweeping Arab euphoria that another dictator was about to fall, indeed more out of serious concern that that particular revolt was in danger of being aborted, the league must have overlooked the fact that it was setting serious precedents. One was the premature suspension of a member state. The other was providing cover for the internationalisation of a purely Arab League problem.

Undeniably, the league’s options were very limited, and in order to better assess its handling of the crisis one should separate the pragmatic from the legal. Legally, both actions - to suspend Libya’s membership and to approve a no-fly zone - were incompatible with articles 8 and 18 of the Arab League Charter. Article 8 binds member states to respect the regimes of all the other states and to pledge not to take any action to change such regimes.

On the face of it, a call for no-fly zone is nowhere near a call for regime change. But the hidden intentions, as well as the disguised implications, were obvious; they clearly amount in the end to the de facto outcome of regime change. The events that followed the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 approving the no-fly zone and other measures have demonstrated this.

Article 18, on the other hand, permits the Arab League Council to consider the membership of any state terminated only if that state fails to fulfil the requirements of the charter. Neither of those two situations applies.

For pragmatic considerations, however, the Arab organisation had to do exactly what it did. Left unchecked, Qadhafi would have utilised all military capabilities available to him, in addition to any other mercenaries he could recruit, to crush the uprising.

In normal situations, it would be the duty of the Arab League to seek a diplomatic end to the crisis, and in the absence of such a probability the league should intervene militarily, as it did before in Kuwait and Lebanon, to avert the worst. But totally incapable, the league had to transfer the case to the Security Council to take action. By suspending Libya’s membership, the league had prematurely eliminated its chances of diplomatic intervention; by recommending to the Security Council to sanction a no-fly zone (with unpredictable consequences implied), it paved the way for international military intervention. Despite all that, the league’s decision was deemed appropriate and therefore welcome regionally as well as internationally. What surprised many afterwards was its reversal of position on the question of the no-fly zone.

The situation in Libya was different “from the aim of imposing no-fly zone”, said a statement by Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa who added: “What the [Arab League] wants is the protection of civilians not the shelling of more civilians.”

It is hard to imagine that Musa, whose flip-flopping has been linked quite to other opportunistic considerations of his own, expected the no-fly zone to be enforced just by issuing a Security Council resolution. The reality is that Resolution 1973 included more than just a no-fly zone. In its operative paragraph 4, the resolution “[a]uthorises member states... to take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” in Libya.

Both resolution elements, the no-fly zone and the protection of civilians, which implied massive use of force against Qadhafi’s armies and military capabilities, and therefore implied unambiguous risks of human life loss, were widely welcomed, coming at a very critical moment when Qadhafi’s forces were close to entering Benghazi, the last bastion of the revolutionaries. It would have been ideal if the goals of the international action were achieved without use of force, but that was impossible. Qadhafi was not expected to comply and promptly surrender. If, on the other hand, the reports on the progress of the military intervention are accurate, the number of civilian casualties resulting from the bombing remains very low. The Qadhafi forces have mainly caused larger-scale damage of property and civilian deaths.

The Arab League vacillation therefore makes little sense. Not only did it fail to take up its duties, when action was taken on its behalf and upon its request, it turned critical of what it originally recommended.

The Arab League has in fact been dysfunctional for long time. Under its current secretary general since 2001, its work has been steadily deteriorating. He dealt with the league much in the same dictatorial manner as many other Arab leaders dealt with their countries, as if they were their own private properties. His authoritarian style was hardly checked by member states.

“Instead of criticising the United States, France and the United Kingdom, Amr Musa along with other Arab leaders should be asking themselves the following question: What would be happening in Libya now if the Western forces did not intervene?” asked Hassan Masiky (MoroccoBoard News Service, 22 March), adding: “It would be a massacre and a humanitarian disaster with hundreds of civilians slaughtered by Qadhafi’s militias. While the Arab nationalist movements find the West intervention in Libya reprehensible, Arabs in general recognise the inevitability of the use of force by the West against a dictator who has no regards to the lives of his own people. The Arab League has no alternative on how to control Qadhafi and protect the Libyan people but to ask for foreign help.”

He also wrote: “What the Arab public expects of their supposedly representative organisation is a plan on how to resolve the Libyan crisis and restrain Qadhafi’s militias. Instead, the Arab League meetings over Libya issued a statement asking for ‘help’ in stopping the killings of innocent Libyans at the hands of their ‘leader’. For Arab observers, the Arab League management of the crisis in Libya is typical of the organisation handling of major Arab predicaments. In fact, the Arab League had never resolved an inter-Arab conflict on its own.”

With the changes that have already taken place in the Arab region and the others anticipated, the league is also bound for major change. The departure of the current secretary general comes at the right time to pave the way for positive change. We definitely need a better and a more credible, an active and a reformed Arab League.