Libya: "Rejoicing at our bloody democracy"

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Today, the United Nations enters a new
chapter in its military history. It will discuss a new Security Council resolution
that seeks authorisation for a mission to bomb boats used by human traffickers
and smugglers in the Libyan waters of the Mediterranean. If it passes, which it
likely will, overnight, militarism will be sanctioned as the default policy
response to unwanted migration to Europe.

The proposed military
mission would be led by Italy and involve some 10 EU states including Britain,
France and Spain. The resolution has been drawn up by
Britain in response to unprecedented refugee flows from the North of Africa which
have been coupled with a huge death toll due to the curtailing of search and
rescue operations. There is no denying that some kind of action is necessary to
save lives: the stretch of water long known as Europe’s graveyard has become a
bleeding blot on our conscience in recent months, with over 1,600
deaths alone this year.

Rather than learning the lessons of
recent history, and of heading calls from organisations such as Save the Children
to fully and systematically ‘restart the rescue’, however, EU member states
have opted for militarism as their primary solution to the ‘migrant crisis’. In
their recent analysis
of the EU plan for action, lawyers Mariagiulia
Giuffre and Cathryn Costello conclude that acknowledgement of
responsibility is nowhere to be seen.

The mass influx of refugees from
conflict-ridden countries is nothing new, as is all too familiar to the
developing countries in the global south that continue to host 86%
of the world’s refugees. But Britain seems genuinely perplexed that its botched
‘military intervention light’ in Libya would result in anything other than
stability.

At the centenary conference
of the Women’s International league for Peace and Freedom in The Hague, I spoke
to Zahra’ Langhi, co-founder and director of the Libyan Women’s Platform for
Peace about alternatives to militarism and
pathways to stability to Libya.

Jennifer
Allsopp: Zahra’, as a peace activist inside Libya, what’s your perspective on
Europe’s response to the ‘migrant crisis’?

Zahra’ Langhi: It’s simple. They want
to stop immigration, and as always, the approach of the international community
is militaristic. But securing the borders is not militarising the borders, it’s
quite different. What the international community don’t seem to understand is
that it’s one cycle. When you stabilise Libya everything will be better. At the
moment a lot of people are not thinking about the human rights of the
immigrants because they’re not even thinking of human rights at all. Human
rights in a situation like Libya has become a luxury – the primary goal is
staying safe and surviving. 

We know that the trafficking of immigrants
comes with the flood of arms, with drugs, all together, and so the answer is
not militarising the borders. We need a holistic approach with development
plans in areas in the peripheries around the borders. But the problem is that
even when the international community says it wants a ‘political solution’,
their political solution is not humanitarian, it’s not about dialogue, it’s not
thinking of the sustainability of their approach, not thinking holistically. We
need a feminist approach, an inclusive approach to the crisis, not just the
‘migrant crisis’, but the crisis of instability in Libya as a whole. It all
comes together: immigration, terrorism, trafficking, gender-based violence.
They need to understand that it comes together. Now they will take a stand on
the smuggling and they will not address the other issues. And that’s the
problem. 

JA:
What would a feminist response to the instability in Libya look like?

ZL: We believe in nonviolent resistance
and in countering violent extremism with development, education, and
with addressing the issue from the standpoint of human security. And this
requires a strong guarantee from the international community to reconstruct our
cities. Because if you come home and find your home is destroyed, anyone can
join a militant group. So if we don’t address these issues, we will be failing
people.

Libyan Women's Platform for Peace

All of the ingredients are there, and we’re waiting to be heard. We’ve
drafted a 14 point crisis strategy
which we presented to the UN Commission on the Status of
Women that links everything together. We
worked with Libyan ex-pats, Libyan community leaders on the ground, women and
young men, they came from Benghazi, from Tripoli, and we developed the first
plan of its kind. The plan isn’t idealistic, it’s rooted in our experience. It
says we need to challenge the whole framework of peace building. It’s about
bringing an alternative, sustainable, inclusive peace.

Peace is at the centre of our thinking,
but we recognise that you can’t ignore the people who are shelling us, they
need to be stopped. The problem is that, when it comes to arms, there’s a huge
hypocrisy in the international community. The international community haven’t
wanted to lift the arms embargo because the argument goes that with a lifting of
the embargo, arms might go into the hands of the extremist groups. But we keep
trying to tell them that they have been going into the hands of extremist
groups for over four years now and nothing is being done about it! At the
moment everybody, the government, the militias are getting arms but it’s not
monitored, it’s not budgeted. If you lift the embargo it will be monitored and
we can have a say. It’s happening anyway. This is what we’re trying to tell the
UK mission in the UN Security Council. Lift the embargo –with conditions, and I
stress this.

We want to monitor the budget. At the moment they’re taking from
the budget and they’re not paying anything into education and reconstruction
and it’s not at all transparent for the people. We don’t want to be another
banana republic, another militaristic country. We’re saying, ‘have focus groups
and ask us how we want our security sector reformed’. We want it based on human
rights, but we want it to be built the way we want it. So we’re not saying we
don’t want an army. We want reintegration into the army, but this is a moment
for us when we need to have a voice.

JA:
Can you tell me a bit about the history of the women’s peace movement in Libya?

ZL: Salwa
Bughaighis was the first woman to come out on the 17th
of February 2011 in front of the court to
call for a democratic Libya where there is rule of law, where there are human
rights, dignity and social justice. Later on she joined the national and
transitional council. She resigned in protest because there wasn’t enough
representation of women, and we cofounded together the Libyan Women’s Platform
for Peace in October 2011, before the killing of Gaddafi. Salwa Bughaighis, National DialogueThe movement was
founded to establish inclusive democracy and  gender equality, and it’s basically about
human rights and gender mainstreaming security sector reform. First we were
involved in the electoral process, which resulted in women winning 17.5% in the
first election ever in 52 years. Salwa then became the deputy president of the
National Dialogue Preparatory Committee. She travelled Libya to call for peace
and national dialogue.

When we managed to change the roadmap
and have another parliamentary election she went back to Benghazi to cast her
vote and that vote cost her her
life. Ironically, three hours before her assassination
I wrote something on Facebook saying democracy without women is a hypocrisy and
it’s true. However, democracy with no arms control is a worse hypocrisy. Salwa
participated in the democracy, in the democratic process that day. There were
clashes, there was no control, no government system. Arms were flooding in,
there was no demobilisation, nothing, and so it was meaningless. And so she got
killed. And so we had the international community celebrating the completeness
of the elections that day, and just one line saying they’re sorry for the
brutal assassination of Salwa and so you see they were rejoicing at our bloody
democracy. Democracy needs to exist in a safe environment. But it seems that
the international community’s intervention in Libya, which was categorised as
‘light model intervention’, was only about regime change, and not building
institutions and introducing democracy in a sustainable manner. It was rushed through.

JA:
And what’s the current profile of the Libyan peace movement?

ZL: Many are involved in a peace
movement without even realising it. We talk about human security, but you don’t
need to introduce this to people, it’s what they want, it’s their priority,
it’s about creating safe passages for them, about access to electricity and
water; an absence of explosives. There are many internally displaced Libyans,
especially in Benghazi, who are really suffering. The city has been completely
deserted and left to the militias firstly, and now to ISIS. And so young
Libyans feel that the international community deserted them. You need a crisis
response strategy or a disaster recovery plan and all the international
community is saying about it is calling for a political solution between political
factions and not thinking of how to make this peace agreement sustainable.

Peace isn’t about NGOs it’s about
communities. You can only make it sustainable if you incorporate grass roots
actors from the beginning. In peace negotiations civil society is seen as
something apolitical, but it’s not, civil society has a political message of
dissent. This stereotype of the 
international community and the UN mission is part of the problem, the
fact that the international organisations always like to deal with structured
organisations that know how to write proposals, speak English etc. It's a syndrome of ‘NGOanisation’.

There needs to be funding for grass roots
activists to implement their work on the ground. We’re doing what we can with limited
resources. Where there are no schools at the moment women’s movements help with
education, or with health problems, but it’s not enough, they need resources.
What I worry about is that because these resources have not come the whole
population became at the beginning politicised and now they’re more nihilistic
and losing faith not only in the process but in human rights. Many activists
have fled the country and they are in Tunis, in Cairo, in Istanbul and they are
working hard to try and support Libyans inside.

JA:
You’ve said at this conference that women human rights defenders are the
missing link in peace and security.

ZL: Yes, exactly. And they need
protection to do their work. We cannot operate in a climate of impunity. Part
of our campaign is to say that ‘justice for Salwa is
justice for all’. We operate under huge risks. We’re calling for two
components. Firstly, ending impunity. In the case of Libya it’s the
implementation of the resolution 2174, which has not yet been implemented because
of the UN Security Council state members. It calls for punishment for warlords
who have committed war crimes. And there’s a travel ban, freezing of assets and
it ends with the International Criminal Court. As colleagues here have said, we
need a comprehensive change in how the international community sees peace
making and it needs to include the democratisation of the UN Security Council.
It all ties together. This is why we’re keen to build a strong network with our
sisters, working under other governments, to make this change.

The other part goes hand in hand with ending impunity and ensuring protection for
human rights defenders. Because after the assassination of Salwa many people
were scared and there was no one to protect them, even when they fled the
country. We need more funding and new ways of funding our work. The
international community needs us, these people at the grassroots are the agents
of change. So much more thought needs to be given to how to protect human rights
defenders and how to secure their role in peaceful transitions. I think we need
to invest in an international law to give them a status. It’s not enough to say
‘participation of women’. We need recognition. At the moment they only seem to
recognise the work of those who take up arms! We need support. Otherwise it’s
all a hypocrisy.

JA:
You are part of peace negotiations hosted by the UN in Algeria. Do you feel
your message is being heard?

ZL: So far we have had two meetings and
for us it was to push for an agenda of human rights and I think a lot of our
points were incorporated: impunity, the human rights aspect, however, I am
critical of the process as a whole. I think the international community is
confused about democracy and about militarism. This is an interesting and
unique moment in history when all of us, not just our societies alone, are
questioning democracy, democratic tools
and we are trying to think out of the box because so far we’ve been seeing
failures of the blueprint. They won’t say, hold on, you could have democracy
though a process of dialogue. That it could be extended for several months or
years and be an inclusive process and give it a real push and a mandate. My
problem is that  I doubt that the
agreement that will come out from this dialogue will work because there’s no
clear mandate, and it’s linked with the drafting committee process which is
failing in Libya.

I wish people would read our
plan.

Zahra' Langhi spoke to Jennifer at WILPF's Centenary Conference in the Hague on 'Women's Power to Stop War'. Read more interviews and articles from the conference in 50.50's series Women's Power to Stop War.