In Libya, the foundation of Prime Minister Dbeibah weakened

Rockets fired on Sunday March 31 at a house of the clan of Abdelhamid Dbeibah in the Libyan capital: the incident sounds like an alarm. An ill wind is blowing against the Government of National Unity (GUN) in Tripoli. The prime minister invested in 2021, until now adept at clearing out resistance to his power, in particular by purchasing civil peace thanks to budgetary populism generously financed by oil windfalls, has been facing, for several weeks, an erosion of his base. policy.

His guardianship, de facto limited to western Libya due to the persistent partition of the country, now faces a triple threat: the threat of financial drying up, the fragility of the security pact between militias in the Tripolitania region and unresolved tensions with the Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the “strong man” of Cyrenaica (east) where a parallel government operates. While Libya had experienced relative stability since the October 2020 ceasefire agreement between the two rival camps of East and West Libya, the rise in these tensions worries Western chancelleries. “ Libya has disappeared from the international agenda but we must not forget it, it can once again become a bomb that explodes in our faces », warns a diplomat stationed in Tripoli.

Orthodoxy

The most thorny issue facing Mr. Dbeibah is undoubtedly the drying up of public funding which had until now enabled him to buy the loyalty of most of the militias in Tripoli. The governor of the Central Bank, Sadiq Al-Kebir, omnipotent and indestructible guardian of the Libyan Treasury, has refused for many months to release the required funds in the name of budgetary orthodoxy, thus fueling an acrimonious conflict between the two men.

In December 2023, a virulent argument reportedly broke out between Sadiq Al-Kebir and Ibrahim Dbeibah, the prime minister’s nephew and advisor, to the point that the governor of the Central Bank, fearing for his safety, had to take refuge in Turkey for nearly a month and a half before returning to Tripoli, according to a diplomatic source.

In the latest dispute between Al-Kebir and the head of government of Tripoli, the governor imposed a 27% tax on foreign currency transactions, a measure intended to stem the squandering of foreign exchange reserves and the concomitant fall in the value of the dinar on the black market, a source of inflationary tensions.

The matter is all the more sensitive for Abdelhamid Dbeibah as the solidity of his political base depends largely on his budgetary profligacy. “ Dbeibah’s power is linked to the armed groups he had supported, underlines a diplomatic source. Financial asphyxiation would expose him to an existential crisis. » Under these conditions, a security slippage in Tripoli cannot be excluded the day after Eid – around April 10 –, this source is alarmed. Tensions are already high between the coalition of militias supporting Dbeibah – such as Mahmoud Hamza’s Brigade 444 – and those which ensure the security of the Central Bank, Abdul Rauf Kara’s Rada Force.

“Corruption pact”

Another breach weakening this “security pact”, which had generally stabilized Tripolitania since 2020, opened on the Tunisian-Libyan border at the Ras Jedir crossing point. Clashes took place on March 18 between local forces controlling the area since the 2011 revolution, mainly from the Amazigh (Berber) commune of Zouara, and the units dispatched to the area by the Minister of the Interior of the GUN, Emad Al-Trabelsi, on behalf of the “ state border security » and the “ fight against smuggling “.

One of the sources of the conflict is the regional origin of Mr. Trabelsi. The latter is in fact a native of Zinten, a town with an Arab population whose militias clashed in the years 2014-2015 with Imazighen armed groups in this part of western Libya. “ The clash around Ras Jedir stems mainly from an economic rivalry for the control of smuggling with Tunisiaobserves a Libyan analyst. At this stage, there is no identity. But if it is poorly managed, it could evolve into ethnic conflict between the Amazigh and Arab population. “.

Finally, the third front on which Mr. Dbeibah sees the noose tightening around him: an increasingly complicated relationship with Marshal Haftar who, from his stronghold of Benghazi, reigns supreme over Cyrenaica. The day after his arrival in 2021 at the head of the Tripoli government, Mr. Dbeibah managed to establish rather peaceful relations with Mr. Haftar, going against the West-East divide which had dominated Libyan political life since the Libyan revolution. 2011. But the lull, allowed by the ceasefire of October 2020, was more of a “corruption pact”according to the formula then used by Libyan analysts, than lasting reconciliation.

“NATO Southern Flank”

The proof was that Mr. Haftar wasted no time – in February 2022 – in inspiring the creation of a parallel government, known as “national stability” (GSN) based in Benghazi. Since then, negotiations between the two camps – led mainly by Ibrahim Dbeibah (nephew of the head of the GUN) and Saddam Haftar (son of the marshal) – to reunify the two authorities have failed. “ Mr. Haftar is very greedy, he demands the main portfolios », confides the diplomatic source. Mr. Haftar appears to have recently upped the ante by behind the scenes supporting Central Bank Governor Sadiq Al-Kebir in his tug-of-war with Mr. Dbeibah. Mr. Al-Kebir has in fact received the ostensible support of Aguilah Saleh, the president of the Parliament – ​​based in Tobruk – controlled by the marshal.

Difficulties are therefore piling up for the head of government of Tripoli. Few analysts, however, venture to predict its imminent fall, the absence of an alternative personality in western Libya working in its favor. Instead of a short-term upheaval, Libya risks continuing to languish in a deleterious impasse against a backdrop of growing influence of two foreign states: Turkey and Russia. A new development is that the latter are opening up from their historical area of ​​establishment: Tripolitania for Ankara and Cyrenaica for Moscow, to now plow the lands of the West and the East indifferently.

Washington no longer hides its concern. While they had closed their embassy in Tripoli in the post-2011 chaos, the Americans are seeking to reopen their diplomatic representation, as revealed on March 11 in a budget request for 12.7 million dollars (12 million euros) addressed for this purpose by the Department of State to Congress. The document cites the“Russia’s growing influence on NATO’s southern flank » among the motivations for this return to Libya, an allusion to the presence of the Russian paramilitary group Africa Corps (ex-Wagner) in Cyrenaica under the umbrella of Marshal Haftar. A new strategic equation in the making?