Politics & Security
Libya's electricity and fuel crisis continues
When Mohamed al-Menfi took the podium at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, he spoke for a country that has spent fifteen years as the object of other people's strategies. Libya's Presidential Council chairman did not name the foreign powers whose rivalries have played out on Libyan soil since 2011, but he did not need to. "We do not seek to replace one influence with another, one axis with another or one dependency with another," he said, and every capital with a stake in Libya understood the sentence was addressed to it.
The line deserves attention because it marks a shift in how Tripoli talks about its own predicament. For years, Libya's competing governments framed foreign involvement as a choice between patrons: Turkey against the Emirates, Qatar against Egypt, Western engagement against Russian mercenaries in the east. Each side sought a sponsor and denounced the other's. Menfi's speech rejects the premise. Libya, he argued, "paid a heavy price" for the struggles of foreign powers on its territory, and the lesson is not to pick a better master but to stop being anyone's client.
What makes the speech more than a diplomatic platitude is the way Menfi tied sovereignty to internal reform. A state that cannot control its own weapons, he implied, cannot credibly refuse foreign guardianship. He called for state institutions to prevail over individuals and factions, for arms to be brought under the rule of law, and for accountability that spares no one regardless of who the perpetrators are. Most pointedly, he insisted that Libya's wealth must remain the property of its people rather than becoming "spoils" divided among parties, interest networks or "dubious partnerships that seek to exercise guardianship over the state."
This is a description of Libya's actual political economy, delivered from a UN podium. The country's oil revenue, the largest in Africa in reserve terms, has for a decade been the prize over which armed groups, rival administrations and their external backers have competed. Militias are paid from the state budget while operating outside state authority. Foreign contractors and security companies operate under arrangements that no Libyan parliament has ratified. Menfi's language about "guardianship" is a diagnosis: Libya's sovereignty is compromised not primarily by invasion but by the capture of its institutions and resources by networks that answer to no one.
The announcement of a national committee for de-escalation and confidence-building is the modest institutional answer. Its mandate, to anticipate conflicts, contain escalation and prevent recurrence by building on national and local initiatives, reflects a recognition that Libya's violence is episodic and local before it is national. Whether the committee acquires real authority or joins the long list of Libyan bodies created to signal intent will depend on whether the armed groups in Tripoli, Misrata and the east see any advantage in cooperating with it.
Menfi placed Libya's search for balanced partnerships within an explicitly Arab and neighborhood-first frame: relations with Arab states, particularly neighbors, based on common interests, mutual respect and non-interference. The formulation is careful. It reaches toward Egypt and Tunisia and Algeria without conceding to any of them the role of arbiter, and it leaves room for Turkey and the Gulf without naming them as patrons.
His remarks on Palestine extended the same logic to the region. Warning that efforts undermining the prospects for a Palestinian state are "driving the region toward an expanded conflict, the spread of extremism, and a search for alternatives," he added that "major expansionist projects now extend beyond occupied Palestine into Syria and Lebanon." The point connects to the rest of the speech: a region in which borders are renegotiated by force is a region in which a divided Libya has no protection.
The obvious objection is that Menfi speaks for a Presidential Council whose writ does not extend across the country, and that a call for balanced partnerships from a government that itself depends on external support carries a certain irony. Eastern Libya operates under its own arrangements and its own foreign relationships. The unification of the military, the holding of elections and the reconciliation of the two administrations remain unfinished, and no committee for de-escalation will substitute for them.
But the speech is worth taking seriously precisely because of what it does not do. It does not ask the international community to choose a side. It does not blame Libya's condition on a single foreign actor. It locates the problem in the relationship between weapons, wealth and law inside Libya, and it treats foreign dependency as a symptom of that failure rather than its cause. That is a more honest account of Libya's crisis than most of its politicians have offered, and a more useful starting point for anyone still willing to help the country resolve it.
The test is whether Tripoli can act on its own diagnosis. Menfi has told the world that Libya wants partners, not masters. The harder message will be delivered at home, to the men with guns and budgets who have found the current arrangement entirely satisfactory.