![]() Since around September 2014, intermittent fighting between Tuareg and Tebu (Toubou) populations, mostly in the Sabha–Oubari (Sebha-Ubari) area of the Fezzan, has been on the rise. Indeed, as another new “post-NATO-intervention” war looks ominously like destroying over 120 years of peace in Libya’s remote desert regions, far from the eyes of western reporters, local Tuareg tribesmen are accusing France of furthering its own designs on Libya’s extreme south.Ī dangerous situation is developing in Libya’s Fezzan. But local people might be inclined to disagree. Indeed, so far, France’s military intervention across the Sahel – Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad – first as Operation Serval and then as Operation Barkhan, has coincided with the increased political instability of Mali, growing anti-French sentiment in Niger, the spread of jihadism across the entire region and the expansion of Boko Haram from Nigeria into both Niger and Chad.įrance will no doubt say that these things are just coincidence and the reasons it has been obliged, as the post-colonial power, to send its armed forces to the region. The catastrophic consequences of NATO’s Libyan intervention for Mali, and to slightly a lesser extent, Niger and Chad, are now moderately well documented, although questions are beginning to be asked about precisely what France’s 5,000 or so troops are actually doing in those countries. As with the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq, not one iota of thought was given by the US State Department, the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and whatever part of the French government was masquerading as a foreign office at the time, to the consequences of their intervention. While few Libyan analysts would disagree with that assessment, NATO’s culpability for what is happening in Libya goes far beyond Libya. ![]() ![]() Vijay Prashad, author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (2012) and holder (2013-2014) of the Edward Said Chair at the American University in Beirut, recently described the situation in Libya as “precisely the consequence of the kind of war NATO waged, destroying the infrastructure, collapsing the state, and allowing a bunch of different militia groups to be treated as heroes.” Tuareg accuse France of promoting Libya’s latest post-NATO war ![]()
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