Mines as a Weapon of War in Post-Revolution Libya: Chronicles of a Plague.
Mines as a Weapon of War in Post-Revolution Libya: Chronicles of a Plague.
The numerous conflicts that have torn apart post-revolution Libya have, those last years, been marked by persistent violence interrupted by short periods of calm. Several civil wars have followed each other since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi (1969-2011), bringing about chronic instability. Territorial fragmentation and the devolution of power between several entities have allowed the emergence of official and non-official actors at the heart of the balance of power, itself already marked by an ideological confrontation between new and old elites seeking access to power on the one hand and, on the other, by the primacy of resistance as a source of legitimacy. The new political and territorial divisions between Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, as well as the ensuing rivalries for the control and retribution of resources, have progressively left room for various foreign interferences defending discordant interests. In this particularly complex context of trivialisation of violence, the use of mines as a weapon of war has been a constant in this conflict that continues to reap the lives of thousands of Libyans. Between 2008 and 2019, anti-personnel mines were the cause of 3351 victims among whom 436 were killed and 2909 severely injured.
The North African Campaign (1940-1943)
Libya has a long history with anti-personnel mines which have spread on its territory throughout the last decades. The Second World War and its wars by proxy conducted outside Europeans borders contributed to the dissemination of mines in Libya from the east to the west.
When Erwin Rommel’s Afrikacorps landed in Tripoli in February 1941, the battle between the British and the Italians had been raging since December 1940. The east Libyan desert plains made of this front during the so-called “Tank Battles” a particularly uncovered theatre of operations. Those numerous battles compelled the armies to plant mines in an abusive way to compensate for the lack of natural protection that would have otherwise been provided by the relief and the natural barriers of which the desert terrain was devoid. The use of anti-personnel mines was initially intended by the military doctrines as a semi-permanent barrier to obstruct the enemy’s advancement in a defensive approach. Anti-personnel mines are conceived to maim soldiers or kill them in the worst of cases while at the same time overloading the enemy’s logistic system. The victims of mines require a long and complex medical care the management of which, in addition to the losses inflicted, is an additional difficulty. All the above has to be added to the lesser cost of mines and their increased range, since they are considered as a force multiplier. The arrival of German troops in support of the Italian troops would modify the balance of power in favour of the Germans during the battle of El Agheila, at 800 km from Tripoli. To catch their enemies up, the British mined the roads taken by the rival armies, which would form “the devil’s garden” and create, a few battles afterwards, an opening for the Axis Forces in Libya. Many of those mines, which count in the hundreds of thousands and are disseminated on the front extending from Tripoli to Cyrenaic, have not been dislodged for lack of cartographical evidence allowing their localisation. Despite numerous demining initiatives in the contaminated zones, at least 1.5 million anti-personnel mines were still left hidden in the territory in 2003, according to the declarations of the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The majority of those minefields are situated in the coastal region, the most densely populated region of the country.
The neighbouring Egypt, equally concerned with the Western campaigns in the North African desert with the battle of Al Alamein that extended to the Libyan border, has dislodged around 17 million anti-personnel mines and unexploded explosive ordnance (UXO) on 38730 hectares for an overall cost of 28 million dollars. With the help of maps belonging to Italian and German troops and satellite images, the Egyptian authorities led several demining missions but the war maps have shown their limits. On a period of half a century, the environmental modifications due to floods and sand movements caused by sandstorms have contributed to the displacement of mines from their initial locations.
Muammar Kaddafi’s war mines
Other wars were waged by Mouammar Gaddafi during the forty years of his reign, thus adding to the mining of the Libyan territory on its borders with Egypt as well as with Tunisian and Chad borders. The first lightning war dated July 1977 and was led by the Libyan leader against neighbouring Egypt which was then an ally but whose decision to start a dialogue with Israel was not to the taste of the Libyan colonel. The outcome of the conflict in favour of the Egyptians would trigger the rise in volume of mines in the border zone between Egypt and Libya. The Libyan leader also planted anti-personnel mines around certain ammunition storage infrastructures (notably in the city of Ajdabiya). Between 1940 and 1995, the data dating to Muammar Kaddin’s era amounted to 6700 casualties of anti-personnel mines in Libya.
Between 1978 and 1987, Libya entered war against Chad, a country with which it shares a 1055 km common border on the south. The conflict broke out over the control of the Aouzou strip, a territory lies at the extreme north of Tchad, along the border with Libya. The strip was invaded by the forces of Muammar Kaddafi in 1973 and was annexed in 1976. The Libyan annexation was based on an agreement concluded in 1935 between Pierre Laval[1] and Benito Mussolini –never ratified by France– which stipulated the cession of Aouzou Strip to Libya in exchange for a chunk of the Libyan west adjacent to eastern Algeria. Hissen Habré, the president of Chad, claimed on his part the legitimacy of the Anglo-French declaration of March 21, 1899, which had situated the Aouzou strip within the borders of Chad.
This 1000 km long and 100 km large strip of mountainous land situated at the north of Tibesti encloses oil and uranium resources. It represented for the Libyan leader a projection tool and an opening towards central Africa. The area covering the provinces of Borkou, Ennedi and Tibetsi (BET) situated in the north of Chad concentrates 90% of the anti-personnel mines disseminated across the country. This particularly strategic zone which has been throughout its existence a transition area for humans, animals and trade has now become insulated from the rest of the country. It is also a migration route taken by thousands of migrants seeking to reach Europe through Libya. Ouadi Doum, located in the province of Ennedi, is considered as the world’s densest minefield, with its 1.5 million square metres contaminated by anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines and explosive remnants from the Chadian-Libyan war. Since 2012, there have been 3157 victims of anti-personnel mines and explosive remnants of war in Cahd. Libya still has not signed the Ottawa Treaty on the prohibition on anti-personnel mines (1999)[2] despite its long history with anti-personnel mines both within its own borders and beyond and despite the the ever growing number of victims, notably among children.
The Libyan Spring (2011-2014)
Prior to the collapse of the Libyan regime in February 2011, Muammar Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya had implemented, during four decades, a politics of deconstruction of institutional structures and of any body likely to gain empowerment, in addition to an exploitation of the tribal reality with the aim of preventing the emergence of a potentially politicised civil society.
The first Libyan war
It is in this particular context specific to Libya that the Libyans, inflamed by the revolutionary upheavals of their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours, stormed the streets. However, the singularity of the “Libyan spring” goes beyond a mere “local variation of the protest movements”[3] of the so-called “Arab spring”. Contrarily to the other countries carried away by revolutions, the revolt in Libya was marked by a rapid and massive militarisation as well as the interference of Western powers. This specific militarisation and the absence of political parties and a civil society were among the things that stood in the way of a civil and democratic mobilisation and stood behind the proliferation of weapons and munitions and led to the extensive use of anti-personnel mines. Loyalists and rebel forces fought each other for months and the use of mines by both parties to the conflict was proven and documented. Five types of models of anti-personnel mines were used by the forces of Muammar Kadhafi: the Brazilian made TAB-1, the Belgian made M3 and M3A1, PRB-NR442, and the Chinese made Type-72SP, metallic AT and Type-84 model A[4]. Governmental forces mined eastern Libya, a territory which remained under their control from March 17 to March 27, 2011, notably the main road of the Ajdabiya-Benghazi axis where anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines were placed. Other cities were affected by the dissemination of minefields, such as Brega, Misrata, Ras Lanuf, Syrt and the enclave town of Bani Walid, as a consequence of the displacement of front lines during which loyalist forces placed landmines before their retreat. All this led to the random dissemination of minefields in zones of great civilian presence. The use of naval mines placed at the port of Misrata has also been documented; models used include especially the diverzkadvodna model, type 66–SK790202 abandoned at ammunition storage facilities at Jabel Nafoussa.
The second Libyan war
As governmental forces lost control of the most important cities, rebels seized several storage facilities. This was the case with the rebel forces at Benghazi, headed by Khalifa Haftar who rapidly seized control of significant anti-personnel mine stocks disseminated in the East, namely at Benghazi, Ajdabiya and Tobrouk. Despite promises made by rebel forces not to use anti-personnel mines, it turns out they used them during the confrontations with loyalist forces as well as during the ensuing inner conflicts among polarised armed groups. Confrontations between armed militias (Libya Dawn) or confederations of armed militia in Zintan and the East broke out in 2014, a year that marked the second inflection since the first war of 2011 between Gaddafists and rebels. Those confrontations bring into light dissensions and inner strife between Tripolitan militias and the militias of the East and they also reveal the use of anti-personnel mines and the availability of stocks of them in the hands of fragmented armed groups with discordant political aims.
The Tripoli offensive (2019-2021)
Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) started, against all expectations, the “Peace Tempest” operation on April 4, 2019 and launched an assault on the city of Tripoli. This offensive was marked by the presence of around 3000 combatants from the private military company Wagner on the side of the LNA. Though it did not bring about the capture of Tripoli, the presence of those combatants largely shaped the balance of forces in favour of the army of the East. In the West, the National Union Government (NUG) was backed by Turkey,[5] which provided military and logistic support and sent between 2000 and 4000 Syrian and Turkmen mercenaries from different pro-Turkey militias: the Sultan Muhammad Division, Suleiman Shah Turkmen Brigade (al-Amshat, after the name of its chief, Mohamed Al-Jashim, aka Abu Amsha) and the Hamzat brigade. The role of those combatants working in close collaboration with local armed groups was crucial in supporting Tripolitan militias. This third war reveals the trivialisation by both foreign combatants an local armed groups of anti-personnel mines and their dissemination in urban and residential areas frequented by civilian populations.
Support for the LNA
Russia contributed to the coronation of Khalifa Haftar when, in January 2017, that is one year after the arrival of the first Russian operators, the Amiral-Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, on its way back from Syria, stopped at Tobrouk and a meeting was organised between several high ranking Russian officials, among whom the chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, and the Libyan marshal. This meeting helped to internationally establish the marshal as a pivotal actor on the Libyan scene, following which a trip to Moscow was organised a few months later, during which negotiations were launched to set up a meeting with Fayezal-Serraj, the then Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity. Conventional diplomatic channels were used in an effort to bring about a mediation between the competing entities. While maintaining this diplomatic effort, Russia initiated a completely different form of mediation. When Haftar visited Moscow he met the with the Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu in November 2018, who was accompanied by a military delegation and by one single man dressed in civilian attire to communicate publicly on the event. This man was none other than Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who had made fortune in the restoration of what was known to the general public as the Internet Research Agency (IRA)[6]. Significantly, it is shortly after this meeting that the first Wagner combatants landed on eastern Libya soil.
The privatisation of the Russian war
In 2016, a demining group and a number of military instructors working for RSB Group, a private military company –whose presence was prior to Wagner’s– headed by Oleg Krintsyn, a former KGB official, arrived in the east of Libya. The absence of institutional status for Russian PMCs makes of those semi-state structures an exception in the theoretical field of the privatisation of war[7]. Despite the presentation of a bill on the recognition and regulation of PMCs submitted to the State Duma (The Federal Assembly of the Russian federation) in March 2018, the bill was rejected by the government[8] and judged unconstitutional[9]. The second exception is the complex intermingling of national and private interests within the Russian governing elites, one notable example of which being the case of entrepreneurs of influence such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman relatively close to Vladimir Putin and considered as the main financier of the private military company Wagner which operated in Libya between 2018 and 2022[10]. The absence of legal recognition makes possible to reduce the control of the State over those PMCs while allowing the Russian State to mobilise their activities in case of plausible deniability[11] or to disengage from their practices when they are not in the interest of the nation.[12] The illegality of those structures restrains competition between them and makes it possible only for a privileged group to operate. This illegality also guarantees circular loyalty towards the state because the fear of being exposed guarantees loyalty to the decision-makers[13].
Mines as a weapon of war
Since 2019, new models of anti-personnel mines have appeared in Libya. Demining organisations have discovered the Russian made POM-2, MON-50, OZM-72 and PMN-2 models which had never been documented on the Libyan territory. Anti-personnel landmines conceived to explode when stepped upon without distinction between civilians and military cost the lives of 326 people between May 2020 and March 2022 in the Libyan capital. Their use by all belligerent parties was observed during the Tripoli offensive where the suburbs were particularly inflicted. At Ain Zara, a western suburb of Tripoli, children were killed in October 2022 and the Salahuddin neighbourhood in the south of Tripoli lost numerous victims. The capital’s suburbs were transformed into front lines and still bear the scars of an offensive thwarted by the Government of National Unity together with its militias and and Syrian auxiliaries. In their retreat from this aborted “conquest of the West”, the Russian mercenaries, in support of the NLA, placed 50 tons of explosives, including 700 traps and mines. The particularity of their method resides in the intricacy of the traps and mines which which are also placed in unexpected locations. In August 2021, the BBC declared having received a tablet PC found near the front line of the southern suburb[14] that had allegedly belonged to a Wagner Russian mercenary. In this tablet PC were consigned documents in Russian together with maps displaying 35 locations identified as containing mines. Libyan demining agencies carried out demining missions in some of the areas designated and they turned out to be infected. After fourteen months of fighting at Tripoli, Wagner combatants disseminated in an area of 720 km2 anti-personnel mines, booby traps and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED).
Conclusion
Anti-personnel mines, booby traps and IEDs are an additional plague in post-revolution Libya. Not only do they cost lives and severely and permanently injure hundreds of thousands of Libyan civilians, but they also harm the land’s ecosystem. The mines placed in the ground contaminate the soil with heavy and toxic metals (iron, nickel, chromium, mercury, etc.) –of which at least two are highly carcinogenic (TNT and RDX)[15]— that are absorbed by the roots. Libya is one of those countries that have been the most harshly impacted by anti-personnel mines those last years and 3095 people have been killed, 71% of whom civilians.
Sources and Works Cited
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Alena Ledeneva, 2013, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
De Shawn Roberts, Jody Williams (1995): After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines, Oxfam Pubns, Washignton DC, USA.
Manal Al-Traboulsi & Mohamed A. Alaib (2021): Phytotoxic effects of soil contaminated with explosive residues of landmines on germination and growth of Vicia faba L, Geology, Ecology, and Landscapes.
Said, Mohamed Kadry. (2003). Landmines from External Powers in World War II at El-Alamein in Egypt. In: Brauch, H.G., Liotta, P.H., Marquina, A., Rogers, P.F., Selim, M.ES. (eds) Security and Environment in the Mediterranean. Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, vol 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
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Irek Murtazin, « На этой кухне что-то готовится » https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/11/09/78517-na–etoy–kuhne–chto–to–gotovitsya
Landmine and cluster munition, Monitoring progress in eliminating landmines, cluster munitions, and other explosive remnants of war, Briefing Paper Libya, March 26, 2021.
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Human Rights Watch, « Landmines in Libya : Technical Briefing Note”, July 19, 2011.
J.C.P. « La bande d’Aouzou : une région stratégique dont Tripoli entend conserver le contrôle », Le Monde, September 20, 1984.
Michael Poznansky, “Revisiting plausible deniability”, Journal of Strategic Studies, 2020.
Laurent Touchard, « 980-1983 : Libye-Tchad, de la seconde bataille de N’Djaména à celle de Faya Largeau », Jeune Afrique, Septembre 2, 2014.
Shelby Grossman, Khadeja Ramali, Renée Diresta, Lucas Beissner, Samantha. Bradshaw, William Healzer, Hubert Ira, “Stoking Conflict by Keystroke: An Operation Run by IRA-Linked Individuals Targeting Libya, Sudan, and Syria”, Stanford Internet Observatory, Stanford University, 2020.
[1]Pierre Laval, a French statesman, was the Minister of Foreign Affairs in France between 1934 and 1936.
[2]The Ottawa Treaty was signed by 133 countries and 164 parties. The “Ottawa Process” was initiated in October 1996 and ratified in 1999 as a follow up to the UN Amended Protocol II of the Convention on Conventional Weapons concerning “mines, booby-traps and other devices”. It was meant to build upon previous international disarmament treaties.
[3]Ali Bensaad, “Changement social et contestations en Libya” [“Social Change and Protests in Libya”], Politique africaine, vol. 125, n. 1, 2012, pp. 5-22.
[4]Human Rights Watch, “Landmines in Libya: Technical Briefing Note”, July 19, 2011.
[5]In exchange, an agreement on maritime delimitation was signed in November 2019 between the Prime Minister, Fayed al-Sarraj and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and which conceded to Turkey access to exclusive economic zones in the eastern Mediterranean that are claimed by Greece and Cyprus.
[6]The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a “troll factory” that contributed to the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 American presidential election by mobilising disinformation campaigns and promoting social media content that was in favour of his candidacy.
[7]Kimberley Marten (2019), “Russia’s Use of Semi-State Security Forces: The Case of Wagner Group”. Post-Soviet Affairs.
[8]Praviteljstvo RF ne poderzhalo zakonoproekt o tchastnykh voenykh Kompaniakh « Правительство РФ не поддержало законопроект о частных военных компаниях”, March 27, 2018.
[9] The argument set forth by opponents to the bill is paragraph 5 of the article 13 of the Russian Constitution which prohibits “The establishment and activities of public associations whose goals and activities are aimed at the forcible changing of the basis of the constitutional order and at violating the integrity of the Russian Federation, at undermining its security, at creating armed units”. The bill on the regulation of private military companies (PMC) suggested that the Ministry of Defence grant a licence to each PMC and thus exert control over them. It seems that the decision of the administration that would be in charge of of the regulation having failed to meet unanimity (Ministry of the Defence or the FSB (the secret services, for example) contributed to the rejection of the bill. Among the initial motivations of the project was the need to fill a legislative gap concerning the cases of death or injury of Russian citizens in Syria and in Ukraine, who not being from the military, did not have access to the same rights and judicial protection.
[10]Reports from a panel of UN experts on Libya addressed to Security Council in 2020 and 2022.
[11]Michael Poznansky, “Revisiting Plausible Deniability”, Journal of Strategic Studies, 2020.
[12]The Russian State has not always been lenient towards private military companies. The relations between those structures and a number of institutions (particularly the Ministry of Defence) is complex and in some cases even a source of tensions et rivalries. See Kimberley Marten, 2019 in “Russia’s Use of Semi-State Forces: the Case of Wagner Group”, Post-Soviet Affairs.
[13]Alena Ledeneva, 2013, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[14]“Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed. Published”, BBC, August 11, 2021.
[15]Manal Al-Traboulsi & Mohamed A. Alaib (2021): Phytotoxic effects of soil contaminated with explosive residues of landmines on germination and growth of Vicia faba L, Geology, Ecology, and Landscapes.