The Hounds of Libya

“Libya must return to being a stable and solid country”. So tweets Prime Minister Renzi from Washington, assuring “Prime Minister Sarraj, finally at Tripoli” that he will do all he can.

Those that share Renzi’s thinking in Washington, Paris, London and Rome are the very people that have used war to destabilise and shatter the Libyan state and are now going to collect the fragments through the “international aid mission to Libya”.

This idea of theirs is filtered down through authoritative voices. Paolo Scaroni, the head of ENI has operated among factions and mercenaries in Libya. Now vice president of Rothschild, he declares to the Corriere della Sera that:
“it is necessary to put an end to the sham of Libya”, “a country invented” by Italian colonialism. We must “work towards creating a government in Tripolitania, that appeals to foreign forces to help it stand on its feet”; a government that pushes the Cyrenaica and Fezzan to create their own own regional governments, with the long term aim of forming a federation. In the meantime, “each one would manage their energy sources” present in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

Ernesto Preziosi, the Partito Democratico MP for the Catholic Movement, put forward a similar idea in Avvenire: “to form a Libyan union of three states —Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan— that have in common the oil and gas community” supported by “an ad hoc European military force.”

This is the former policy of eighteenth century colonialism, modernized by the US/Nato strategy to serve a neo-colonial end. It has wiped out entire nation states (Yugoslavia, Libya) and splintered others (Iraq, Syria), to control their territories and their resources.

Libya possesses almost 40% of African oil, valuable due to its high quality and the low extraction costs, and huge reserves of natural gas, from which, US and European multinationals can extract today profits, by far superior to those that were obtained before by the Libyan State. Furthermore, by eliminating the National State and negotiating individually with groups in power in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, they can secure the privatization of state energy reserves and therefore, their direct control.

In addition to black gold, US and European multinationals want to seize white gold: the huge reserve of fossil water from the ground water table, that stretches under Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad. The possibilities that this offers have been demonstrated by the Libyan state. It has built acquaducts that carried drinking water and for irrigation, millions of cubic meters each day extracted from 1,300 wells in the dessert, for 1,600 km right to the coastal cities. This makes the land of the desert, fertile.

Disembarking in Libya on the official justification of helping it and liberating it from Isis’s presence, the US and the largest European powers can also reopen their military bases, that had been closed by Gaddafi in 1970, in an important geostrategic position at the intersection between the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East.

Finally, with the “mission of helping Libya” the US and the biggest European powers divide among themselves the spoils of the biggest looting in the century: 150 billion dollars of funds from sovereign Libya that were confiscated in 2011, that could be quadrupled if Libyan energy exports return to their previous levels, the sovereign funds, at the time of Gadaffi, invested to create a currency and independent financial organisms of the African Union (the reason for which it decided to overthrow Gaddafi, as evidenced from Clinton’s e mails) shall be used to dismantle the remnants of the Libyan state. A state “that never existed” because in Libya there were only a “multitude of tribes”. So declares Giorgio Napolitano, convinced of this, to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy.