07/15/14 – Bel Trew – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so I hope this works now.
Hi, Bell.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
I was just telling the people how you'd written this article here at TheDailyBeast.com, the ex-CIA asset trying to conquer Libya, General Heftar, who is now attempting to take control of that country.
I was going to say Tripoli, but maybe that's too specific and not quite true.
First of all, I guess, could you please give us the background on Heftar, who he is, how he ended up working for the CIA?
Well, I think the accusation that he worked for the CIA is a bit strong.
He definitely was assisted in his leaving of Libya back in the 80s by the CIA, but basically his name is General Khalifa Heftar.
He was a Qaddafi era general in the army until he basically broke ties off with Qaddafi, Libyan dictator back in the 80s and fled to America where he spent two decades in exile.
He came back as a kind of hero during the Libyan revolution as he was a leading opposition figure and fought on the front lines with the rebels to topple Qaddafi.
And now he's saying three years after the revolution, enough's enough, they need to clear the country of a rising group of Islamists, extremists, as well as militias.
And that's what he's doing at the moment in East Libya, in Benghazi, with the remnants of the Libyan army and his own special forces.
And so where exactly is he based out of?
Well, at the moment, as I said, he's in East Libya, which Libya's second city is called Benghazi, and he's just about 80 kilometers outside of that.
You're saying that's where his base is?
Yeah, that's where his base is.
He's originally from East Libya, but that's where his base is.
And that's where I met him at his military camp.
So he's there about 50 kilometers away from the front line in this sort of heavily secured barracks.
And as I said, he's got the backing of quite a substantial part of the former Libyan National Army.
And he's fighting extremist groups at the moment and also militias.
So that's exactly where he's based at the moment.
But he has got designs to march on the capital, Tripoli, in the next three months to overthrow the government that he calls criminal.
And now when it comes to the Islamists, are they geographically centered more in the east around Benghazi?
Are they pretty much all over the place in Tripoli and everywhere else, too?
There are definitely pro-Islamist militias that are across the country, but at the moment quite a lot of the more extremist groups like Ansar al-Sharia, who the U.S. accused of being behind the attack of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, are based around the east at the moment in Benghazi and also a town called Derna.
That whole countryside there is sort of pockmarked with tunneled hideouts where allegedly Islamists are also likely to move to and were based during the 90s when Gaddafi was fighting them.
So definitely the east has got a large proportion of these extremist groups that Hefter is currently fighting.
And just to add, he did have some support of the population who were fed up with these extremist groups and also the militias who are kind of running riot across the country.
So he's been labeled rogue by the West, but certainly a lot of the population here in Libya are behind him with his latest operation.
And now, is there any reason to believe or maybe is there any reason to doubt that he's working for the CIA right now and doing this?
I mean, this is something that the West has sort of toyed with mainly because, like I said, the CIA may have helped him flee the country back in the 80s and he was living in North Virginia next to the CIA headquarters in Langley.
But I've done some digging and certainly can't see any connection between the intelligence services in the U.S. and Hefter.
It just makes for an attractive headline, really, in the West.
He's at the moment, I think, getting support from people inside Libya and, as I said, waging this war against rising extremism.
He does see, he did tell me that he does see this as a global battle against extremists.
He sees it connected to the battle that's happening in Iraq and that he is sort of singlehandedly taking on these extremists in Libya who could be feeding more extremist groups across the region.
But I think in terms of direct contact with the Americas, I don't think you can prove that at this point.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we've got to take this break.
But if you please hold on, I'd love to ask you a bit more about this, everybody.
It's Belle True.
She writes, I guess, mostly for The Times in London, but here at thedailybeast.com.
And we'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
And you know, we had a little telephone difficulty there, and so Belle did not get a decent introduction on the show.
Belle True is a print and broadcast journalist who lives in Cairo, and she is the Egypt reporter for The Times and the Sunday Times, and also writes for Foreign Policy, New Statesman, RT, Sky, and BBC.
Here she is at the Daily Beast with ex-CIA asset trying to conquer Libya.
And actually, that's really not right.
It's the ex-CIA asset trying to conquer Libya, because it really is, to a great degree, a profile of this General Hiftar, formerly Qaddafi's men, and then apparently America's, and now he is here waging a war against the Islamists and the extremists.
And I have to ask you, Belle, isn't that the parliament?
Isn't they a majority or even super-majority Islamist-run institution there in Tripoli?
Well, absolutely.
The current or the outgoing parliament, the General National Congress, is Islamist, is dominated by Islamists, and that's actually General Khalifa Hiftar's big problem with the GNC, and he actually wants to send all 200 members of the parliament to trial.
That's one of the first things he'll do when he marches on Tripoli, he said.
Libya has just elected its new parliament, which is due to start in August, but the general has decided to recognize that, and said he'll actually protect the building of the parliament as it's supposed to start in Benghazi, where all the fighting's happening, although most people here are not sure how that's going to happen, considering that city's become somewhat of a war zone.
Well, and it's the same problem as in Algeria, Egypt, Gaza, or anywhere else, if you actually let the people have their elections, they'll elect Islamists, rather than American-backed secularists, right?
I mean, I don't know how, I mean, I've reported on the region now for several years and been through a lot of these elections.
I mean, definitely there was a trend after the Arab Spring for people to look towards political Islam as an answer to new democracies in the region, and that's largely because organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood were the only organized and sort of together groups in these particular countries when you had decades of corrupt dictators.
So people look towards groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations because they're actually organized enough to carry through a political agenda.
But certainly we're seeing a tidal change here across the region, and particularly a backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood, both in Libya in terms of Khalifa Hiftar and his operation, dignity, he's called it, against the Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood.
And also, of course, in Egypt, where you've had a military takeover with the head of the armed forces actually becoming president, and in other parts of the region, too.
So we're seeing a shift at the moment.
Yeah, certainly in terms of power, but then again, nobody really took al-Sisi's election seriously at all, right?
It was one of those Saddam Hussein style elections where it's more of a remark about what a dictator he is than a mark of legitimacy in any democratic sense.
Well, definitely the Egyptian government were pushing for a high turnout because that's what they really needed.
They know that you could get like a 90 something percent yes.
They just needed to have the people getting to the polling stations so they could say yes, 50 percent of the country have voted, you know, 50 percent of the eligible voters have voted yes.
But that didn't end up happening to the point where the Egyptian government had to break electoral law to actually extend the vote by an extra day for no reason at all.
The election commission said it was because it was too hot, which is ludicrous in a country like Egypt, which is always hot in the summer.
And that was basically so they could get as many people out as possible.
They even had a national holiday.
Basically, you know, everywhere you went, there were posters of Sisi.
You couldn't, you couldn't walk down the street without looking up and seeing posters of him, you know, with signs next to it saying vote yes, vote yes or just vote.
So, I mean, definitely the elections in Egypt were somewhat farcical.
It also came in the background of serious human rights abuses and the, you know, obliteration of the Muslim Brotherhood and any of the opposition voices, including secular activists.
But yeah, I mean, so definitely Egypt has been seen to be quite a successful military coup that's ended in, you know, a new president from the actual army itself.
Well, it makes sense whether, you know, all things being equal, whether it's Egypt, Tunisia or Libya, where if Islamists get elected, that they'll get themselves unelected pretty quick if, you know, they can't, you know, at the very least provide for basic security and services that people expect, that kind of thing.
But so let me make sure I understand you right, because I don't think I do.
Actually, you're saying they just had a recent election for a new parliament and Heftar is saying he'll be loyal to this new parliament.
But isn't it Islamists dominated to or won't it be?
Yeah, the Libyan authorities did a clever trick with this parliamentary elections because of the fierce fighting here in Libya.
And when I'm talking about fighting, if there's a political debate in the country, it tends to end with a gun battle like it's happening right now.
So what they did was they ensured that all candidates taking part in the elections had to apply as an individual, not as a political party.
So it's hard to determine exactly who's what political affiliations each candidate has.
That means that the government is hard to say that the parliament is Islamist dominated or not, because we're not having parties or alliances applying.
It's all individuals, every man for himself.
So Heftar is able to say that he will support this new democratically elected parliament and that he'll use his troops to protect the building, which, like I said, is going to be in Benghazi in the heart of the fighting.
So we'll have to see how that plays and whether the individuals in the parliament behave in an Islamist way or not.
Mm hmm.
All right.
And then I guess, could you talk about the relative strength and the momentum of his group, you know, compared to the the groups that he's fighting?
Is this just sort of slowly playing itself out or?
Well, at the moment, what we're looking at is a potential stalemate at the moment in Benghazi.
Heftar does have the remnants of the shattered Gaddafi era Libyan National Army and the special forces behind him.
He's got several fighter jets and attack helicopters.
He claims to have 70,000 troops.
That's pretty significant.
The Islamists, on the other hand, have a lot of weapons that they gathered during the 2011 civil war, but they're not trained special forces troops and neither are they massively allied.
They've got different militias there who wouldn't necessarily be fighting alongside each other if it weren't for the fact that Heftar was bombing them.
So he does have significant firepower in comparison to them.
But still, at the moment, they've apparently moved the fighting into the central of the city, center of the city.
And this isn't an area that Heftar can do his airstrikes.
This is going to be, you know, face to face, gun to gun fighting on the streets.
And that's going to turn very bloody and already has, judging by the video footage coming out of Benghazi.
So we're going to have to see how it goes forwards.
But this civilian, this civilian area fighting certainly isn't going to end anytime soon and could drag on into a very unpleasant stalemate as the country is, you know, teetering towards civil war.
All right, well, I'll let you go, but thank you so much for your time on the show today, Bill.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
All right.
That's Bell True, everybody.
She's Egypt reporter for The Times and The Sunday Times in London.
And here she is at The Daily Beast, the ex CIA asset.
Trying to conquer Libya.
We'll be right back with Patrick Coburn in just a sec.
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