On Thursday, April 4, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in a heavily fortified UN compound in Tripoli when Khalifa Haftar ordered his fighters to move on the Libyan capital with the bravado of an ancient warrior king launching a military conquest.
"Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim," began Haftar in an audio statement released online, invoking the Islamic "In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful" incantation. "Today we are responding to the call of our people in our precious capital."
Guterres however was in the capital to respond to an internationally-backed call for peace, to help organise a planned national reconciliation conference and the chutzpah of Haftar’s timing stunned the international community.
"Declaring an operation to move on Tripoli the same day that Guterres arrived hoping to give impetus to the forthcoming peace conference was really audacious," said Mary Fitzgerald, a researcher specialising on Libya. "Haftar has tried to undermine the UN process at every step. He wants to create facts on the ground ahead of that UN conference planned for mid-April."
But Haftar’s designs didn’t go quite as planned. The strongman’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) was repulsed late Thursday by anti-Haftar forces at the Checkpoint 27 ‐ also called "Gate 27" ‐ a strategic checkpoint on the coastal road between Tripoli and Zawiya, a city located around 45 kilometres west of the Libyan capital.
Perhaps we are silent because we just don't give a shit. Solve your self-created problems yerselves
| To be fair, certain select Western countries did drive out that spiffy Colonel Moammar Khadaffy, who worked so hard to annoy everyone. Still, letting the locals figure it out by themselves is probably a better response than us trying to impose another unworkable solution. |