Whatever happened to Libya? How are they doing now? Who are the people [really] in power there?
There was a lot of brouhaha in the mass media about "liberating" them, then nothing.
There was a lot of brouhaha in the mass media about "liberating" them, then nothing.
Instead of waging War, international negotiation for the succession of power with guarantees of safety should have been performed painstakingly - with lots of carrots offered, but there are just too many warmongers in the US and even the UN.
Most are about the migrant crisis, but the rest are about the ongoing war.
Not every violent conflict has to be the fault of the US and the UN, and the argument they ought to have intervened more to stabilise the country afterwards is at least as plausible as the argument that they intervened too much. (The conspiracy theory that Western intervention had something to do with Gadaffi's gold dinar idea doesn't have much to rest on either. Round about the time Gadaffi was talking up one of the oldest ideas in Islam as part of his vision for Africa and not getting anywhere even when he was the African Union president, a Malaysian state actually introduced one and was roundly ignored, even by the Malaysian government.)
This is just my personal opinion - but military intervention should be only used for self-defence and the defence of one's allies. And for nothing else.
In a democracy we as the electorate like to pretend we have no involvement in this decision making, yet we pride ourselves on the system of government that apparently represents 'the people' the most. "Don't blame us, it's just our government!"
Oh well, that's alright then. Does Mussolini get a pass because he made trains run on time?
Albeit long before being removed from power.
The other point is that the people desperate to emigrate are non-Libyan Africans using Libya as a port of departure. These people have suffered rape, mutilation etc at the hands of the various warring factions.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
Ignoring Libya is more of a regional thing as well. Being seen as part of the middle east / North African mess which the whole American public got their fill of for two decades.
If there was still airstrikes happening in Ukraine it’d certainly get more coverage than Libya.
This lead to the start of the second Libyan civil war. The newly elected House of Representatives, (from now on, "Tobruk government") wanted to take power, but the parties that lost the elections refused to yield it, passing a measure that granted them temporary special authority, and formed the "National Salvation Government". The various Islamist groups in the country declared that neither government represented them, and took the black flag as many different factions, most important of them being "The Libyan provinces of ISIL" and "The Shura council of Benghazi revolutionaries".
The war from then on had many twists and turns, with the UK, US, France, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Jordan, Belarus, Italy, Germany, EU, Qatar and Iran supporting a faction or another at any time. The only really consistent part of this was that the western powers were stumbling over each other to bomb ISIL and other Islamists.
The end result was that a shrewd Libyan-American warlord named Khalifa Haftar (his tagline being that he fought with and against every major faction at some point or another) essentially took over the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Tobruk Government (they still exist and maintain all the trappings and procedures of democracy, but do so in a building where the security is provided by Haftar, and would never go against his will), and conquered most of the country, including most of the economically significant oil and water resources.
Haftars winning strategy was largely realizing that the western powers would support anyone fighting Islamists, so instead of directly challenging his main opponents, he cleared out all the Islamists he found and took their territory. He might have "encouraged" areas that would not otherwise have flown the blag flag to do so, before crushing them.
He had a lot of western support on the way, but his policy of not taking Islamists prisoner and just having them summarily executed seems to have cooled those ties. Since 2016, he's been courting for Russian support, and seems to have gained it.
If you asked this question in early April, I'd have said that it seems like Haftar will be the next Gaddafi, as his forces were finally moving on the capital and the remaining territory not held by him, but this offensive seems to have failed because of strong Turkish support. LNA withdrew for a time, and Haftar ordered LNA to target any Turkish ships, companies and arrest Turkish nationals found in the country. It seems like he's building up for attempt two.
Also, Haftar is 75 years old, and no-one has any clue what would happen to his forces if he died.