ON A MORNING in early March 2016, Majdi el-Mangoush and I drove out of Misurata for the farm fields and small villages at its southern outskirts. He wanted to show me the forest that he and a group of local conservationists tended. Three years earlier, Majdi had become involved with an environmental group based in Tripoli called Tree Lovers and had been so inspired by their work that he had helped start a Misurata branch. While both money and supplies are tight, the volunteers have planted flowers and shrubs along many of the city’s dusty median strips and sought to raise awareness about the importance of preserving the very little vegetation Libya possesses.
“With climate change, it’s even more important,” Majdi said. “The desert is spreading in lots of places in Libya, and the only way to stop that is with trees.”
After receiving his sham diploma in communications engineering from the Libyan government in 2012, the former air force cadet had faced a stark choice: he could use that piece of paper to land some inconsequential government job, or Majdi could start over. The following year, he had enrolled in Misurata University to study engineering, and by 2016 was finally close to receiving a degree that actually meant something.
All around him, though, he saw a country that was not just stagnating but going backward. For the first two years of the post-Qaddafi era, Libya had enjoyed at least the appearance of a central and democratic government, the General National Congress (GNC), but that had ended in mid-2014 when, following a failed military coup, two rival governments were established. With Islamist groups taking over the GNC in Tripoli—they soon renamed it the Government of National Salvation—a competing regime, the Council of Deputies, decamped for the eastern Libyan port town of Tobruk. As might be predicted, the two rival administrations soon had their own lineup of competing outside benefactors, with Qatar and Turkey leading regional support for the Islamist-dominated regime, while the United States and most Western European nations insisted the Tobruk organization was the legitimate one—never mind that, for a time, its authority barely extended beyond its seat of government: a leased Greek car ferry moored in Tobruk Harbor.
As might also be predicted, into this power vacuum stepped the Middle East’s radical militias. By late 2014, groups operating under the ISIS umbrella had taken over a vast stretch of Libya’s central coast, culminating in their seizure of the city of Sirte in early 2015. By the end of that year, thousands of ISIS fighters threatened to turn the North African nation into a new terrorist internationale. Coming terribly late to the game, Western powers began bombing purported ISIS encampments in Libya in February 2016, actions that by then did little more than drive deeper wedges between the country’s dizzying array of regional factions and tribal militias.
For Majdi, there had also recently been a more personal reminder of the capriciousness of war, of how what separates the living from the dead is often a matter of luck or connections. During our drive out through the farmlands, he was recounting the story of his escape from the clutches of the Qaddafi regime when I thought to ask after the fate of Ayoub, the regime spy handler he had double-crossed in Misurata. I fully expected to hear the man had been placed before a rebel firing squad, but instead Majdi gave a caustic chuckle, shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “I saw him on Tunisian television just last month. He’s become a political pundit.”
But along with its governmental crisis, Libya is now hurtling toward an economic brick wall. Incredible as it might seem amid the chaos of the past few years, the Libyan national bank has continued to pay the salaries and pensions of the 50 percent of Libyans who were on the government payroll during Qaddafi’s reign. Among these is Majdi el-Mangoush. “Because of my time in the air force,” he explained. “Even though I have no duties, I’m still officially a reservist, so every month I get a paycheck for that.”
Along with this staggering payroll, another carryover from the Qaddafi era is a broad array of economic subsidies; gasoline, for example, remains just seven cents a gallon. The most tangible result is the transformation of Libya into the world’s largest fire-sale bazaar, with huge quantities of its subsidized products smuggled across its borders to be resold in Tunisia or Egypt. So vast is this outflow that entire fishing fleets along the coast have been converted into oil-and gasoline-smuggling vessels, simultaneously causing fish to all but disappear from local markets and ensuring that the Libyan oil industry actually loses money for every barrel of oil it produces. In tandem with the collapse of world oil prices, this phenomenon has helped accelerate the emptying of Libya’s hard currency reserves. By best estimate, those reserves—standing at $110 billion as recently as 2013—had already been reduced to $43 billion by late 2016, with the zero mark likely to be reached sometime in 2017. Yet, within Libya there is little sign of any will to confront this approaching calamity. To the contrary; with most of the rival militias and political factions having a hand in the looting, there is a powerful incentive to let it continue.
In contemplating the series of vicious circles that have engulfed his homeland, Majdi el-Mangoush has turned to a novel idea: a restoration of the monarchy that Qaddafi overthrew in 1969. “Not that it will solve all our problems,” he said, “but at least with the king we were a nation, we had an identity. Without that identity, we are all just individuals—or at most, members of a tribe.”
If Majdi’s proposal seems a naive one, it’s actually rooted in a kind of pragmatic despair; unless some unifying force like the monarchy is introduced, he fears, the dissolution of Libya will merely accelerate. “And it won’t just be the split between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica that everyone talks about,” he said. “It will then go to the tribal and provincial level, because once you start with divisions here, there’s no natural place to stop.” Off the top of his head, Majdi listed six major ethnic or tribal fault lines in Libya, six potential future statelets—and even that number, he suggested, was probably conservative. “So that is why I believe we need the monarchy back. When I first started saying this to my friends a couple of years ago, they just laughed, but now more and more people are thinking this way.”
After about an hour’s drive into the countryside below Misurata, Majdi turned the car onto a narrow farm road and stopped. One of the more intriguing phenomena observed among ex-soldiers most everywhere is a desire for solitude, to be out in nature. Majdi clearly shares this impulse, but in the arid lands of Libya, that means making do. His “forest” proved to be little more than a few rows of scraggly pines set beside the farm road, with trash strewn about from careless picnickers, but Majdi was very happy there. Stepping around the garbage, he strolled among the trees and breathed in deeply of the pine scent with a satisfied smile.
“Okay, it isn’t Jebel Akhdar,” he said, referring to the Green Mountain region he had visited with his friend Jalal, “but at least it’s a beginning.”