By for Al-Monitor. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Libya Business News.
Mahmoud Jibril, the former Libyan prime minister and head of the National Forces Alliance, places a great deal of the blame on the international community and the major powers for what is happening currently in Libya.
He believes that Libya is meant to be the courtyard to dump the terrorist members from around the world. Despite the harsh outcome of the Arab Spring, Jibril strongly rejects “the nostalgia for previous regimes” and believes that “had it not been for the performance of the fallen regime, we would not have gotten to this jungle of mass murders.”
The full text of the interview follows:
Al-Hayat: What is the stance of the National Forces Alliance on [Fayez al-] Sarraj’s government?
Jibril: The current Libyan current has been expected since the fall of the regime in October 2011. I had staunchly warned against this situation in a meeting in Brussels before submitting my resignation. I said that Libya was different than Egypt and Tunisia — in other words, the fall of the Libyan regime back then was the fall of the state as well. Libya had become a society without a state, where arms spread everywhere, as they were either stolen from the army’s warehouses or the caches of [Moammar] Gadhafi’s security brigades, not to mention the weapons that had been imported from many countries during the conflict against Gadhafi. A state with a tribal combination and weapons spread everywhere without any authority or control is the perfect recipe for a civil war and the spread of terrorism, knowing that terrorism is a mercurial phenomenon without any limits.
Al-Hayat: Why did major states, which are now sounding the alarm of terrorism in Libya, allow many of the states to provide terrorist groups with weapons? Planes loaded with terrorists who were fighting the international alliance against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq came to some Libyan airports from the West and from the East before the very eyes of the international community.
Jibril: When we wanted to dismantle the militias after the fall of the regime and a decision was issued by the Executive Office in this respect, why did the international community refuse this? I remember that when I talked about collecting arms and dismantling militias at an international meeting in Paris, an Arab country leader objected to my proposal before the entire world and in front of the presidents of the participating countries. He told me, “Oh brother Mahmoud, the rebels will never let go of their arms.” No one commented and no one denounced his statement. I think that when the international community intervened in Libya, it intended to settle scores with Gadhafi and not to help the Libyans.