Caption: A screenshot from a CGTN Africa broadcast in 2023. (Google/CGTN Africa)
Select LanguageAfrikaansAlbanianArabicArmenianAzerbaijaniBasqueBelarusianBulgarianCatalanChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CroatianCzechDanishDutchEnglishEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchGalicianGeorgianGermanGreekHaitian CreoleHebrewHindiHungarianIcelandicIndonesianIrishItalianJapaneseKoreanLatvianLithuanianMacedonianMalayMalteseNorwegianPersianPolishPortugueseRomanianRussianSerbianSlovakSlovenianSpanishSwahiliSwedishThaiTurkishUkrainianUrduVietnameseWelshYiddish
—
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country’s only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We’ve provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
Please consider setting up a monthly or annual donation through Donorbox.
—
Written by: Owen Schalk
Last year, a family member told a friend of theirs that I’d written a book about Libya. The friend scoffed. “What’s it about? How Qadhafi was good?” My relative replied with their own take on Libya’s modern history: Libya had been stable and relatively prosperous during the Jamahiriya period (1969-2011), free from civil war and hunger and open-air slave markets, so surely the situation is worse today than when the much-demonized Muammar Qadhafi was in power.
Their friend’s response has stuck with me ever since. “There aren’t slave markets in Libya,” they replied. “I don’t believe that.”
A quick Google search of “Libya open-air slave markets” generates results from the BBC, Al Jazeera, Time, NPR, The Guardian, Reuters, and many other decidedly mainstream outlets. These reports cite the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the African Union, and formerly enslaved people themselves describing the horrors of forced captivity – not to mention actual footage of Africans in Libya being bought and sold. The BBC quotes the IOM’s director of operations and emergencies as saying: “The more IOM engages inside Libya, the more we learn that it is a vale of tears for all too many migrants.”
Not only is the slave markets story true, but Canada had a central role in creating those slave markets by campaigning for and participating in the destruction of the Libyan state.
A spiral of instability
In 2007, Libya had an annual per capita income of more than $6000 USD, which made Libya the richest African nation by a significant margin. Healthcare and education were free and universal, while hunger and food insecurity had been erased. According to UN data, Libyan life expectancy was nearly 72 years – three years higher than the average in Arab countries, and almost 18 years higher than the average in sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, 803,000 Libyans require humanitarian assistance. Out of a population of 7 million, 1.2 million Libyans are internally displaced. Agricultural production has fallen behind 2011 levels; the al-Fatah Revolution of 1969, led by Qadhafi, had eradicated food insecurity. However, after NATO’s war, it returned with a vengeance. As the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states, “Libya’s heavily subsidized agricultural sector has suffered since the outbreak of conflict, particularly between 2011 and 2020, with production declining significantly. The protracted conflict continues to make it difficult for farmers to access agricultural supplies, including fertilizers and spare parts.” On top of this, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans used to work in Libya’s comparatively developed economy and send money home to their families – now, many of those Africans try to cross Libya for the Mediterranean, and thereafter Europe, to seek employment and comparatively safe, stable lives elsewhere. Tragically, many have drowned or fallen prey to human traffickers.
In short, Libya today is a failed state, ripped apart by militia violence, parallel governments competing for resources and international recognition, and foreign powers all pursuing their own interests – Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, France, et cetera. As Mahmoud Jibril, a leader of the NATO-backed uprising against Qadhafi, stated: “Every foreign power you can think of is trying to look after its own interests in Libya. No one is excluded.”
Before NATO’s 2011 war, Libya was an upper-middle-income country, meaning its standard of living was comparable to Southern Europe, China, and many Latin American countries. It was debt-free and politically sovereign. Since 2011, the more apt comparison would be Somalia or Sudan. One struggles to envisage a solution to the spiral of poverty and instability that has consumed Libya since NATO’s attack.
‘He will not last very long’
Canada played a central role in NATO’s destruction of the Jamahiriya. From imposing sanctions to parroting lies about Libyan forces’ response to armed protests, to campaigning in favour of a no-fly zone aimed at destroying the Libyan government’s ability to combat the uprising, to directly bombing Libyan government soldiers, tanks, ammunition depots, and more, Ottawa played an integral part in the anti-Libya crusade at the economic, diplomatic, discursive, and military levels.
The anti-Qadhafi uprising began on February 17, 2011, in the city of Benghazi. NATO powers mobilized to use the protests to their advantage. On February 26, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1970, which imposed an arms embargo and other punitive measures against Libya. On March 17, UNSC Resolution 1973 imposed the no-fly zone, giving Western powers legal cover to bomb Libyan government targets for the supposed goal of “protecting civilians.”
Neither resolution allowed foreign boots on the ground in Libya, and in fact Resolution 1973 explicitly forbade “a foreign occupation of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Even so, NATO powers, including Canada, deployed special forces troops to battlefields in the North African country; as Postmedia reported in March, the Canadian military had sent the special forces unit Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) to the Libyan theatre (the military officially denied these reports). Resolution 1970 forbade arms shipments into Libya; NATO powers disregarded this as well. Furthermore, neither Resolution 1970 nor 1973 endorsed the overthrow of the Libyan government. Nevertheless, NATO launched an operation to dismantle the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
Resolution 1973 called for “a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians.” Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper contradicted the resolution and asserted that there would, in fact, be civilian casualties. “We should not kid ourselves,” said Harper. “Whenever we engage in military action – essentially acts of war – these are difficult situations.” Further defying the UN, Harper implied that the true purpose of the mission was not to protect civilians and achieve a ceasefire, but to remove Qadhafi from power. “If Mr. Gadhafi loses his capacity to enforce his will through vastly superior armament, then he simply won’t be able to sustain his grip on the country,” said Harper. “He will not last very long.”
Canada’s role in destroying Libya
After the passing of Resolution 1973, the US launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, its military operation to dismantle the Libyan state, with the backing of NATO allies. On March 18, 2011, Western bombs began raining down on Libya.
Canadian warplanes arrived in Italy on March 19. Their first major deployment centred around Misrata, a city east of Tripoli that had fallen to rebels in late February. Alongside a Canadian warship, Canadian fighter planes defended the rebel-held city of Misrata from a Libyan government offensive; Canadian forces also violated the UN arms embargo by allowing weapons to pass through the Port of Misrata into the hands of anti-Qadhafi forces. For instance, the Canadian government put a Waterloo-based drone company called Aeryon in contact with the rebels’ parallel government. A private security firm in Ottawa, Zariba Security Corporation, delivered a $100,000 USD military drone to anti-Qadhafi forces in Misrata; it had no issues sailing through NATO’s naval blockade. The head of Canada’s navy, Vice-Admiral Paul Maddison, later said that far from enforcing the UN arms embargo, Canada’s HMCS Charlottetown “played a key role in keeping the Port of Misrata open as a critical enabler of the anti-Gadhafi forces.”
The Misratan Brigade that Canadian forces supported later ethnically cleansed Tawergha, a city of mostly Black Africans. The Misratans depopulated Tawergha, which had a pre-war population of 40,000, by 95 percent. A journalist for The Telegraph reported that the rebels from Misrata had painted a slogan on the road into Tawergha proclaiming that the Misrata brigade was “the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin.” The Canadian-backed Misratans were also the ones who tortured and killed Muammar Qadhafi and his son, following the bombing of their convoy by a US predator drone and French fighter jets. The French aircraft had been refueled before the strike by Canadian CC-150s. By the mission’s end, Canadian fighter jets had flown 10 percent of NATO bombing sorties over Libya.
Operation Unified Protector, the NATO mission to destroy the Jamahiriya, was commanded by a Canadian named Charles Bouchard. While leading the mission, Bouchard justified the bombing of hospitals and mosques. “Gaddafi is hiding in hospitals, hiding in mosques, he’s hiding under various covers everywhere,” claimed Bouchard. According to the Ottawa Citizen, Bouchard also defended anti-Qadhafi atrocities in Tawergha by regurgitating the discredited “African mercenary” accusation that rebels had used to justify racist violence throughout the country. Bouchard said: “Many of these individuals [in Tawergha] are still remnants of mercenaries who need to move out of the country and need to go home because there is no value to keeping them.”
Upon Bouchard’s return to Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Governor General David Johnston awarded the general with the Meritorious Service Cross. Ridiculously, Harper claimed that Bouchard embodied “our commitment to international law, to the rights and freedoms we cherish in a democratic society.” Harper then bragged that “the taking of Tripoli by rebel forces was materially assisted by the [Canadian] CF-18 missions that cleared away Gaddafi’s remaining mechanized forces.”
Following Bouchard’s success in commanding the NATO mission to dismantle the Jamahiriya, the general promptly became an executive at Lockheed Martin, the Canadian branch of the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. In 2014, Bouchard told the CBC: “There is no doubt in my mind that the work that we did in Libya was right, that we needed to do it, that we saved lives. I have no doubt about that.”
Throughout the war on Libya, Canada, and NATO broadly, sidelined and ignored the African Union (AU), an organization that represents all 55 countries of Africa. When the AU proposed its roadmap to peace in Libya – which Qadhafi accepted – NATO pushed for UN cover for its military intervention in favour of rebel forces. As NATO’s war began, the chairperson of the AU Commission said, “Nobody has talked to us, nobody has consulted us.” When asked if the AU had been sidelined by outside forces, the chairperson replied, “totally, totally.” For its part, South Africa directly accused NATO of misusing Resolution 1973, stating, “We strongly believe that the resolution is being abused for regime change, political assassinations and foreign miliary occupation.”
The marginalization of the AU is even more scandalous given the fact that African countries warned that NATO’s intervention would empower Islamist insurgencies in the region. Following a report in late March that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) had seized weapons from a Libyan government stockpile, Chad’s president Idriss Deby said, “This is very serious. AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region.” Niger’s foreign minister said: “The region has turned into a powder keg. With stolen weapons circulating, al-Qaeda’s total impact is growing.”
Canada’s response, in effect, was to shrug and keep bombing. In fact, the Canadian government knew ahead of time that militant Islamist organizations comprised the backbone of the anti-Qadhafi opposition. A Canadian intelligence report described Libya’s east, the stronghold of anti-Qadhafi sentiment, as an “epicentre of Islamist extremism.” During the intervention, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, stated that “we have seen flickers in the intelligence of potential al Qaeda” among the rebel forces. In fact, al-Qaeda’s African wing had announced its support for the anti-Qadhafi uprising and sent a representative to Derna to recruits among the rebels there. Meanwhile, a commander of the anti-government Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) admitted that his forces contained troops from al-Qaeda in Iraq, later known as ISIS.
Canada cannot claim ignorance of this reality; and in fact, some Canadians did not. Investigative journalist David Pugliese reported that as the war escalated, Canadian military members privately joked that the Royal Canadian Air Force had become “al-Qaida’s air force” in Libya.
Exposing NATO’s lies
Classified documents reveal the true calculations behind NATO’s decision to impose chaos upon Libya – and it was, in all likelihood, a conscious decision. As Canadian intelligence specialists warned in the leadup to the intervention: “There is the increasing possibility that the situation in Libya will transform into a long-term tribal/civil war. This is particularly probable if opposition forces received military assistance [from] foreign militaries.”
Internal communications show that NATO powers lied about events on the ground in Libya to further their own interests. In particular, they falsely accused the Libyan air force of firing on civilians; this deliberate lie, alongside the unconfirmed claims that Qadhafi was planning to massacre civilians in Benghazi, was used as a justification by the US and NATO governments when they pushed for a no-fly zone at the UN.
Emails released by WikiLeaks show that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her advisor Jake Sullivan possessed no evidence that Libyan planes were firing on protests. Clinton wrote: “I’ve heard contradictory reports as to whether or not there are planes flying and firing on crowds.” Sullivan replied: “Honestly, we actually don’t know what is happening from the air right now.”
The US government was not alone in lying about events in Libya for their own interest. France, too, misrepresented the situation on the ground. While publicly repeating the same unproven claims about Qadhafi’s actions and intentions, behind closed doors, French intelligence officers listed five reasons why the French government wanted Qadhafi gone: “A desire to gain a greater share of Libyan oil production; Increase French influence in North Africa; Improve [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy’s internal political situation in France; Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world; Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.”
A subsequent investigation by the British House of Commons confirmed that “the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.” Furthermore, the parliamentary report stated, “Militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion” and “Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians.” According to the report, “Emigres opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene.”
These documents are available for all to view. Like the reality of open-air slave markets in post-Qadhafi Libya, anyone who wants to understand the lies behind NATO’s war on Libya simply needs to want to know.
Libyan nostalgia, Canadian denial
Libyans I’ve spoken to, and who have been interviewed about their views on the post-2011 situation in their country, overwhelmingly praise the Qadhafi period. This even applies to Libyans who fought against Qadhafi. In 2016, a Zimbabwean newspaper interviewed former anti-Qadhafi fighters about the situation in Libya. They expressed nostalgia for the government they helped overthrow. One former anti-government fighter remarked, “Before 2011, I hated Gaddafi more than anyone. But now, life is much, much harder, and I have become his biggest fan.” When I asked a Palestinian Libyan from Benghazi if many former anti-Qadhafi fighters now regretted their actions, he grew animated and replied, “Most of them!” And how could they not, given the fact that for so many, life in post-Qadhafi Libya has become a “vale of tears,” to borrow a phrase from the UN’s migration agency?
In this context, I cannot forget the conversation between my family member and their friend regarding slave markets in post-Qadhafi Libya. The friend’s denial of reality was, in effect, a denial of all the chaos, poverty and instability that NATO knowingly imposed upon Libya. This denialism is representative of the broader way in which Canadian society has closed its eyes to the horrors that Ottawa inflicted on what was once Africa’s most prosperous country.
Amongst Canadian politicians and mainstream media, there is no desire to look back on Canada’s role in destroying Libya. The present realities of Libya are absolutely harrowing, so the Canadian ruling class simply ignores them; as a result, Canadians who rely on the ruling class for their knowledge of world affairs exist in a state of blissful ignorance about the horrors their government has wrought abroad.
When former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to Donald Trump’s annexationist rhetoric on February 1, 2025, he told the U.S. public, “From the beaches of Normandy to the mountains of the Korean Peninsula, from the fields of Flanders to the streets of Kandahar, we have fought and died alongside you during your darkest hours.” Trudeau did not mention Libya. Amid the SNC-Lavalin affair, the political scandal surrounding the Canadian multinational’s conduct in Libya that bedeviled the first Trudeau government, Libya itself was largely absent from press coverage. It is this rejection of the past that allows the CBC to blame Libya’s supposed “preoccupation with war” for casualties caused by natural disasters, rather than NATO’s decision to violently dismantle the Libyan state in 2011.
Canadian politicians are uniquely unreflective about the role they played in destroying Libya. The British Parliament held an investigation into the David Cameron government’s actions during the war against Libya, the findings of which reflected extremely poorly on London. Even Barack Obama, who was US President during the anti-Libya operation, later described the mission as a “shit show.” On June 19, 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron asked, “Does anyone think that what was done in Libya last decade was a good idea? No.”
In Canada, there is no such introspection about this country’s role in the 2011 war on Libya. No parliamentary investigation, no major media digging into the Harper government’s lies or the opposition parties that supported the war, and not even mildly remorseful statements from government officials implicated in the atrocities. If politicians and media refuse to remember, then politically conscious Canadians at the grassroots must remember for them; we must write, educate, and organize so that Canadians like my family friend can no longer deny the horrors that our country’s foreign policy has brought to the African continent.
—
Owen Schalk is the author of Targeting Libya: How Canada went from building public works to bombing an oil-rich country and creating chaos for its citizens, an exploration of Canada’s pivotal yet little-known role in Libya’s history, now available from Lorimer Books.
—
More Articles
http://dlvr.it/TP7q3k
