Tripoli Falls to Libyan Rebels, Norway Suffers Its Worst Terrorist Attack and America’s Debt Crisis Ends Its AAA Credit Rating

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 October 2011 | Reporting Period: 3 July – 2 October 2011

Quarterly Briefing

• Libyan rebel forces, supported by sustained NATO airstrikes, overrun Tripoli on August 21–23; Muammar Gaddafi flees but remains at large; the National Transitional Council assumes governmental functions; Libya’s civil war enters its final phase.
• Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 people in Norway on July 22, first with a car bomb at a government building in Oslo and then in a ninety-minute shooting rampage at a Labour Party youth camp on Utøya island; it is the worst mass killing in Norway since the Second World War.
• The United States Congress passes the Budget Control Act on August 2, averting a debt default and raising the debt ceiling; Standard & Poor’s nonetheless downgrades US sovereign debt from AAA on August 5, the first such downgrade in American history, triggering global market turbulence.
• Syrian security forces continue assaulting cities across the country throughout the quarter; the UN estimates over 2,700 people have been killed since the uprising began in March; the Arab League and Western governments tighten sanctions but stop short of military action.
• The eurozone debt crisis deepens as Greece’s second bailout negotiations stall; European bank exposure to Greek debt generates anxiety about a systemic banking crisis; the European Financial Stability Facility is expanded but markets remain unconvinced.
• Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s propagandist and operative Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, is killed in a drone strike in Yemen on September 30; the strike reignites debate about targeted killing and due process for American citizens.

Prologue: Revolution’s Summer and Extremism’s Face

The third quarter of 2011 marked both a high point and a complication of the Arab Spring’s revolutionary project. In Libya, the military dimension was largely resolved: Tripoli fell, Gaddafi fled and the regime that had brutalised the country for forty-two years was dismantled. But in Syria, a government with different levels of international protection was demonstrating that the Arab Spring could be weathered by a sufficiently ruthless security apparatus. And in Norway — one of the world’s most stable, prosperous and humane societies — a domestic right-wing extremist killed 77 people in an attack whose ideology rejected multiculturalism and immigration with a totality that made it a different kind of political violence from the Islamist terrorism that had dominated Western security discourse for a decade. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the quarter’s events mattered through familiar channels: oil prices, European economic stability, American fiscal credibility and the general sense of whether the world’s order was holding or fracturing.

Libya’s Liberation and Its Aftermath

The fall of Tripoli on the nights of 21–23 August was the decisive military turning point of the Libyan civil war. Rebel fighters, coordinated with NATO’s air campaign and with communications support from Western intelligence agencies, surged into the capital from multiple directions simultaneously. The fighting was intense in parts of the city; Gaddafi’s compound at Bab al-Aziziyya was overrun on 23 August. Gaddafi himself had escaped; his whereabouts remained unknown as the NTC moved to establish governmental functions in Tripoli. Regime loyalists continued to control Sirte, Sabha and a few other pockets; the war was not completely over, but its outcome was no longer in doubt.

Libya’s liberation raised immediate questions about what would follow. The NTC was a coalition of pre-revolutionary professionals, Islamists, former regime figures and regional commanders whose interests did not always align. The country’s oil infrastructure, while largely intact, required restoration. The question of how the enormous stockpiles of weapons — including surface-to-air missiles capable of downing civilian aircraft — from Gaddafi’s arsenals would be secured was already a matter of acute international concern. Caribbean governments, several of which had maintained relationships with the Gaddafi regime for decades, were quietly recalibrating their approach to the new Libyan authorities.

Norway’s 22 July and a Different Kind of Extremism

The attacks of 22 July 2011 began at 3:25 pm when a car bomb exploded outside the Norwegian government quarter in Oslo, killing eight people. The bomber was Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian who had spent years preparing the attacks and producing a 1,500-page manifesto expressing extreme right-wing nationalist views and opposition to multiculturalism. Two hours after the Oslo bombing, he arrived at Utøya island, where the Labour Party’s youth wing was holding its annual summer camp, dressed as a police officer and carrying firearms. He spent ninety minutes methodically shooting young people, killing sixty-nine. The total death toll was 77. Norway’s political response was remarkable: Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg led a national process of mourning that explicitly rejected calls for restrictions on civil liberties and emphasised democratic resilience and openness as the appropriate answer to terrorism.

The attacks were a reminder to governments globally, including in the Caribbean, that the terrorism threat was not confined to Islamist ideology. Right-wing nationalist extremism, with its rejection of pluralism and multiculturalism, was capable of producing mass casualty attacks in societies as open and tolerant as Norway. For Caribbean societies with their own histories of racialised violence, the ideological dimensions of Breivik’s attack had specific resonances.

America’s Debt Crisis and the Caribbean’s Exposure

The debt ceiling confrontation that had gripped American politics since the spring reached its climax in late July and early August. Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to raise the debt ceiling without accompanying spending cuts; the Treasury warned that a failure to raise the ceiling by 2 August would trigger a default on US government obligations. The Budget Control Act, passed on 2 August, raised the ceiling by $2.1 trillion in exchange for spending cuts and the creation of a bipartisan “super committee” tasked with identifying $1.5 trillion in further savings. The deal averted default but satisfied few. Three days later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded US sovereign debt from AAA to AA+, citing both fiscal trajectory and political dysfunction; Moody’s and Fitch maintained their AAA ratings. Global markets reacted with significant volatility.

For the Caribbean, the American fiscal debate was not an abstract event. The United States is the Caribbean’s largest tourism source market, its most important trading partner and the home of its largest diaspora communities. A US economic slowdown driven by fiscal austerity would reduce consumer spending, holiday budgets and remittance volumes simultaneously. Jamaica’s own fiscal situation — with debt above 130 per cent of GDP and negotiations with the IMF ongoing — made it acutely sensitive to shifts in the global financial environment that the US credit downgrade was signalling.

Looking Ahead

Gaddafi remains at large as this edition publishes; the final military phase of Libya’s war is not yet complete. Syria’s crackdown is intensifying, not abating, and the international community has no consensus on what, if anything, to do about it. The eurozone’s banking sector is showing signs of stress that the second Greek bailout has not resolved; a systemic European banking crisis would be catastrophic for global growth. The US super committee faces a November deadline for its deficit recommendations; whether Congress will accept them is already contested. And the Arab Spring’s ultimate direction — toward democratic consolidation or military restoration or fragmentation — will be determined in the coming months in Egypt, Libya and, if the crackdown ever ends, in Syria. The Caribbean enters the fourth quarter of 2011 closely watching each of these threads and hoping that none of them snaps in a way that pulls the global economy back toward recession.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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