Ankara Is Redrawing the Mediterranean Over Libyans' Heads

Who gave Ankara the right to draw Libya's maritime borders? Not the Libyan people. Not one ballot box in Libya has been opened in years to ask them. Yet a deal signed in 2019 between Turkey and one faction in a broken country is now being pushed into international law by a parliament in Tobruk that opposed it for six years, and then reversed itself within the span of a few weeks.

Let us be precise about what happened. On October 6, the eastern parliament removed Aguila Saleh as speaker and replaced him with Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi, a man who had chaired the Libyan-Turkish parliamentary friendship committee. Days later, lawmakers approved the maritime agreement their predecessors had refused to touch. Turkey's Defence Ministry then renewed its offer to Egypt, claiming Cairo could gain more than 15,000 square kilometres of maritime jurisdiction. That figure is Ankara's own estimate, and it is offered to a neighbour as a bargain. Look closely at the arithmetic of this diplomacy. A parliament changes its chair, a vote follows, and a map of the sea shifts. Libyan voters appear nowhere in the sequence.

Follow the pattern and the picture sharpens. In 2019 and 2020, Turkish support helped turn back Khalifa Haftar's assault on Tripoli, and we should never pretend that Haftar's offensive was a noble cause. But the rescue came with a price tag that Libyans have yet to read. Ankara kept its ties with the Tripoli government while quietly building a second relationship with the eastern camp. Turkish defence minister Yasar Guler met Saddam Haftar in May. Intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin sat with Saddam in Benghazi on June 23. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan met both Khalifa and Saddam Haftar in August. This is not the behaviour of a partner who wants a unified Libya. This is the behaviour of a power that has learned to hold both ends of a divided country at once, so that whichever side wins, Ankara collects.

Consider how this looks from the streets of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sabha, or Misrata. Libya has lived without a unified government for most of the last fifteen years. Elections planned for December 2021 collapsed, and the country's two rival administrations have since bargained over power while ordinary Libyans queue for electricity, fuel, and cash. Foreign capitals arrive with military advisers, drone deals, and maritime treaties, and they speak the language of stability. Stability for whom? For the men who command the militias and the officials who hold the oil revenues, certainly. Not for the nurse waiting on a salary that has not come, or the young man in Zawiya who has no choice but to hire himself out to a warlord.

Egypt, too, is being played. Cairo has backed the eastern leadership for years, and it now watches its influence in Benghazi shrink. Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and the European Union joined Egypt in a statement at the United Nations on October 26 rejecting the Turkey-Libya accord. Athens was already discussing an eastward extension of its 2020 partial maritime deal with Egypt, toward Cyprus. Ankara, meanwhile, has sent its land forces commander, General Metin Tokel, to Cairo and scheduled a joint naval exercise in Alexandria from November 4 to 9. Every party is courting every other party, and every party is protecting its own claim to the same sea. Analysts such as Anas El Gomati of the Sadeq Institute have put it bluntly: Egypt still has influence in eastern Libya, but it no longer has a veto. Read that sentence again. A neighbour's veto over a neighbour's destiny has been replaced by a foreign capital's leverage over it. That is not sovereignty. That is a new scramble, dressed in the language of partnership.

This is the old story, with new players. In the nineteenth century, European capitals carved up Africa at tables in Berlin. In the twenty-first, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, China, Qatar, and Western governments compete over Libya's oil, its ports, its coastline, and its migrants, and they do so through militias, parliaments, and maritime treaties rather than flags. The method has changed. The extraction has not. And when we point this out, the usual defenders of the status quo accuse us of choosing sides. We are choosing a side. It is the side of the Libyan voter, the one who has been told for a decade that the next election is coming and who has never once been allowed to vote for the government that decides what happens off their coast.

Ankara's own spokesman has said that Turkey will not give up the rights it recognises as its own, and that Turkey need not seek the consent of "unrelated third countries." Fair enough. But who, in this equation, is the related party? The Libyan people are the only ones with a legitimate claim to Libya's waters, and they have been the last to be consulted. When Ankara says it wants "one Libya," we should hold it to those words. One Libya means one government chosen by Libyans, one army answerable to that government, and one set of resource contracts approved by a parliament that voters can actually remove. If Turkey truly believes that, it should stop pressing its agreements through the unelected factions and start demanding the thing Libya has been denied since 2021: a national vote.

There is a better model, and Africa has already built it. Botswana has held regular elections since independence and used transparent mineral revenues to fund its development. Mauritius, after its own hard years, built institutions that attracted investment because contracts were honoured and courts were independent. Senegal, in 2024, showed that a population can force a peaceful transfer of power when its institutions are still alive. None of these countries is perfect. All of them understood that the sea, the oil, and the land belong to citizens, and that foreign governments must negotiate with citizens through elected representatives, not through whichever faction happens to be holding the capital that week.

So what must happen? The African Union must stop treating Libya as a sideshow and convene a Libyan national dialogue with a binding timetable for elections and a unified security sector under civilian control. The United Nations Security Council must insist that no maritime or energy agreement affecting Libya's sovereign waters be recognised without ratification by a government that Libyans have elected. Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus should be asked, publicly and repeatedly, to put their maritime claims before an international arbitral forum rather than settle them through military exercises in the same water. Libya's own civil society, its judges, its professional associations, and its young people online must refuse the elite bargain that Anas El Gomati warns could leave everyone outside it behind.

And you, reading this on your phone from Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Kampala, or Cairo: demand that your government ask the questions Ankara would rather not answer. Who signed this deal? Who approved it? Who was consulted? Which Libyan voters had a say? Ask your own parliament to say where it stands on sovereignty when a foreign power writes treaties for a neighbour. Africa's future is not decided only in Libya's capital or Tobruk's chamber. It is decided every time we accept that other people's wars, deals, and maps are normal. They are not. Libya's sea belongs to Libyans. Say it loudly, and keep saying it, until the men making these deals have to answer to the people they claim to represent.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA