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Jon Alterman: Ghassan Salamé is a Paris-based Lebanese academic with more than three decades in public service and in academia. He headed the UN mission in Libya from 2017 to 2020, twice served as a senior advisor to the UN secretary general, and was political advisor to the UN assistance mission in Iraq in 2003. He was also the founding dean of the Paris School of International Affairs—part of Sciences Po. Ghassan, welcome to Babel.
Ghassan Salamé: Thank you.
Jon Alterman: You are a scholar of our governments and have spent a lot of your academic career describing the shortcomings of our governments. How did your academic work inform your policy work?
Ghassan Salamé: I spent five decades of my career basically going back and forth between academia and action. Academia, I started in Beirut at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and Saint Joseph University. Later, I spent 25 years at Sciences Po. During all of that time, I sometimes fled academia and went into action—first, as a member of the Lebanese government.
Jon Alterman: You were the minister of culture. I remember because we were attending a conference on Iraq, and they said, "Ghassan Salamé is not here because he's just been appointed the Lebanese minister of culture."
Ghassan Salamé: That is true. That was 2000, and before that I advised the Lebanese government on the negotiation with Israel in Madrid and Washington. Later, instead of serving the Lebanese government, I started serving in the United Nations—mainly advising then secretary general Kofi Annan during his second term and helping him in Iraq.
More recently, I’ve served as the UN secretary-general’s special representative in Libya for almost three years. It means going back and forth. I always felt that both sides benefit from this nomadic approach to a professional career. On the one hand, when you are, an academic, you can go somewhere—to Iraq or Libya or Lebanon, or Tunisia—and people are happy that you can give them a background and a comparative approach to other cases.
They don't feel that they are completely different from other cases. You can offer some detachment from current events and ways to plan for the future, like why a constitution needs time to be agreed on by various groups or why you shouldn't go into elections immediately—because if you do it without security or without a commitment to accept the results by the various players, you may produce a new problem instead of solving one. This kind of academic wisdom is appreciated by the players because they feel that it is based on thinking. On the other hand, your students—when you come back to the auditoriums and the classrooms—are happy that you can tell them real anecdotes from the ground, not only what you or they have read. You tell them real stories from the ground. You tell them not what they could find in any book on the United Nations, but how the United Nations operates in places like Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. You tell them not what you have read in books about conflict resolution, but how you succeeded or failed in resolving a conflict yourself. Both sides were happy from this back and forth spent, for almost 50 years now, between academia and—I would say—real life.
Jon Alterman: What was your first experience taking your academic experience and applying it to a real-life political problem?
Ghassan Salamé: Well, it was to a large extent Lebanon, I'd say— where the challenge was different. I knew the players. I knew the situation, but I was Lebanese. The question is a Proustian one to a certain extent: me needs to be another. You need to accept some kind of schizophrenia—while being emotionally attached to the country, you need to be detached as an advisor to the Tripartite Committee that produced the Taif Accords.
Jon Alterman: Was it the Taif Accords in 1989?
Ghassan Salamé: Yes, it was October 1989, and it was the product of many months of action by a Tripartite Committee— then formed by Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Algeria.
Jon Alterman: How did you get drafted into that?
Ghassan Salamé: Before that, I had read a paper on the weakness and paralysis of the Arab League of States in Tunis—when the Arab League was in Tunis. Who was moderating that session? Lakhdar Brahimi, and he was taken by what you may call my “youngster’s temerity.” We became friends. Something similar happened with Kofi Annan. I was in the Lebanese government, and the Lebanese government asked me to organize the Arab League Summit in 2002—because I am condemned to serve the organization and states whom I have criticized heavily—and Kofi came. That was in March 2002. The idea of a war against Iraq was in the making and Kofi needed to meet discreetly with the Iraqis who were there at the summit. I helped him, and he liked my modest contribution to that. Immediately after I left the government 15 months later, I had a call from New York, saying, “Hey, you are outside the government. Why don't you go to Iraq?" Things happen.
Jon Alterman: I'd say most of your academic work was really on the failings, the shortcomings, and the imperfections of Arab governments. In some ways that makes you an improbable partner to these governments because you see their flaws, and so many are unwilling to admit their flaws.
Ghassan Salamé: That's true, and some of them didn't admit the flaws. When I wrote my PhD dissertation and published it on Saudi Arabia, I was persona non grata in the kingdom for almost 15 years. When I wrote my book on power and state in the Arab Levant, I was persona non grata in both Iraq and Syria. When I wrote about Lebanon, a lot of local groups were extremely unhappy with me. What makes them change their mind sometimes later? That happens when they discover that these are really academic books. I'm not writing polemics. I am not taking sides in any conflict. I'm just saying that these countries should be governed in a different way. It’s when they come to the conclusion that I am not being inspired by their rival or their enemy. It takes them a few months sometimes—and more often a few years—to accept it and to talk back to me when these books or these academic articles are published.
Jon Alterman: You had an approach to what successful politics might look like that was informed by both your experience and the intellectual work you did as a political scientist—thinking about politics. I think the first time I saw your work was the book you edited, Democracy Without Democrats, about 25 years ago—an edited volume that argued that there was a path forward for the Arab world. It wouldn't look like the American path. It wouldn't look like the European path, but it represented a way to gain greater success in Arab politics. I'm wondering how that work influenced the work you did in Iraq and Libya and, in particular, how did your experience trying to reassemble post dictatorial politics in Iraq help inform the way you thought the United Nations had to try to help play a similar role in Libya?
Ghassan Salamé: In Iraq, the challenge was clear, Jon. You had the UN resolution basically labeling the U.S. presence as military occupation. Then there was another resolution that said that the United Nations had to play a vital role, but that vital role was too ceremonial to be serious. What kind of a role? We sat with the late Sérgio Vieira de Mello and we said, "What can we do to make it vital?” The thing to do was to go and to talk to all those to whom the Americans were not talking. That started with Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf and ended with former members of the Ba'ath party. We learned a lot from these meetings. For example, it was to us who Sistani said that he would never accept a constitution written by some law firm in New York or elsewhere and that he wanted Iraqis to write the constitution. And we supported that.
Of course, U.S. leadership on the ground was not happy with us, but that was the way to go. Then we wanted the Iraqis to be part of designing the transition. The administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq, Paul Bremer, wanted to take a number of Iraqi expatriates who had just come back to Iraq, appoint them as consultative, and then rule the country. I remember telling him, “You are giving yourself more powers than Saddam Hussein. This is not the way to go." We started transforming step by step.
That's how the transitional government’s body was built of 25 Iraqis. My little joy was to introduce some people that Bremer and others were not happy with—including a member of the Iraqi Communist Party and a radical leftist Kurdish notable—to say, "We want to go in representing as many Iraqis as possible in this transition. You don't want the Ba'athist party? Okay, but let's at least have some other parties than just the 10 or 15 guys who came with you when you defeated the dictator.” In Libya, it was different. I didn't go immediately after the fall of the regime. In Libya, we went there after the country was already in the middle of a civil war, so it was a completely different challenge. There, you are not building a post-dictatorial regime immediately after the fall of the dictator—by having a constitution and elections after a transitional period. In Libya, you first had to stop the civil war, and we did it. In December 2017, I was able to stop an attack of Tripoli by Misrata at the very last moment. I really stopped it physically by putting myself before the cars starting to move out of Misrata towards Tripoli.
Then we had the big attack by Libyan National Army (LNA) general, Khalifa Haftar, against Tripoli. When I discovered that the ceasefire could not be produced by shuttle diplomacy between Tripoli and Haftar—mainly because there was too much foreign interference in the war and the war was becoming more and more international—I changed my strategy. Instead of having the international community coming in later, accepting, and blessing what the national conference of Libyans would decide, I wanted them to agree on a consensus that sends a strong message to the Libyans. They needed to signal that there is a minimal consensus among those who interfere in Libyan affairs on a minimum agreement. We worked on that between August 2019 and January 2020, and we were together able to bring President Putin, President Erdogan, and President Sisi together. In January 2020, in that meeting on Libya, Erdogan and Sisi were meeting for the first time in six years. The Libyans got a clear message that the international community has agreed on a minimum among themselves. That encouraged the implementation of the three tracks—military, economic, and political—that the Libyans were invited to participate in. That's how we produced a ceasefire that is still holding.
It was different, and this is something one should keep in mind. When you are a mediator in a conflict you are faced with two pitfalls. The first one is saying, “Oh, I have seen that elsewhere in that or that country, and I'm going to repeat it here.” This would be a mistake. Or the other one—saying, "it's so different that I should forget all my former experience and try to invent something new.” The real challenge is to strike a balance—an osmosis—between your past experience and of the idiosyncrasies of each conflict that you have to deal with. That's how I approached Libya—with my former experience in Lebanon with the Taif agreement, in Iraq with the 2003 Majlis al-Hukm al-Intiqali, with Yemen in 1994. I tried to draw some lessons from all this but also respect the idiosyncrasies of the Libyan case—the fact that the country was not divided into two but had imploded into a number of forces and that it was your role to put the puzzle together, rather than bring two guys together and have them kiss the other on the cheek.
Jon Alterman: You've had—as you just mentioned— a number of engagements with the United Nations. You had direct experience with the United Nations because it has been very involved in Lebanon and you were involved with the UN system in Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, and other places. What do people not understand that the United Nations can do? What do people not understand that the United Nations can't do? How do people mis-assess both the possibilities of the United Nations, and what do they not understand about its shortcomings?
Ghassan Salamé: I have to be honest here and tell you exactly what I think—which is not going to please some of my colleagues at the United Nations or elsewhere. When one permanent member of the Security Council—that is say the United States, Russia, or China—is directly involved in a conflict in a matter that is important to that country, the United Nations has no role because the Security Council is basically paralyzed. That's why the United Nations has been marginal in a conflict like in Ukraine, or in Tibet, or Taiwan. You need a situation where the big powers are disinterested in a conflict. Then, you can do something.
The second condition for the United Nations to be useful is that you define clearly what the organization can do. Nowadays, you cannot send Blue Berets all over the world. First, you do not have volunteers for that. The United Nations doesn't have the budget for that, and in many cases, it has to rely on subcontracting to regional organization like the African Union—which is not always a happy story as we have seen in Darfur and elsewhere. It is not, “Bring the Blue Berets.” No. Blue Berets can do a few useful things as they have done in the southern part of my country—or in some monitoring situation like Cyprus or the Golan or elsewhere—but they cannot re-establish peace everywhere they are invited to.
The third condition is that you need a minimum agreement in the Security Council. You need to cultivate this. You cannot come to this consensus easily. If the international system is heavily polarized, it's very hard to see great powers agree on anything—even on things that would not really affect their national interest. The countries are there to basically block each other. If you do not have the support of the Security Council as a special envoy, you can't move very far.
Finally, to succeed in the mediation, you need your boss to take his phone and call Russian minister of foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov—or Secretary of State Antony Blinken or French foreign minister Jean Yves Le Drien—and say, “Look, I have sent a guy to that conflict, and he is the only mediator, so we don't need many mediators anywhere.” He should also talk to the regional organizations as well and say, “Look, there is a mediator. You can help him. You can be disinterested in him, but you cannot compete with him.” If you compete with him, it means that the local players would pick and choose from this mediator’s ideas or that mediator's ideas, and then you cannot find a solution. You need your boss to support you and to try and prevent other players from coming and saying, "Hey, we are doing this." He should say, “No, you can’t do that.” There is one mediator. You can help him. He should listen to you, but you cannot compete with him and come up with alternative ideas to the ideas he's putting on the table for the various players.
Jon Alterman: Do people appropriately define what success looks like in a UN context? Libya—where you put a lot of effort in—has elections scheduled for the end of December. There's a lot of anxiety about whether it'll happen at all, what it might look like, whether Libya is going in a good direction. How should we benchmark success for the UN, given that politics is often very messy, even in successful situations?
Ghassan Salamé: Yesterday, I had a phone call from a foreign minister who was asking me, "What do you think of the idea that Libya should not have elections before all the weapons have been taken from the various groups”—before demilitarization, basically? What? No elections before demilitarization? You have 20 million pieces of weapons in Libya. That means you should have a benchmark here that demilitarization will take years—possibly a generation—before it's implemented. You cannot condition elections on that.
There are things you can do immediately. There are things you can do in a very long time. Three times during my stay in Libya, I had to reopen the oil fields because one group went and stopped the production. This you can do immediately, and the benchmark would be: is oil flowing or not? Demilitarization is not a short-term objective. It's something you should start, but you will certainly leave the country without seeing it completed. It will take time, so I believe that people should have a sophisticated mind in defining what is feasible in the short term, in the midterm, and in the long-term. Reopening the fields is a short-term objective. Having the judiciary united and the central bank united is a short-term objective. You have other objectives that will take a lot of time, like infuse a democratic culture in a country. This is generational, and you cannot do it by decree. Another would be to demilitarize the country or recycle those who have been fighting.
Armed groups are like an accordion in countries like Libya. When you have a ceasefire, it becomes a very small accordion because it's closed. When there is a need for fighters, it opens back up. Meanwhile, these guys have been working in banks, in insurance, or as teachers in schools. Then, there is a point where the city is involved in a war, and it asked all those guys to come back and fight. That’s what happened in April 2019 when Haftar attacked Tripoli. When he attacked, I would say the armed groups in Tripoli had maximum of 2,000 fighters, but two months later, there was five or six times that number. The problem is not that people are full-time militia men. You need to understand that.
Private military firms are different from fighters coming from a regime. They are very different from what I could consider—in terms of numbers—the largest group of mercenaries. These are expatriates from sub-Saharan Africa who work in Libya and who are mobilized more or less voluntarily by the armed groups to go and fight. These are not mercenaries. These are people who have been somehow compelled to go and participate in the fighting.
When I hear people saying, "Oh, you need all these mercenaries to go back home,” I say no. For most of those who have been fighting—Libyans or non-Libyans—the question is not to go back home. The question is to go back to civilian work and for that, you need a ceasefire and a political solution. You need a basic agreement on the redistribution of work. Iraq and Libya have at least one thing in common: both are rentier economies. Civil wars and rentier economies very quickly turn around the basic issue: who has the money and how much of it do they have access to?
Jon Alterman: That's a useful segue to get back to the academic part of your career, because that's a very academic observation based on things that you've written that I've read. You were the founding Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs. How has your practical experience shaped what you think is the foundational education that practitioners need? As you were conceptualizing what the curriculum should look like, how did your career as a practitioner inform your academic approach to the training future practitioners should have?
Ghassan Salamé: That's a very interesting question, and I have to confide to you that you are the first one to ask me that question. It's a very important issue. I insisted on having a compulsory minor in regional affairs—Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East—because you need not to be in the globalization generalist track all the time. I need you to learn a language, and I need you to know more about Zimbabwe or Nepal or Costa Rica. I need you to have regional experts telling you what they have learned from their books and writing and ground research. This was crucial. The second point is what you may call the recycling of my colleagues. One of my mentors is Lakhdar Brahimi.
He was 80 years old when I built the school. I went to see him. I said, "What are you doing? Come and tell the younger generation about your experience." He took his class to New York, and they attended UN Security Council meetings. He took another class a year later to Cote D'Ivoire to see what the UN was doing in Cote D'Ivoire. I did the same with Alvaro de Soto—and with a number of people who have been mediating. I had the academic side coming and telling them about the theory of international relations and conflict resolution methods, but I also insisted on having a number of people who have been on the ground as mediators coming and telling them about their experience. When you have been a nomad between the university and the ground—like I have been—you do not denigrate any half of your life. I wanted my colleagues at the university to accept the idea that they have half of the tools. The other half is in the hands of those who have been on the ground. The curriculum was first, and the faculty second. The third thing is that I insisted that the third semester of their two-year program needs to be spent on the ground as interns—in embassies, international organizations, and NGOs. I had an office helping them. This is quite common in the United States, but this is uncommon in the European system where you are basically put in in a school at the age of three and you come out with a PhD at 25 without having seen the real world. I thank you for that question because I don’t get asked it often.
Jon Alterman: Which is crazy. Ghassan Salamé, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Ghassan Salamé: Thank you for inviting me.