Where does Haftar get this audacity?

The aim of the uprising the Libyan people launched ten years ago on the road to self-determination was to put an end to despotism, the final gift of the colonial occupation administrations that had been imposed on them for a hundred years. Yet Gaddafi, who had been ruling the country with a merciless tyranny for forty years, had a discourse that was thoroughly nationalist, and his actions were strangely idiosyncratic. Frankly, in the early days this flattered the wounded pride of his people, indeed of all the Arab peoples, hurt during the colonial years. His going to France, pitching a tent in the garden of the Hôtel Marigny and conducting his official meetings in that tent, seemed to offer the Arabs a chance, however fake, to look down on the Westerners.

But the cost of this image was quite heavy. Besides, with the large purchases from France, Arab public opinion had by now begun to pay more attention to the fact that Libyan money was pouring into France, and the falsity of these images embarrassed it all the more with the disgrace they concealed. Such displays of arrogance staged against the Westerners were nothing but a farce masking a colonialism that was being pursued even more intensely.

Even the objections of the French left, indeed of the entire French opposition, to the humiliation involved in this show meant nothing. After all, France was looking to its colonial gains. A guaranteed economic exploitation could allow such relations in rhetoric. This was not the first and only disgraceful situation the French national character had fallen into.

For the Libyan people, the Arab Spring gave an important opportunity to escape this contradiction, to free their homeland and their honor from this two-faced despotism. They seized that opportunity and made their revolution.

Today Haftar, who is trying to restore the Gaddafi order against this revolution in a more merciless way, with the support and financing of those who exploit Libya, accuses of colonialism Turkey, which is there at the invitation of the Libyan people and which has left his coup-plotting, occupying ambitions stuck in his throat. At a ceremony organized by the LNA General Command in Benghazi on the 69th anniversary of Libya's independence, without minding his own size, forgetting that only a few months ago he fled in disarray before the forces of the Turkey-backed Government of National Accord, he blusters: "While Turkish soldiers disrespect the sanctity of our country, independence has no value and freedom has no meaning. There is no security and no peace either. The enemy has no other option: either it will leave willingly and in peace, or we will force it to do so with weapons and a strong will."

Turkish soldiers are there, not to disrespect the sanctity of Libya, but against the collaborator Haftar, who hands it over to the occupiers on a platter.

Haftar spoke at the ceremony held in Benghazi, but in the article we wrote in recent days we showed that even the people of Benghazi are not on his side. At least 150 thousand people who have had to emigrate from Benghazi right now also show what kind of illegitimacy Haftar suffers from there. Haftar, who is an occupier even where he has set foot, who tramples on the sanctity of the Libyan people, who hands his country over to France, to the sons of Zayed, the gang of the Gulf, and to the coup-plotter Sisi, speaks of independence and freedom. The independence he speaks of is evidently not Libya's independence, and the freedom is not the freedom of the Libyan people.

Even in Benghazi, where he has somehow been able to set foot today, the people are looking for ways to be rid of him and become free. In essence, he has no legitimacy whatsoever by the way he set out. With the weapons he seized, he came to power by staging a coup against the elected, legitimate administration. At the outset he displaced 250 thousand of the people of Benghazi who did not consent to this coup, killed thousands, and imprisoned thousands.

These acts fall within the scope of crimes against humanity that require his trial in international criminal courts. Later, the dozens of mass graves he left behind as he withdrew from Tarhuna, which he held for a while in his coup that he wanted to spread to the West as well, reveal the scale of the crimes he commits every day. This alone is enough to show what kind of rule he has in the regions where he is currently stationed, namely Tobruk and Benghazi.

With all this, one should not put down to his own accord the fact that this criminal, whom Turkey has already taken the measure of, is nowadays daring to issue challenges.

It is clear that there are again those who are provoking Haftar these days and trying to push him back into conflict with Turkey. Why? To make him lose even what he has left? Or have the forces that used the ceasefire period as an opportunity to build up troops and munitions now judged the strength they have amassed sufficient, and are they looking for an opportunity for a rematch with Turkey?

Whatever they are looking for, let them look. From Turkey, which acts together with the wishes and will of the Libyan people in particular, they will find only their own trouble.

Yesterday's visit to Libya by the Minister of National Defense, Mr. Hulusi Akar, conveyed precisely this message in the clearest way. It was very important that Akar particularly drew attention to the fact that the massacres committed by the coup-plotter Haftar had come to light once again with the 21 mass graves in Tarhuna.

That the world continues to remain silent against Haftar, who is being presented as a legitimate party in international negotiations, is of course extremely strange and unacceptable, but Mr. Akar has expressed his belief that the Government of National Accord will not let go of the pursuit of this crime against humanity.

This is very important, because pursuing this crime at the International Criminal Court would be a move that will re-establish the distribution of legitimacy among the parties in Libya at present.

Those who commit crimes against humanity against the Libyan people and have no respect whatsoever will not be accepted as having a say in Libya's future. Yet, as Akar also made clear, for Turkey Libya belongs to the Libyans, and Turkey's reason for being there is the wishes and will of the Libyan people.