Garm Bel Iblis is a human male Corellian who served as senator for Corellia in the Galactic Republic and became one of the founding figures of the rebellion against the Empire. Timothy Zahn introduced him in Dark Force Rising (Bantam Spectra, 1992), the second novel of the Thrawn trilogy.
The best idea in the Thrawn trilogy that is not Thrawn
Bel Iblis exists to answer a question the films leave alone: what happened to the people who started the Rebellion and then fell out with each other? Zahn’s answer is that one of them walked away. Bel Iblis broke with Mon Mothma over the concentration of authority in her hands, took his own forces, and spent years fighting the Empire independently — a second rebellion, running in parallel, invisible to the Alliance and to the reader until the novel reveals it.
Why it works
Because it is a disagreement between two people who are both partly right. Mothma’s case is that a rebellion needs unified command. Bel Iblis’s case is that unified command is how you end up with an Empire. Zahn declines to settle it, and the reunification when it comes is transactional rather than sentimental.
The Corellian dimension
He is also the Expanded Universe’s most useful Corellian politician, which matters because Corellia spends the Bantam and Del Rey eras being the awkward system that will not quite behave. Bel Iblis’s history — the bombing of the Treitamma Political Center, his flight from Palpatine, his private fleet — gives that later material a spine.
In the New Republic
Once reconciled, he becomes a New Republic general and one of the fixed points of its military establishment, serving through the campaigns of the 1990s novels and beyond. He is the officer the books reach for when they need somebody who outranks the protagonists and is not an idiot.
Continuity
Bel Iblis is Star Wars Legends. Current canon has not used him. His narrative function — the founder who dissents — has since been taken up in canon by Saw Gerrera, who is a much angrier and less reasonable version of the same argument, and by the fractured Alliance politics of Andor and Rogue One.
Where to read him
Dark Force Rising and The Last Command first, then Zahn’s later duology Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future, where the New Republic he helped build is coming apart along exactly the seams he warned about.
