<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/16/qaddafis_lingering_legacy>
Libya's Year Zero
Life without Qaddafi's Green Book.
BY CLARE MORGANA GILLIS | MARCH 16, 2012
TRIPOLI, Libya - In the Libyan capital, the constant hum of construction and
traffic, along with open shops and restaurants, suggests a thriving country.
Few visible traces of war scar the city, aside from the hulk of wrecked
concrete and rebar that was Muammar al-Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya complex. In
what now ranks as one of the world's most heavily armed countries, armed
clashes have become quite rare, and the sound of gunfire is almost never
heard.
But there's another side of Libya's story. It's a country where fighters
outside the control of the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) are
embedded in the heart of the capital, journalists
<
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/british-journalists-libyan-in
telligence-15928876> are imprisoned for weeks without charge by militias,
and Amnesty International
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/16/libyan-militias-detainee-tortur
e-amnesty-international> has detailed multiple instances of prisoners being
fatally tortured by the country's erstwhile liberators.
In the Arab country where revolution has come closest to obliterating the
old order, Libyans have embarked on a long process of resurrecting their
state. Without their hatred of Qaddafi to unite them, Libya's new ruling
class is having a series of difficult conversations about what they want
their new government to look like.
Perhaps the most daunting project for the new Libya is fostering civil
society and democratic principles in a society controlled for so long by an
egomaniacal dictator. One player is Mahmoud Jibril, the former chair of the
NTC's executive board, who is organizing a new political coalition from an
office building in a nondescript area of Tripoli. He changes headquarters
frequently for security reasons, and indeed, his current office bore no
personal traces. While a large staff bustled in the outer offices, he sat in
a spacious but austere office, its windows facing the Mediterranean Sea, and
put his calls on hold for our interview.
"We need either a strong leader or a strong legitimacy in the system,"
Jibril told me. "If we go for the strong leader it's more swift, but there
is no guarantee that we don't slip again into dictatorship. We have to
establish a strong system. It will take more time, but it's the better
goal."
Regarding reports of widespread abuse of prisoners, Jibril observed that
"rehabilitating the winners is much more difficult than rehabilitating the
losers."
Jibril's political coalition, one of dozens that has sprung up ahead of
Libya's first post-Qaddafi elections in June, is called the Alliance of
Libya's Patriots. It is made up of parties, powerful local personalities,
sports clubs, and other social groups from across Libya. Each has pledged to
educate those in their community about the democratic process via leaflets
and brochures that detail what elections are, what institutions are, and
what parties are.
Jibril insisted that his coalition's primary goal is to teach people about
democracy rather than push a specific political platform. "I have no
ideology," he said at a news conference in February. "We need better health
care, better education, better communications. We have some moderate Islamic
presence in the coalition, some liberals, some secularists. Whether you are
liberal or Islamist, I say with all respect, what matters to me is visible
results."
The problems Libya inherited from Qaddafi's regime are not just a lack of
knowledge about democracy, however. Corruption is widespread. The interim
government is opaque and distant. And many argue that anyone who served
under Qaddafi -- including Jibril, who was a reformist aide to Saif al-Islam
al-Qaddafi -- is too tainted to be trusted with governing the new Libya.
A rival political coalition, calling itself the Union for the Homeland,
insists that "a new Libya needs new faces." Founded by Abdul Rahman
al-Swehli, a dissident imprisoned by the Qaddafi regime at the beginning of
the uprising, the movement consists of people who were on the outside
looking in under the old regime.
"In Mr. Jibril's meetings for his alliance, everybody who was there before
is there now, except for Qaddafi," said Salah El-Bakkoush, a co-founder of
the union. He pointed to projects such as the
<
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/concrete_jungles?page=0,3#
3> Great Man-Made River, which cost the country millions in the 1980s, as
examples of how the old government squandered the funds of the people and
yet enriched themselves. "People should get the idea that they have some
responsibility for the loss of our money."
As in Egypt and Tunisia, the toppling of a dictator has also opened a door
long shut to political Islamists. On March 3, Libya's branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood
<
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-03-03/Muslim-Brotherhood-part
y-Libya/53348332/1> announced the formation of its political party, the
Justice and Development Party. Lacking the wide grassroots support that the
Brotherhood enjoys in Egypt and Tunisia, the party nonetheless declared
itself heartened by interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil's
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/world/africa/libyan-leaders-remark-favori
ng-polygamy-stirs-anger.html?pagewanted=all> statement in October that
Islamic law should be the basis of the future Libyan legal system.
Islamist parties, however, are not the only ones announcing themselves into
Libya's burgeoning political scene. Ali Tarhouni, the NTC's former finance
minister who had previously taught economics at the University of
Washington, launched his National Centrist Party on Feb. 27. "We are a
moderate Islamic country," Tarhouni told me over the phone. "This is a
grassroots political party, and we look to have serious political force in
this country."
As if those competing political currents were not enough, some Libyans in
the east are looking to radically curtail the control Tripoli exerts over
their affairs. On March 6, NTC member Ahmed Zubair al-Senussi, a scion of
the old monarchy,
<
http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-06/africa/world_africa_libya-benghazi_1_nat
ional-transitional-council-moammar-gadhafi-benghazi?_s=PM:AFRICA>
unilaterally declared a federal state in the eastern part of the country,
with its capital in Benghazi.
Others, however, criticized the move as too much, too soon for the nascent
Libyan state. "We made the revolution against individual decisions and
dictatorship," said Hana el-Gallal, a Benghazi native who holds a Ph.D. in
international law and has been active in the revolution from the beginning.
"We will not accept federalism unless it comes from a government elected by
the people. It is an idea we want to put on the table, but it has to be put
before the entire people."
The most pressing political issue facing the new Libya is what to do about
the thuwar -- the revolutionary fighters who toppled Qaddafi but are now
running amok across the country, much to the dismay of many Libyans.
"Mohammed," a well-educated, soft-spoken native of Tripoli, tells a grim
story that exemplifies the complete helplessness of some citizens of the new
Libya. His family is from the Warfalla tribe, historically among Qaddafi's
most loyal supporters. At the end of January, two of his brothers were
"kidnapped by a militia" on suspicions of being a Qaddafi loyalist, he said.
Mohammed himself sounded an ambivalent note about the uprising, blaming
international forces for civilian casualties and making the case that the
thuwar were employing the same tactics as Qaddafi did, only worse. "I
supported this revolution from before it started," he said. "But at the end
of March [2011], I changed my mind because I support Libya. Not Muammar, but
not the rebels either. If it's about brothers fighting each other, OK. But I
cannot support NATO."
The militiamen claim they found weapons in Mohammed's brother's home, as
well as a list of names on his computer -- men whom he allegedly planned to
kill. They are being held in an unknown location, off the grid of the NTC
prisons.
Mohammed's legs shook under the table of the hotel cafe where we spoke as he
recounted his own recent kidnapping. He was lured into a trap by a phone
call that promised him an opportunity to visit his brother. When he arrived,
he was taken by the same group of thuwar; they interrogated and beat him
until he passed out several times. He was let go after less than a day. He
showed a cell-phone video of bruises sustained on his leg during the attack
and said there were more in "sensitive areas."
Any time he makes a move toward meeting with a human rights group, he told
me, he receives phone calls from militiamen ordering him to stop. When I
asked whether he had gone to the authorities for help, he replied, "There is
no government. Are you kidding?"
The dominance of the militias is even worse outside Tripoli. In the town of
Gharyan, only 30 miles outside Tripoli, Imad Sager -- a harried chain-smoker
who quit his job as an English teacher to fight in the revolution last year
-- manages a makeshift prison crammed with nearly 1,000 sub-Saharan
Africans, mainly from Niger. "The government doesn't give me any money," he
said. "If the police want to do something to me, they have to ask -- I have
more men and more guns."
The new Libyan government has made halting progress in bringing the militias
under its control. Deputy Interior Minister Omar al-Khadrawi oversees the
operations of the High Security Committee, a newly formed council designed
to integrate the disparate fighting groups into the national police and
military forces. As his phone rang nonstop during our interview in his
richly appointed office, he told me that more than 15,000 thuwar are working
with the committee. They will receive three months of training in Jordan,
Qatar, Turkey, or the United Arab Emirates, which is intended to equip them
to halt drug trafficking and other criminal acts.
After a few weeks, Khadrawi said, any thuwar not signed up for training
through this committee will be illegal. But I asked whether the national
security forces were strong enough to force them to disarm, he answered
immediately. "No, they are not."
The challenge facing the new Libyan government is not only integrating the
new fighters, but getting some of the old security forces back on their
feet. During the revolution, protesters viewed the police as Qaddafi's
front-line enforcers and burned their stations to the ground across the
country. "Police forces feel like defeated army, feel themselves unwanted
ones, and we need to support them," Khadrawi said.
Not all of Libya's policemen were irreconcilable Qaddafi loyalists, though.
Khadrawi said that hundreds of pro-Qaddafi police personnel were removed
from the force in recent months, and others left of their own accord. "Once
Tripoli was liberated we called the police to return, and 70 percent
returned to their posts," Khadrawi claimed.
On the surface, everything in Libya is in a state of flux. Ministry offices
bustle with fast and furious phone calls, meetings, announcements of new
political coalitions and committees. But this constant motion is also
coupled with a sense that not nearly as much is being accomplished as
Libyans had hoped. Perhaps that's Qaddafi's lingering legacy: Libya's new
leaders form political "coalitions" rather than parties, chose to name an
"executive board" of the NTC rather than specific leaders, and constantly
form committees charged with making decisions. The steady insistence on
consensus brings to mind the Qaddafi-era "popular committees," which were
supposed to be local committees where people power ruled supreme -- but were
in fact smokescreens behind which the Leader enforced his will. Now there is
no Leader and the people are free to claim their power, but many seem
reluctant to do so.
In Tripoli, as in many other cities throughout Libya, the hated word
"jamahiriya" -- Qaddafi's term for his system of government, which
translates as "republics" but was really just a cover for his autocratic
rule -- has been painted over, scraped off, or covered with a tricolor flag
sticker on most cars' license plates. Likewise politics in the new Libya:
Even as authorities seek to replace the old system with modern democracy,
the rate of change is uneven, and the clouded incoherence of Jamahiriya
thinking, along with the lawless brutality of the Qaddafi regime, still
lurks somewhere beneath the tricolor flag.
------------[ Sent via the dehai-wn mailing list by dehai.org]--------------
Received on Fri Mar 16 2012 - 18:27:05 EDT
