Exit the Colonel (49 page)

CHAPTER 14

Toward the Precipice

I
n the months immediately following liberation from the Gaddafi regime, polls showed much optimism among the Libyan people in general. When asked whether Libya was better off before or after the revolution, 34 percent of Libyans said the situation was “much better now” and 41 percent, “somewhat better.” Only 11 percent felt it was either somewhat or much worse. Ninety-three percent said they believed the situation would be either somewhat or much better in a year. When asked if the revolution was “right” or “wrong,” a full 82 percent of Libyans said they felt it was “absolutely right” and 2 percent, “absolutely wrong.”
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About half the respondents felt no distinction should be made between religion and politics, while only 21 percent felt the new Libyan government should make a distinction between the two spheres. Security was very much on respondents' minds: a large majority felt the government's top priorities should be to fight crime and disorder, rebuild infrastructure, and create jobs, in that order.

The National Transitional Council, now composed of some eighty members, relocated from Benghazi to Tripoli, symbolically starting a new era in a unified Libya. It brought with it not only the world's attention, but a fair degree of baggage (from the point of view of those in western Libya) due to being a product of the east.

As the days and months have gone by, however, one senses, through anecdotes, a creeping despair. One young female Libyan academic said that while she herself was optimistic by nature, she noticed what seemed to her a twenty-eighty pattern, whereby 20 percent of the people, some of them teachers, housewives, or otherwise “normal” people, had become activists, forming small associations to feed the poor, pick up trash, form neighborhood watch associations, assist with the search for the
mafqoodeen
(the war missing), or start a newspaper; 80 percent of the others, she continued, spent much of their time complaining that the nascent government was not meeting their needs.

As the militias continued to sit in Tripoli, pressing for salaries, jobs, and concessions, the NTC found itself severely challenged to maintain order. The various militias strove to strengthen their hand by taking control of key assets—like Tripoli Airport, which was held by a Zintani militia for over a month—and people, like Saif Al Islam, whom the Zintanis also held as a bargaining chip to trade for positions of political influence, such as interior minister.
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Meanwhile, the outlines of a transition process had been set. The NTC, still the primary executive and legislative body in Libya, named a transitional government on November 22, headed by US-educated Abdelrahim Al Keeb (at the time, unknown in Libya), and announced that elections would be held in the summer of 2012. They would not elect a new government directly, but a two-hundred-member
Mu'tammar al Watani
(National Conference), effectively another, larger transitional government. Its primary responsibilities would be to write a new constitution, which would set the overall political framework for the country, and to appoint the next (transitional-transitional) government.

While the NTC, and some of its senior members, were roundly criticized for inaction, favoritism, cronyism, inefficiency, and so on, it faced the same gargantuan tasks in attempting to satisfy pressing postwar needs in relation to ensuring medical services, creating or recreating government infrastructure, paying salaries, establishing order from mayhem, disarming the militias, and so on. Meanwhile, no one was able to tell if Abdeljalil was a strategic genius or just barely muddling through. The new government certainly had no easy time. At one point, Abdeljalil announced Al Keeb had been sacked, then retracted that announcement. Al Keeb, for his part, accused the NTC of “impeding” the process of preparing the country for elections.
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It would have been unrealistic to believe that Libya's post-Gaddafi path would be anything but turbulent—for all the reasons outlined in previous chapters. In addition to the myriad internal interests, Libya is an easy target for foreign manipulation. Qatar, while widely credited by the rebels with helping enable the revolution, is also known to be supporting the Islamist groups with money and weapons. The Algerians are providing sanctuary for the Gaddafi family members and allegedly still enable loyalist elements. The Chinese and Russians can be expected to stir the pot in Libya (as a future market and distraction from other interests, such as Syria). Within Libya, Egyptians are suspected of trying to promote discord as a means of grabbing some oil-rich lands along the Libyan-Egyptian border. As of June 2012, Tripoli remained hostage to four or five main militias from Zintan, Misurata, and Tarhouna, which doggedly refused to disband and occasionally made grand plays to wrest control of major civic assets—like the airport, again.

Attacks on the NTC offices, members of the transitional government and symbolic foreign targets, fed the sense of insecurity. A bomb was thrown at the convoy of UN envoy Ian Martin in Benghazi on April 10 (with no casualties). On May 8, militiamen stormed Al Keeb's office while he was meeting with his defense minister. An improvised explosive device was dropped outside the US consulate in Benghazi on June 6 (also with no major damage or casualties), supposedly in retaliation for a US drone attack in Pakistan that killed Abu Layth al Libi, a Libyan-born fighter and number-two Al Qaeda leader.
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On June 10, the UK ambassador's convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, causing injuries but no fatalities. A few of these incidents have been attributed to or claimed by hitherto unknown extremist groups.

All this noise overshadows some real accomplishments, such as the fact that 50,000 and 70,000 ex-militiamen and former
thuwwar
have been integrated into a quasi-standing army, salaries are starting to be paid regularly, banks are reopening, and a number of early regional elections were held without major incident.

While most of the attention is focused on the northern population centers, the vast south remains a major concern; borders remain unsecured and intratribal fighting continues to flare up. The southern borders are entry and exit points for smuggling of all manner of military equipment,
guns, drugs, and people. Problems in Libya have had repercussions in Niger and Mali, where extremist elements, backed by munitions smuggled out of Libya, have effectively staged an extreme Islamic coup.
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Further, the south is home to a good portion of Libya's water and oil resources. The sheer number of weapons loose in Libya—and that have left Libya—remain a very serious concern. Internationally sponsored buyback programs within Libya have recouped some of the loose handheld missile launchers, but have made little progress in reducing the overall number of weapons to the point where it would actually be difficult for anyone to obtain munitions.

For those looking for a worst-case scenario with respect to the influence of extreme religion in Libya, there are certainly plenty of potentially scary stories. The eastern town of Derna reemerged in the spring and early summer of 2012 as a poster child for the lurking “Great Somalia”: on March 4, the newly appointed head of the security committee for Derna, Mohamed al-Hassi, was assassinated in broad daylight at a petrol station in the city center; Abdel Hakim Al Hasadi, a former LIFG member, who had joined the revolution and denounced Al Qaeda, was attacked in Derna some days later. There have been a few car bombs, attributed to a hitherto unknown local Islamist group,
Ansar Sharia
. “Derna is not without al-Qaeda presence,” one resident noted. “Al-Qaeda even has a presence in several areas in Libya, and this could be very dangerous if the National Transitional Council (NTC) doesn't pay attention and put an end to it.”
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At the same time, it is well worth noting that large groups of Dernawi residents have staged sit-ins at local mosques to protest what they feel is a foreign-instigated attempt to blacken their names and hijack their traditional, but moderate values dating back to the early days of the 2011 revolution.
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If one considers that the Libyan revolution began in February 2011 and continued for more than eight months, causing enormous physical and psychological casualties in addition to what the Gaddafi regime had inflicted for forty-one years, the fact that Libya is still reeling is not a surprise. Libyans have tremendously high expectations for the future in the wake of liberation. The Western media have a tendency as well to put Libya under a microscope. Libyans outside the country tend to bemoan how the country has left so many promises unfulfilled. The fact is, Libya is at the start of a long process, and, as one activist noted, “there are no guarantees.”
Provisional Prime Minister Al Keeb felt compelled to address this “artificially short horizon” during a speech to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, in March 2012, “There are some who chose to dwell today on our challenges, on our differences and on our mistakes. I have no problem with that. But I believe that in so doing, they lack both perspective and an understanding of history and of the human spirit in Libya . . . and we have all the institutions of the state to rebuild from scratch, a huge challenge but a truly exciting one.”
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As the date of the general elections approaches, the mood seems to be rising again, as reflected in mass voter registrations and an increased interest in the actual process behind the elections (as of May 15, 1,833,000 of Libya's 6 million odd citizens, close to 80 percent of those eligible, had registered to vote).
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Not in the manner anyone had envisioned it, but a full eight years after Saif Al Islam broached the notion, Libya has a draft constitution, whose articles appear designed to satisfy all the major interest groups. Article 1 states that “Islam is the religion of the State and the principal source of legislation is Islamic jurisprudence (
Shari'a
)” (without specifying whether the final draft would be formally based on Shari'a or merely be “in spirit” with it).

Article 4 of the NTC's draft constitution reads: “The State shall seek to establish a political democratic regime to be based upon the political multitude and multi-party system in a view of achieving peaceful and democratic circulation of power.”
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These parties, as necessary now as they were in 1951, did not spring full-blown from the Libyan dust. Predictably, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first to develop a formal structure, reconstituting itself as the Justice and Development Party on December 24, 2011. The
I'tilaf quwwaat al wataniyya
, or Alliance of National Forces, a coalition of “44 political organizations, 236 NGOs, plus more than 280 independent national figures,” elected Mahmoud Jibril, former NTC foreign minister and prime minister, its head on March 13, 2012.
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The alliance's platform includes “support for moderate Islam” and the “establishment of the foundations of a democratic, civil state”—something that sounds much like the Turkish model. Ali Tarhouni, the former oil and finance minister, founded his own center party about the same time.
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While at the time of writing,
both Tarhouni and Jibril were said to be discussing an alliance, the situation calls attention to many critical deficiencies in the “non-Islamist” camp—a leadership gap and organizational and capacity gaps. A third secularist alliance had been forming, but its leaders, lacking sufficient funds, decided to toss their support to the existing centrists so as not to further dilute the liberal opposition.

Advocates of the NTC say it has done its best under highly difficult circumstances, but seen from the outside, the process seems a complete mess. In a stab at political correctness, one of the first electoral laws set a quota for women candidates to reflect the active role of women in the revolution. That decision was reversed after a few weeks.

In the winter of 2011, Libya's political intelligentsia and external analysts stressed the need to encourage the formation of political parties and to reserve a certain proportion of seats for party lists as a counterweight to individual candidates, who were seen to be more susceptible to tribal influence and moneyed interests.
Asharq Al Awsat
warned that deemphasizing political parties would “open the door to a repetition of the Gaddafi experience in power, as moneyed classes, tribal interests and armed elements [militias] would have undo influence in the new state.”
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In January 2012, the NTC lowered the party quota from 136 seats to 80 seats, and increased seats available for individual competition from 64 to 120—then later reversed this allocation.

The next and perhaps deeper minefield related to regional representation: in late spring, the NTC caused a stir in the east by proposing to allot the sum of seats on a regional basis, but with quotas set according to population. In practice, this meant awarding the east 60 seats, against 102 for the west, raising the specter of renewed Tripolitanian dominance over national decision making. (Just as in 1951, the majority of Libya's 7 million people live in the west. However, much of the oil and gas resources are concentrated in the Sirte Basin, which is technically east.)
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