What’s next for Libyans? Hard part begins
Libya’s victorious revolutionaries now face a new threat: Themselves.
The secular and religious, the politicians and the militants basked on Thursday in the demise of a dictator, as fighters killed Moammar Gadhafi and eradicated once and for all his four decades of cruel repression in Libya.
But jubilation over Gadhafi’s demise is being tempered by concerns over the circumstances of his death—and lingering doubts about Libya’s future.
Gadhafi’s death clears a cloud over Libya’s shaky interim government while focusing new scrutiny on the group of former rebels and exiles now in charge and the possible candidates to lead a permanent government.
The National Transitional Council’s largely secular leaders have promised to respect human rights and the rule of law and foster in an inclusive era of government, but the NTC is held together by a shaky coalition of individuals with competing interests and ambitions. There remains a massive power vacuum, and uncertainty about what or who will fill it.
Under no illusions
Armed groups across the country have emerged as laws unto themselves. Interim leader Mahmoud Jibril has indicated he will step aside once Libya’s liberation is completed, which would create possibly another vacuum. And in a country awash in weapons, where Gadhafi’s once vast arsenal of conventional arms and rocket-propelled missiles have been looted, the threat of widespread instability is high.
US President Barack Obama said the US was “under no illusions.”
“Libya will travel a long and winding road to full democracy. There will be difficult days ahead,” he said.
Britain and France, the powers that played a leading role in the military campaign that sealed Gadhafi’s fate, said they hoped that his death would open a new, and more democratic, chapter in Libya’s history.
Appeal: No revenge attacks
French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined other leaders, including United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon in calling on the victorious NTC fighters to refrain from revenge attack against Gadhafi’s defeated loyalists.
“Now is the time for all Libyans to come together… This is time for healing and rebuilding, for generosity of spirit, not for revenge,” said Ban.
Nobody is in charge
Libya’s patchwork of competing tribal and regional loyalties makes it a challenging place to govern under any circumstances, and 42 years of idiosyncratic rule under Gadhafi compounds the difficulty. He drained the country of institutions, eliminated any threat to his authority and defined nearly all aspects of life through his bizarre political vision that centered on a green book, powerless “people’s committees” and his unpredictable antics.
“Nobody is in charge,” said Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “You have a council that is barely able to work together, and you have militias with no chain of command. In the course of the next week or so, they are going to have to figure out how to govern.”
“The revolution is over and the state-building must begin, and we have no clue how they are going to do it,” added Eugene Rogan, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Oxford.
No civil service
Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Libya does not have an old constitution or parliament to turn to because Gadhafi so thoroughly decimated the government, and Libyans “have no working civil service, no proper ministries and no officials with a mandate from the people.”
The NTC’s public statements have sometimes raised eyebrows, as when military chief Abdel-Fattah Younis’ body was found dumped outside the eastern city of Benghazi in July. Leaders insisted the assassination was the work of the Gadhafi regime, even as several witnesses came forward and said Younis was killed by fellow rebels.
Tricky part begins
US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner echoed that the “tricky part” of the revolution begins now, saying Libya’s leaders should move rapidly “to establish control over the military” and “to establish control throughout the country.”
“You’ve got militias, you’ve got units that have been very much involved in fighting, and it is a significant challenge how to bring them under a single command,” he said.
Revolutions often are abducted by armed or organized minority interests. By removing the whole political order, as opposed to a head of state or head of government, revolutions are by nature unpredictable and dangerous.
Libya’s fighters include both secular and religious Muslims, and their militias almost surely will demand a large role in Libya’s future governance. Some come with questionable pasts, having waged jihad against US forces in Iraq or belonged to hardline Islamist groups suppressed under Gadhafi’s dictatorship. With a third of the country impoverished, the US and other Western powers are worried about what will happen if the jubilation of defeating Gadhafi turns to entrenched political frustration.
“My guess is that there will be more fighting,” said retired US diplomat Leslie H. Gelb.
Ali Errishi, a former Libyan minister who abandoned Gadhafi early in the revolution and sought his removal, said the best strategy for stability would be to start democracy work immediately.
“We don’t have to wait for elections,” Errishi told the Associated Press, saying the leaders of Libya’s “quasi-democratic” council should “give everybody a chance and show the rest of the world we are capable of having a civilized democratic conversation for the best interests of our people.”
No credible institution
Libya’s path is in many ways the most tortuous of the North African revolutions. When Gadhafi came to power 42 years ago, Libya was divided among three loosely confederated provinces and dozens of insular tribes. He forged Libya into a single nation built around his own bizarre cult of personality. He did not build any national institutions; he insisted that Libya was a direct democracy of peoples committees with no need for a government—that might challenge his power.
“Libya is going to have a terrible time,” said Lisa Anderson, a political scientist who studies Libya.
“For a long time what knit them together was a kind of morbid fascination with Gadhafi, and until now everybody felt that until they saw his body that he almost might come back, like a vampire,” said Anderson, who is the president of the American University in Cairo.
But when the euphoria dies down, “they don’t have a credible institution in the entire country,” she said. “They don’t have anything that knits them together.”
Syria and Yemen
Some in the Arab world now say they hope that the success of the Libyan insurrection in toppling Gadhafi without the aid of an institution like the Egyptian military, and by force of arms rather than moral suasion, could reinvigorate activists in violent struggles elsewhere, especially Syria and Yemen.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen, with its weak state, splintered national army and strong tribal affiliations, may be the region’s closest analogy to Libya—but without oil, said Paul Sullivan, a Georgetown political scientist.
“The brutality of the Assad regime in Syria and the Saleh regime in Yemen is still being felt,” Sullivan said. “But with the demise of Moammar Gadhafi, the light at the end of the tunnel is a lot less dim.”
Or, he added, Libya may yet follow Yemen in to chaos.
“Libya still has its chance of becoming a failed state,” he said.
Experience of unity
Ahmed Ounaies, a former Tunisian ambassador who served briefly as foreign minister after the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, argued that in some ways Gadhafi’s government had prepared the Libyan people to avoid that fate.
“Now they are very well-trained not to accept the rule of one unique leader or party,” he said.
“And this experience of liberations from inside is itself an experience of national union and integration,” he said.
“Though martyrdom, through sacrifice, through heroism, they have built up a strong union, a strong Libya, and that is very important for the building of a nation,” said Ounaies. With reports from New York Times News Service
