Issue No. 1078Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Libya's ordeal
Allah had not designated it as such, but NATO had. So was it a question of till death do us part? Everyone had foreseen the likelihood of a bust-up.
 Click to view caption |
| A trigger happy anti-Gaddafi fighter celebrates the capture of Gaddafi's son and heir apparent Seif Al-Islam who boasted his father's army's invincibility and pictured left mimicks the "Hail Hitler" salute |
The protracted armed struggle to undo the Machiavellian mechanisms that sustained the 42-year iron grip of Muammar Gaddafi over the oil-rich North African nation ended in his gruesome torture and assassination in his hometown of Sirte on Thursday 20 October 2012. Gaddafi is dead and he had to go, it seems. But is this really the end?
Whatever one thinks about Gaddafi's welfare policy, it was far from being designated as a mess, until the horrendous three-month siege of Misrata in mid-summer. He will go down in history as a tragic and quixotic tool of imperialism because he believed he could do brisk business with Western leaders. It is an end he eschewed.
The Libyan armed opposition forces, especially the Misrata Brigade, braced themselves for a long and bloody confrontation with the well-armed forces of Gaddafi. The economic and social challenges now, most Libyans concur, are greater still than those they suffered under the Gaddafi dictatorship. In November, Gaddafi's son and heir apparent Seif Al-Islam as well as Abdallah Al-Senousi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law and spymaster, were taken into custody while trying to escape the country. "I think the way in which Gaddafi was killed creates suspicions of war crimes," conceded International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo in The Hague, noting the there was no death penalty on the ICC statue book.
"We are raising the concern to the national authorities in Libya and they are preparing a plan for a comprehensive strategy to investigate all these crimes," Moreno-Ocampo confessed, casting a long shadow of doubt on the rancorous legal process of the new warlords of Libya.
Hope persists that in the aftermath of the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of the late Libyan leader, the Libyan economy will achieve phenomenal growth rates estimated by the British-based Economist Intelligence Unit to hover around 13.6 per cent in 2012. Prospects appear good as long as political stability is secured.
Looking at the options of the Libyan electorate when they troop in 2012 into their voting booths, the vast majority might be tempted to cast a vote for politicians representing their tribal and regional specificity rather than any preconceived ideological considerations.
That said, there remains some reluctance in Tripoli to move more quickly on the next stage of reform and this is likely to intensify. Institutional interests are at stake.
That the Transitional National Council (NTC) in Libya fails to see this raises serious questions about its judgment. There is no detailed reconstruction plan for post-Gaddafi Libya. Tribal and clan politics are now surfacing in the post-Gaddafi Libya and they cannot serve to unblock the political stalemate between contending factions. Moreover, Libya's estimated $160 billion of frozen assets have to be released and invested in sorely needed social infrastructure and upgrading.
Rising to the social and political challenges would be a good procedure for the post-Gaddafi rulers of Libya to boost their government's standing. Abdel-Rahim Al-Keib, educated in the United States where he obtained a masters and PhD, was promptly appointed prime minister by the NTC in November and he identified the ministerial portfolios of defence, the interior and rehabilitation as the most problematic. Libya's Minister of Interior Fawzi Abdel-Aal said that ex-fighters would be dispatched abroad for higher learning to create cadres of professionals to lead Libya. Some believe the move is designed to placate the disgruntled elements eager to sow the harvest of toppling the Gaddafi dictatorship.
In truth, the NTC should have more important things to think about. "We will announce a system for the security structure of the army and for establishing police and border guards in no more than 100 days," declared NTC Chairman Sheikh Mustafa Abdel-Jalil in Libya.
If the late Libyan leader's way of liberalising offered an appalling prospect for the country as the NTC claims, then Gaddafi's minions say good-bye to all that.
For their part, too, the NTC will have no significant achievements to boast of. Libya's Minister of Defence Osama Al-Gueli warned this week that the main obstacles to rehabilitating militiamen is the political peripheralisation of the poorly-educated and illiterate men in arms.
Some experts believe that such threats can be politically counterproductive. If only there were an alternative. Post-Gaddafi politics operates at two levels. There is the instantaneous, hard-nosed level of the struggle for power. In Libya's case it is which group -- regional or military, and the two often overlap -- wins an election, which elects the future president or holds key ministerial portfolios.
However, there is also the underlying struggle of political ideologies. The battle between secularists and Islamists, socialists and liberals has intensified in the post-Gaddafi era. And, the power struggle for legitimacy between liberalism and autocracy. The battle of ideologies is underway in Libya.
Secularism has become a hard point to press in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Libya is no exception. Secularists in the Arab and Muslim worlds are coming under intensifying pressure to adopt a more confrontational stance on this issue.
The NTC has plenty of ground to make up. The leaders of the NTC would be ill-advised to engineer a vendetta against the Gaddafis and their diehard henchmen. The late Libyan leader licked his wounds. He aimed for a restoration of some semblance of dominion over his war-battered land throughout the summer of 2011.
By autumn it became clear that his fall was pending. The ragtag army of rebels enjoyed especially high morale, buoyed by NATO backing. In Cyrenaica and Misrata they were fighting on their home ground.
The untrained volunteers fighting Gaddafi's heavily armed forces marched unabated towards the west, Tripolitania, the heartland of the pro-Gaddafi forces. They dallied around the central stretch of desert wastes surrounding the Gulf of Sirte.
The militias captured key oil terminals in the east such as Ajdabiya, south of Benghazi, Libya's second city and the rebel stronghold, and moved cautiously towards Ras Lanouf on the eastern approaches of Sirte, Gaddafi's own hometown and administrative capital with perhaps one of Libya's largest arms depots. Gaddafi, determined to instill fear and terror into the hearts of his opponents, failed altogether to boost his standing among his people. Simply re-enforcing the status quo did not do now.
No optimism diluted Gaddafi's Green Book's doomsday descriptions of the deadly scenarios that awaited complacent policymakers.
The Libyan popular uprising against Gaddafi had a strong ethical component. There was no canon of sacred books in rebel-held areas but the Quran. Gaddafi's infamous Green Book was trashed, seared and derided as absolute rubbish. But not everyone in the Arab world or the West for that matter was particularly enamoured by the Islamist new order in the "liberated zones" held by Libya's rebels. The Qataris and to a lesser extent the Saudis assisted the NTC militiamen with their largesse.
This read like a timely warning to Libya. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has named former Jordanian foreign minister Abdel-Illah Al-Khatib as UN special envoy to Libya. The UN Secretary General warned against the Libyan "government's disproportionate use of force and indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets". The West, and especially the United States, has been caught unawares. There was no consensus in Washington as to how to deal with the Libyan crisis other than demanding that Gaddafi step down forthwith.
The no-fly zone imposed by Western nations, and a US contingent of 2,000 marines is just a few miles off "the shores of Tripoli", or rather Libya's oil terminals, were crucial in instigating the downfall of Gaddafi.
American politicians lined up to attack and discredit the administration of US President Barack Obama's inaction. Railing about the failure of US presidents is a satisfying ritual for American politicians and a rather boring pastime. But in Libya's case it worked wonders.
What mattered to the Libyan people was that US policies towards Libya made them feel more secure. By and large, the Libyan people do not trust the West, and the US in particular. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) pressed for regime change in Tripoli. There was no love lost between Gaddafi and the oil-rich GCC countries though their rulers were themselves facing growing unrest, especially in Bahrain.
The Arab League excitedly joined the anti-Gaddafi chorus. Gaddafi's airforce ruthlessly used Russian-made Sukhoi and MIG warplanes as well as French Mirages to bombard strategic rebel-held positions across the sprawling desert country, but, to no avail. Gaddafi and his cronies persistently pursued the fallacy that Third World leaders esteemed the pseudo-socialist of his Jamahiriya -- inspired by his anti-imperialist predecessor Egypt's Gamal Abdel-Nasser -- as much as he did.
Gaddafi marketed himself as the champion of secularism, thereby earning the sympathy of non-Muslim Third World leftist leaders. The anti-Gaddafi armed opposition forces decided to cynically use religion for political ends. Many of their leaders have spouted militant Islamist rhetoric, both before and after Gaddafi's gory political murder.
NTC leader Abdel-Jalil, much to the chagrin of Libyan anti-Gaddafi activists, signaled that polygamous marriages were permitted in the post-Gaddafi period. The legitimate and legal gains garnered by Libyan women during the Gaddafi dictatorship were to be systematically eroded.
Moreover, the Libyan uprising emerged as the spark for the biggest single outbreak of racial violence in North Africa. Women had the most to loose. Local black-skinned Libyans and the alleged Sub-Saharan African mercenaries were targeted by the NTC affiliated militias for retribution. The sight, as the New York-based Human Rights Watch and London-based Amnesty International have rightly forewarned, of Libyan anti-Gaddafi forces wielding weapons and shouting racist slogans and lashing out against innocent Black Africans in Libya was an alarming phenomenon.
With Libya's economy in freefall, xenophobia was a most perilous genie to let out of the bottle. The Gaddafi regime itself must share the blame for the fact that Libya now faces a backlash of racism against black Africans. Gaddafi's foes emphatically flirted with chauvinism and xenophobia directed primarily against Black Africans, widely seen as politically sympathetic to Gaddafi and used as pawns and mercenaries in the Libyan political arena. Unfortunately Libyan tribal society has a strong propensity for blatant racism. There was also the risk of losing control of xenophobia as a dubious means of political consolidation. The parading of Black Africans as soldiers of fortune on Pan-Arab satellite television channels was a warning signal that racial war was about to erupt.
Be that as it may, there were more pressing issues that preoccupied the Libyan populace. The Libyan leader and his lackeys faced a liquidity crisis of unprecedented proportions. The crisis in public finances was triggered by the spectacular advance of the armed opposition forces and their control of key eastern cities in Cyrenaica including several oil terminals on the Mediterranean. The personal financial reckoning of the Gaddafi clan has also been embarrassingly and precariously acute.
Libya is still on paper a pivotal petroleum exporter. Gaddafi, or at least his ghost, and his henchmen must be kicking themselves for throwing the oil bonanza away and rightly so.
Aberration or not, the rebels pinned their hopes on oil to underpin Libya's post-Gaddafi economy. Not to be outdone, the official pro-Gaddafi state television proudly announced that the Libyan government has removed custom duties on essential and basic commodities and eliminated taxes in celebration of the victories on the battlefields against "the terrorist gangsters".
However, mopping up after the bubble that burst with the popular uprising against Gaddafi will take some time. Funding, in spite of Libya's considerable oil wealth, will arguably be the more difficult challenge in the months to come.
No sector of the Libyan economy has been unscathed by the armed opposition to the Gaddafi regime. He espoused socialism, some will call it state capitalism, and Gaddafi's state influence extends far beyond the issue of ownership and direct management control. In the short-term, the Libyan economy is in an unenviable mess.
Abdel-Razik Al-Ardy, NTC representative from Tripoli announced that the NTC decided that Benghazi, where the spark of the 15 February Revolution was first ignited, will serve as Libya's economic hub in the new decentralised dispensation. Benghazi will host the crucial ministries of the economy and oil. The Cyrenaican city of Derna was declared the culture capital of the country and the Ministry of Culture is scheduled to relocate there in the near future. Misrata, a traditional trading hub will house the Finance Ministry. Regionalism reactivated is, disappointingly, a dangerous distraction.
For all his faults, Gaddafi laid the foundations for a nation based on social welfare and social justice, and the revolutionaries should keep this in mind when they welcome their new Western benefactors.
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