Libyan election joy darkened by
divisions By Victor Kotsev
"Election Results in Libya Break an
Islamist Wave," read a New York Times headline on
Sunday. While only interim results are currently
available, it seems that the most votes, by a
considerable margin, went to the Alliance of
National Forces, a broad coalition of 40 parties
and hundreds of non-governmental organizations and
independent political figures.
Headed by
Libya's former transitional leader, the
American-educated 60-year old political scientist
Mahmoud Jibril, the Alliance is often described as
secular and liberal, despite vowing to uphold
Sharia law as its main source of legislation.
The Islamist parties reportedly softened
their rhetoric considerably in the run-up to the
election, further signaling that Libya might
once again stand out in
the regional trends. According to the British
daily The Guardian, even the alleged hardline
Islamist, Abdul Hakim Belhaj, attempted to court
women's rights and clothing choices in his recent
campaign messages. [1]
However, while the
victory of liberal pro-democratic forces in the
National Conference (parliamentary) elections is
seen as a positive development in the West, it is
one of not so many good tidings coming out of
Libya these days. This trend is aptly illustrated
by the most recent edition of the Failed States
Index, released by the Fund for Peace last month,
according to which the country experienced the
worst yearly decline in the history of the index.
[2]
To be sure, the election is an
important step forward, and the very fact that it
was held successfully throughout the country,
despite considerable challenges and a number of
violent incidents, is a positive sign for
democracy in Libya. The National Conference is
tasked with forming a new government to take over
from the Transitional National Council (TNC),
which has ruled since the fall of Libya's former
dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, last year. The
TNC has come under increasing criticism in the
last months, and many look to the new government
to correct its shortcomings. Still, the
challenges that remain are formidable at best -
and at worst threaten to tear the country apart
across lines of tribal, clan and criminal
affiliation. Belhaj and the Islamists, who command
formidable military forces, have threatened Jibril
in the past, but they are only one of a number of
challenges his coalition will have to confront.
Tellingly, Jibril, who as a former leader of the
transitional government is barred from taking a
seat in parliament, announced Sunday that he would
seek a "grand coalition".
To the east, a
federalist movement came close to torpedoing the
elections; to the west, where the main Libyan
power centers lie, the government institutions
have reportedly been split up, much in the manner
of war booty, between rival militias. In a country
whose population is armed to the teeth and
different groups frequently battle each other with
heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and
mortars, it is hard to imagine that the process of
transferring power will go smoothly.
According to most sources, the main cities
- such as Tripoli, Misrata, and Benghazi - feel
relatively safe, despite periodic gunfights. Much
of the countryside, however, is in a true state of
chaos, and scars from the civil war last year are
fomenting new divisions.
Revenge killings
and raids by the victorious former rebels have
sown terror in a sizeable part of the population -
specifically, though not only, in those who
supported Gaddafi. The atrocious crimes his forces
committed in rebel population centers - such as
the city of Misrata to the west, which saw some of
the worst street-to-street fighting - are being
repaid by similar atrocities.
Tawergha, an
entire town of 30,000 whose inhabitants were
accused of mass rape, was depopulated and burnt to
the ground (its population forced into refugee
camps), while a particular complex in Misrata,
ironically named "Heaven Hotel", gained infamy as
the grounds of hundreds of brutal executions. [3]
In part as a response, forces sympathetic
to the late dictator - himself murdered without a
trial by the rebels - took over Bani Walid, a town
in the northwest of the country, earlier this
year, and have held it ever since. During the
election on Saturday, two journalists from Misrata
were kidnapped there, and negotiations for their
release are taking place, backed by threats by the
powerful Misrata militias.
The TNC has
thoroughly failed to start a national
reconciliation process, instead choosing to
criminalize and punish by up to a life in prison
any acts or statements that praise the former
regime. The law in question has provoked outrage
among many Libyans. [4]
The issue of how
to deal with the past also threatens to unravel
Libya's relationship with the International
Criminal Court (ICC), and by extension with parts
of the international community. Saif al-Islam
Gaddafi, the dictator's prominent second son, is
held by rebels in the Western Mountains, and is
wanted by the ICC for suspected crimes against
humanity. However, the transitional government has
refused to extradite him, and an attempted visit
by ICC lawyers last month turned sour when the
delegation was held for 26 days by the militia
that holds him. On her release, the Australian
defense lawyer of the ICC claimed that it would be
"impossible" to hold a fair trial for him in
Libya. [5]
On the other hand, Gaddafi
family members and former regime officials, some
of whom are held in neighboring countries on
uncertain terms, are widely rumored to be using
their smuggled riches to foment unrest. In the
thinly populated south, Arabs, Berbers and African
tribesmen intermittently battle for control of a
desert territory that stretches between several
towns hundreds of kilometers apart. The fighting
has spread beyond Libya, too - most notably in
neighboring Mali, whose government was overthrown
as a result of the chaos earlier this year.
Some analysts caution that in the long
run, the loosely defined Berber identity, also
known as Amazigh or Imazighen, will gain political
prominence. "Of all the ethnic movements that have
surfaced since Gaddafi's overthrow, that of the
Imazighen has the greatest reach," writes Nicolas
Pelham in an article published by The New York
Review of Books. [6] (The Berbers are spread
throughout North Africa, including over a million
in Libya; the Touareg, one of the most militant
tribes in the south, are a famous example of a
desert Berber people.)
In the
shorter-term, however, a breakup along the
traditional regional boundaries in
Libya-Tripolitania in the West (including the
cities of Tripoli and Misrata), Cyrenaica in the
East (including Benghazi) and Fezzan in the
south-is a far more urgent threat, perhaps the
most urgent one facing the country. The TNC
narrowly avoided a widespread boycott of the
election in the east, where a homegrown federalist
movement launched a campaign of violence, even
shooting down a helicopter of the High National
Election Commissions days before the poll.
The divisions between eastern and western
Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, date back for
centuries; although less densely populated than
the west, Cyrenaica boasts of being the cradle of
last year's uprising against Gaddafi, as well as
the former power center of the country from the
time before Gaddafi overthrew its monarchy. A
number of people with symbolic family ties to the
last king of Libya, such as the longest-serving
political prisoner under Gaddafi, Ahmed Al-Zubair
al-Senussi, have joined the federalists, attesting
to the deep roots of the splits.
The
immediate issue at hand between the federalists
and the TNC was the distribution of seats in the
parliament. According to the rules drawn up by the
TNC, 102 seats in the 200-seat National Conference
would go to Tripolitania, compared to 60 for
Cyrenaica and 38 for Fezzan. This angered the
eastern federalists, who blocked roads, sabotaged
oil production and unleashed other forms of
violence. Arguably, only a last-minute compromise
by the TNC, which gave Cyrenaica an equal
representation, along with Fezzan and
Tripolitania, in the commission tasked with
writing the new Libyan constitution, saved the
election. [7]
In the end, the high voter
turnout - over 60% of registered voters, or 1.7
million people, turned up at the polling stations
(94% of which opened on Saturday) - shows that the
new parliament, if anything, will have a popular
mandate to rule. There are some encouraging signs
at the grassroots level as well. Non-governmental
organizations have mushroomed in the country, and
the number of independent candidates in the
election also suggests that a considerable effort
is underway to create a functioning civil society.
However, the process of drawing up a
constitution, which has not yet even started
formally, is just as important, and perhaps even
more so, than the parliamentary election for the
formation of stable democratic institutions in
Libya. Besides, the challenges ahead are not
limited to the bitter political divisions and the
militarization of the population, just as the
difficult legacies of the past are not limited to
the scars from last year's civil war.
Creating a civil society, for example, is
much easier said than done. The cases of many of
the Eastern European countries, whose totalitarian
regimes were toppled in the early 1990s, suggest
that even in societies that stick together fairly
well, it may take a generation. The examples of
several failed states in Africa and the Middle
East (closer to home in Libya) suggest it may take
even longer.
In an article published by
Foreign Policy magazine, Sean Kane analyses the
general sense of confusion that has often baffled
foreign observers in Libya. He writes:
This lack of state institutions, and
above all, a national identity, is perhaps the
most lasting and pernicious legacy of the
Gaddafi jamahiriya. In fact, Gaddafi's spasmodic
state of perpetual change was a deliberate
construction. His populace was kept perpetually
off kilter by the near constant reshuffling of
cabinets, provincial boundaries and systems of
administration. Street names, place names,
universities, and even the names of the months
were always in flux, creating an almost physical
feeling of disorientation. This pious Muslim
country even started fasting for the holy month
of Ramadan on a different day from the rest of
the Middle East.
There was a method to
this madness. Throughout all the chaos, the only
fixed point for the Libyan people to take a
bearing from was the unchanging axis of Gaddafi
himself. And on a certain level this anti-system
made sense. Gaddafi hailed from the remote
desert town of Sirte in central Libya. He had no
connection to the country's western economic
elites in Tripoli or the prominent families in
the east that made up the court of the Libyan
monarchy that he overthrew. His own tribe, the
Qadadfa, is small and holds little sway. Since
Gaddafi had no natural allies among the Libya's
elite networks, he set out to unmake and unmoor
them. [8]
It is hard to imagine that
the Libyan society would emerge from the confusion
created by its prolonged isolation easily or
quickly. A positive example, albeit a distant one,
can perhaps be gleaned from Albania, an even more
secular Muslim-majority country, which came out of
prolonged isolation 20 years ago. Its communist
dictator, Enver Hoxha, held the Albanian
population for decades in terror of its neighbors,
cutting off ties even with the Soviet Union and
most of the Eastern Bloc. (As a further point of
comparison, clans were also prominent in Albanian
society not that long ago.)
Albania is
still one of the poorest countries in Europe, and
the transition there has been far from smooth, yet
Libyans could only dream of such good fortunes.
While hopeful scenarios are possible to imagine,
reality remains grim: at present, Libya resembles
more closely a gunpowder keg waiting to explode in
more violence.
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