http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1078/re3.htm
29 December 2011 - 4 January 2012
Issue No. 1078Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Libya's ordeal
A look back at Gaddafi's ignominious demise offers an intriguing insight into
the dynamics of Libya's 2011 political sandstorm, says Gamal Nkrumah
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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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.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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