Libya: Can the rebels rule? Wednesday, 24 August 2011 02:32

By Steve Negus

There’s been a lot written about the difficulty that the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) may have consolidating control over a post-Gaddafi Libya, and the likelihood of splits – possibly bloody ones – between the different factions. I think that the fears are legitimate, but the situation is not quite as dangerous as some might believe.

I’m currently in Benghazi, where the rebel government had a fairly easy time establishing its authority in February and March thanks largely to a region-wide sense of neglect and persecution by the Gaddafi regime, so maybe I’m underestimating some of the difficulties. But here are my thoughts.

First, some of the strikes against post-Gaddafi stability

■ There are lots of privately organised militias or “kitaeb”, 40-plus at last count. They are mostly unpaid volunteers, usually from one particular town or region. The nucleus of one of the largest — Benghazi’s 17 February Martyrs Brigade — is a computer company.

Several hours of tracer fire over Benghazi’s skies one night recently bore witness to how many weapons are in private hands, and how much people like to fire them. They are bound together by group solidarity engendered by the fighting of some pretty hard battles, and while right now they say they just want to get rid of Gaddafi, rebel forces also frequently develop a strong sense of entitlement.

■ The 28 July assassination of rebel commander Abdel Fattah Younis, apparently by rogue militiamen, has caused something of a backlash against katiba autonomy, and most katiba members in the east at least insist that they will either return to their jobs or join a new Libyan army. In the west, however, there appears to be some resentment against the Benghazi-based NTC for failure to provide the rebels with enough supplies.

■ Gaddafi still has a base of support, or – just as dangerously – groups that will be perceived by the victorious rebels as bases of support. The NTC has tried to bring in representation from as many different tribes as possible, and some of the larger groups allied to Gaddafi are big enough that the perception of regime ties will simply be diluted by their numbers.

However, it’s going to be very difficult to make the colonel’s own tribe, the Gaddadfa, feel like they are full partners in the new Libya. The Gaddadfa dominate the highly inconveniently located town of Sirte.

■ Thanks to Gaddafi’s obsession with a facade, Libya has no experience of party politics, and competing interests. The NTC is a rather lawyerly bunch, which often seems to lack political acumen. It engendered a lot of criticism last week for announcing an interim constitution, supposedly without proper consultation.

■ One danger here is that as soon as the revolutionary euphoria wears off, inevitably people will start imagining that the remnants of the old regime have just gone underground and are plotting a comeback, cutting nefarious deals with the NTC to remain in power. One or two mysterious bombs or assassinations can easily spark a panic, and the next thing you know you’ll have katiba members demanding that they retain their arms to “safeguard the revolution”. There’s no way that the NTC can stop this, but they should be careful to be as inclusive and as transparent as possible.

Now a few points in Libya’s favour

■ The combination of foreign airstrikes – which rebels realise saved them, albeit without foreign ground forces, which would inevitably antagonise people – gives the west leverage without creating a backlash. Foreign interference is not a dirty word here: one katiba member I met in Ajdabiya said that the first thing he wanted to do after victory was buy a sheep and bring it to Nicolas Sarkozy to slaughter in Sarkozy’s honour.

This means that proposals like bringing in the UN to help with the transitional process, as some Libyan politicians have proposed, is probably going to be broadly acceptable. Also, when NTC member Mahmoud Jibril says that fighters should not loot or commit reprisals because the “eyes of the world are upon us”, his logic is actually appreciated by fighters on the ground.

■ Libya has no ruling party like the Ba’ath. In Iraq, you had to join the party to rise high in your career, and to some degree the entire middle class was tainted by association with the Ba’ath. This meant that technocrats got turfed out of their jobs by religious Shia parties, and in some cases terrorised by radical Shia militias. In Libya, the NTC has been fairly successful in keeping professionals in their posts, and only a few fairly organisations – ie, Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees” – are really tainted by their relationship to the regime.

■ There seem to be few divisive differences over the identity of the country. Libya is tribally and ethnically diverse, but pretty homogenously Sunni and conservative. In order to whip up radical Islamist populism, it really helps to have some kind of “other” – be they crony capitalists, nefarious secularists who want to sneakily impose atheism through supraconstitutional principles, Ba’athists, Shia or others who practise scandalous rituals, or other “heretics”, Tartar military dictators, etc.

There aren’t any of these in Libya, yet. There also aren’t any liquor stores to smash. Maybe this will change if a militant Berber movement emerges, or if luxury hotels start going up in which an ex-NTC member has a silent partner.

The Guardian