LIBYA’S BIG STEP FORWARD…THEN WHAT?
Amb. Marc Ginsberg
Huffington Post, July 8, 2012
Under a cloud of sporadic militia-inspired violence and divisive regional rivalries which have rocked the nation since its liberation, Libyans triumphantly flocked to the polls [last week] in their first free vote in 40 years to elect representatives to a new national congress—which was supposed to be empowered to draft a new constitution for the nation within 18 months. Recall that it was merely 9 months ago that rebel Libyan forces, supported by NATO and its Arab allies, liberated Tripoli, ending the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi.
For all of the good cheer on election day, there were sad reminders that the Transitional National Council (TNC)—which has struggled to rule Libya since Gaddafi’s demise—remains locked in a bitter contest with unruly, violent-prone militias and tribal gunmen who continue to roam vast swaths of Libya, refusing to lay down their arms. Adding to the central government’s headaches is a rebellious Islamist-oriented eastern province centered around Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, which has threatened to tear Libya apart by seceding from the country.
Just how difficult it has been for the TNC was revealed when, on the eve of the vote, it capitulated to demands of the Benghazi-based Islamist-oriented separatists and stripped the new congress of its constitution-drafting duties.… The TNC mandated a separate election for a smaller constitution-drafting assembly composed of an equal number of delegates from each part of the country. The unexpected decree is sure to set the stage for a major struggle between the outgoing TNC and the newly elected congress over the future authority of the congress in the constitution drafting process (shades of Egypt’s contest of wills over its future constitution between secular liberals and Islamists).…
All this begs the question: who will emerge as the leader of Libya by having won enough votes to form a majority alliance or coalition in the new congress? What to watch for in the days ahead insofar as parties and leaders likely to grab headlines as each maneuver for control over the future government:
–The Libyan faction of the Muslim Brotherhood (yes, Libya has the Brothers largely centered in Benghazi) headed by Mohammed Sawan, who was imprisoned by Gaddafi for almost a decade. Sawan is the major instigator behind the TNC’s decision to rescind the constitution drafting authority from the newly elected congress.
–The Alliance of National Forces (ANF)…led by Mahmoud Jibril, who served as the rebels interim prime minister leading up to Gaddafi’s downfall. Jibril hails from Libya’s largest tribe—the Warfala. Jibril was precluded from holding an elected position in the new congress because of the restriction barring TNC members from running, but given the popularity of the ANF and Jibril himself as a major tribal leader, he is bound to have major influence in the future government.
–Libya has its own brand of Salafists, who represent the more virulent Islamists in the country. The Salafists formed their own political party (Al Watan or the Nation Party and includes remnants of the Libyan Fighting Group terrorist organization that had been affiliated with Al Qaeda).
–The National Front Party (NFP), which is the more “mild” Islamist opposition leadership of Libya. The NFP is composed of former Libyan exile groups and militants who launched a series of attacks against Qadaffi and his regime during his rule. The NFP is headed by a highly respected Libyan nationalist—Mohammed al Magarif.
–The most secular party likely to also gain significant representation is the centrist National Party led by former American-educated and respected TNC oil and finance minister, Ali Tarhouni.
All this is to suggest that [Libya’s] election has set the stage for a struggle for power between secularists and Islamists on the one hand, and between westerners and Benghazi Islamists on the other—playing out against the continuing violence and lawlessness that the new government will have to subdue quickly if it is to gain the respect of the millions of Libyans who voted.
(Marc Ginsberg is a former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco.)
LIBYA IS STILL FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY
Karim Mezran
Atlantic, July 12 2012
Nine months after the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Libyans went to vote for the first time since 1965, a major step towards a more pluralistic Libya. The country held the free and fair elections in a state of relative peace and public enthusiasm. Despite 40 years of dictatorship, little training in participatory policy, low levels of education, and fragmented politics, Libyans themselves ensured the success of the elections by flocking to the polls. In the eastern provinces, supporters of federalism—a controversial call to grant Libyan provinces greater autonomy from the capital—tried to undermine the electoral process by attacking some polling stations, yet in all cases except one, were turned away by newly created security forces as well as by voters who stood for their rights. That’s the glass-half-full view of the Libyan election, and it’s important. But the glass-half-empty view matters as well.
For all the reasons to celebrate Libya’s election, many in the West might be overestimating the importance of the presumed electoral victory of the secularists and liberals, led by Mahmoud Jibril, who had served as interim prime minister of the revolutionary transitional government during the 2011 conflict. As Jibril himself has stated, calling his party secularist and liberal is a mistake. His is chiefly a nationalist movement.… [Furthermore], this election was actually only for the 80 seats in the new, 200-person legislative assembly that are chosen by voting for party lists rather than individual candidates. The other 120 seats are reserved for independent candidates; no one knows exactly what affiliation they will align themselves with after being elected.…
It’s still not clear exactly what Libyans were voting for. The roadmap for Libya’s political transition, established in August 2011, said that the election of a Constituent Assembly would be held within a year. This assembly was supposed to appoint a government and write a new constitution. According to the plan, Libyans would then vote for a parliament or house of representatives as described in the hypothetical new constitution. The winners of that election would then form the first definitive, non-transitional government. But is that still the plan?
A few months ago the National Transitional Council (NTC), which has governed Libya since the first few weeks of the revolt in 2011, announced that the Constituent Assembly would not draft the constitution itself but instead appoint a 60-member committee to draft it. The members of this committee were supposed to be chosen from outside the assembly and represent the country’s three geographic regions of Libya—Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan—in equal numbers. Yet, a few weeks ago, the NTC changed policy again at the last moment, declaring that the members of the constitutional committee would not be appointed by the assembly but directly elected by the people, though it’s not clear when. Confused? So are Libyans.…
A successful election is just the start of dealing with one of Libya’s most important challenges right now: national unity. Regional and local claims and jockeying for power threaten to undermine the legitimacy of and support for the national government. A few thousand inhabitants of the eastern provinces are calling for a federalist state, if not of outward secession.… [This] could easily…split the government and the people, thus slowing or even reversing Libya’s progress toward stability.
Most Libyans, as well as Western nations, are rightly happy with Libya’s progress toward becoming a stable, unified, democratic state. But if they want progress to continue, they’ll all have to work together.
QADDAFI LIVES
Alison Pargeter
Foreign Policy, July 6, 2012
…It is easy to forget that just one year ago parts of [Libya] were still in the grip of one of the most unusual dictators of the contemporary era. Yet while the giant portraits and revolutionary slogans have been torn down, the specter of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s four decades at the helm still hangs heavy over the country.…
Libya’s post-Qaddafi existence has been bedeviled by regional divisions, out-of-control militias, and inexperienced political leaders. Indeed, the newly elected congress is…a bizarre mishmash of tribal chiefs, nascent political parties, militia leaders, Islamists, and former jihadists. It is difficult to imagine how such a mixed bunch will be able to reach a consensus, let alone run the country.
The self-styled Brother Leader’s legacy may have stripped Libya of its political consciousness, but in truth, the country’s politics were not particularly developed under the monarchy that preceded him. Libya had an elected parliament after independence in 1951, but political activism was confined largely to the urban elite and the monarchy, which ensured that the palace held the keys to power. In any case, the country’s experiment with democracy was cut short by Qaddafi’s 1969 coup.
After coming to power, Qaddafi sought to shake the country out of its political apathy—to rouse an entire nation to a political and cultural awakening. This mass mobilization, however, was to be harnessed completely to the evolving and peculiar vision enunciated in his Green Book. When Libyans proved reluctant to engage in his new “state of the masses”—what he termed the Jamahiriya—the colonel declared in 1971 that he would “take the people to paradise in chains.”
Qaddafi made good, at least, on the latter part of that promise. His mass mobilization became synonymous with mass repression: All opportunities for political and economic advancement outside the framework of his rule were prohibited. Political parties were banned, and setting up or joining any organization was made punishable by death.… Qaddafi’s Libya was the enemy of any genuinely independent civil society or professional organizations—the entire public arena became an outward manifestation of his bizarre political vision.…
The results are clear for all to see. Libya today is a land where suspicions of the democratic process, of political parties, and of liberalism more widely still linger. Although some Libyans have rushed to form political parties, the population at large tends to view such institutions with distrust.… [Accordingly], the most likely result from Libya’s election is political fragmentation.… Qaddafi was the center—and when he collapsed, the center collapsed with him. Aside from the energy sector, the colonel failed to create any meaningful institutions that could outlive him. Even the army, kept deliberately weak by Qaddafi, has been unable to survive the crisis and is struggling in the face of the militias.…
The intense localism that has emerged is also symptomatic of Qaddafi’s failure to stamp a sense of “Libyanness” on the country. His long rule only served to intensify, rather than reduce, regional divisions. Always wary of the east given its links to the former monarchy, the colonel clamped down heavily on the region after it became the focus of an Islamist rebellion in the mid-1990s. The east’s grievances would provide the spark that lit last year’s revolt, but Qaddafi’s punishment of the region has still left a bitter legacy. The east, it seems, has been unable to shake off a perceived sense of marginalization.… This resentment has manifested itself in a movement for semi-autonomy.…
As Libya’s fractious politics make clear, the country’s efforts to move beyond Qaddafi will not be completed in a single election cycle. This should come as no surprise: The Brother Leader ravaged Libya for more than four decades, and the radical nature of the challenges facing the country today are a reflection of his disastrous rule. The colonel may be dead and gone, but his legacy will continue to haunt Libya for years to come.
LIBYA’S UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Ross Douthat
NY Times, July 7, 2012
…When the United States intervened on behalf of Libya’s rebels, skeptics worried that we could end up splitting the country in two, empowering Islamic radicals and creating a bigger humanitarian disaster than the one we hoped to forestall. This worst-case situation has not come to pass in Libya itself. But thanks to the ripple effects from Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, it’s well on its way to happening in nearby Mali.
Not much attention has been paid to these events, because although Mali has more than twice Libya’s population, it is neither oil-rich nor strategically important.… But northeastern Mali is part of the same Saharan region that encompasses southern Libya, which means weapons and fighters from the Libyan war have moved easily across Algeria into Mali since Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, transforming a long-simmering insurgency into a multifront civil war.
Mali’s insurgents are mostly Tuaregs, a Berber people whose homeland cuts across several national borders. This spring, their uprising won them effective control of the northern half of Mali, which they renamed Azawad. The central government’s weak response, meanwhile, led to a coup in Mali’s capital, Bamako, which replaced the civilian president with a junta that promised to take the fight to the rebels more effectively.
That hasn’t happened; instead, the rebels have taken the fight to one another. The Tuareg insurgency included an Islamist element, known as Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), which is affiliated with a jihadi group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In the last month, Ansar Dine’s fighters have seized the breakaway region’s major cities, ousting their erstwhile allies and embarking on a Taliban-style campaign of vandalism against the region’s monuments.
So Mali today looks a bit like Libya did in early 2011, except with a more obvious jihadi presence: You have a weakened authoritarian government governing half the country, a dubious and divided rebellion trying to rule the other, and a humanitarian crisis looming for the civilians caught in between.
But in this case, the civilians are on their own. There is absolutely no possibility that the United States, France and Britain will intervene on their behalf.…
The goal of the Obama White House throughout our Libyan quasi war was to keep America’s intervention as limited as possible. In this, it largely succeeded. But just because our involvement was limited does not mean that the long-term consequences will be limited as well. War has a life of its own: insurgencies spread, weapons intended for one cause end up in the service of another, and turmoil is rarely contained by lines drawn on a map.…
A NEGLECTED ANNIVERSARY
David Harris
Huffington Post, July 8, 2012
Libya is once again in the news…[as] the North African nation just held its first election since the fall of Gaddafi.… But there’s another reason Libya should be in the public eye now, though don’t hold your breath that it will make the news anytime soon: Forty-five years ago this month, the last Jews of Libya were forced to flee the country.…
Some would call the few thousand Jews who remained in Libya after 1951, naïve.… There had already been pogroms in 1945 and 1948 [and] the vast majority of Jews had left.… The last Libyan Jews were targeted following the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War, a thousand miles away, for no other reason than that they were Jews.…
And what of the Jewish legacy in Libya?
Here was a community that had lived on the soil for more than two millennia, long predating the occupation by invading armies from the Arabian Peninsula. And Jews, numbering nearly 50,000 at their peak, had contributed in every way imaginable to the area’s development. Yet Libya went to work to erase every trace of Jewish existence.…
Libyan Jews, like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews from Arab countries uprooted and sent packing simply because they were Jews, found new homes primarily in Israel, but also in Western Europe and North and South America. Were many bitter about their forced exodus? No doubt. But they impressively started over and quickly began playing a part in their new countries.
[By contrast], the case of the Palestinians—some of whom were encouraged to leave their homes by Arab leaders who promised a quick return, and some of whom became refugees in a war their Arab brethren began against Israel—has been entirely different. They always seem to be in the news. They have a special agency, UNRWA, devoted entirely to them, with no mandate for resettlement in other countries and an unprecedented, open-ended definition of “refugee,” which is transferred from one generation to the next.…
So while the world watches post-election Libya to see what unfolds, I’ll be…waiting to see if, after 45 years, Libya is ready to confront its past. Yes, this is about Jews, but not only. For the Arab upheaval to have a chance to turn into an Arab spring, newly emerging regimes need to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the protection of minorities—and to confront the consequences of that lack of protection in the past.…
THE ISLAMIST ASCENDANCY
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, July 12, 2012
Post-revolutionary Libya appears to have elected a relatively moderate…government. Good news, but tentative because Libya is less a country than an oil well with a long beach and myriad tribes. Popular allegiance to a central national authority is weak. Yet even if the government of Mahmoud Jibril is able to rein in the militias and establish a functioning democracy, it will be the Arab Spring exception. Consider:
Tunisia and Morocco, the most Westernized of all Arab countries, elected Islamist governments. Moderate, to be sure, but Islamist still. Egypt, the largest and most influential, has experienced an Islamist sweep. The Muslim Brotherhood didn’t just win the presidency. It won nearly half the seats in parliament, while more openly radical Islamists won 25 percent. Combined, they command more than 70 percent of parliament—enough to control the writing of a constitution (which is why the generals hastily dissolved parliament).
As for Syria, if and when Bashar al-Assad falls, the Brotherhood will almost certainly inherit power. Jordan could well be next. And the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing (Hamas) already controls Gaza.
What does this mean? That the Arab Spring is a misnomer. This is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation. It constitutes the third stage of modern Arab political history. Stage I was the semicolonial-monarchic rule, dominated by Britain and France, of the first half of the 20th century. Stage II was the Arab nationalist era—secular, socialist, anti-colonial and anti-clerical—ushered in by the 1952 Free Officers Revolt in Egypt.…
But the self-styled modernism of the Arab-nationalist dictators [Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Assad] proved to be a dismal failure. It produced dysfunctional, semi-socialist, bureaucratic, corrupt regimes that left the citizenry (except where papered over by oil bounties) mired in poverty, indignity and repression.
Hence the Arab Spring, serial uprisings that spread east from Tunisia in early 2011. Many Westerners naively believed the future belonged to the hip, secular, tweeting kids of Tahrir Square. Alas, this sliver of Westernization was no match for the highly organized, widely supported, politically serious Islamists who effortlessly swept them aside in national elections.
This was not a Facebook revolution but the beginning of an Islamist one.… “Islam is the answer,” carried the day. But what kind of political Islam? On that depends the future. The moderate Turkish version or the radical Iranian one?
To be sure, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is no paragon. The increasingly authoritarian Erdogan has broken the military, neutered the judiciary and persecuted the press. There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in China. Nonetheless, for now, Turkey remains relatively pro-Western (though unreliably so) and relatively democratic (compared to its Islamic neighborhood).…
Genuinely democratic rule may yet come to Arab lands. Radical Islam is the answer to nothing, as demonstrated by the repression, social backwardness and civil strife of Taliban Afghanistan, Islamist Sudan and clerical Iran. As for moderate Islamism, if it eventually radicalizes, it too will fail and bring on yet another future Arab Spring where democracy might actually be the answer (as it likely would have been in Iran, had the mullahs not savagely crushed the Green Revolution).…
Perhaps. The only thing we can be sure of today, however, is that Arab nationalism is dead and Islamism is its successor. This is what the Arab Spring has wrought. The beginning of wisdom is facing that difficult reality.
