On Sunday Libyans will celebrate the outbreak two years ago, of the revolution that drove Muammar Qaddafi from power. The question is do they really have grounds for celebration? The news that the rest of the world reads about Libya seems to suggest that it is in the hands of trigger-happy militiamen and in danger of being over-run by fundamentalist terrorists.
So concerned are governments in Europe and North America that they have warned off their nationals from traveling to Libya, unless their trips are absolutely unavoidable. Benghazi, where has been a series of killings, mostly of former regime police and military, but also last September of the US ambassador and three colleagues, is supposedly entirely off limits.
Yet international politicians continue to fly in and out, looking for lucrative deals and the settlement of multibillion dollar debts run up by the old regime. These include UK Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government only 48 hours before had warned Britons not to go to Libya. Cameron even went on a meet-the-people walkabout in Tripoli’s main square with minimal security protection, and survived the experience.
Libya’s problems are not in fact rooted in violence but in the slow pace at which the country has been changing since Qaddafi’s downfall. As Tunisia, where the Arab Spring first bloomed and Egypt where it next took root, have demonstrated, in the exhilaration of a successful revolution, citizens expect that, with the disappearance of a hated regime, everything will change overnight. Such aspirations are not only unrealistic; they are dangerous. Though Libya, like Egypt and Tunisia, has held a successful election, it has become bogged down in the process of writing a new constitution while also only slowly persuading militiamen to join the police or army.
Delays and disagreements are most crucially threatening to bring regional rivalries to the fore. Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica, which was where the revolt against Qaddafi first broke out two years ago, feels that the deliberate neglect it experienced under the former regime, is being continued by the government of premier Ali Zeidan. Though federalist voices in the city are loud, they are not yet that numerous. Nevertheless the people of Benghazi are becoming impatient at the lack of the government investment and the granting of greater local autonomy, which they feel is their due.
The national capital Tripoli is meanwhile the arena in which rival political and regional groupings are jockeying for power. The Zeidan government appears to be failing in its promise to clamp down on past and new corruption. Meanwhile the General National Congress, the elected Parliament which appointed Zeidan and signed off his Cabinet, is still struggling to function efficiently, with so many diverse and sometimes deeply divided voices.
The reality of post-revolutionary politics in the Arab Spring countries is that nothing can be achieved without compromise. Unfortunately compromise is the harder to reach when so many people of different opinions imagined that they were going to get what they wanted overnight. The genie of expectation is unlikely to be pushed right back inside the bottle.
Yet the analysis is far from bleak. Libyans understand the freedom they have won, even if they are still struggling with how to use it positively. With the exception of the minority who did well under Qaddafi, (many of whom are now excluded from political power or government office), the bulk of Libyans are enthusiastic about being free. Their main complaint about the lawlessness that makes city streets risky after dark, is that it is random, whereas when Qaddafi’s thugs moved against someone, their feared appearance was often predictable.
Libya’s challenge rests in a changed mindset. For the best part of 40 years, the country was run at the whim of one man and his family and cronies. Ordinary people were bought off with modest tranches of oil money or state jobs, but independent thought was a crime, which could lead to death.
So used did Libyans become to being told what to do, that now the dictator is gone there is confusion, coupled with a thorough-going suspicion of those who have assumed power in his stead, even though they emerged from democratic elections. A lack of independent institutions, the almost total concentration of economic power in state-owned entities and a feeling of helplessness at the sheer immensity of the task of nation building, all could conspire to reignite popular anger.
But Libya, with its considerable oil wealth is in a far better position than Tunisia or Egypt to meet its challenges. Improvements will come, but they will take time. Revolutions do not bring quick fixes in their wake.
Editorial: Uprising anniversary: Something to celebrate
