Rocky road ahead for Libya

No end is in sight to the worst disruption to Libya’s oil industry since the civil war in 2011 as armed groups, security guards and oil workers with tribal loyalties shut down pipelines and oil ports across the country.
Central state power is already tenuous and separatist groups are exploiting the stoppages, but the government risks bloody clashes with tribal militias if it sends ill-equipped nascent army units to capture oil terminals held by armed groups.
“These militias are intoxicated with power,” said a senior Libyan official, adding that Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s strategy was to appease oil workers and apply tribal mediation with caveats and incentives to end the standoff. Zeidan, accused of allowing corruption to flourish, can ill afford to prolong a crisis that the government says has already cost more than $2 billion, threatening Libya’s healthy foreign currency reserves, power supply and remnants of law and order.
Libya’s oil production has fallen to just over 10 percent of capacity due to a month-long disruption by armed security guards who shut the main export ports in the east and center over pay demands.
“It’s a tribal war to terminate the political process. They want a body that represents the tribes,” Noman Benotman, president of Quilliam, a counterterrorism think tank, said. “Practically the government is dead, technically it is still there.” Calls for federal rule have become stronger since Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011, fuelled by complaints in the east that it has not been given a fair share of Libya’s wealth, and the weakness of the central government. Any military move by Tripoli to deploy troops to retake control of the port terminals would be “considered a declaration of war”, federalist Ibrahim Al-Jathran told cheering crowds gathered in the eastern coastal town of Ajdabiyah on Monday.
The federalists say they are not separatists and only want a bigger role and better distribution of wealth.
Karim Al-Barase, a federalist activist, said federalists were planning to set up a new oil company in the east to handle the region’s oil exports transparently.
Protesters are tapping into widespread disenchantment with Libya’s new rulers, saying little has materialized in improved living conditions despite the country’s oil wealth.

• REUTERS