TIMELESS EDITORIAL: Post-Gaddafi Libya: The Road Ahead

It was a death foretold, even by the strongman himself. He had a death-wish that quite simply wouldn’t be cured. The events of the last few weeks have been epoch-making, to say the least. The death of the Libyan strongman once described with characteristic candour by US President Ronald Reagan, as “the mad dog of the Middle East” came as an anti-climax. It is now a past that isn’t quite past.

In the wake of the nationwide civil intolerance by the populace, both armed and otherwise, starting in February and culminating in the collapse of the Gaddafi regime which had been in power for some 42 years, Libya is currently administrated by a caretaker government, known as the National Transitional Council.

A country in the Maghreb region of North Africa, Libya is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west.

With an area of almost 1.8 million square kilometres, Libya is the fourth largest country in Africa by area. The largest city, Tripoli, is home to 1.7 million of Libya’s 6.4 million people. The three traditional parts of the country are Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica.

In the wake of the death of its ‘Brother Leader’, as Gaddafi fancied himself, outpourings of predictions about the future of Libya have been torrential. While degrees of expertise vary, the simple reality is that nobody knows what happens next.

The most obvious question to ask is who will now control the Libyan state. The National Transitional Council, with Mustafa Abdel Jalil as chairman, enjoys unstinted recognition from Western governments and pockets of allied nations around the world. Yet, that is not the same thing as recognition on the streets of Libya.

Reports from the country suggest that there are other political forces on the ground, including city-based groupings come from Benghazi, Misrata, Zentan and Tripoli. There are also a number of minor militias.

Pro-Gaddafi elements still exist, especially within the cluster of clans around his hometown of Sirte, where he was killed in action, or probably executed. These are likely to demand a place in any future government. There are also the traditional tensions between Arabs and Berbers and between Islamists and secularists to factor into these equations.

It is not for nothing that the United Nations said it wanted a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding Colonel Gaddafi’s death before his burial. Even his tucking-away, in a secret location deep in the Sahara Desert, something reminiscent of the treatment meted out to the remains of Osama bin Laden, is not enough guarantee that the ghost of Gaddafi will be kept at bay.

However, in the overall interest of nation-building and fence-mending, the UN would also have to call attention to the fate of Black African members of Libyan society for it to maintain its credibility as a force for good for resolving the lingering logjam on Libya’s path to a rebirth as a nation and a democratic and peaceful society.

All the ingredients are there for a protracted insurgency along the lines of what has been witnessed in Iraq. One can only hope that commentators who argue that Libya’s terrain is not suited to guerrilla struggles, and insist that the country’s ethnic and ideological fissures are not sufficient to spark conflagration turn out to be right.

It is slippery and it is unprecedented. The road ahead for Libya is as tough as nails as it is nebulous and uncharted. As one commentator has said: “There is no political heritage, no political culture, no political institutions. In theory they existed under Gaddafi but in practice they didn’t, so the biggest challenge is building a political culture. No one has been able to vote on anything for 40 years.”