The Gaddafi system was not a political regime within a normally constituted state; rather, it was a personalized state within a political regime.
In consequence, the libyan state smashed to ashes with the fall of the regime.
That was the difference between the cases of Tunisia and in Egypt- the regimes crashed while state organs, albeit fragile, remained in place- and the case of Libya where society lost all mechanisms of control and where chaos is still reigning throughout the country’s large territory. Unaware of this specificity of Libya, Western political and military efforts had focused exclusively on the annihilation of the Gaddafi evil regime, with no planning for the day after. Western political and strategic blindness could be traced to several factors:
* The unity of libyan opposition against Gaddafi since the first hours of the revolution. This unity, along with the leadership role played by distinguished libyan personalities, created the illusion that the political leadership with which the Western powers were dealing was unified, representative of fighting groups and, thus, able to fill the post-revolutionary void through an effort to rebuild the state and its mechanisms of social control.
* U.S. and european acquiescence to Qatar’s vision of the Libya question. The Qatari leadership managed to convince Western capitals that Libya, a country lacking any substantive experience of political parties and suffering from the the total absence of civil society movements during four decades, was alien to the concepts of freedom, democracy and modernity as basis of societal control; and that libya’s society was part of a societal antiquity filled, exclusively, by tribal confederations whose sole political and moral capital was religion. Consequently, ‘moderate islamists’ should be encouraged to seize power and to fill the vacuum created by the fall of the regime. The emir and the crown prince of Qatar gave assurances they would be able to collect arms from the population and to safeguard Western interests in the country. Such assurances were corroborated by the attitude of members of Libya’s National Transitional Council, many of whom travelled to Doha and coveted the emir’s enormous gratuities, and by the Council’s decision to make the Qatari capital, Doha, its official headquarters. During discussions with French and other Western officials, Qatari officials tended to minimize the dangerous sequels following from the fall of the libyan regime and implied they had fully anticipated the future chaos and would be able to lead Libya’s ship to a safe harbor.
* Qatar’s efforts, supplanted by a few armed islamic groups, to thwart attempts to build ‘national’ army and security organs in liberated Cyrenaica, as a prelude to seizing arms depots and barracks in the Tripolitan region once liberated. The assassination of Libya’s ex minister of interior, General Abdul Fattah Younes, was intended to thwart any attempt to reconstitute national army and police forces.
* The resignation of Western powers to the futility of a pragmatic transition of power after the rejection by Gaddafi, and by his son Seif al-Islam, of a proposal for the formation of a reconciliation government led by Dr. Mahmoud Jibril, comprising both rebels and representatives of the regime on a 50-50 basis. Such a government was to conduct general elections, under UN supervision, to determine the future of Libya and its regime. The proposal had been finalized by both Qatar and France and approved by all Western powers. Paradoxically, rebel commanders and Libya’s transitional government were not consulted about the proposal as Qatar was, presumably, the decision maker and the spokesman for Libya’s revolution. However, Gaddafi’s rejection of the proposal accelerated Western resolve to topple his regime. The Gaddafi regime did fall and Libya plunged into full anarchy, with infighting spreading between regions, cities and tribes and the country becoming a safe haven for all kinds of extremists, including members of al-Qaida, and a passageway for arms and drugs to all neighboring countries. The prevailing free-for-all situation allowed foreign armed groups to occupy a substantial portion of Libya’s southern region, not far from oil wells and water resereves.
* Another specificity distinguishing Libya from other Arab Spring countries is the high potential for the rise of a new dictatorship. Unlike the economies of Egypt or Tunisia, based on production or services, Libya’s economy is that of a rentier state based on the production and sale of oil. Considering that oil represents Libya’s sole revenue and that it is state-owned, whoever controls the state power would control this tremendous rentier revenue and would be able to buy loyalties and to use state revenues to build an authoritarian regime, as Gaddafi did.
The next question could be: who would be the new dictator? A coalition of tribes? Or a fundamentalist ideological group? Or, would the new authoritarian regime be part of Qatar’s Islamic Caliphate state? Or a combination of all such elements?
The coming days shall give ample proof of the impossibility of the building of a state system in Libya in a foreseeable future. The security of Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt shall be endangered by Libya’s instability, and Europe’s security and business interests shall be in jeopardy. Is there a way out of this disastrous situation. That shall be the focus of a coming article.
honiblis@yahoo.fr