Daily Times

It was the last week of April 2000 when a delegation headed by General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan landed at Sirte Airport, Libya, on a chartered flight from Cairo, Egypt. Libya was then under the UN sanctions and leader Mummer al-Gaddafi was lodging in a tent village at his birth-place. The international environment, however, was not as finicky as twisted after 9/11 attack on Twin Towers, New York. The delegation cherished diplomatic niceties and parley of Libyan Government for three days. Leader Qaddafi was calm and cool and strictly observed regular prayer timings during his official commitments. The government of Libya was then a direct democracy without any political parties under Gaddafi’s supervision as a revolutionary leader ( Quaid al-Sorra). Libya under Gaddafi was not at all hellish as the world has been made to believe by the western propaganda. Leader Gaddafi had made sure that all Libyans were provided with a respectable standard of living and comfortable housing to reside. Under Gaddafi, housing, education and health care were free for all.

To understand the Libyan tragedy, we must first study the peculiarities of Arab-Berber culture. For centuries, Libya languished on the sidelines; resisting the encroachment of the modern world and the perceived dangers of cosmopolitanism. The Libyans did not exist as a homogenous nation under one flag that shared one common ideal. It was a collection of fiercely autonomous, proud and unruly tribes, suspicious of centralised rule. The history of deeply hostile relationships between Libya’s ethnic groups is littered with violent raids, betrayals, unfulfilled vendettas and long-held frustrations carried like shocking injuries that have festered over the years as each generation is brought up to seek revenge for old sins. The West, however, decided to let Libya tear itself apart. You cannot simply launch an attack on a country without any knowledge of the mindset or character of its inhabitants. You can destroy every tank and combat aircraft in its arsenal; wipe out its entire strategic networks, but if you do not know what kind of people you are dealing with, you are merely opening a Pandora’s Box.

For four decades, Gaddafi acted as a guarantor of the nation’s stability and a careful moderator amongst tribal leaders

By toppling Gaddafi, the NATO interfered with the order of effects, guarantying peace in Libya. Once the personal guarantor of national unity had been assassinated by his compatriots, the Libyan people were left to their own devices in a dreadful state of upheaval, with no roadmap to guide them. Gadda? was portrayed as a controversial and highly divisive world ?gure. He was globally wrongly judged as a dictator whose authoritarian administration violated the human rights of Libyan citizens, persecuted dissidents abroad, and supported international terrorism. Supporters precisely lauded him for his willingness to tackle the unfair economic legacy of foreign domination as well as his support for pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism.

Gaddafi played a defining role in the rebuilding of the modern Libyan nation. Born of the Bedouin tribes, a wretched child destined for humble tasks and a lifetime of poverty, Gaddafi immediately won the adoration of the underprivileged on the fringes of society and rallied the aggrieved and the rejected to support his cause. He succeeded in bringing together the intensely opposed ethnic groups of Libyan north and south, who had always despised one another. To the casual observers, this might seem a basic achievement and of little import, but for chronic tribalism, it is little short of a miracle.

For four decades, Gaddafi acted as a guarantor of the nation’s stability and a careful moderator amongst tribal leaders; reconciling warring parties and delicately handling the aftereffects of the past, which still awoke old demons from time to time. Gaddafi, as vigilant keeper of the flame, kept a weather eye open, heaping privileges on some and prestige on others to consolidate alliances and plaster over any cracks that threatened to appear. A peerless orator, unparalleled expert in tribal psychology and extraordinary manipulator, he ostentatiously showered gifts on his allies while pitilessly crushing his doubters. Giving with one hand torturing with the other, he kept the nation on steady footing as if marching in a military parade.

The bastion Gaddafi built had crumbled and Libyan unity is now no more than an old story, a fairytale. Through herd mentality or pure atavism the leaderless Libyan state had drawn back to its one familiar point of reference, the tribal system of its ancestors, and with it the full force of its legacy. It is, unfortunately, a return to the hatred of the past, to intractable rivalries, violent raids and an unquenchable thirst for vengeance.

Tripoli and Libya’s west are controlled by the Government of National Accord (GNA), an interim government established in 2016 through an UN-led political agreement between the elected House in the east and the then-ruling government in Tripoli. Militiamen fighting in Tripoli for the GNA supported by Turkey and Qatar are defending the revolution and civilian rule and fighting the return of a dictatorship.

The rival General Hafted was a former army officer under Gaddafi, who was sentenced to death in absentia for plans to stage a coup against Gaddafi regime. He returned to Libya from the USA during the uprising and later became the Commander of the Libyan National Army. While many see Haftar as a dictator and a counter-revolutionary, his strongman tactics have won popular support amid the chaos that followed Gaddafi’s ouster, which has left some Libyans questioning the wisdom of removing the former authoritarian leader.

It has been nine years today since Gaddafi was captured and brutally killed at his birthplace Sirte in Libya but the opposing Libyan forces are fighting a ferocious civil war. Support for both sides from outside nations has turned the conflict into a proxy war. After years of conflict and billions of dollars’ worth of damage to infrastructure, Libya’s economy has plummeted, while oil production remains stifled by security fears. Stability will require disbanding militias and collecting weapons, a task that is becoming more difficult.

For many of the Arab nations that rose against autocracy in 2011, things have not necessarily gone so well either. Libyans, on their part, need to think about an all-encompassing Libyan identity; a vision that represents the whole of Libya, would be enshrined in the future constitution and deals with the issue of distribution of wealth and power. They have to keep the hope that they will eventually have a system fought for, a system for which they struggled and paid dearly, and a system that all believe in eventually.

There is a glimmer of hope that after the entire struggle, something meaningful will emerge. Rather than engaging in cheap talks about democracy, veteran diplomats in Washington and London should attempt to enforce rules of the game as a corrective to the zero-sum mentality in Libya whereby winners try to marginalise the vanquished and control all the spoils. Issuing concrete pledges to protect Libya’s crucial physical infrastructure, namely the electricity, water, and oil grids, as well as the few brave Libyan technocrats, willing to implement painful economic reforms, is long overdue. Without such a backstop, even the most courageous Libyan stakeholders will have difficulty in safeguarding their country’s sovereign assets from predation. They know that if they stick their necks out to correct injustices they will likely to be chopped off by the disgruntled militiamen who benefit from the corrupt status quo.

“I am a Bedouin warrior who brought glory to Libya and will die a martyr.” (Muammar al-Gaddafi)

The writer is a retired Pakistan Army Officer