IN BENGHAZI, the dilapidated seaside city that was the birthplace of the Libyan rebellion, the rebels' entry into the heart of Tripoli set off a frenzy of celebration. “Every problem in Libya is caused by Muammar Qaddafi: the neglect of education, the neglect of health, the neglect of justice,” declared Khaled Abdullah Hassan, an unemployed graduate who was celebrating on the city's corniche amid home-made bombs packed with looted industrial explosive. Benghazis, who blame Colonel Qaddafi for squandering the country's oil wealth on arms and failed military adventures in Africa, and for driving many of the country's best minds into exile, swear happily that the dictator's ouster will usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity.
Most of the outside world, although jubilant that the regime seems at last to be ending, is more cautious about the future. The United States, in particular, is still bruised by the insurgency and sectarian civil war that followed the deposition of another Arab dictator, Saddam Hussein. Benghazis do not share those fears, perhaps because their own transition to rebel control was relatively painless. Colonel Qaddafi's control of this city of 650,000 people melted away remarkably quickly after a popular uprising and a mutiny by local army units.
The dictator had few supporters in Libya's eastern capital, a place he despised and starved of resources. The National Transitional Council (NTC), a self-selected body whose nucleus was the group of human-rights lawyers who had organised the protests that snowballed into the Benghazi uprising, declared itself the “political face of the revolution” and, a little later, the “sole representative of all Libya”.
The NTC was quickly able to call upon a network of power-plant managers, logisticians and others who kept Benghazi's lights shining and its warehouses stocked with food. The council also managed to get speedy de facto recognition, granted by Arab countries, such as Qatar, which provided petrol and other essential supplies, and by Western countries, such as France, Britain and the United States, which provided the airpower that at the very last minute saved Benghazi from a government armoured-column that had bulldozed its way to the outskirts of town. Most easterners seem to realise how valuable it was that a united leadership filled the power vacuum so quickly.
As other uprisings freed towns farther west, the NTC expanded its membership. Council members claim that they were chosen in close consultation with tribal and revolutionary leaders inside the liberated zones or, if such leaders could not be contacted, with western Libyan refugees living either in the east of the country or in Tunisia. But the NTC itself acknowledges that its legitimacy is tenuous. The council has consequently tried hard not to tread too roughly on regional sensitivities, affirming at every possible opportunity that it intends the east to be part of a united Libya with Tripoli as its capital.
The rebels have also planned their military strategy so that, whenever possible, any advance on a government-held town was co-ordinated with an uprising of revolutionaries from within. This appears to have given each part of Libya a sense of having delivered its own “liberation”, as opposed to having been conquered by easterners. The policy has been so successful that some western military commanders even complained that they were left to do the bulk of the fighting with minimal support from the east.
The NTC is acutely sensitive to international public opinion, and desperately wants to avoid chaos in liberated areas, including the capital. Members say that they will retain as many policemen and other officials as possible in their posts. “We put the experience of Iraq in mind and also the experience of the eastern block after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Fatih Baja, the council's head of political affairs. The council acknowledges that preventing disorder in Tripoli, a sprawling city of over 1m people, will be far tougher than bringing smaller and more socially cohesive provincial towns under its control.
The council has shown itself anxious to avoid reprisal killings. It has reminded the rebels on a number of occasions that their human-rights record will have a huge impact on Libya's future relations with its current Western and Arab benefactors. The council's chairman, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, a grandfatherly former justice minister, has even threatened to step down if victorious rebels embarrass him by carrying out revenge murders. “I object strongly to any executions outside the law,” he said at a press conference on August 22nd, praising rebel field-commanders but adding that “the actions of some of their followers worry me.” The next day he emphasised his point about due process, by repeating an earlier pledge to stand trial himself for his years of serving the regime.
The rebels have certainly acted wrongfully against some civilians, though most human-rights groups say their abuses pale beside the attacks on civilians by the regime. A few categories of loyalists appear to be particularly vulnerable: pro-regime fighters believed by the rebels to be African mercenaries have been abused and possibly executed after capture. Similar treatment is said to have been received by some unfortunate dark-skinned immigrants.
In June and July, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, rebels in the western mountains reportedly burnt buildings and beat civilians in a region where one tribe had been settled by the regime in another tribe's traditional territory. Flashpoints for possible future tribal infighting include the isolated oasis town of Sebha, still held by the regime, where Colonel Qaddafi's own Gadadfa clan dominates other clans such as the Awlad Suleiman, whose members attempted an unsuccessful uprising in June. However, despite Colonel Qaddafi's alleged strategy of pitting one clan against another, no one major tribe, other than the Gadadfa, is deeply associated with the regime.
One difference between Colonel Qaddafi's Libya and other authoritarian states that might work in the NTC's favour is that the “Brother Leader” had promulgated his own tribally inspired ideology of direct democracy, and thus had never instituted a ruling party, such as the Baath in Iraq. (The post-Saddam Hussein policy in Iraq was to strip every Baath member of his responsibilities. Since only Baath members held responsibilities, this left the country bare. At least this cannot happen in Libya.) Some loyalists who joined the network of informants known as the revolutionary committees have remained in rebel-held cities, and have been lying low, trying to regain the trust of their neighbours. Others have disappeared, and may be among the forces holding out in the colonel's final enclaves.
Those independent militias
The NTC may be less able to restrain its fighters once the threat from Colonel Qaddafi is removed. Much of the rebel manpower is grouped into 40-plus privately organised, privately funded militias known as katibas (brigades). Each katiba is usually drawn from one town, commanded by a respected local military veteran or, in some cases, by the businessman who financed it. They drive privately owned pickups or jeeps with mounted anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, captured from government arsenals or supplied by foreign benefactors. Members are enthusiastic but usually have only cursory training and very little sense of military discipline, often commuting to the front from their homes. Katiba leaders say that they meet the NTC's more formalised military wing in an operations room to plan battles, but decisions appear to be arrived at by consensus rather than through any military chain of command.
Relations between the NTC and the katibas were brought to crisis point by the assassination on July 28th of Abdel Fatah Younis, a defecting general who became the NTC's top military commander and may have wanted to bring the militias under centralised control. The circumstances surrounding the killing have yet to be explained. NTC judges had issued an arrest warrant for General Younis on suspicion that he had made unauthorised contact with Colonel Qaddafi, but the killers themselves are reported to have been rogue katiba fighters with a personal vendetta against the one-time Qaddafi loyalist.
They may have been members of the Abu Ubeidah Ibn al-Jarrah brigade, said to be a force of former political prisoners, some of them radical Islamists. After Younis's death, the brigade was reportedly dissolved, and the NTC has turned him into a martyr, standing for proper military discipline. Posters of the confident, neatly uniformed general smilingly greet motorists on several of Benghazi's main streets.
In the aftermath of Younis's assassination, katiba members swear that they answer to the orders of the NTC. “We all have the same goal. We all want to end this,” says Muftah Barrati, a senior official at the camp of one of Benghazi's largest katibas, the 17 February Martyrs Brigade. “When this is complete, we all will return to our jobs.” He himself was a financial manager for the computer company of Mustafa Sigizli, a businessman who helped set up the brigade. Rebels, with no former jobs to return to, may be given the option of joining a national army.
However, it would be a rare rebel force that did not derive some sense of entitlement from the sacrifices made during a hard-fought war, and the katibas still brush off requests by NTC officials to place themselves under the authority of a unified command. Based on the barrages of celebratory gunfire in Benghazi that erupt nightly to mark weddings, funerals or good news from the front, katiba members enjoy owning automatic weapons and would be reluctant to give them up.
Council members say that they know they would have more authority were they an elected body. They have thus opted for a fairly swift transitional period. The fall of Tripoli, when it is fully established, will set off an eight-month countdown to provisional elections. Some say this timetable is too short for a country with no experience of even single-party politics, let alone of genuine democracy. A group of protesters holding a sit-in outside NTC headquarters last week said that they suspected senior council leaders of having cut a deal with a handful of Libyan political groups, such as the Muslim Brothers and the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, a long-established exile group. The experienced groups, complained the protesters, had an unfair advantage in knowing how to campaign and win votes.
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For the moment all such political manoeuvrings are of little interest to a nation gripped by the dramatic news from the battlefield. Nor is there much public debate about the country's future shape. The role that religion will play, a heavily divisive issue in many Arab countries, seems to be reduced in Sunni Muslim Libya to an uncontroversial clause in the interim constitution declaring sharia to be “the major source of legislation”. The katibas are presumed to contain a sprinkling of more militant Islamists and possible former al-Qaeda associates, but if they are there, they are keeping a low profile.
Once the fighting stops, however, the personalities of those who wield power, and important differences over the wording of the country's founding documents, will become much more compelling issues. This will be particularly relevant for fighters returning from the front who have no idea how to form parties or interest groups, but who will certainly expect to have their voices heard simply by virtue of being revolutionaries.
The downfalls of dictators in Egypt and Iraq were followed by extended bouts of fear about hidden regime sympathisers infiltrating the new government, plotting their return. Libya's revolution is fortunate in having leaders who say they want stability, respect for human rights and political inclusiveness. But the legitimacy and authority they need to realise those priorities are perilously fragile.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Good intentions, fragile legitimacy"
