The question has hovered over the Libyan uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?
The answer could determine the course of both the Libyan uprising and the results of the Western intervention. In the West’s preferred chain of events, airstrikes enable the rebels to unite with the currently passive residents of the western region around Tripoli, under the banner of an essentially democratic revolution that topples Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
He, however, has predicted the opposite: that the revolt is a tribal war of eastern Libya against the west that ends in either his triumph or a prolonged period of chaos.
Am not sanguine about the situation in Libya, or within the
larger realm of Arab countries. I don’t expect any outbursts
of Jeffersonian democracy there any time soon. All these countries are
still mired in their neo-Stone Age tribalism. Their only
political concept is that of “The Big Man” (e.g. Mubarak,
Gaddafi, etc.). In the U.S., U.K., and Israel, presidents
and prime ministers come and go. The Arab world will
remain attached to its template of “The Big Man”. They
will change their leaders, but only for someone who’s
just as bad, or worse. Once in power, “The Big Man” will attempt
to perpetuate his power through his sons or family, attempting
to create a dynasty. This is a temptation even in the West, but
the few examples (Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons -all fledgling dynasties manqué) have shown that
this is not in the interests of a mature democracy.
Furthermore, the exercise of the right to vote is no guaranty
that a peace-minded regime will come to power. Hamas was duly
elected by the Palestinian people. It has pursued a policy of
bloody violence against Israel, and when deemed necessary,
against its own people.
A superficially attractive analysis, but worth looking at in some more detail:
The West’s aims are to enforce UN Resolution 1973 regarding a no fly zone and to stop the murder of Libya’s civilians by its government, not to aid the rebels, or free Libyans. Certainly there are other hopes, but the UN intervention is strictly limited. The West then hopes to leave it to the Libyan people, both the free Libyans and those in the regime to determine their future, with genocide from artillery and aerial bombing removed from the equation.
This is certainly part of the propaganda of Gaddaffi who variously and inconsistently claims:
1. the revolt is by disgruntled rats and cockroaches at the behest of Imperialist powers;
2. the revolt is by Al Qu’ada operative rats and cockroaches;
3. the revolt is by tribal rats and cockroaches; and/or
4. the revolt is by disobedient feral children whose parents do not care about them.
The evidence is none of the above, and in particular the revolt has been by all of the Libyan tribes, although some from Gaddaffi’s own tribe have remained loyal, but the genocide has often been undertaken by African mercenaries imported to do what the Libyans would not do to their own.
Perhaps this is because they are rather preoccupied with just surviving at the moment.
Such reports as there are, are that the free Libyans come, like the Egyptian revolution, from all walks of life, ages, sexes and include many professionals, teachers, doctors and soldiers, and this is reflected in what we know of their leadership. No doubt they have difficult issues to face with the infiltrators who have come in, often abandoning their uniforms for jeans underneath, in order to kill them.
I watched an interesting interview with the former British Ambassador to Libya from the period before and after Gaddaffi took over. He said there had been very little use of the death penalty in that period [only a few cases of state judicial killings], but that this changed when Gaddaffi took over and since then there has been massive use of terror and killing by the state.
On the issue of tribalism, the former King of Libya was the Emir of Cyrenaica which encompassed the East of the Country, but with the uniting of that area with the Western Tripolitania and the Interior, the Kingdom seemed to gain wide acceprtance, and all sides see Libya as one country and do not want any partition of it or regional government. Their aim is a united Libya. The Tribal leaders have recently made it clear that they are not interested in tribal infighting and this has nothing to do with what is going on at the moment in spite of Gaddaffi’s propaganda.
The evidence is that the culture of violence under Gaddaffi has had little to do with Gaddaffi forging provinces into a single state, which it already was, or subduing tribal justice, but everything to do with maintaining his own power, and murdering all opposition to him.
I could go on, but you get the general drift of where this article is going notwithstanding the ‘experts’ who it quotes and the more positive outlook given towards the end, but its underlying assumptions perhaps should not be taken at face value.
We don’t know where it will all end, but Libya has an educated population, and a large part of its population is under 30, but perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt rather than claiming that they are bounded by the tribalism of their grandparents, or the savagery of the Libyan government in what they are seeking to aspire to again. Much will probably depend on the support and encouragement they receive from the West to create a decent, humane and a democratic and perhaps a relatively happy society such as Libya once enjoyed when our former man in Libya was there.
Perhaps we can move on from the position under Gaddaffi, where word association connects in our mind the word ‘Libyan’ with ‘terrorist’.