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The trick is to stay on course

Loyal readers will not be surprised by Libya’s smooth handover of power yesterday from its revolutionary Transitional National Council (NTC) to its General National Conference, the parliament elected in July.  The July election went far better than many expected.

The Libyan revolution had many ways of going wrong.  I wrote about them for the Council on Foreign Relations during the spring of 2010.  My visit last September convinced me they had come down to just two:  militias and Islamic extremism.  Both have proved problematic, but they have not derailed a process that the NTC scoped out a year ago.

Why has Libya gone more right than wrong?  There are many reasons.  It is a geographically large but demographically small (6.4 million, more or less) country.  It is rich.  Even before the oil and gas started flowing, repatriated frozen assets provided ample resources.  Libya is relatively homogeneous from an ethnic and sectarian perspective (compared to Iraq or Syria), though there are distinct groups, especially in the south, that have not yet fully accepted the revolution.  The regional tensions are real, especially in the eastern province of  Cyrenaica, but the revolution against Qaddafi gave Libyans a common cause, at least until now.

The role of the international community in Libya has been one of support, not direction.  The United States and Europe, which were vital to the NATO operation that dislodged Qaddafi, had more important things on their minds once he was gone:  Syria, Iran and the euro crisis.  The United Nations and closely allied agencies (UNDP, IFES, etc.) provided assistance in organizing the July elections, but the Libyans were unequivocally in the lead.  They have owned their revolution and its aftermath.

Now Libya faces its biggest challenges:  deciding on how power is to be distributed and who will have it to start.  A prime minister and new government is to be chosen within 30 days.  When I left Libya last month, the clear intention of the biggest winner in the election, Mahmoud Jibril, was to form a broad, national unity government.  If it can be done, this is smart. Bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and others with significant popular support in is a lot better than keeping them out.

The first and most important job of that new government is to decide how the committee to write the constitution is to be chosen.  The original plan was for the GNC to somehow empower a committee.  The TNC decided, in a last-minute move of dubious validity intended to encourage electoral participation in the east, that the committee should instead be elected on a regional basis.

However selected, the committee is to prepare a draft within 60 days that has to be submitted for approval by a 2/3 majority in a popular referendum.  This is important:  it guarantees that, however and by whomever written, the new constitution will have to have broad geographical and popular legitimacy.  The time for preparation of the new constitution is far too short to allow serious public participation in the process.  It would be wise for the GNC to give the process more time.

Once the constitution is approved, the GNC promulgates a new election law within 30 days and new elections are held with 180 days.

Many people are still worried about Libya’s once-revolutionary militias, which have not been fully demobilized or reintegrated, and about its Islamic extremists, who have been attacking the Red Cross (symbol of the crusaders of course) and trying to sow havoc.  These are real and present dangers.  Libya is still a long way from establishing law and order, even if the environment is already reasonably safe and secure most places most of the time.

Libya is on a good course.  That is what counts.  I am reminded of Zeno’s “dichotomy” paradox in its collegiate version:  if you halve the distance between yourself and an attractive other at a constant rate, mathematicians say you’ll never arrive.  But for all practical purposes, you do.

On its current course, Libya will arrive at something resembling a democracy, sooner or later.  The trick is to stay on course.

PS:  for another, well-informed, view see Christopher Blanchard’s Libya Transition and US Policy.