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So far so good

Free Libya seems to me headed in the right direction.  It could still be diverted, in particular if Qaddafi manages to raise an insurgency or if the revolutionary militias fall out with each other and begin internecine fighting.  But the National Transitional Council (NTC seems to have won the battle with TNC) has legitimacy in the eyes of every Libyan I’ve talked with.  They like the roadmap to elections and the constitution the NTC has laid out, they like what they regard as its uncorrupted leadership, and they have confidence that things will improve because of Libya’s vast oil and gas resources.

I’ve never been in a post-war situation with as much unanimity and solidarity on main issues as here.  You can see it literally painted all over both Benghazi and Tripoli–the pre-Qaddafi (royalist) flag that symbolizes, Libyans tell me, independence (not the monarchy that flew it originally).  Their anthem, they say, is not a “national” anthem but an “independence” anthem (they’ve of course ditched Qaddafi’s and brought back the royal one).  I bought a flag in Benghazi’s Court House square, to join the excessive number of symbols of freedom that decorate my office at Johns Hopkins/SAIS.  It would be hard to leave Libya without it.

The sense of solidarity and unanimity extends to Tripoli, though it certainly does not entirely fill the vast expanse between the two cities.  There is still fighting at Sirte, Bani Walid and other places where Qaddafi’s loyalists are holding out.  There is a question whether the NTC can reach out and extend its big tent approach to those who live in central Libya, but they have certainly engaged Tripoli, at least for now.

I spent a few quality hours at the Defense Ministry in Benghazi, where I found a number of professionals engaged seriously with less than glorious challenges.  They believe Qaddafi’s forces have strewn 15,000 mines across the countryside.  The preferred method for finding them in sand for the moment is with your hands, though there are some higher-tech approaches whose export to Libya is still prohibited by the UN arms embargo.  I hope the UN fixed that in the Security Council resolution that passed yesterday.

The Defense Ministry is also concerned about its expeditionary medical capacity, which is close to zero.  They haven’t got field hospitals or the logistical capacity to support them.

These are not the kinds of problems that I usually worry about, but I was glad to hear that others do worry about them.  “Uniform” may be a euphemism at the Defense Ministry–everyone seems to wear whatever BDUs (battle dress uniform, or “camouflage” as the civilians say) come to hand, as well as the uniforms of Qaddafi’s army.  There is no saluting and no formality, even in the anteroom to the minister’s office.  But there is a sense of professional purpose and seriousness, as well as a good deal of camaraderie.  These folks know each other, have fought a war together, and are now trying to sort out the thousand things that got left behind.  But how much the Defense Ministry is linked to the militias guarding street corners in Tripoli is not clear.

The challenge is to unify Libya’s many former rebel forces before they start serious jockeying for territory and power, demobilizing at least some of them and getting others to return to the rougher places from which they came.  It will not be easy.  Life in Tripoli may look pretty good to someone from the Nafusa Mountains.

Elementary school opens today in Libya.  Universities next month.  The police are on the streets.  The garbage collectors are out with reflective vests, even if their efforts still seem spotty.  I talked to a former Mercedes manager today.  He says people are still not taking their fancy cars out of the garage.  But traffic is heavy.  Friday nights’s exuberant demonstration, well attended by women and children, is still ringing in my ears.

Libyans are feeling proud, even giddy with their refurbished identity, which they trust will be more welcome in the rest of the world than the previous one.  Fears of an east/west split in the country have so far not materialized.  Qaddafi may still be at large, but no one is expecting him back except to be tried (and they expect executed).  So far so good, even if big challenges lie ahead.

From the shores of Tripoli

I arrived in Tripoli yesterday.  Things here are much less “normal” than in Benghazi:  there are lots of young men with guns on the street.  Detonations happen, some more than just the usual “celebratory” AK 47 rounds.  Procedures at Mitiga airport are haphazard, security at the Radisson (where lots of business is conducted) is tight.  The internet is agonizingly slow, especially once the journalists start trying to file in the evening.

But everyone agrees that things are improving.  Water and electricity are flowing.  Many stores and restaurants are now open, traffic is getting more congested.  Lots of people are on the street–often with children (a clear sign of feeling relatively secure).

The Western journalists I talked with last night were on the gloomy side:  they worry about Qaddafi being at large, the three major towns still holding out against the Transitional National Council (TNC), jockeying for position among the many militias that control different parts of Tripoli, rascist incidents and slurs against black Libyans, especially those who once supported Qaddafi.  All those problems are real.

But I’m far cheerier, because I managed somehow to strike up a conversation last night with a group of young doctors, dentists and engineers trying to preserve the spirit of their jihad (that’s struggle in English, with spiritual but not necessarily specifically religious connotations) against the Qaddafi regime.  These people in their 20s spent months caring for wounded demonstrators in their homes to avoid sending them to hospitals, where they would have been arrested (or in some cases killed).

They have organized themselves as Free Doctors’ Forum, Free Generation, Libya Youth Forum and the like in an effort to “bring Libya back to life.”  They fear that others may attempt to hijack their revolution.  They are cautious about politics–the only politicians they have ever known were Qaddafi and his cronies, so they distrust politicians and political parties even though they want a free political system.  The parallel to America’s founding fathers, who likewise feared their revolution would be hijacked and corrupted if political parties formed, is hard to miss.  The Libyans want the revolution they just went through to be the last the country will ever need.

Freedom is the word Libyans associate most with their February 17 revolution.  Freedom to speak their minds, to associate in groups as they please, to read and view what they want, and to form their own opinions.  The young people I met distrust power.  They accept NTC chair Jalil as a transition leader but look forward to a day when they can choose their own.  They plan to monitor and evaluate the performance of their leaders through independent organizations. They did not use the term “civil society” with me.  But they somehow have reinvented the concept.  Nor did they know what USAID is (though they had already met with European assistance providers).  What a pleasure to discover revolutionaries before they’ve learned the international vocabulary!

The young people I talked with are mildly suspicious about big international organizations–they rightly fear that some of them would rather provide medical services themselves rather than support a Libyan organization that provides medical service.  They will resist being hired away from their own nascent service providers to work for the internationals.  I wished them fortitude in this, as I’ve seen it happen all too often:  the internationals come in under the banner of supporting civil society and quickly destroy the indigenous institutions by hiring away their personnel as translators and drivers.

I ran down to Martyrs’ (formerly Green) Square this morning along the Tripoli shoreline, which U.S. marines failed to reach (they got only as far as Derna) in their effort to suppress Berber (Barbary) attacks on American shipping in 1804.  The town was about as quiet as it gets at 9 am Friday, as people sleep late on a day that begins the Muslim weekend.  Street sweepers were cleaning up the square after whatever happened there last night.  I got a few quizzical looks and one “good morning!”  I’ll try later today to talk with people coming out of a mosque, hoping to get a picture of how more religious people regard the revolution and future prospects.

Normal, but still far from ideal

If life seems normal in Benghazi these days, it is still far from ideal.  Having previously discussed the positive developments, I need to delve into the directions in which growth and development is still required.

The most obvious to the eye and nose of the casual observer is what my wife and I call “garbagio,” a term we invented forty years ago when traveling in southern Italy (well before we both learned Italian).  Every public space in Benghazi seems littered, sometimes to a depth of several inches.  I asked some young Libyans yesterday about this.  They said things have actually improved a good deal since the revolution, with people cleaning up a lot more than in the past.  The garbagio problem developed, they added, because no one felt pride in being Libyan.  The public space belonged to the state, so throwing trash into it was a tacit, maybe even unintentional, form of protest.

Libyans held the state in low esteem not only because of the way it treated them but also because they had no voice in it.  Essentially no independent civil society was permitted–only service organizations, and they had a hard time even doing things like helping the poor because Qaddafi denied that there were any.  Hundreds of nongovernmental organizations have sprouted rapidly in Benghazi, though they are naturally in a rudimentary state, and spontaneous contributions to social improvement like directing traffic if the stop lights go out are common.

There is still little visible sign of political parties.  I spent the evening yesterday wandering among the many tents/booths set up in the courthouse square, where people gather each evening to enjoy the sea breeze and talk.  The different tents host discussions of issues while a goodly number of men alternately pray and listen to talk radio (or was it television?) broadcast over loud speakers.  The Libyans are really enjoying their freedom.  They seem almost reluctant to organize political parties because it will lead to divisions among them.

Newspapers have sprouted as well, with something like 80 newspapers and magazines now publishing in Benghazi (most not dailies), where there were only six before the revolution.  One of the young people I talked with is getting ready to put out a free English language weekly for distribution in Benghazi hotels.  Will there be enough foreigners left to attract advertisers now that the National Transitional Council (NTC) seems really to be moving to Tripoli?  Maybe not, but The Voice would like to give the enterprise a try.  There will of course be a dramatic weeding out of some of these publications, but in the meanwhile it is thrilling to talk with people who are for the first time in their lives discovering that their thoughts and writings might actually make a difference.

Another area where a great deal of “capacity building” (that’s what the development types call training) is needed is human rights.  My compliments go to USAID (that doesn’t always happen) for the human rights training that I attended yesterday, conducted under contract to the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Warsaw) by three veterans of the Polish transition.  The day was devoted to a moot court to consider the case of a prisoner who had died of a heart attack while incarcerated.  The outcome was different from the real case, in which the Polish government lost for the first time at the European Court of Human Rights.  But it was argued with an intelligence and style that I hope foreshadows what Libyan courts may be like in ten years.

The court system is in fact a big problem.  Corrupted under Qaddafi, it will require a thorough vetting and retraining, something that will take more than a few years.  In the meanwhile, Libyans generally want Qaddafi, his family and his cronies tried in Libya, if only because here there is a death penalty not permitted at the International Criminal Court (ICC).  But a debate at the human rights workshop ended with the young Libyans voting to send Qaddafi to the ICC, due to the difficult problems of meeting international standards and preventing the trial from becoming a political nightmare.

The political nightmare could be deadly, as Libyans are still armed to the teeth.  This will only change if stability is maintained and a spiral of revenge killing prevented, as few will give up their guns if they really think they need them.  There has been some effort to collect the weapons, but there are still a lot more out there.  Re-restablishing the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force will not be easy or immediate.

Surprisingly, I’ve found relatively little complaint so far about the economic situation.  One Libyan did say that his salary of 350 Libyan dinars per month working in oil services was low, but he seemed to mean that in comparison to international wages rather than in comparison with what other Libyans make.  I suspect the grumbling will increase, but Libyans are clearly pleased that Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC), lives in a modest house in Benghazi and is thought to be uncorrupted.  At least to some, that makes a big difference and may account for patience on the economic front.

With apologies for the lack of photos–I have no way of getting them from my nonfunctional cell phone to my computer–these are some of the ways in which Libya is still far from the ideal.

Benghazi: a normal life, for the moment

It would be wrong to suggest that everything is going well in Libya.  Yesterday’s attack on oil facilities at Ras Lanouf by Qaddafi’s forces and the failure of an apparent government (that is Transitional National Council)-led offensive at Surt show otherwise.  But here in Benghazi even yesterday’s inspiring TNC rally in Tripoli seems far off.

Life here is about as close to “normal” as it ever has been.  No one is visibly carrying weapons.  The one detonation I’ve heard did not cause any reaction among the Libyans present–they knew right away it was a car engine backfiring.  By all reports, people feel far freer to speak their minds than they did under Qaddafi.  They also feel freer to drive down one-way streets the wrong way and run red lights, though they do both not with abandon but with caution.  Mostly they go about their business trying to earn a living and support their families, which has not gotten easier.  Salaries and other payments made through banks are not fully available to depositors, who can only withdraw one-third to one-half of the total amount.

Libyans know that this is the price of liberty and hope it will not last.  There are some good omens.  Egyptian oil service workers told me this morning that some wells in the east are already producing, the Libyans are respecting pre-revolution contracts and the people they deal with are clearly more relaxed and taking more responsibility than under Qaddafi.  Libyan Air has started up service between Benghazi and Misrata, Turkish Airlines starts to fly to Istanbul on Thursday, and there are rumors of British Air and others preparing to fly.

None of this of course affects most Libyans, who live in what can only be described as poverty despite the enormous oil and gas wealth produced during the Qaddafi regime.  That money seems to have gone into the pockets of few people, who deposited a great deal of it in bank accounts and investments abroad.  Benghazis are certainly convinced that none of it came here.  They are quick to note the outlet for raw sewage that fouls their spectacular beaches and the empty square from which Qaddafi removed the grave of Omar Mukhtar, hero of the resistance against Italy in the early 20th century.  Qaddafi did not want any competition, even from a long-expired hero.

The road ahead will not be easy.  NATO spokespeople may suggest that finding Qaddafi is not so important, but they are wrong.  Few believe Qaddafi can mount the same kind of resistance that emerged in Iraq, or attract the kind of foreign assistance the Sunni insurgency there benefited from, but many in Washington and elsewhere have gotten worried about the possibility of an insurgency.

They are right to worry:  insurgency would make it far more difficult for the TNC to pursue the moderate course it has so far chosen, favoring reconciliation over retaliation and avoiding revenge against those who fought for and protected the Qaddafi regime.  I am already receiving from a Belgian email address pro-insurgency emails.  It only takes the beginnings of suspicion that people are associated with an insurgency to generate fear in the population and a harsh crackdown from the authorities.

None of that is yet apparent in Benghazi today, however.  A friend is teaching a human rights class.  A colleague is arranging a conflict management workshop.   A journalist classmate is tracking the TNC and trying to ask them tough questions when they seem to do things different from what they say.  The Egyptian oil service company people were off to arrange well workovers.   Traffic is heavy, the markets are bustling, people are walking, bargaining, shopping, working.  Water, and since this year’s August Ramadan also electricity, are flowing.

Libyans have experienced both autocracy and war.  The normal life so many people who have lived in those conditions crave has arrived in Benghazi, at least for the moment.