The New York Review Abroad (76 page)

If the periphery is fraying, the center, at first sight, has taken serious steps to set up an authority that its architects hope will sooner or later radiate out to the provinces. As under Qaddafi, Tripoli displays the best that revolutionary Libya has to offer. Utilities work. Air-conditioners cool tempers. Civil servants clock in at ministries. Banks have lifted wartime restrictions on cash withdrawals. International airlines unload their cargoes of oil prospectors and businessmen for the latest trade fair. Government coffers are flush with oil revenues of $5 billion a month. Unlike Baghdad’s quick turn to insurgency after the US ousted Saddam Hussein, Tripoli has resumed business. Tripolitanians fail to understand their bad press.

The presence of militiamen is receding as well. The checkpoints manned by irregulars that once crisscrossed the capital are gone, and their heavy weapons have fallen silent. Tripoli’s professionals nervously speak of the last of the Misratans, the militia from the large town of Misrata that fought in Tripoli. Despite the prevalence of weapons—some 20 million guns are estimated to be circulating in Libya—crime levels in Tripoli are said to be lower than in many Western capitals. Store managers have whitewashed away the obsessive green, the color of the book Qaddafi wrote to reveal his Third Universal Theory, perhaps the world’s wackiest personality cult. Salafis troop into the former cathedral, now a mosque, for a lecture on the virtues of polygamy. Otherwise, for a moment, it might be Europe.

In the People’s Congress where delegates waited for the Great Leader to raise his hand before voting, the halls buzz with a plethora of community organizations criticizing the NTC’s management. New radio stations offer traffic updates, a novelty in a country where Qaddafi banned reports of car accidents and traffic jams lest they stain his utopia. On Ozone Radio you hear, “Sexy girl, I like the way you’re grooving”—another novelty, since Qaddafi also banned Western pop. In place of a melodramatic megalomaniac, the country has for a leader a soft-spoken professor, Prime Minister Abdurrahim al-Keib. When I talked with him on his arrival from the United Arab Emirates in Tripoli in August 2011, he shed some tears in a handkerchief when the rebel victory became clear. Later he offered to be my guide, driving me around the capital. So long had he spent in exile that he had to stop to ask for directions to the Corinthia Hotel, the capital’s bulkiest landmark.

For all his kindness, al-Keib’s self-effacing nature makes him vulnerable. For many Libyans, he seems too small and retiring to step into the Great Leader’s shoes. That he has no accompanying goons around him only makes him seem weak. In addition, a rapid changeover of governments has confounded efforts to make plans. Ministers say their only mandate is to prepare for the ballot for an elected assembly in June. Officials use the formula “not before the elections,” insisting that only an elected authority would have the legitimacy to undertake substantial change.

The result is that the part of the bureaucracy that continues to function largely belongs to the old Qaddafi order. Visas remain as hard to come by for foreign journalists as under Qaddafi. And minorities detect signs in government ministries that the colonel’s promotion of the Arab cause is making a comeback. Only after a month of protests did the government appoint an Amazigh minister. The old ways persist. The NTC has been under heavy pressure from workers striking
to uphold their right to elect their own bosses, in accordance with the Third Universal Theory. Children at birthday parties still clamor for green balloons. Revolutionaries struggle—often in vain—to coin a post-Qaddafi terminology and method for their new institutions.

“Revolutionary committees” continue to exercise sway as part of a shadow government.
Katibas
, or brigades of paramilitaries, remain beyond the control of the formal military chain of command. “After forty years Qaddafi lives in our minds,” I was told by the minister of industry.

Where the state does not function, there are impulses toward anarchy. Drivers head the wrong way up a one-way street shouting
Libya Hurra
—Libya’s Free. A mild-mannered bank clerk tells me he drives to work repeating the mantra “kill or be killed.” A taxi driver pulls out a brochure for German guns and recommends that I purchase one called a Viper Desert. Looters are still active; some cite Koranic verses justifying their rights to
ghanima
, the spoils of war. The words “holy property” are scrawled on mansion walls all over the capital. “From the garage or God?” Libyans ask friends driving new sports cars.

Reestablishing law and order has proved to be the hardest task, not least because many militias want to provide an alternative. The government has succeeded in cajoling the militiamen to make a formal decision to leave the capital’s airports. But whole units have simply switched uniforms and painted their cars the red and white of security vehicles. “We call them policemen,” a security official tells me; but the new Libya still has no criminal justice system, because judges are too nervous to issue verdicts, and the police too powerless to enforce them.

In their absence, the militias offer what little rough justice exists. They maintain their own makeshift detention centers with an estimated
five thousand captives, all held without prospect of trial. “Tripoli is safe only as long as the rebels are here,” says Faraj Sweihli, an eccentric militia leader from Misrata who has refused to hand over his headquarters in Tripoli’s military college for women despite government requests to leave. While I am talking to him, he threatens to arrest me for not having a government press card. (He did the same to two English journalists a month earlier.) A friend in Tripoli calls the uprising Libya’s “rebelution.”

The arrival of private security companies, primarily from London, further undermines the government’s hope of regaining a monopoly on the use of force. Soldiers and veterans of Baghdad and Kabul, they are the “West’s Afghans”—a counterpoint to the movement of global jihad, chasing the world’s crises to sell their mercenary services. Though they carry arms, few are registered, and none are regulated. They open safe houses in Tripoli while they solicit contracts to guard oil installations and establish a multibillion-dollar border force. The EU delegation made a deal for its protection with G4S, a company that helps secure Ofer, an Israeli prison for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

With “security” in so many competing hands, many fear violence will only get worse. Security officials attempting to instill some method into this madness estimate that some 15,000 fighters took part in the battle to topple Qaddafi. Of these, they say, thousands have returned to their previous jobs, from car mechanics to psychiatrists. But the authorities’ attempt to forge a new security apparatus out of the remnant has hit an impasse in part of their own making. Enticed by government handouts of 4,000 dinars for married men who took up arms against Qaddafi’s regime and 2,400 for bachelors, as well as the chance to cover up their history of involvement with Qaddafi, hundreds of thousands more have registered as “revolutionaries,” proclaiming their loyalty to some sixty militias. “The truth is
no one knows how many there are,” I was told by Mustafa Rugbani, the labor minister and former Paris-based IBM manager responsible for vetting recruits.

The authorities claim to have established a 78,000-strong security force that is independent of the militias. A few hundred officers and men—primarily professionals from Qaddafi’s old army—have been dispatched to the south to set up buffer zones between the feuding forces. Although cease-fires have largely held, there are a good many exceptions and the army is too stretched to do more than curb the most egregious bloodletting. The army set up a zone of twenty kilometers at the western borders from which militias were to be excluded. It remains unenforced. An April 2 deadline for the dissolution of militias has come and gone. So have predictions by spokesmen for the transitional council that militias would largely disappear from Libya by mid-May. With sporadic attacks on the prime minister’s office, even in Tripoli the government can seem more ephemeral than the militias.

Elections for a two-hundred-seat assembly scheduled for mid-June remain the best chance to replace the militias with the legitimacy of the ballot box. Behind the scenes, Ian Martin, the UN’s special representative in Libya, drawing on his experience overseeing elections in East Timor and Nepal, has been trying to get the NTC to keep to its timetable. Voter registration has proceeded remarkably smoothly, even in the south. According to the UN more than two million of Libya’s estimated three million voters registered within the first two weeks.

But it is unclear whether the forces working against the elections will allow them to proceed on time. Reluctant to relinquish their golden goose, members of the NTC say there mustn’t be hasty elections. Communal and tribal politicians favor holding local elections first in order to buy time to build up regional power bases. Above all
the militias are afraid that an elected government will strip them of their authority and revolutionary credibility. Daw Ahmed al-Mansouri, a teacher on a reconciliation committee in the town of Sabha, told me he is still deciding whether to run for office. “Any militia unhappy with the results can use its stockpile of heavy weapons to shell a polling station or kill a candidate,” he says.

Nowhere are the militias stronger than in Benghazi, the eastern city where Libya’s “rebelution” began. After a year of paralysis, the goodwill that still keeps the wheels of central authority turning in Tripoli has evaporated here. The courthouse, beneath which tens of thousands gathered to hail the new rulers in the first days of the uprising, is boarded up. Its leaders have long since left for the plusher world of Tripoli, lured by free accommodation in the marble decadence of the city’s Rixos Hotel. Left behind, Benghazi languishes, as before the revolution, in a perpetual
ghayla
—the siesta that Lib-yans take between the midday and late afternoon prayers. The dirt and dust of abandonment coat the city along with smoke from a thousand burning refuse piles. “At least there was a system before,” I was told by a middle-aged soccer fan, whose al-Ahli team shut down after its chairman fled to Egypt with the company’s proceeds. “Now there is nothing.”

Strikes are the exception in Tripoli but they have become the norm in Benghazi. The war wounded have set up a roadblock along the coastal road to force the government to pay for their medical treatment abroad. Gasoline haulers demanding pay hikes park their trucks outside garages. The headquarters of Agoco, the national oil company’s eastern subsidiary, which functioned for the first months of the revolution and through which much of the country’s oil flows, was closed for four weeks in April and May. On the day that I visited, picketers had barricaded its gates. “We protected the company from
Qaddafi with our lives and it gave us nothing back,” says a protester. He said he was a cleaner fired earlier this year to make way for newly arrived and cheaper Bangladeshis.

With the collapse of central authority, militias rule in and around Ben-ghazi. The day I arrived there hundreds of militia members had converged on the city for a congress aimed at unifying their ranks and reclaiming what they see as their rightful inheritance from the NTC and whatever elected authority might follow. “Benghazi paid the price, and Tripoli takes the profits,” declared the organizer, as he spoke from the podium after the militiamen had feasted beneath a golden canopy, regaling each other with past exploits.

Paraplegics paraded their untreated injuries, shouting war cries and accusing the health minister of pilfering the funds for their treatment. A skinhead in jeans and a camouflage jacket pranced across the stage, claiming he had killed Qaddafi, only to be denied his prize money. “I was a taxi driver before, and I’m a taxi driver now,” I was told by Ahmed Sweib of the Lions of Libya Brigade. (He drives a blue-metallic two-door Daewoo with the word PUNISHER stenciled on the back window in Gothic capitals, and black flames painted on the side. The car has a German license plate.)