Libya

Libya
Must it get worse before it gets better? I The Economist Page 1 of I
Economist

Libya

Must it get worse before it gets better?

The country is going through its roughest patch since Muammar Qaddafi’s
downfall two years ago

Sep 14th 2013 1 MISRATA AND TRIPOLI I From the print edition

“THE only road to paradise,” runs a joke doing if ., S p (,5
the rounds in the cafés of Tripoli, Libya’s V
iseafrontcapital, ‘‘is the one to-the ‘ kg‘. 1.
international airport.” Most Libyans. still revel g ‘A XI i,_
in the freedom and sense of possibility brought 3 ‘ g .I.
on by the NATO-backed war that ousted 4, V ” ‘I. :~ . V‘._pv_
Colonel Muammar Qaddafi two years ago. “Yet i S if if 7 ’ hi’ ” ‘3‘ i A
before, when someone disappeared, you knew

they were with Qaddafi forces,” reminisces a rebel-turned-security man. “Now we have no
idea.” That was made clear earlier this month when the government denounced the kidnap of
the daughter of Abdullah al-Senussi, Qaddafi’s former spy chief, only to discover that one of
its own forces had nabbed her; she was freed a few days later.

Libya has hit its rockiest patch since Qaddafi’s demise. No one has managed to reassert full
authority over the tribes, regions and groups welded together under the colonel’s iron rule.
Institutions of state, absent under Qaddafi, have yet to take firm shape. In the past few weeks
the country’s key oil ports have been blockaded by disgruntled workers and militias.
Assassinations and carjackings are rife. Water and electricity have been cut off in Tripoli for
the past week. On September 11th a bomb was defused in Tripoli; another went off in
Benghazi, the cradle of the anti-Qaddafi revolt and the main city of the east.

Security is the biggest complaint. “A state at its most basic has a monopoly of force,” says
Anas al-Gomati, who runs Sadeq, a Libyan think-tank. “Here you can argue that the
government works for the militias.” The authorities, with Western help, are in the process of
building an army and police force which are supposed to take over from the militias on its
payroll, most notably the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), a collection of former rebels
which functions as a temporary police force, and the Libyan Shield, a group of Islamist

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/215 86312-country-going-through… 9/ 1 2/20]

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