Building a new Libya

Freed from the monkey king

IN A parliament building that predates the Qaddafi regime, the founding fathers of a new Libya have gathered. In this Green Mountain town, perched above the coastal sand-flats, they plan to write a new constitution and restore civilian rule. A week after their uprising against 41 years of dictatorship, lawyers, doctors, tribal leaders, colonels, university professors and even Muammar Qaddafi's justice minister are preparing for power. Inside and outside the assembly hall, crowds of men, women and children cheer and cry for their “monkey king” to leave.

Along a 600km stretch of the Mediterranean, from the Egyptian border west to Ajdabiya, Mr Qaddafi's rule has been sloughed off. All across eastern Libya, youth committees of the February 17th revolution have sprung up to try to fill the vacuum. At former checkpoints, now burnt-out hulks, and at the border, youths joined by army deserters wearing vests saying “No to tribalism, no to factionalism” stop cars to ask for donations of blood.

In Tobruk, an eastern port town of 120,000, volunteers with red berets have occupied the mataba, the headquarters of Mr Qaddafi's local militia, and turned it into a storehouse stacked with donated supplies for the thousands still camped in the central square. These “cockroaches”, as Mr Qaddafi called them in his speech on February 22nd, include lawyers and university lecturers. Other volunteers guard the port, local banks and oil terminals to keep the oil flowing and ward off looters. Teachers and engineers in the foyer of a local hotel have set up a committee to collect weapons, and another committee in Sattah, near Beida, has collected clothes, food and blankets for hundreds of captured government troops held in a school.

Omnipresent only a week ago, the emblems of the cult Mr Qaddafi fostered lie shattered. A statue of the Green Book, his manifesto, has been reduced to rubble. “There were so many billboards of Qaddafi, he used to appear in our dreams,” says Idris Hadoth, a schoolteacher. No longer. The tricolour of King Idris, the monarch Mr Qaddafi overthrew in 1969—beyond the memory of most—flies across the east, and where that is unavailable red cloth flutters. Anything to erase the emblem of the regime's all-green flag.

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Mr Qaddafi did nothing for this region. Despite its oil wealth, the east appears devoid of infrastructure apart from its oil industry. Oil is stored in first-world depots, water in concrete pits. The only ships docking at Tobruk's jetties are tankers, and despite the energy flow there are blackouts. So poor is health care that Libyans with enough money head to Egypt or Tunisia for treatment. An elderly teacher points out the spelling mistakes in the graffiti daubed across the town. Until recently, foreign languages were banned from the syllabus; they were enemy tongues, and talking politics with foreigners carried a three-year prison term. “None of us can speak English or French,” laments the teacher. “He kept us ignorant and blindfolded.”

“All our wealth went abroad,” says a law student distributing food. “He built towers across Africa, but we don't even have a playground.” Tobruk had a cinema, old-timers recall, but Mr Qaddafi closed it soon after taking power to guard against public gatherings. Without entertainment, the town shut down after dark.

That was why electronic media, from Al Jazeera to the internet, were so vital. They offered forms of communication beyond Mr Qaddafi's grasp. The regime shut down the internet as soon as the uprising started, but by then it was too late.

Libya's second city, Benghazi, staged the first demonstrations on February 15th. Barely 60 youths showed up. Similar protests erupted in other cities over the next two days, and were met by security forces with heavy weapons. In Tobruk and Beida protesters kept the anti-aircraft cartridges as evidence, but four deaths and 80 people injured only spurred larger numbers onto the streets. In Beida and other cities, youths who despaired of confronting African mercenaries' heavy-calibre machineguns with stones resorted to dynamite used for catching fish. They broke into the compounds of the security forces, ransacked them and put them to the torch.

In most barracks along the eastern coast, the armed forces quickly stood down rather than turn on their countrymen—sometimes at the cost of their lives. Protesters breaking into the Benghazi army base found 15 officers shot dead, apparently for refusing orders to open fire. Using bulldozers looted from foreign companies working in Libya, protesters raided their vast armouries. The March 28th base, east of Tobruk, was littered with open safes, gas-masks, helmets, cardboard boxes of ammunition (stamped “Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”) and Russian explosives. At al-Hisha and other bases near Beida, youths captured tanks and anti-aircraft guns and turned them on the few bases manned by katibas—literally brigades, but more closely resembling militias—flown in from Tripoli.

After four days of fighting, some 300 fighters at Abraq air base—the regime's last stronghold in the east, and a supply-point for reinforcements—fell to the opposition. Other opposition forces have reportedly pushed to Ajdabiya, west of Benghazi; and a turncoat colonel said clashes had erupted between tribal forces in Sirte, in the heartland of Mr Qaddafi's tribe.

Freedom and chaos

To a man, Cyrenaica's new landlords insist they are the launchpad for a countrywide liberation, with Tripoli as the capital, and not a separatist movement. Delegates to the new assembly paint Libya's future as a liberal parliamentary democracy, and have decked Beida's parliament building in portraits of King Idris and his tricolour. Lawyers from Tobruk and Benghazi claim to be running civilian committees, and have called for the restoration of the 1952 constitution, amended to uphold a multi-party republic. But the hold of the lawyers seems uncertain in Benghazi. The royal tricolour—which sprouts on lampposts across Beida—is a rarity, as if people are uncertain which way the tide of history will go, and though the police have finally left their posts, they have not helped the civilian leadership fill the resulting vacuum, apparently for fear of appearing in public.

And not all are so nostalgic for rule by lawyers. Though the protests began peacefully, they owe their success in Libya's east as much to victorious fighters as people power. Youths celebrate by shooting heavy weapons, as well as honking horns. And having defected early in the uprising, army units, too, will claim their stake in the new order. A secret ten-man military committee has been formed, says its spokesman, Colonel Hamid Sanussi, and has recalled forces to their bases, he says. The military committee is also raising a Martyrs' Brigade, which promises to marshal an estimated 50,000 armed youths if Cyrenaica needs to defend itself.

How many will join that brigade is unclear. But almost everyone has either been tortured and imprisoned, or has a close relative who has, and has scores to settle as well as stories to tell. After the mass looting of army bases, they are also armed. “Under Qaddafi, carrying weapons was banned. Now everyone does it,” says the justice minister.

Thanks to the ransacking of army bases, others have also acquired the means to resist. Jihadist groups have kept a low profile. Their previous armed uprisings were a reaction to suppression, says a lawyer who claims that the assembly remains committed to a separation of religion and state. But Beida is also the seat of the Sanusi, a Sufi order founded by an Algerian mendicant in 1837, which subsequently waged a jihad against Italian rule, and gave birth to the monarchy. They too may contend for a place in the new order.

Blaming outsiders

Although the roots of the uprising are internal, Cyrenaica's opposition is disgusted at the perceived lack of external support. “They care more about oil than our blood,” says a Tobruk history teacher.

Feeding their grievances is an ingrained resentment of foreigners that verges on xenophobia. The easterners see Western contractors reaping the benefits of their oil wealth to the tune of millions of dollars, while propping up the regime in return. And although a third of Libyans are jobless, 1.2m Egyptians and hundreds of thousands of other migrant workers have found work in Libya—the result of Mr Qaddafi's aborted attempts at African and Arab unity. Among the spray-painted graffiti in Beida, some denounce foreign workers and call Mr Qaddafi a Jew.

Migrant workers fleeing to Egypt reported scenes of mayhem as looters stormed their compounds, unprotected because the regime banned private security guards. An Egyptian accountant described how sword-wielding youths drove off in his company cars. A British project manager building an extension to Darna's university reported that youths arrived with a dozen trucks to cart away the site's 80 computers and other hardware, before burning his pre-fab to the ground.

Libyan oil-industry operators are now threatening to destroy pipelines, and cut supplies to Europe, if European states fail to intervene to end Mr Qaddafi's rule. Workers at Brega, one of Libya's five ports used by tankers, stopped work on Monday, said Mansour Saleh, a manager at a Tobruk-based oil company who oversees the pumping of 300,000 barrels a day. “If that doesn't make them act against the tyrant,” he added. “We'll destroy the wells.” But on the evidence of his speech from Bab al-Aziziya, Mr Qaddafi will not be tormenting them much longer.