New rulers must embrace old enemies to unite the nation

MUAMMAR al-Gaddafi is dead, but the rump of his regime lives on – and remains the most intractable problem facing Libya’s new masters.

More than one rebel fighter remarked during the six-month war that Gaddafi himself never pulled a trigger, torched a home, or tortured a prisoner; the evil deeds that made him loathed and despised were performed by a security apparatus that, though deprived of its leader, remains very much in being.

And on show: last Friday armed Gaddafi supporters brazenly took to the streets of central Tripoli, waving his banner, the green flag, and starting a gun battle with government forces. Imagine that, a month after Berlin fell to the allies in 1945, Nazi stormtroopers staged such a protest and you have an idea of the scale of the problem facing the new regime.

Gaddafi, it is now clear, preferred to shelter among his own tribe in the coastal city of Sirte, rather than take his chances in the southern desert when Tripoli fell in the summer.

Just as clearly, the people of Sirte, his kin, rallied around to support him, one reason why the city held out for nearly two months after the fall of Libya’s capital.

Gaddafi might now be gone, but the clan loyalty of the people of Sirte, a city he built up from a fishing village and financed, will live on. Their opposition to the new government will only be sharpened by the death and destruction inflicted in a siege that has left much of the city in ruins.

Talk of Gaddafi loyalists mounting a guerrilla war, masterminded by the dictator’s surviving sons, is fanciful. The old regime cannot hope to win back all it has lost, against opponents who now control not just the entire country, but its stock of weapons.

But the old regime can mount a serious roadblock to the new. For 40 years, this apparatus ran the country with an iron hand; famously, the only organisation independent of the old regime was the boy scouts.

Now it is the old regime’s experts to whom the new government must turn for expertise on finance, on electricity generation and on the whole machinery of government. Libya’s western backers, principally Britain and France, are insisting on this, wanting to see no repeat of Iraq, in which “De-Baathification” saw the security forces fired from their jobs, only to create guerrilla armies to bring terror to Baghdad’s streets.

Instead, Libya’s new rulers are encouraged to embrace the old regime, leaving open the question of whether officials raised to run a dictatorship will be able to run a democracy.

Such an arrangement might work if Libya’s new leaders were united, but they very clearly are not.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the National Transitional Council, the recognised Libyan authority, is dominated by officials from Benghazi and eastern Libya.

The president, Abdul Mustafa Jalil, is from Beda, near Benghazi. The commander-in-chief of the NTC military council, General Suleiman Mahmood, is from Tobruk, and was chosen at least in part because he is from the same eastern tribe, the Obeidi, as that of his assassinated predecessor, Abdul Fatah Younes.

There are few places on either body for officials from the central and western parts of Libya, nor for commanders of the two most powerful armies, those of Misrata and the western Nafusa mountains.

Misratans, in particular, complain they are being excluded from power, accusing the NTC of keeping them as bit players in the new regime and even of excluding their fighters from reports on state-run television.

At the back of the minds of both Misratans and Nafusans is that it is all about the oil; the new government will soon get its hands on the oil production and on £100 billion-plus in overseas assets.

Ominously, both Misrata and Nafusa have kept large military garrisons holding large parts of the capital, Tripoli, and say they have no intention of withdrawing them any time soon.

The new government insists it will become more inclusive, but not yet. It confirmed yesterday that, with the fall of Sirte, the one-month countdown has begun to the announcement of a new cabinet.

This cabinet will have to manage the delicate task of including not just enough Misratans and Nafusans to keep their commanders happy, but also the various tribes and clans that either sat on the sidelines in the past war, such as the Warfalla tribe of Beni Walid, or actively opposed the rebels – notably the Gaddafis of Sirte.

Then it will have to embark on building a country from the bottom up, not just in terms of government, but in terms of law, education, healthcare and police.

All of this might yet be possible with a strong, charismatic leader at the helm. Sadly, Mr Jalil has so far left both boxes unticked.

He has credibility and respect across the country thanks to his time as Gaddafi’s former justice minister. But moral courage – he was one of the first revolutionaries to the barricades – is so far unmatched by political nous.

Nor has he managed to impose order on a dysfunctional cabinet.

Order will have to be imposed, and quickly, if the seething tensions of this war-torn country are not to slide into something worse.