My Blog Space News: Special report from Libya: How NATO's toppling of Gaddafi has turned to disaster

By Ruth Sherlock Saturday 14 March 2015

The country that fought for freedom is falling back into factionalism and bloodshed

Tears rolled down Khadija’s cheeks as the 17-seater plane – the whirr of its propellers deafening in the cabin – began its descent into the capital of a country crippled by war. The hope she’d felt of a better future for Libya after the ousting of dictator Col Muammar Gaddafi had long soured into resentment and fear. Now she was flying back into her homeland from exile. An uncle had been killed and she needed to attend his funeral.
“It wasn’t meant to be like this,” she said. “We have lost our dignity. We fought Gaddafi so that we could speak freely. Now it’s the same as before, but with less security.”
Many of her countrymen agree with her. Since the end of the 2011 NATO-backed war that toppled Gaddafi, Libya has fragmented – with two rival governments and their allied armed gangs vying for power. Nascent democracy has been supplanted by a system of repression and fear. Militias have become the most powerful players in a country devoid of the rule of law, of a national army or a police force. Anyone opposing them, be they politician or civilian, is silenced – often at gunpoint.
A policeman from the Nawasi brigade questions a motorist in Tripoli's Martyr's Square (Sam Tarling/The Telegraph)
In the new Libya, just as in the old, speaking out against those wielding power is enough see you threatened, or killed. There was, many admit, a “golden age” in the months immediately after the end of Gaddafi’s 40-year-rule. But it was not long before factionalism began to spin out of control. Now that brief, optimistic interregnum is spoken of nostalgically, as thought it were a distant era.
In fact it was only three years ago, in 2012, that Libyans rushed to the polls to vote for their first democratically elected government. Newspapers proliferated. Misrata, Libya’s merchant second city, had 23. In the conference halls of five-star hotels, wise men gathered to debate the finer details of the country’s new constitution. But when the business of governing began in earnest, things began to go wrong.
It had taken a war of eight months to remove a tyrant, but it soon became clear that the mentality of the people subjugated to his rule would need much longer to change. With no established social base for democracy, Libya’s new rulers resorted to the politics of old. Corruption became worse even than during Gaddafi’s regime, as every politician secured his seat with nepotism and patronage. “Every time a new prime minister arrived, he sacked the staff across departments and institutions and brought in his own people,” said Mohsen Derregia, the former head of the Libyan Investment Authority, the body managing the country’s $65 billion sovereign wealth fund. “In four years LIA had six chairmen. Barely had you learnt to do the job than you were moved on.”
Libya’s oil-rich economy began to founder. Under a succession of weak governments, and with few other job opportunities, fighting groups formed to oust Gaddafi refused to disband. Instead, each accused the other of secretly being Gaddafi loyalists, and gunfights broke out once again as they battled for control of key public facilities.
In Tripoli the fighting between militias from Misrata and the mountain town of Zintan, saw hundreds of people killed. Their fight for Tripoli’s international airport ended with the terminal burned to the ground. Rows of planes, some gutted by fire, others riddled with bullet holes and with bits of their wings broken off, stand abandoned on the closed runway, in silent testimony to the chaos.
The wreckage of what was once the departure lounge at Tripoli International Airport, Libya
With everyone keen to stake their claim to wealth and power in the new Libya, and to prove their involvement in the revolution that toppled the old, the number of militiamen burgeoned from the estimated 40,000 fighters during the 2011 war, to 160,000. In their midst, Islamic extremists began to thrive. Ansar Sharia, the hard-line jihadi group accused of killing US ambassador Chris Stevens, grew in strength. Facebook, once a platform for opponents of Gaddafi to arrange protests, became a tool of repression.
“Last year I received death threats after I wrote a public post on Facebook, criticising the fighting between militias,” said one young resident of Misrata, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. “I hate what is happening here. Why are they doing this? How can they raise a weapon against men who were their brothers in the revolution?
The eastern city of Benghazi, the “capital of the revolution”, where the first anti-Gaddafi protests took place in 2011, became a murky, dangerous place. Some estimates suggest 200 people have been assassinated. The dead include liberals and campaigners, as well as victims of federalists who want to separate the east from the west.
Last August, Libya Dawn, a coalition of militias including Islamists, seized control of the capital, Tripoli, sending those in parliament fleeing to Tobruk. There the parliamentarians allied themselves with Khalifa Haftar, a former general in Gaddafi’s army who once worked for the CIA. Gathering up his own broad coalition, which includes a large number of soldiers from the old regime, Haftar has declared war on Libya Dawn – which he dismissed as a band of terrorists. As the anarchy in Libya resolves into these two warring factions, freedom of speech is being pushed ever further underground.
Young men play table football in Martyr Square (Sam Tarling/The Telegraph)
By day, a veneer of normality lacquers the capital. Shops, including international brand names such as Mango, and Marks and Spencer are open. Traffic is gridlocked. Cosmopolitan Libyan girls gossip over cappuccinos in one of the city’s many Costa Coffee shops. Men in plain clothes drive police cars, and soldiers in pick-up trucks wearing mismatched uniforms enforce the law. “We are here for security,” said Captain Murad, 40, the commander of the Nawasi brigade, one of the biggest militias under Libya Dawn in Tripoli. “Our men police the streets. We stop crime.”
Policemen belonging to the Nawasi brigade conduct traffic searches in Tripoli's Martyr's Square (Sam Tarling/The Telegraph)
On one recent Thursday night – the start of the weekend in Libya – I joined the Nawasi brigade on patrol. Wearing green masks to hide their faces, the militiamen set up flying checkpoints. They pulled over cars without licence plates to check if they were stolen. They searched the seats and boots for drugs.
All very unobjectionable. But residents repeatedly told me that, as well as stopping petty crime, militias use their power to destroy opponents. Last month in Tripoli, the body of Intissar Hassairi, a female political activist, was found in the boot of her car. Government prosecutors in Tripoli told me she had been killed in a “simple family dispute”. This may yet be the case. But in the days after her murder, the policeman who took fingerprints at the scene also disappeared. Ms Hassairi’s boyfriend fled the country. A friend told me her family was too afraid to talk.
Women look in the window of a dress shop in Tripoli (Sam Tarling/The Telegraph)
A pervasive sense of fear is barely concealed below the surface in Libya today.
“Are you sure no one followed you?” asked Murad, a civil rights activist, looking nervously around the café in Tripoli. Lighting a cigarette, the young man sighed. “Freedom of speech is the big fear for Libyan Dawn. Mind you, if I was on the other side [in east Libya] I’d be scared of the militias there, too.” Murad, who spoke using a pseudonym, explained how he had been part of a pro-democracy group that since 2012 had been encouraging fighting factions to settle debate through the ballot box.
After the outbreak of hostilities between Haftar and Libya Dawn, however, his work became impossible. “If you criticised Dawn they accused you of being with Haftar,” he said. And vice versa.
Such chaos, the ever-present threats, have driven thousands into exile. Looking nervously through the window of the plane bringing her home for her uncle’s funeral, Khadija is one of them. She fled Libya in 2013. Many of Murad’s colleagues have gone too, forced out by the factionalism and gangsterism that has brought their country to the brink of civil war.
“These people, they say they are doing this to keep us safe and to protect the revolution against Gaddafi supporters,” said Murad. “But it’s been four years. Gaddafi is over. This is about everyone getting as much money as they can. The options now are military rule, like before – or chaos. I am at the point where I just want to have a stable country. Democracy just feels too far beyond our reach.”