The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  “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 Libyans 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 middleaged 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 Benghazi. 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 w
ith 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.)

  Many of the former militiamen appear as mentally battered as the buildings they fought for in the eight months of bloodshed. “They returned from the front line, from war, to find no one wanted them,” I was told by a psychiatrist who ran a soup kitchen on the front. “They thought they were heroes, and were treated as troublemakers. That’s why they act so boisterously and aggressively. That’s why they say Libya needs another revolution.”

  Their capacity for being spoilers is substantial, whether of the electoral process or the system of government. “Revolutionaries have to lead the country of the revolution,” says Hussein bin Ahmed, an oil engineer turned general coordinator for preventative security, who acted as host for the militias’ congress in his headquarters. In their concluding session, delegates resolved not to hand over weapons “to those who killed us”—that is, the NTC’s formal army, which they see as recruited from old regime forces—and some delegates drew up plans for a united militia to protect the revolution.

  Some at least seemed prepared to use force to defend their powers. When the UN’s Ian Martin arrived outside an Interior Ministry office in Benghazi to discuss plans for security sector reform, someone hurled a gelignite stick under his armored car. Two NTC members have been kidnapped for supporting—in view of widespread fraud—the cancellation by the council of handouts for militiamen. On May 8, two hundred militiamen opened fire on the prime minister’s Tripoli office with anti-tank guns, forcing the unfortunate al-Keib to briefly take flight.

  Against such pressures, there are signs that the NTC is buckling. It has agreed to establish a Patriotism and Integrity Commission, a star chamber for de-Qaddafization, which will vet all appointments from officials to electoral candidates. Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, a Benghazi lawyer who announced the NTC’s formation in the early days of the uprising, lost his NTC post amid accusations of being an associate of Qaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam. Some want Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Qaddafi’s justice minister who replaced him, and his first prime minister, Mahmoud Jibreel, another of Seif’s appointees, to suffer a similar fate.

  More sober voices caution that the root-and-branch elimination of all remnants of the old civil service and security forces will precipitate the country’s collapse, as happened for some years in Iraq. A poet I met at the Amazigh rally in Tripoli told me, “Everyone blames the vestiges of the old order for their woes, as if they had no association with it. But the truth is we were all complicit. We had to survive.” A Salafi car dealer, who spent years in Qaddafi’s torture chamber of Bu Salim and has a job in the Interior Ministry, warns of repeating the mistakes of France’s postrevolutionary reign of terror. Quoting an eighteenth-century revolutionary who was subsequently guillotined, he warns, “Like Saturn, the revolution is devouring its children.” And then he adds, “A small country cannot afford such a loss of qualified staff.”

  —June 21, 2012

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ROBERT B. SILVERS and the late Barbara Epstein are founding editors of The New York Review of Books, which this year celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its first issue in 1963. Before he was a co-founder of The New York Review, Mr. Silvers was Paris editor of The Paris Review and then associate editor of Harper’s magazine. In 2006, together with co-editor Barbara Epstein, Mr. Silvers was recognized by the National Book Foundation with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. In 2012 he was awarded an inaugural New York City Literary Honor by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his contributions to the literary life of the city. He has edited several books for The New York Review.

  CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE has written widely on political developments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Among his books are In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, Rebel’s Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten People, and The Struggle for Iran.

  MISCHA BERLINSKI lives in Rome. His first novel, Fieldwork, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

  CAROLINE BLACKWOOD (1931–1996) was an Anglo-Irish writer. Among her books are the novels Great Granny Webster and Corrigan; On the Perimeter, an account of the women’s anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common; and The Last of the Duchess, about the final years of the Duchess of Windsor.

  IAN BURUMA is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. Educated in Japan and the Netherlands, Buruma has written extensively on East Asian literature and history and, more recently, on globalization. His books include Murderer in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, and the novel The China Lover.

  MARK DANNER is an American journalist and scholar of American foreign policy. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College. Danner’s books include The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War; and Torture and Truth (New York Review Books).

  JOAN DIDION is an American novelist and critic. She has received the National Book Award and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Among Didion’s novels are Play It As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer; her nonfiction works include Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Miami, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Blue Nights.

  ROSEMARY DINNAGE is a British essayist, playwright, and literary critic. Her books include One to One: Experiences of Psychotherapy, Annie Besant, Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, and the one-act play The Ruffian on the Stair.

  AMOS ELON (1926–2009) was an Israeli journalist, historian, and essayist. Born in Vienna, he emigrated in 1933 to Palestine; he devoted much of his career to the history of European Jewry and of Zionism. His final book was The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933.

  HELEN EPSTEIN is an American writer and scholar of public health. She has devoted much of her career to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the developing world. The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa recounts her experiences as a medical researcher in Uganda in the early 1990s.

  JONATHAN FREEDLAND is a British journalist. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian and a monthly article for The Jewish Chronicle. Freedland is the author of Bring Home the Revolution: How Britain Can Live the American Dream and Jacob’s Gift, as well as numerous best-selling thrillers published under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

  TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Among his books are The Magic Lantern, an eyewitness account of the velvet revolutions of 1989, and Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.

  NADINE GORDIMER is a South African writer and political activist. An unwavering critic of racial and economic injustice in her homeland, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Her novels include Burger’s Daughter, The Conservationist, and No Time Like the Present.

  ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO is a Mexican journalist. She has written extensively on Latin American culture and politics for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2001 Guillermoprieto received a George Polk Award for the anthology Looking for History. Among her other books are Samba, an account of her time at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro, and Dancing with Cuba, a memoir of a year spent in Cuba.

  ELIZABETH HARDWICK (1916–2007) was a literary critic and co-founder of The New York Review of Books. Among her works are Sight-Readings, American Fictions, Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays, Seduction and Betrayal, Herman Melville, and the novel Sleepless Nights.

  NATALYA VIKTOROVNA HESSE was a longstanding friend of Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov. Before emigrating to the United States in 1984, she visited Bonner in Moscow and Sakharov under house arrest in Gorky.

  TIM JUDAH is a British journalist. He reports on the Balkan
s for The Economist. Judah is the author of numerous books about the region, including The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia and Kosovo: War and Revenge.

  RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI (1932–2007) was a Polish essayist, journalist, and poet. Among his translated works are The Soccer War, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Travels with Herodotus, and Shah of Shahs.

  AVISHAI MARGALIT is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include The Decent Society and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises.

  MARY MCCARTHY (1912–1989) was the author of the novels The Group, The Groves of Academe, and Birds of America; among her nonfiction books are Venice Observed, The Stones of Florence, Vietnam, and the autobiographies Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and How I Grew. A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays, a collection of her literary, cultural, and political writings, was published in 2002 by New York Review Books.

  V. S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932 and emigrated to England in 1950, after winning a scholarship to University College, Oxford. Among his novels are A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and In a Free State. Naipaul has also written several nonfiction works based on his travels, including India: A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. He was knighted in 1990 and in 2001 received the Nobel Prize in Literature.