Libya's Election

[Sheilbh]

Libya's democratic election is a subject I didn't think I'd ever be reading about:

Libya's election
The right direction
Despite uncertainty and occasional violence, a hopeful election beckons
Jun 30th 2012 | TRIPOLI | from the print edition

ALL being well, Libyans will go to the polls on July 7th, less than nine months after Muammar Qaddafi's death, to elect a national congress that will in turn choose a government and a committee to draft a constitution that should be ready in another four months. Next year Libyans will elect a full-blown parliament under the new rules. Despite outbreaks of violence, especially on the country's wilder fringes, plus the lingering menace of militias that are loth to submit to a central authority, the democratic process has been muddling along in the right direction.

"No one has a clue who will win," says a diplomat. According to the election commission, 142 parties have been registered and 83% of the 3m-plus Libyans eligible to vote have put their names on the roll, from a population of around 6m. Eighty members of the 200-seat congress will be chosen from party lists, and the other 120 will be elected as individuals, so the ideological and religious flavour of the legislative body may not be clear for some time after the election. Tribal and city allegiances will play a part in the make-up of what will probably be a coalition government.

Broadly speaking, three main trends are competing. A group of secular-minded modernists, led by Mahmoud Jibril and Ali Tarhouni, who served respectively as de facto prime minister and finance-and-oil minister in the immediate post-Qaddafi administration, is bidding for the centre ground under the banner of the National Forces' Alliance. Some Libyans mistrust Mr Jibril, since he served as Qaddafi's economy minister before turning belatedly against him. And relations between Mr Jibril and Mr Tarhouni, a professor who used to teach in Seattle, have been scratchy.

Then there is the National Salvation Front, a group that was set up in opposition to Qaddafi in the early 1980s, was forced abroad, and is led by a band of ageing exiles. Most observers say they have failed to make a mark since their return, but in the absence of professional pollsters it is almost impossible to measure party or personal popularity in the run-up to the election. Several parties also back a return of the monarchy, which was overthrown by Qaddafi in 1969.

And then there are the Islamists, who cover a wide spectrum. If the number and glitziness of posters is anything to go by, el-Watan would win in a landslide. It is led by Abdel Hakim Belhaj, once head of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, widely regarded as being close to al-Qaeda. Mr Belhaj, who commanded a Tripoli militia in the assault against Qaddafi's regime in its final days and now disavows his earlier jihadist views, is suing the British government for its alleged complicity in "rendering" him to the colonel's security services in 2004, when Western governments were trying to bring the Libyan regime in from the cold. Hundreds of Mr Belhaj's posters, showing smiling voters, dominate the main roads of the capital, vastly outnumbering those of his opponents. But his rivals point out derisively that the maroon-and-white colours of his posters match those of the flag of Qatar, generally seen as his chief sponsor. Indeed, many Libyans complain about Qatar's apparently burgeoning influence.

If recent elections elsewhere in the Arab world are a guide, the Islamist group closest to the Muslim Brotherhood should have a good chance. This is the Justice and Development party, a studiously moderate lot, led by Muhammad Suwan, a former inmate of Qaddafi's jails. But there is a plethora of other Islamist parties, some of them a lot more extreme, so the Islamist vote may be split.

Even as the electoral process steadily advances, worries persist about insecurity, attitudes to the law, and tendencies to flout the central authority. Although Libya's three main cities—Tripoli in the west, Benghazi in the east and Misrata in the coastal middle—are largely peaceful, fighting still often breaks out on the fringes, in places such as Zwara near the border with Tunisia, in the citadel of Zintan, in Beni Walid south-east of Tripoli, and in the southern desert towns of Sebha and Kufra.

Militias from Misrata and Zintan are particularly loth to come under central control. In an effort to keep them happy, the ministries of defence and interior were allotted to their representatives in the transitional government that is due soon to be dissolved. The Misratans jealously guard their autonomy, to the extent that visitors cannot enter their city without permission. In a recent spat an aggrieved militia from Tarhouna, 64km (40 miles) south-east of Tripoli, briefly closed the capital's airport. On June 26th a militia near Ras Lanuf, an oil-refinery town, blocked the main coastal road, demanding more seats for easterners in the national congress.

Benghazi, Libya's second city, also likes to flex its muscle. Islamist extremists seem particularly active in the east, including such towns as Derna and Tobruk, though their numbers may be exaggerated. The American and Tunisian consulates and the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Benghazi have recently been attacked, as have convoys in which the British ambassador and the UN special representative were travelling on separate occasions. Commonwealth war cemeteries have twice been desecrated.

But the locals seem keen to keep the extremists at bay. When a convoy of scores of armed jeeps sporting the black flag signalling sympathy for al-Qaeda recently put on a show of strength in Benghazi's courthouse square, where Libya's revolution began in February last year, thousands of young people, summoned to oppose them by Facebook and text messages, poured into the square and forced them to leave.

Building respect for the law, after 42 years of Qaddafi's bizarre rule, will be the hardest task. Hundreds of pro-Qaddafi prisoners (some say more) are still in the hands of militias, who have also recently arrested an Australian lawyer from the International Criminal Court at The Hague after she had come to visit Saif Qaddafi, the colonel's son, who is held in Zintan. The new government will have to act fast to tackle such judicial shortcomings if the country is to be put firmly on a path to the rule of law. A peaceful election would be a giant first step.

[Tamas]

so have they disbanded the gangs of the local lords then?

[Crazy_Ivan80]

so have they disbanded the gangs of the local lords then?

iirc, no.

Afghanistan the sequel?

[jimmy olsen]

Lets talk about the Mexican election instead.

$37.50 gift cards!

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12570126-mexicos-president-elect-shrugs-off-claims-of-vast-vote-buying-coercion-in-election?lite

[KRonn]

I have a wait and see attitude on Libya, same with Egypt. I don't expect a western style democracy, but I fear they'll go with something closer to a theocracy or a Iranian type government than anything western. I'll remain hopeful that they don't want something like in Iran though.

[Jacob]

Interesting times in Libya. Let's hope it works out better than Egypt.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting times in Libya. Let's hope it works out better than Egypt.

Jury's still out on Egypt.

The new President, I think, made a wonderfully promising start.  The military are dominant but they've kind of got a Lear-ish situation going on.  It's difficult to resist the charisma of office, the footage of Tantawi saluting a Muslim Brotherhood President is striking - as was the presence of anti-SCAF chants at official events.  Similarly Morsi was the Brotherhood's back up candidate.  It'll be interesting to see if his power within the organisation shifts to reflect the power of office - as opposed to, say, Shater.

Similarly the military expressly wrote into the constitution that the President would swear the oath of office in front of the Constitutional Court.  Morsi swore it, repeatedly.  First he went to Tahrir Square and said he drew his legitimacy from the people and the revolution.  Then he went to swear in front of the dissolved MPs.  Then he went to the Constitutional Court and, I believe, refused to allow the cameras show him swear in there.

Other touches have shown promising hints.  He's suggested he'll appoint a Christian and a woman as his Vice-Presidents, similarly he keeps on emphasising the 'civil, democratic' nature of the state.

I mean he is still ultra-conservative and the MB are still a very strongly Islamist group.  The military is still too strong.  But the next stage of Egypt's revolution - the constitution writing - is only just beginning.  Things are still in balance but I think the pessimism can be overplayed.

[sbr]

Lets talk about the Mexican election instead.

$37.50 gift cards!

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12570126-mexicos-president-elect-shrugs-off-claims-of-vast-vote-buying-coercion-in-election?lite

What the fuck.  You start a new thread on every little fucking that that ever happens in this world, or in space, and now you try to hijack someone else's thread.

[citizen k]

LIBYA MAY HOLD BIGGEST SURPRISE OF ARAB SPRING
Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- In the years that I covered the Middle East, Libya was always kind of the crazy neighbor. The people weren't funny like the Egyptians, they weren't beautiful like the original Arabs of the Arabian peninsula, and if they knew how to gracefully sail boats like the Tunisians, surely they never showed it.

Then when the glassy-eyed Moammar Gadhafi left the desert tent in which he had been raised in the vast expanses of Cyrenaica and Tripoli and ruled over Libya for 42 dark years, the country became even crazier.

In my interview with Gadhafi in 1973, at midnight in his office, I was initially unable to get him to say much of anything interesting. He just stared with that strange, sleepy look of his. Finally, out of desperation, I asked him how he saw Libya's presence in the world.

"Libya," he said with dark enthusiasm, "is in a dark forest surrounded by howling wolves."

So, as this country of only 6 million souls sitting on vast oil wealth has tried to clean house over the last year, there was honestly little reason to expect much from them. There was nothing in their past to say to the world that, hey, while the Egyptians are being cheated again by their military and the Syrians are tearing one another limb from limb, the Libyans might actually do the best.

And yet, that is what has happened. At least as of this writing, the Libyan elections -- not for a president, but for a 200-seat parliament that will form the new government -- were the best so far in the Arab world. Turnout for voting in most cities and towns was between 60 and 70 percent, and it appears that the liberal democratic political leader, former Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, has led his party to victory.

It also appears at this moment that history's man out, Libya, has led the outbreak against the Islamic wave that crashed across Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco in the aftermath of their "Arab springs," most elections bringing the old Muslim Brotherhood to power. In Libya, the two Islamic parties did not come near Jibril and his party.

Part of this important development is due to the repression that Gadhafi, who ruled from a crazy quilt of ideologies incorporating Marxism, desert faith and, above all, Gadhafiism, heaped upon the Islamists. After the Mujahedeen's war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the American arms suppliers left the Afghans in a Central Asian lurch, the Muslim terrorists poured across the middle east into North Africa to the Maghreb, but then skipped over Libya and regrouped mainly in Algeria, where they massacred some 200,000 innocent villagers.

In Libya, in fact, one of the rebellious phrases used during these elections was: "Do the radical Islamists think they are more Muslim than we are?"

In effect, Libya has had the advantage in this election -- and perhaps in this entire period of Middle Eastern history -- because it has not had Islamic political parties already ensconced in the fabric of the country, and it has not had institutions already in place that it had to fight. The only institution that survived Gadhafi's takeover in 1969, Libyans joke, was his secret police.

As The New York Times wrote in a recent piece: "Libyans were inventing a new nation virtually from scratch."

In fact, across the worlds-within-worlds that span the globe today, it has often been those who could start from scratch who moved the fastest toward development -- from the Persian Gulf states, to Oman, to Singapore, to South Korea, to Tunisia and many more. And now, Libya?

So it would seem that the party and loyalists of Mahmoud Jibril, who was interim prime minister during this last year and therefore cannot run immediately again now, will win this round. This would be good for the Libyans and good for the West.

Jibril is a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also taught. He is a devout Muslim, but one who insists that "this great religion cannot be used for political purposes. Islam is much bigger than that." His party, the Alliance of National Forces, is one of several secular parties, the other one of note being the National Front party, which organized several failed attempts to assassinate Gadhafi.

So Libya may unwittingly show us one way for hitherto backward countries to develop. It has oil and riches in all that sand, not to speak of some breathtaking Roman ruins, such as Leptis Magna. Finally, what interests me, too, as I see the amazing pictures of Libyans smiling and voting, celebrating and shooting off guns, is that the Libyans today are attractive people. The women are often beautiful and the men, in contrast to 1969, are more sophisticated and worldly.

[Jacob]

Similarly the military expressly wrote into the constitution that the President would swear the oath of office in front of the Constitutional Court.  Morsi swore it, repeatedly.  First he went to Tahrir Square and said he drew his legitimacy from the people and the revolution.  Then he went to swear in front of the dissolved MPs.  Then he went to the Constitutional Court and, I believe, refused to allow the cameras show him swear in there.

Well played on his part.

Other touches have shown promising hints.  He's suggested he'll appoint a Christian and a woman as his Vice-Presidents, similarly he keeps on emphasising the 'civil, democratic' nature of the state.

I mean he is still ultra-conservative and the MB are still a very strongly Islamist group.  The military is still too strong.  But the next stage of Egypt's revolution - the constitution writing - is only just beginning.  Things are still in balance but I think the pessimism can be overplayed.

That does sound promising.

[Eddie Teach]

Lets talk about the Mexican election instead.

$37.50 gift cards!

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/05/12570126-mexicos-president-elect-shrugs-off-claims-of-vast-vote-buying-coercion-in-election?lite

What the fuck.  You start a new thread on every little fucking that that ever happens in this world, or in space, and now you try to hijack someone else's thread.

You complain about him starting lots of threads, and now you complain about him posting stories in loosely related threads. Nobody ever wins. 

[Sheilbh]

That does sound promising.

It is.  Both sides can be hugely overdone and often are.  My own view is that this is still, even for Egypt, the most hopeful time in the history of modern Arab states and that we, in the West, should be there to help as much as we're wanted.

Incidentally, a very helpful approach has been John McCain's.  He's spent a lot of time getting to know senior Muslim Brothers in Egypt and was in Libya during their election. 

Interesting times in Libya.

I'd read (and posted) a couple of articles that suggested Libya might not work out for the Islamists because almost everyone in Libya is pretty devout and part of the same Sufi sect.  But at the same time I think everyone expected the federalists to do better.  The truth is there's almost no-one writing who really knows anything about Libya.

It's like all of those 'China experts' in the UK and US who don't even speak Mandarin.  In the case of Libya there's been no in country research or academic exchanges in over 40 years.  The truth is that almost no-one in the West really knows anything about Libyan society after Gadaffi.  So it's probably worth taking everything with a pinch of salt.  Having said that the election does seem positive.

[CountDeMoney]

It's like all of those 'China experts' in the UK and US who don't even speak Mandarin.

I don't need to speak their filthy pig latin to know what they're up to.