The birth of free Libya

After a six-month struggle, Libya’s rebels have seized power. We look at Tripoli in rebel hands and, in a second article, at the new people now in control

WESTERN governments could hardly have hoped for a better finale. Libyans themselves finished off the regime’s reign in the capital, enabling NATO to retreat to the wings and refute the last flourish of the colonel’s spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, delivered on a crackly radio, that the conquest was the work of imperialism. Liberation came from the west, not the east, allaying Tripoli’s fears of a Benghazi takeover. The doomsday scenarios of a bloody civil war in the streets proved mercifully overblown.

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had fled his headquarters at Bab al-Aziziya. Rebels, denied their ultimate prize of his head, made do with kicking a gold-plated replica they found in the grounds, posing on the iconic statue of a fist grasping an American fighter jet (see picture) and torching his ceremonial tent. The last big battle occurred on the highway between Zawiya and Tripoli. The city itself escaped largely unscarred, the glass blocks housing the capital’s banks continuing to gleam unshattered. Rebel radio issued incessant calls against looting government buildings (they are your buildings, said the announcer, to the soothing strains of a twangy southern guitar), against harming captured prisoners and, optimistically in a capital now awash with arms of all kinds, against using guns to settle old scores.

After Tripoli most other fronts appeared to crumble. Rebel forces from the east overcame loyalist fighters who had hemmed them in for months outside Brega and pushed on to Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad, whose tribesmen had hitherto remained loyal. Sirte, the stronghold of Colonel Qaddafi’s tribe on the coast, continued to stay the eastern advance to the capital. But loyalist forces are squeezed in a receding central buffer from Sirte on the coast to Sebha in the desert. Even in Sebha, the ancestral home of Abdullah el-Sanussi, the bully who headed the regime’s intelligence, rebels attempted an uprising, but not in sufficient numbers to dislodge the Megraha, one of the last loyal tribes.

But at least for now the Tripolitans are not cheering all that much. In striking contrast to the east, scenes of elation were muted. Girls in pretty dresses and women in black chadors waved to the revolutionaries from the rooftops, egging them on to Colonel Qaddafi’s compound. News of its fall induced a surfeit of celebratory gunfire. For the most part, however, Tripolitans marked the exodus of their leader, after four decades of tyranny, by staying indoors. There were no mass prayers of thanks in Green Square. The Qatari TV station, Al Jazeera, which has acted for much of the uprising as the rebels’ propaganda arm, had shown huge crowds in Benghazi. In Tripoli it made do with close-ups of single flag-wavers.

There were, of course, mitigating circumstances. Power cuts plunged the city into darkness, hampering efforts to reclaim the streets. Rumours spread through town that the colonel had mined Green Square in order to go out with a final bang. And such is the desperate shortage of petrol that only a few cars cruised the town honking their claxons. Random fighting continued in pockets, with loyalist forces dug in around the city’s southern outskirts.

Though relatively few people went out to celebrate, Tripolitans by the hundred plundered the arms depots. No sooner had news of Bab al-Aziziya’s seizure spread, and the faithful broken their fast, than the adventurous headed out to the vast warehouse at the Airport Road base, whose gates the colonel’s men had left open in the final hours of their rule. Dentists jostled with high-school children to haul Kalashnikovs off the shelves. Young teens experimented with newly acquired military knives to relieve bystanders of their wallets. By day, the streets were deserted.

Colonel Qaddafi called his withdrawal tactical. It looked more like a whoosh, particularly given the success of his initial counter-attack. Deprived by NATO of the air power required to control his huge country, he ran out of steam to fight on multiple fronts. Rebel control of the border at Tobruk in the east and Wazin in the Nafusa mountains bordering Tunisia gave the militia unbroken supply lines, while the colonel’s lines began to fragment.

Armed Berbers, apparently equipped by Qatar with sophisticated tank-piercing bullets and backed by special forces from Western powers as well as from Jordan (mysterious English-accented men who strongly resemble special forces have been spotted in the western mountains as well as in Misrata helping to co-ordinate NATO’s bombardment with the rebel advance), swept down from the Nafusa mountains to break through the regime’s defences. Most of the Berbers were amateur fighters, but some had received at least cursory training. Nalut, tucked in the heart of the sun-caked mountains, served as a rear base, recruitment point and training ground for the Berbers and some dissidents from the coast.

Ruses, last stands and victory

The turning-point for Tripoli came on August 21st, when NATO fighter-jets bombarded a base at the eastern edge of Zawiya just as rebels consolidated their control. As loyalist forces fled the base, rebels restocked and chased after them. Simultaneously, loyalist brigades in Colonel Qaddafi’s headquarters at Bab al-Aziziya reportedly abandoned their positions, apparently retreating south to Sebha and Jufra in the Sahara. They may hope to regroup out of rebel reach, import fresh mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa and perhaps make a last stand. The rebels’ reported capture of two of the colonel’s sons in hindsight may have been a loyalist ruse, to throw the rebellion off the scent while the ruling family planned its getaway.

Rebel fighters converging in armoured cars from Zawiya in the west and Misrata in the east quickly swept through the city from both sides. After a midday NATO bombardment, they punched their way through, meeting so little resistance that they feared at first that they had stumbled into a trap. In the final hours, Tripoli’s population, including many beneficiaries of the colonel’s rule, declared their allegiance to the rebels rather than be caught on the losing side.

Raiding the bases that loyalist brigades had abandoned, armed irregulars sprouted across the city, some sporting walkie-talkies and daubing rebel flags on walls. With remarkably few clashes, each neighbourhood and sometimes each alleyway erected and manned its own barricade. The more sophisticated were assembled from fridges, used missile pods and wrecked cars. Others were school-desks.

A chessboard king eluding checkmate, Colonel Qaddafi has begun retracing the finale of Saddam Hussein, the first of the Arab world’s tyrants to fall to regime change. For nine months the Iraqi leader issued insurgents with their orders from his hiding place, until first his sons and then he himself were hunted down. Though Colonel Qaddafi may seem in hindsight a paper tiger, such is the fear and dissimulation he has injected over four decades of misrule that he continues to cast a long shadow. His fighters fear the consequences of abandoning their posts, and many are still continuing to hold out in isolated places.

Meanwhile, the NTC broadcasts its hopeful pretensions for the future. The radio announcer unveils a vision of equality between men and women, rich and poor, east and west, and other traits of a constitutional Utopia. But as the plume of black smoke lifts from Bab al-Aziziya, tangible signs of leadership are nowhere to be found. The muezzins made a valiant effort to silence the (mainly) celebratory shooting by cautioning against wasting bullets, but to little effect.

The NTC can take some succour from spreading the eastern symbols of the rebellion westward. The rebel tricolour, revived from the Benghazi-based monarchy which predated Colonel Qaddafi, flies at every checkpoint, and someone has renamed a central highway after King Idris. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the council’s self-effacing leader, seems to enjoy wide acceptance and is credited by some rebels in Tripoli for having given the signal for them to rise up on August 20th. But many still question whether the NTC is up to the challenge.

The NTC’s endorsement of the erroneous reports that the colonel’s sons had been captured damaged its credibility and revealed that it had poor contacts on the ground. With no strong central regime for the time being, western Libya belongs to its self-reliant and armed local fighters who, having won power, may resent the efforts of besuited national councillors to recoup it. Self-reliance, too, will probably bolster clan, tribal and regional coping mechanisms, the very forces the council was formed to quell.

In Tripoli the cohesion that marked the conquest could unravel. Further complicating the prospects for central control, the police who once instilled terror have melted away. The doors of the prisons, as well as the armouries, have been flung open. Looted weapons and government pickups may keep the more lawless among Tripolitans occupied for some days, but the continued closure of shops, schools and workplaces is unsettling for many. Without a resumption of economic activity, not to say generous and rapid pay rises, people could become restless.Guns, not civilian politics, are currently determining Libya’s future, and could yet precipitate a squabble for the country’s tantalisingly rich resources. Most worryingly, Tripoli’s conquest has already exposed divisions between the mountain militia who led the fighting in the west and the civilians who joined in the final days. Some of the fighters from the mountains have remained in place in the capital to continue the offensive and to prevent the colonel carrying out his threat to dispatch thousands of supporters to the city, but some are already abandoning Tripoli in disgust. “Tripolitans are snakes,” says a Berber rebel fighter heading home with a cache of stolen weapons. “We fought for six months in the mountains, while they stayed in Tripoli and partied.” So self-serving are the capital’s people, he declared, that they carry a Qaddafi flag in one pocket and a rebel one in the other.

The National Council is hoping to get $2.5 billion from Qatar, perhaps before the end of Ramadan. This would be a start, at least. Despite diplomatic support for the NATO campaign, most Gulf countries remain wary of advertising the benefits of regime change to browbeaten populations. The task of proving that the Arab world without its dictators is a better place may yet be a tortuous struggle.