Must it get worse before it gets better? I The Economist Page 1 of I

Economist

Libya

Must it get worse before it gets better?

The country is going through its roughest patch since Muammar Qaddafi’s

downfall two years ago

Sep 14th 2013 1 MISRATA AND TRIPOLI I From the print edition

“THE only road to paradise,” runs a joke doing if ., S p (,5

the rounds in the cafés of Tripoli, Libya’s V

iseafrontcapital, ‘‘is the one to-the ‘ kg‘. 1.

international airport.” Most Libyans. still revel g ‘A XI i,_

in the freedom and sense of possibility brought 3 ‘ g .I.

on by the NATO-backed war that ousted 4, V ” ‘I. :~ . V‘._pv_

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi two years ago. “Yet i S if if 7 ’ hi’ ” ’3‘ i A

before, when someone disappeared, you knew

they were with Qaddafi forces,” reminisces a rebel-turned-security man. “Now we have no

idea.” That was made clear earlier this month when the government denounced the kidnap of

the daughter of Abdullah al-Senussi, Qaddafi’s former spy chief, only to discover that one of

its own forces had nabbed her; she was freed a few days later.

Libya has hit its rockiest patch since Qaddafi’s demise. No one has managed to reassert full

authority over the tribes, regions and groups welded together under the colonel’s iron rule.

Institutions of state, absent under Qaddafi, have yet to take firm shape. In the past few weeks

the country’s key oil ports have been blockaded by disgruntled workers and militias.

Assassinations and carjackings are rife. Water and electricity have been cut off in Tripoli for

the past week. On September 11th a bomb was defused in Tripoli; another went off in

Benghazi, the cradle of the anti-Qaddafi revolt and the main city of the east.

Security is the biggest complaint. “A state at its most basic has a monopoly of force,” says

Anas al-Gomati, who runs Sadeq, a Libyan think-tank. “Here you can argue that the

government works for the militias.” The authorities, with Western help, are in the process of

building an army and police force which are supposed to take over from the militias on its

payroll, most notably the Supreme Security Committee (SSC), a collection of former rebels

which functions as a temporary police force, and the Libyan Shield, a group of Islamist

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/215 86312-country-going-through… 9/ 1 2/20]

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