Fayruz Abdulhadi writes: Libya has been an especially difficult place to live over the past few weeks. With a string of high profile assassinations, a jailbreak, and a series of sometimes thwarted car bomb attacks, there is plenty for Libyans to be exasperated by. Yet amidst the lawlessness of recent weeks, nothing has frustrated the Libyan streets more than the daily power outages, sometimes running up to an excruciating 16 hours at a time.

The government has offered explanations, from overconsumption in the summer months to lack of maintenance, a legacy underinvestment in the network, and even sabotage by Qaddafi loyalists. This may be post-Revolution Libya, but given the country’s vast riches, a lack of electricity is a problem that seems especially hard to explain away.

The country boasts some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves, substantial capabilities for natural gas production, $168 billion in foreign assets and an enviable 2000 km-plus stretch of coast on the Mediterranean. For all these assets, Libya (pop. 6.4 million) also has a relatively small number of mouths to feed. In other parts of the world, the combination of small population and ample natural resources has generally proven a surefire formula for success. Why does Libya fail to follow suit?

During Qaddafi’s reign, at the very least it was clear why infrastructure and public services were lacking: the Colonel and his cronies were visibly enriching themselves on the back of oil exports, leaving little of the country’s bounty for the average Mohammed to enjoy. Now that the Qaddafi family and their business associates are gone, however, the lack of public investment is more puzzling. In a nascent democracy, it is also far less tolerable.

Truth be told, conditions for ordinary Libyans have not improved in the two years since the Revolution. The hospitals are “unfit for human beings,” in the Health Minister’s own words. The schools are decrepit. Sewage spills pungently into the once-pristine Mediterranean shoreline. Even an internet connection is a serendipitous occurrence. For Libyans and observers alike, it is not immediately obvious why Libya should be in such dire straits.

Incompetence and widespread corruption top the list of popular explanations for the country’s current condition. Both are, to some extent, true. Emerging from dictatorship, public servants are equal parts unskilled and corruptible. But the reality is that even a competent and fully transparent government would find governing today’s Libya an impossible task. The reason is simple: despite its apparent wealth, Libya is broke. [Continue reading…]

Deutsche Welle: A bomb has exploded outside of Benghazi’s main hospital, according to Libyan officials, claiming several lives and injuring many more. The blast came one day after gunmen lifted a siege on government buildings.

A car bomb detonated outside of a hospital in Libya’s second city, Benghazi, on Monday. The death toll varied in initial reports.

Libya’s deputy interior minister, Abdullah Massoud told then news agency AFP at least 15 people were killed in the explosion. He cited a “preliminary toll.”

The blast “totally destroyed a restaurant and seriously damaged nearby buildlings,” Massoud added.

However, a health official speaking to the news agency Reuters gave a lower estimate of three fatalities, among them children.

The Daily Beast: Diplomatic missions here in the Libyan capital are observing the strictest security procedures following suspicions that the bombers behind last Tuesday’s blast at the French Embassy have rigged a second car with explosives and are hunting for another high-profile Western target.

Embassy protection teams and private security contractors working with foreign businessmen and nongovernmental organizations are on high alert, and the United Nations compound on the outskirts of Tripoli has introduced onerous security measures and placed severe restrictions on the movement of their diplomats.

The French Embassy wasn’t the only target on Tuesday—the second target was, according to diplomatic sources, the British Council, a government-funded educational body under the aegis of the British Foreign Office. That attack was thwarted by security guards; the bombers were foiled as they were preparing to park a rigged vehicle in front of the compound gate, diplomatic sources say.

Robert Draper writes: The bronze likeness of Muammar Qaddafi’s nemesis was lying on his back in a wooden crate shrouded in the darkness of a museum warehouse. His name was Septimius Severus. Like Qaddafi, he was from what is now Libya, and for 18 years bridging the second and third centuries A.D. he ruled the Roman Empire. His birthplace, Leptis Magna—a commercial city 80 miles east of what the Phoenicians once called Oea, or present-day Tripoli—became, in every meaningful way, a second Rome. More than 1,700 years after the emperor’s death, Libya’s Italian colonizers honored him by erecting a statue of the imposing, bearded leader with a torch aloft in his right hand. They installed the statue in Tripoli’s main square (now Martyrs’ Square) in 1933—where it remained for a half century, until another Libyan ruler took umbrage.

“The statue became the mouthpiece of the opposition, because he was the only thing Qaddafi couldn’t punish,” says Hafed Walda, a native Libyan and professor of archaeology at King’s College London. “Every day people would ask, ‘What did Septimius Severus say today?’ He became a figure of annoyance to the regime. So Qaddafi banished him to a rubbish heap. The people of Leptis Magna rescued him and brought him back home.” And that is where I found him, reposing in a wooden box amid gardening tools and discarded window frames, awaiting whatever destination the new Libya might have in store for him.

Qaddafi correctly viewed the statue as a threat. For Septimius Severus stood as a wistful reminder of what Libya had once been: a Mediterranean region of immense cultural and economic wealth, anything but isolated from the world beyond the sea. Spreading over 1,100 miles of coastline, bracketed by highlands that recede into semiarid wadis and finally into the copper vacuum of the desert, Libya had long been a corridor for commerce and art and irrepressible social aspiration. The tri-city region of Tripolitania—Leptis Magna, Sabratah, and Oea—had once provided wheat and olives to the Romans.

Yet Qaddafi squandered the country’s advantages: its location just south of Italy and Greece, which made it one of Africa’s gateways to Europe; its manageable population (fewer than seven million inhabiting a landmass six times the size of Italy); its vast oil reserves. He quashed innovation and free expression. To schoolchildren, who memorized Qaddafi’s tangled philosophy as inscribed in his Green Book, the story of their country consisted of two chapters: the dark days under the West’s imperialist bootheel, and then the glory days of the Brother Leader.

Today the dictator and his warped vision for Libya are dead, and the nation is undergoing the spasmlike throes of reinvention. As Walda says, “The journey of discovery has just begun. In many ways this moment is more dangerous than wartime.” Temporary prisons are overstuffed with thousands of Qaddafi loyalists awaiting their fate as laws and court procedures are reformed. Militias control whole swaths of the country. Guns are less visible than they were during the war, but that only means the hundreds of thousands who possess them have learned to keep them out of sight. Highways in rural areas remain thoroughly unpoliced (not counting the checkpoints manned by former rebels, or thuwwar). Immigrants pour into Libya from its western and southern borders. Key Qaddafi associates, as well as his wife and some of his children, remain at large. Several new ministers are already on the take. [Continue reading…]

Mary Fitzgerald and Umar Khan report: While heads are rolling in Washington over a damning independent report that found the U.S. State Department’s security planning to be “grossly inadequate,” tensions in Libya’s second largest city continue to rise. On Sunday, gunmen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a police compound in the city, killing one officer and sparking a firefight that resulted in the deaths of three others who had rushed to the scene. Images of a patrol vehicle’s blood-splattered interior rippled across Libyan TV channels and social media. Not for the first time, Benghazians wondered what had become of the city they proudly describe as the wellspring of Libya’s revolution.

More than three months after the storming of the U.S. mission, and with the Libyan investigation into the attack that killed Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans all but ground to a halt, Benghazi remains jittery and tense. Even in affluent neighborhoods, gunfire and explosions form an almost nightly soundtrack. Many residents are wary about where they venture after dark. The American drones that circle overhead prompt bitter complaints — as well as the occasional attempt at black humor. “That’s my brother-in-law up there keeping an eye on me,” one man said with a laugh as he pointed skywards.

But there is little levity when it comes to confronting Benghazi’s dense knot of security challenges — which include rogue militias, frequent assassinations, and a fraught political environment made even more flammable by the ready availability of weapons. “I think the security situation is going from bad to worse after the consulate attack,” says Wanis al-Sharif, the top Interior Ministry official in eastern Libya. Why that is depends on whom you ask.

For some, Ansar al-Sharia, the hardline Islamist faction which has rejected accusations it was involved in the U.S. consulate attack, is a popular target. “The Ansar people want to kill everybody who is against their ideology or anyone who was involved with Qaddafi,” said one Benghazi resident, as he and a friend debated who may have been behind the weekend attack on the police station. His companion begged to differ: “No, no, it was the azlaam (Qaddafi loyalists). They want to destroy the reputation of the Islamists and create chaos at the same time.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this sentiment resonates with many of the former rebels — Islamist and otherwise — who still call themselves thuwar, or revolutionaries.

Fourteen months after Muammar al-Qaddafi’s death, Benghazi finds itself pulled in multiple directions. Not only are there tensions between powerful militias that pride themselves on their revolutionary credentials and remnants of the old order — pejoratively referred to as taheleb, the Arabic word for algae and a reference to the green color of the Qaddafi era flag — but cleavages between Islamists and non-Islamists, and supporters and opponents of the region’s nascent federalist movement also threaten to tear the city apart. [Continue reading…]

The Libya Herald reports: The United States and NATO were premature in withdrawing from Libya and suffered their own “mission accomplished” moment when the Qaddafi regime fell last year, Mahmoud Jibril [who served as interim Prime Minister of Libya] has controversially claimed.

The National Forces Alliance chief said that the decision had risked opening up a power vacuum in Libya, which could be exploited by militant Islamists and other armed groups.

“After the collapse of the regime, the immediate task of our friends was to help us rebuild the government before they withdrew from Libya,” Jibril said on Wednesday, during a visit to the United States.

“The moment the regime fell down, they felt that their mission has been accomplished. I think it was a premature decision.”

The Washington Post reports: The CIA rushed security operatives to an American diplomatic compound in Libya within 25 minutes of its coming under attack and played a more central role in the effort to fend off a night-long siege than has been acknowledged publicly, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday.

The agency mobilized the evacuation effort, took control of an unarmed U.S. military drone to map possible escape routes, dispatched an emergency security team from Tripoli, the capital, and chartered aircraft that ultimately carried surviving American personnel to safety, U.S. officials said.

The account provided by senior U.S. intelligence officials offers the most detailed chronology yet of the Sept. 11 assault that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. The attack has become a flash point in the U.S. presidential campaign.

The decision to give a comprehensive account of the attack five days before the election is likely to be regarded with suspicion, particularly among Republicans who have accused the Obama administration of misleading the public by initially describing the assault as a spontaneous eruption that began as a protest of an anti-Islamic video.

U.S. officials said they decided to offer a detailed account of the CIA’s role to rebut media reports that have suggested that agency leaders delayed sending help to State Department officials seeking to fend off a heavily armed mob.

Instead, U.S. intelligence officials insisted that CIA operatives in Benghazi and Tripoli made decisions rapidly throughout the assault with no interference from Washington. [Continue reading…]

The Libya Herald reports: The head of the Libyan armed forces, General Yousef Mangoush, has no control over Bani Walid and civilians are being prevented from returning home by vigilante “gunmen”, Defence Minister Osama Juwaili has said.

In a scathing broadside, almost certain to be his last as defence minister ahead of Prime Minister-elect Ali Zidan’s expected announcement of a new government later today, Juwaili said the hilltop town was near-deserted as a result of the fighting and that the small number of people who remain are living in terrible conditions.

“The chief of staff has no control over the town and therefore armed men are able to prevent families from coming back”, the minister was quoted as saying by AFP, following a televised speech on Monday.

“The town is completely empty except for a small number of people who are living in tragic conditions; there is no activity; the impact of shelling is visible everywhere”.

He went on to describe soldiers controlling the checkpoint leading into the town as “gunmen”.

In his first public statement on Bani Walid, Juwaili claimed that as many as 40,000 people had been displaced by the conflict out of a town reckoned to be home to some 80,000 residents. As at 22 October, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that some 25,000 people had fled into the Urban area, to the northwest of Bani Walid, alone. The Libya Herald saw little sign of life on the morning of 25 October during a visit.

The remarks are deeply at odds with the statement made last Friday by army spokesman Ali Al-Sheikhi, who said that refugees were being allowed to return to the town and that no reports of any “violations” against them had been received. He added that should any such incidents take place, then an immediate investigation into them would be launched. [Continue reading…]

The Libya Herald reports: Forces from the national army together with allied brigades have taken control of Bani Walid, the last pro-Qaddafi stronghold in Libya.

The announcement was made today by Chief of Staff General Yusuf Mangoush, following reports that the army and allied brigades had succeeded in entering and holding the centre of the town early this morning.

Sporadic fighting was reported between the opposing forces today, but only in certain small pockets of the hilltop town.

“The army is controlling Bani Walid and I can announce that military operations have now concluded”, Mangoush said this afternoon. “But that does not mean we don’t have follow-up operations and some resistance here and there.”

Well over 25,000 civilians are said to have been displaced, with scores killed and wounded on both sides, in a conflict that first began on 2 October.

Mangoush failed to respond to allegations that he had lost control of his forces at several points over the course of the conflict, but said that reports of a breached 48-hour ceasefire declared last week to enable the evacuation of civilians were incorrect. “We didn’t announce it was a ceasefire”, he said. “We said it was the end of the main military operation.”

The general also defended the use of heavy weapons, including Grad rockets, in civilian areas, saying that the force deployed against Bani Walid was necessary and proportionate. “They [the armed forces] used the appropriate weapons to fight. When some fighters use certain weapons, we have to use the same weapons to stop the fight. It is a practical point.”

In the past few days, the military succeeded in taking control of the populated districts surrounding Bani Walid but had hitherto failed to achieve more than temporary raids into the centre.

Both sides have deployed light and heavy weapons against one another, resulting in large numbers of civilian as well as military casualties.

The Libya Herald reports: Displaced refugees from Bani Walid have said that the military now controls the populated districts surrounding the town and are making frequent raids into the centre, using both light and heavy weapons.

The assertion comes amidst an ongoing exodus of civilians fleeing the fighting, with tens of thousands now believed to have left the hill-town.

Relief workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated yesterday that as many as 5,000 families, or some 25,000 people, had fled Bani Walid into the Urban area alone, with the total figure believed to be much higher.

The Bani Walid Crisis Management Centre has claimed that almost 10,000 families have fled in total. It is estimated that Bani Walid and its environs are home to around 80,000 people.

Refugees are fleeing the town in every direction, with thousands known to have headed to Tarhouna with more passing on to other towns including Tripoli.

Few if any native residents are taking the main roads out of the Bani Walid, preferring instead to take the hazardous desert tracks in attempt to evade security forces who have a list of some 1,000 names wanted for arrest.

Reuters reports: The State Department’s decision to hire Blue Mountain Group to guard the ill-fated U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, entrusted security tasks to a little-known British company instead of the large firms it usually uses in overseas danger zones.

The contract was largely based on expediency, U.S. officials have said, since no one knew how long the temporary mission would remain in the Libyan city. The cradle of last year’s uprising that ended Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, Benghazi has been plagued by rising violence in recent months.

Security practices at the diplomatic compound, where Blue Mountain guards patrolled with flashlights and batons instead of guns, have come under U.S. government scrutiny in the wake of the September 11 attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

Federal contract data shows that the Benghazi security contract, worth up to $783,284, was listed as a “miscellaneous” award, not as part of the large master State Department contract that covers protection for overseas embassies.