Umar Khan writes: The results of the first elections of Libya in over four decades have been emerging gradually and there almost certainly will still be major surprises ahead. There has already been a one big one. Before the poll, it was widely expected that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Justice and Construction Party (J&C) would emerge as the largest party in the National Congress.

However, it is now clear that Mahmoud Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) is leading in the party lists and will have the lion’s share of the 80 seats reserved in the congress for political parties. In several constituencies, it took as much as ten times the votes won by J&C which came a poor second.

However, after subsequent predictions that Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) would therefore gain a majority in the 200-seat congress, the picture that is emerging in regard to the 120 seats reserved for individual candidates is rather different. Candidates linked to other parties and genuine independents appear to have won the majority there.

These 120 seats are likely to determine the fate of the future congress.

The results of the party list seats have clearly surprised the J&C leadership. They say they were unable to effectively counter 42 years of propaganda by Qaddafi that portrayed them as traitors and extremists. They accept the fact that they did not win as many seats on party lists as they expected but also claim they are confident of gaining the same number of seats as the NFA because of the success of their individual candidates.

Libya Herald reports: An estimated 5,000 people are still being held in militia-run detention facilities, two days after the deadline to hand them over to government control expired, Human Rights Watch said today.

Under Law 38, the ministries of interior and defence were required to refer all “supporters of the former regime” currently detained by militias to the competent judicial authorities by 12 July, provided sufficient evidence existed against them to bring a charge.

HRW accused the government of “a lack of political will” in challenging militias over the issue, and said it had “shied away from using force” as a way of compelling them to comply.

“We are not saying they should use force”, insisted Tripoli-based researcher Hanan Salah, when asked if HRW was advocating military action by the government to enforce its mandate, “we are just saying that they haven’t”.

The rights group claimed that some detainees were “subjected to severe torture” and that it receives new allegations of abuse “on a weekly basis”.

In addition, HRW has estimated that 4,000 detainees are now being held in state custody under the authority of the Ministry of Justice across eight regions.

Sean Kane writes: Libya’s elections did not need to be perfect, but the country plainly needs a popularly elected government to tackle the difficult and unpopular decisions involved in building the new state. The polls thus could have been judged a success merely by taking place without major disruption, a test they aced with flying colors following reports of 65 percent turnout and over 98 percent of polling centers opening without incident. Around the country, the long-awaited vote was justifiably treated as cause for national celebration.

But the seeds for political contention at the next stage may have been sown in the run-up to the polls. Less than 48 hours prior to elections, the National Transitional Council (NTC) stripped the to be elected national congress of its core mandate: supervising the drafting of Libya’s new constitution. Rather than being appointed by the new congress, the constitutional commission actually drafting the charter will theoretically now be directly elected in a second set of polls that give all parts of the country equal representation. This legal bombshell risks acrimony later this year between different parts of the country as well as rejection by the newly ascendant political parties, who on paper find themselves in charge of a congress suddenly relegated to bystander status on constitutional matters.

A Libyan proverb has it that “laws are made in Tripoli, observed in Misrata and die in Benghazi.” It captures Tripoli’s status as the seat of government, the highly organized nature of the commercial port city of Misrata, and the hotbed of activism that is Benghazi. True to form, as a long-running center of opposition to Qaddafi’s rule, Benghazi was the birthplace of the Libyan revolution. It should not then be a surprise that the city sees itself as the watchdog of the revolution and the new authorities in Tripoli.

Normally the vigilance of Benghazi is a healthy thing, helping the country avoid a return to the excessive concentration of power and wealth in Tripoli that marked the Qaddafi regime. But somewhere in the last few months Benghazi took a wrong turn. Following the revolution it was the most stable and institutionally advanced city in Libya, but now residents describe it as increasingly troubled. The city has become a locus of aggressive street actions by federalism supporters, seemingly politically motivated assassinations, and had its international presence targeted by small groups of Islamist militants. Underlying all of this is a deep current of resentment of the more wealthy and populous Tripoli.

Libya has of course been no stranger to unrest since the triumph of its revolution in October, 2011. But what is happening in Benghazi is qualitatively different. Other clashes around the country have generally been micro-conflicts, locally contained and concerned with parochial issues rather than larger ideology or proposed alternatives to the new order.

This is not the case among backers of an Islamic emirate or with the harder core of federalism supporters in eastern Libya. The latter include the self-declared Barqa Council (Barqa is the Arabic name for Libya’s eastern region), who periodically threaten separation from the rest of the country. Both groups have been willing to go outside of the political process to pursue their respective visions. And while high electoral turnout in the East was an emphatic demonstration that neither faction has widespread support, both have shown an ability to exploit broader regional feelings of maltreatment to act as violent spoilers. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The National Forces Alliance of Libyan wartime premier Mahmoud Jibril extended its lead over Islamists in landmark free elections with a landslide victory in the eastern city of Benghazi, new partial vote tallies showed on Wednesday.

The North African country’s first national vote in six decades has been hailed as a success by observers despite election-day bloodshed that claimed at least two lives.

Results from Saturday’s election so far point to a crushing defeat for the Justice and Construction Party (JCP) that is the political arm of Libya’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood – a sharp break with the electoral gains chalked up by Islamists in other Arab Spring countries such as Egypt or Tunisia.

Benghazi, the cradle of last year’s uprising against dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has been not only a JCP hub but also saw violent election-day protests against the vote by easterners who want more autonomy from the capital Tripoli.

But with 70 percent of the ballot counted, Jibril’s NFA had won 95,733 votes in the constituency against just 16,143 for Justice and Construction, official tallies showed.

Oliver Miles writes: Both the Libyan public and international observers appear to have been more than satisfied with last weekend’s elections, the votes of which are still being counted. There were incidents of violence in the run-up, but in the end polling took place almost without disturbance, except in Kufra in the far south-east, where there is a long-standing tribal problem.

The 200 successful candidates will now form a national assembly that has two tasks: to appoint a temporary government, and to establish a committee that will draw up a new constitution.

Now that oil production has been restored close to the pre-revolutionary levels (much more quickly than anyone predicted) and many frozen assets have been released, the government no longer faces the cashflow problems that crippled it earlier this year. But its most urgent task is to ensure continued security, and here the main problem is that so-called militias – consisting of fighters who took up arms spontaneously in the revolution – remain semi-independent.

They are not in revolt against the central government, but the government does not have a monopoly on legitimate force, which is essential for stability.

The government has progressively taken control of airports, ports and key border crossing points, but much remains to be done. An example is the situation in Zintan, in the western mountains, where the militia are still holding Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. The government allowed a delegation from the international criminal court to visit him, but the militia arrested them on allegations of malpractice. They were released after an apology from the ICC president himself, Sang-Hyun Song, but the government was not in full control and it is still uncertain how and where Saif will eventually be tried – and of course how the government will eventually come to terms with the militia. [Continue reading…]

Abigail Hauslohner writes: Libya seems relentlessly committed to proving the pessimists wrong. When last year’s revolution quickly evolved into a brutal civil war, the international community — and indeed many Libyans — warned of a quagmire down the road. “God is great” served as the rebel battle cry in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and the jihadists the dictator had once repressed rose to prominence as militia leaders and politicians in the vacuum left by his fall. Libya has always been a conservative and largely homogenous country; its population of 6 million is almost entirely Sunni Muslim. And that’s why when Libyans went to vote last weekend in the first national election since 1965, many observers assumed — with good reason — that if neighboring Tunisia and Egypt had elected Islamist governments in the aftermath of their revolutions, surely Libya — of all places — would follow suit.But in the past 18 months since the start of the Arab Spring, Libya has also served as the Arab world’s anomaly: waging war when others waged protests, overthrowing an entire regime rather than simply its strongman, and most recently, demonstrating remarkable stability despite the odds. As election results trickle in this week, Libya appears poised to buck yet another Arab Spring trend: the Islamist rise.

Weeks after Egypt elected Mohamed Morsy, the first Islamist president in the country’s history—and just months after it elected a parliament dominated by Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood — Libya has done the exact opposite. Early electoral results indicate that the liberal, secular-leaning National Forces Alliance of Mahmoud Jibril, the former wartime Prime Minister of the rebels’ National Transitional Council (NTC), has swept the majority of the country’s new parliament. Even Libya’s newly empowered Muslim Brotherhood has conceded that it failed to win a majority of the assembly’s 200 seats. And indeed, as the newly elected body moves to select a government to replace the NTC this month, Jibril may well become Libya’s first post-revolution prime minister.

All that may have some observers blinking and blind-sighted in the Libyan sunlight, but analysts on the ground say it makes more sense than you might think. To start, many Libyans voted along tribal and familial lines, rather than according to ideological alliances. And analysts say that political inexperience may have fragmented support for the Islamists even as Jibril’s broad coalition, benefited from well-known personalities and parties that span the country’s tribes and cities.

But many also point out that Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood, as well as Islamist militia leaders like Abdel Hakim Belhaj — once a terror suspect tortured and extradited by the CIA, and now the head of one of the better organized political parties — never had the popularity that their counterparts had in neighboring Egypt. After all, Egypt’s ousted authoritarian, Hosni Mubarak, had allowed the Brotherhood to cultivate charity networks and even run for parliament. It may have all been part of a decades-long scheme to convince Egyptians and Egypt’s allies that the country’s options for governance were limited to two extremes, but the end result was that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was more prepared. Gaddafi on the other hand never tolerated the Islamists — or even weak political parties. Men with beards or political sympathies were so regularly monitored and rounded up, that many Libyans said it was a crime to be religious or have opinions. Few bothered to try.

That rise from exile and repression may have given Libya’s Islamists an early boost when it came to political organizing during the uprising, but it also meant that they were starting at square one — just like everybody else. When TIME met with one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s senior leaders in Tripoli late last year, he admitted that he had no idea how many members the group even had inside the country. “Yesterday was the first time we met in Tripoli not underground,” Alamin Belhaj said shortly after the rebels took control of the capital. “The Brotherhood has been around for a long time, since 1951. But after Gaddafi came, it vanished.” [Continue reading…]

Luke Harding reports: It was once a place you ventured in a tin helmet, with your fingers stuffed in your ears. After the fall of Tripoli last August, rebels celebrated by firing round after round of bullets into the night sky. The debris of battle and revolution was everywhere.

There are no weapons to be seen in Martyrs’ Square now. Instead the square has been turned into a children’s playground with a Superman bouncy castle, a toy train, and outdoor table football. There is a market with women’s clothes and shoes. Other stalls sell kalashnikovs – the plastic variety – and cups of mint tea.

Sitting in a cafe across from the square’s imposing Ottoman palace, Saad Kamur explained that he had voted for Mahmoud Jibril in Libya’s historic election. Jibril, a 60-year-old US-educated political scientist, appears to have won a landslide victory in the poll on Saturday, defying predictions that Islamists would sweep to power in Libya, as they have done elsewhere.

“He’s moderate. And experienced,” Kamur said. “I don’t think the others were capable of running a government.” Kamur, a Tripoli businessman, said observers who predicted that Libya would go the way of Egypt and Tunisia – now run by religious parties – had misinterpreted the national mood, and Libya’s prevailing centrism.

“Libyans are open to the outside world. Many have studied abroad. They haven’t seen anything positive yet from Islamist governments,” he suggested. As for the election, in which he cast his first ever vote at the rather belated age of 52, he said: “Nobody imagined it would go this smoothly.”

Abdul Muntasar, a purveyor of squeaky dog-toys for eight dinars each, said he liked Jibril because he was nothing like Libya’s previous ruler Muammar Gaddafi, who was caught and killed last October.

“Jibril isn’t a man trying to seize power,” he said. Ahmed Ibrahim, a tourist visiting from provincial Al-Jufra, chipped in: “He’s educated, on the side of democracy.”

Indeed, Libya’s new leader has a reputation as a pragmatic moderate.

He attracted votes from all points on the country’s political compass: from liberals and the educated in Tripoli; from tribesmen in the desert south; and – in an arguably hopeful sign for reconciliation – from disgruntled former supporters of the previous regime.

The Los Angeles Times reports: A political coalition led by the former National Transitional Council’s de facto prime minister has claimed an early lead in Libya’s national election to replace the government of fallen longtime dictator Moammar Kadafi.

The National Forces Alliance, which appeals to secularists and moderate Islamist sensibilities, said that early exit polls showed it securing sizable majorities in the party vote for a national assembly. The coalition is headed by Mahmoud Jibril, an American-educated political scientist who once served as an economic advisor for Kadafi.

The NFA’s polling claims, made by Secretary General Faisal Krekshi, were backed up by the rival Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party.

“The National Forces Alliance achieved good results in some large cities except Misrata,” the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party’s Mohammed Sawan told AFP. “They have a net lead in Tripoli and in Benghazi.”

High National Election Commission officials refused to confirm Krekshi’s claims.

“We are all waiting and we have nothing to suggest that one party is ahead of others,” the commission’s head Nouri al-Abar told journalists.

Official results are expected later this week.

Election officials said about 60% of eligible voters turned out on Saturday for a vote that was largely incident-free and hailed by foreign observers as free and fair.

BBC News reports: Vote-counting is under way after Libya held its first free national election for 60 years on Saturday.

The first results are expected on Monday, with some unofficial exit polls suggesting a liberal alliance was doing better than Islamist parties.

Sunday has been declared a holiday, amid celebrations after a largely peaceful election with a 60% turnout.

The 200-member assembly will choose the first elected government since Col Gaddafi came to power in 1969.

On voting day there were pockets of unrest in the east, where there are fears the region will be under-represented in the new temporary assembly being elected.

Reuters reports: Swept up in the euphoria of Libya’s first free national vote in six decades, voters in the eastern city of Benghazi braved anti-election protests on Saturday to pour into polling stations.

But the mood of celebration should not fool anyone: in the city that was the cradle of last year’s uprising against Muammar Gaddafi and remains the hub of Libya’s lucrative oil sector, the revolution is far from over yet.

Long a political hotbed that nurtured earlier attempts to unseat Gaddafi, Benghazi is now the focal point of a widespread sense among easterners that post-Gaddafi authorities are still neglecting their region economically and socially.

Many queuing to cast their ballots in Benghazi said they were using their votes simply to back candidates in a new interim assembly whose main policy drive will be to demand greater political representation for the region.

“We were able to get rid of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi with all his power and resources,” local women’s rights activist Salwa Homi said of the insurgency which, with the help of NATO bombs, ended 42 years of hardline Gaddafi rule.

“Don’t you think we can do the same to a few people we’ve elected ourselves?”

Nearly 18 months ago, the arrest of human rights activist Fethi Tarbel sparked a riot in Benghazi that triggered a civil war, the fall of Tripoli 1,000 km (630 miles) to the west and ultimately the capture and killing of Gaddafi himself.

The immediate bone of contention now is the fact that the east will get only 60 out of 200 seats in the new assembly being voted in on Saturday and which will appoint a new prime minister and prepare the ground for parliamentary elections in 2013.

But the bigger issue is what status Libya’s second-largest city will have in the new country taking shape and what stake it will have in national oil supplies currently running at 1.6 million barrels a day – the bulk of which are in the east.

“We contributed the most blood and the most sacrifice to the country and to the revolution,” Hamed al-Hassi, a former rebel who leads a military body originally charged with securing the east but which has since fallen out with the interim government.

“The country will be in a state of paralysis because no one in the government is listening to us,” said Hassi.

Reuters reports: Crowds of joyful Libyans, some with tears in their eyes, parted with the legacy of Muammar Gaddafi on Saturday as they voted in the first free national election in 60 years.

But in the eastern city of Benghazi, cradle of last year’s uprising and now seeking more autonomy from the interim government, protesters stormed polling stations and burned hundreds of ballot papers.

Libyans are choosing a 200-member assembly which will elect a prime minister and cabinet before laying the ground for full parliamentary elections next year under a new constitution.

Candidates with Islamic agendas dominate the field of more than 3,700 hopefuls, suggesting Libya will be the next Arab Spring country – after Egypt and Tunisia – to see religious parties secure a grip on power.

In Benghazi, witnesses said protesters stormed a polling station just after voting started and publicly burnt hundreds of ballot slips in a bid to undermine the election’s credibility.

One local election commission worker said two other polling stations in Benghazi had also had their ballots boxes looted.

At one polling station hit by the protests, a man was shot in the arm, local election official Ismail Al-Mjbali told Reuters. Blood from the attack stained the floor and the man had been taken to hospital, Mjbali said.

In the capital Tripoli, voting was smooth. A loud cry of “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) went up inside a polling station there as the first woman cast her vote in a converted school building abuzz with the chatter of queueing locals.

“I can’t describe the feeling. We paid the price, I have two martyrs in my family. I am certain the future will be good, Libya will be successful,” Zainab Masri, a 50-year-old teacher, said of her first experience of voting.

“I am a Libyan citizen in free Libya,” said Mahmud Mohammed Al-Bizamti. “I came today to be able to vote in a democratic way. Today is like a wedding for us.”

Majdah al-Fallah flashes a broad smile and pumps the hands of shoppers in downtown Tripoli as she works potential voters on the campaign trail ahead of Libya’s landmark national assembly elections on Saturday.

A doctor by trade who lived in Ireland for years, Fallah is running for the Justice and Construction Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood which is tipped to do well. But her small team of election helpers often find the going tough.

“Sometimes when I give out the flyer some people reject it or take it and then rip it up in front of me because there are women on it,” said Huthaifa al-Harram, a 20-year-old male backer of Fallah and another female candidate on the same ticket.

“People say, ‘I don’t think women should play a role in the government – they don’t know what to do’,” Harram added.

Luke Harding reports: In a villa on Libya’s stunning sea coast, a sculptor finishes off a war memorial. It commemorates the 50 men from the western town of Zuwara who perished last year in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi.

The slab, which is destined for Zuwara’s small concrete roundabout, is engraved in two languages: one is Arabic, the other is Tifinagh, the ancient script of North Africa’s Berbers, or Imazighen (the Berbers prefer to be called Imazighen, noting that Berber originally meant “barbarian”). Before last year’s uprising, anyone who spoke Berber in public could be arrested.

During his 42 years in power, Gaddafi persecuted the country’s minority Berber or Amazigh community, arresting its leaders, banishing its language from schools, and having protesters beaten. His vision for Libya was as a mono-Arab state. Gaddafi insisted the “traitorous” Imazighen were an ethnolinguistic fiction, even though they make up about 600,000 of Libya’s 6 million population.

Nearly a year after Gaddafi was turfed out of power, and days before the country’s first democratic election this Saturday, Amazigh culture is enjoying a revival. Zuwara’s secret police headquarters has been transformed into an Amazigh radio station. A beach mansion belonging to a Gaddafi loyalist is home to an artists’ workshop and a recording studio where banned Tifinagh songs and poems are heard again. Amazigh activists are busy relearning their forgotten, 2,000-year-old Punic alphabet.

But there are darker rumblings too. In March, 17 people were killed after fighting erupted between Amazigh Zuwara and the neighbouring Arab towns of Riqdaleen and Al-Jamail. The two sides lobbed mortars at each other. The ethnic clashes were triggered by fresh tensions over who did what during last year’s revolution – with Zuwara accusing its neighbours of siding with Gaddafi – as well as smouldering disputes over land and smuggling routes.

This isn’t post-revolutionary Libya’s only conflict. In the absence of a strong central authority, ethnic quarrels have broken out in several parts of the country, most notably in the south-eastern desert town of Kufra. Here, more than 150 people have been killed in fighting between black Toubou tribesmen and their Arab Zuwayy neighbours, leading some to wonder whether the country is already beginning to fall apart. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Libya’s caretaker government has quietly reactivated some of the interception equipment that fallen dictator Moammar Gadhafi once used to spy on his opponents.

The surveillance equipment has been used in recent months to track the phone calls and online communications of Gadhafi loyalists, according to two government officials and a security official. Two officials say they have seen dozens of phone or Internet-chat transcripts detailing conversations between Gadhafi supporters. One person said he reviewed the transcript of at least one phone call between Saadi Gadhafi, the exiled son of the former dictator, and one of his followers inside Libya. Saadi Gadhafi, who is in Niger, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Libya is among the post-Arab Spring nations grappling with a difficult question as they move toward democracy: Whether or not to use the security tools left behind by former dictators. Libya plans elections this Saturday.

Reuters reports: Abdulnasser Ruhuma was asleep in his bed when the militia fighters barged into his Tripoli home. The shouting woke the Libyan bank worker and he rushed downstairs to find around 40 men pointing their rifles at him.

Moments later they started beating him. Ruhuma’s wife and relatives begged the intruders to stop but they dragged him and his uncle away. Punched, hit with rifle butts and cut with knives, Ruhuma was taken to a makeshift detention center in the middle of the night.

In a stark reminder of the lawlessness that prevails in Libya eight months after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, the gunmen never told Ruhuma why they abducted him. He says it stems from a family issue – a relative wanted revenge, so he called on the help of an armed brigade.

“We weren’t told anything, we were just beaten – our hands, our legs, our bodies,” the 42-year old father-of-two said.

“I thought I would never make it out alive.”

Libya’s aspirations to replace Gaddafi’s repressive rule with an ordered, democratic nation are being undermined by increasingly wayward volunteer militias who operate outside the control of fragile state institutions.

The militias attract most attention when, mounted on their battered pick-up trucks with anti-aircraft guns welded to the back, they fight pitched battles in city streets against rival groups, usually over some perceived slight or a dispute over territory.

But it is their less visible activities that have done the most to puncture the sense of euphoria and freedom that followed Gaddafi’s downfall.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports: As the casualties mount from fresh clashes in southern Libya between soldiers and tribesmen, the security situation in the capital Tripoli, Zintan, Misrata and the eastern city of Benghazi remains shaky as militia groups extend their control.

Militia from former rebel strongholds have mounted a series of attacks over the last week, including a blast at the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Misrata on Tuesday.

A convoy carrying the British ambassador to Libya was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Benghazi on Monday, and days earlier, a rocket-propelled grenade was also fired at the US consulate in the eastern city. Two weeks ago, the international airport in Tripoli was seized by armed militia.

In the midst of this instability that has plagued Libya since the revolution that ended Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, a delegation from the International Criminal Court, including Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor and her Lebanese-born interpreter Helene Assaf, was detained in Zintan on June 7.

Ms Taylor was in Zintan to visit Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who has been held by the Zintani militia since they captured him in November last year. The ICC charged Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam, and Libya’s former intelligence chief Abdullah al- Senussi with crimes against humanity.

Ms Taylor and her ICC colleagues have been placed in “preventive detention” for 45 days as Libya investigates the alleged threats to its national security the Zintanis claim she committed.

“We have had a steady deterioration of the security situation in Libya in the past couple of weeks,” said Dr Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, head of Middle East and North Africa Program at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

“The proliferation of the militia is one of the key elements destabilising Libya – they are young men roaming around, heavily armed and with a sense of entitlement about the paternity of the revolution.

“This should have been tamed by the NTC months ago and the militia channelled into civilian organisations.”

Libya is at a crossroads, Dr Ould Mohamedou said, and the continuing threats from the militia calls into question the authority of the national interim government that operates under the auspices of the National Transitional Council.

He says Tripoli is in danger of becoming like Baghdad in 2005, with different groups controlling turf and instituting neighbourhood political economies. The government’s decision to delay elections for a national congress scheduled for June 19 until July 7 was a symptom of the chaos.

“To be fair to Libya and to the NTC, these are not easy issues, this cannot be engineered overnight – there were no political parties, no civil structures – in effect Gaddafi left a booby-trapped society.”

But the NTC had contributed to the deteriorating security situation by repeatedly capitulating to the militia and as a result, he said, it was “losing its grip on the situation as the months go by”. [Continue reading…]

Ranj Alaaldin writes: The past month has been a tumultuous one for Libya. Successful local elections in Benghazi, in which voter turnout was impressive and a female candidate secured the largest number of votes, showed that the country can move towards becoming a state with viable democratic processes and representative leaders.

Yet, with every step it takes forward, Libya takes another two back. The security situation has deteriorated rapidly over the past two weeks. On Tuesday, it was the turn of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Misrata to come under attack. On Monday, the British ambassador’s convoy in Benghazi was hit, with two bodyguards injured in the ensuing gun battle. Last week there was an attack on the US diplomatic mission in the same city.

Apart from terror attacks such as these, Libyans are fighting each other. Militiamen act with impunity, as the recent seizure of Tripoli airport showed, while clashes continue in the southern town of Kufra, where pro-government militiamen are locked in an armed conflict with tribal forces over smuggling routes. The clashes have so far claimed at least 20 lives.

Civil war and increased bloody lawlessness in Libya is now a real possibility, with all indicators suggesting the worst may be yet to come because of the continued lack of state control and failure to stabilise the security environment. [Continue reading…]