Nicholas Pelham writes: Eight months after Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow, journalists seeking wars in Libya have to journey deep into the Sahara and beyond the horizons of most Libyans to find them. A senior official of Libya’s temporary ruling body, the National Transitional Council (NTC), flippantly waved away an invitation to leave his residence at the Rixos, Qaddafi’s palatial Tripoli hotel, to join a fact-finding delegation to Kufra, a trading post 1,300 kilometers to the southeast, near Sudan and Chad. “Isn’t it Africa?” he asks.

Yet for Libya’s new governors, the turbulent south—home to Libya’s wells of water and oil—is unnerving. Since Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the NTC chairman, declared an end to the civil war last October, the violence in the south is worse than it was during the struggle to oust Qaddafi. Hundreds have been killed, thousands injured, and, according to UN figures, tens of thousands displaced in ethnic feuding. Without its dictator to keep the lid on, the country, it seems, is boiling over the sides.

Kufra, some six hundred kilometers from the nearest Libyan town, epitomizes the postwar neglect. Several on the NTC’s nine-man mission I accompanied in late April were making their first visit there. The air of exuberance we felt flying aboard Qaddafi’s private jet and breakfasting on salmon-filled omelets cooked by his dashing stewardess, clad in a scarlet uniform, vanished as we began our descent. How much protection could we expect from the two members of the mission who had been included to protect the group and who had been recruited for the journey from the Kufra’s two fighting tribes—the Arab Zuwayy and the black Toubou? A NTC official criticized the pilot for approaching the runway from the town, where we made an easy target, not the desert. The airfield was deserted.

“We have a tradition of welcoming our guests,” said the Zuwayy’s tribal sheikh, Mohammed Suleiman, in less than welcoming tones, once we had found his mansion. “But we’re cursing this government for abandoning us to the Africans.” A room full of sixty tribesmen echoed his rebuke; since the revolution, members of the Toubou tribe had swarmed into the town and were threatening to wrest control of the oil fields nearby, he said. For the sheikh, the only solution was to expel them.

The catalyst for the fighting had been the NTC’s appointment of a Toubou leader to guard the Chad frontier, thus putting him in control of trans-Saharan smuggling, apparently as a reward for his support in the revolution. Gasoline, which in Libya is cheaper than water, subsidized flour, and guns go out; whisky and migrants come in. Though the Zuwayy had ten times as many Mercedes trucks as the Toubou, their incomes had plummeted. As animosities rose, the two tribes divided their mixed town of Kufra into fortified zones and fired mortars at each other’s houses. In fighting that followed this spring, 150 were killed.

After a communal meal of lambs’ heads served on vast tin trays, we crossed town to the Toubou quarter. Red-tiled Swiss-style villas gave way to African cinder-block shanties, some blackened by bombing. Tarmac roads led into sandy tracks. Where the Zuwayy had served us a feast on thick blood-red carpets, the Toubou poured glasses of goat yogurt. The Zuwayy had chandeliers; the Toubou had a flickering neon strip and sporadic blackouts. “The air-conditioning is broken,” their spokesmen apologized. The NTC delegates, who sat silently during the Zuwayys’ browbeating, now seemed like feudal lords chiding troublesome peasants; as we left they said the Toubou border guards were outlaws. The next day fighting flared. At a gathering of Libya’s many militias in Benghazi, nearly a thousand kilometers to the north, startled UN officials ducked for cover as Zuwayy and Toubou gunmen faced off in the corridors.

Some nine hundred kilometers west of Kufra as the crow or plane flies—for there are no roads—Sabha, the provincial capital of the southwestern Fezzan, also suffered from ethnic strife. On March 27, in the midst of a heated session of a local military council meeting to discuss the allocation of payments to former fighters, the representative of the Awlad Suleiman, another Arab tribe, shot three Toubou councilors dead. As the fighting spread, Arab snipers took to their villa rooftops and lobbed Katyusha rockets across the tin wall separating their neighborhood from the Toubou shantytown of Tayuri. Footage on their mobile phones shows tribesmen parking their tanks at Tayuri’s entrance and shelling its shacks. When the firing subsided three days later, the Toubou counted seventy-six dead in the shantytown alone. Scores more were killed on the roads.

Like the Toubou, North Africa’s indigenous Berbers — or Imazighen as they prefer to call themselves — depict Qaddafi’s rule as four decades of unremitting Arabization. To erase their ethnicity, they say, Qaddafi labeled them mountain Arabs, replaced their historic place-names with Arab ones, and suppressed the Ibadi school of Islam that many Imazighen follow on account of its more egalitarian bent. Unlike Sunnis, the mainstream Ibadi school opens up leadership of the Muslim community to all ethnic groups, not only the Quraish, the Prophet Muhammad’s Arab tribe. Qaddafi accused mothers who spoke the Amazigh tongue, Tifinagh, at home of feeding poison to their children. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: A bomb exploded outside the gates of the US consulate in Libya’s second city, Benghazi, on Tuesday night, in the first attack on an American diplomatic target in the country since the fall of Gaddafi.

There were no casualties reported and the explosion caused damage to the surrounding wall but a US embassy spokesman in Tripoli said they were still waiting for a full damage assessment.

He said the culprits were unknown but that security has been tightened around US diplomatic missions in both Benghazi and the capital, Tripoli.

“The United States deplores the attack on the mission in Benghazi,” said the spokesman. “We want a full investigation.”

Suspicion will fall on jihadist militias operating in the eastern Libyan city, who came to prominence in April when they were filmed using hammers to smash tomb stones and monuments at the Commonwealth Graves cemetery in the city.

After the senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi, was assassinated in a drone attack on Monday, Noman Benotman, a former senior member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who spent significant time with al-Libi in the 1990s, spoke to CNN. Benotman says that al-Libi had significant influence with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al Qaeda’s North African affiliate. CNN reported: “With his death, it is possible there may be a backlash by pro al Qaeda forces in Libya. According to several sources, al Qaeda has developed a presence in eastern Libya, where it has recruited and trained several hundred fighters.”

The Guardian reports: Members of an elite unit set up by the Libyan government to rein in the country’s rival militia forces have been accused of kidnapping and severely beating one of the country’s foremost surgeons.

The abduction appears further evidence that 10 months after taking over, Libya’s new interim government has failed to curb human rights abuses, and is seemingly incapable of controlling either the militias or its own security force. It comes as the country faces its first national elections later this month – a key test of whether Libya is heading towards democracy or violent secessionism.

Salem Forjani, a heart surgeon working for the health ministry, was seized on 17 May when he went to Tripoli medical centre – the city’s largest hospital – on orders of the health minister to remove the director, who was accused of links with the Gaddafi regime.

Instead, he was confronted by members of the government’s supreme security committee (SSC) waiting in the director’s office, who dragged Forjani through the hospital, beating him so badly he lost consciousness in front of horrified staff.

A fellow medic photographed Forjani being carried, his shirt off, spreadeagled, down the hospital’s ambulance ramp while an SSC soldier threatened to shoot unarmed hospital security staff giving chase. [Continue reading…]

Nicolas Pelham writes: Beneath a golden canopy lined with frilly red tassels and vaulted with chandeliers, hundreds of militiamen from across Libya gathered at a security base in Benghazi, the launch pad of their anti-Qaddafi revolution, at the end of April and called for another uprising. After a lunch of mutton and macaroni, a nod to their former Italian masters, one belligerent revolutionary after another took to the podium to lambast Libya’s would-be governors, the National Transitional Council (NTC). “Thuwwar (revolutionaries) of Libya unite!” cried the chairman, beseeching his fellows to reclaim the country from those who had stolen the revolution. These are no idle threats. My lunch companion from Jufra, one of Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s former garrison towns in central Libya, claimed to have 600 tanks under his command. If push came to shove, the militias could overpower the fledgling forces the NTC have at their disposal.

While the militiamen flaunt their might, they seem less confident of public support. No one at the swashbucklers’ Congress mentioned the upcoming elections, scheduled for June 19, as the means of being catapulted to power. Rather, for many the new assembly threatens to transfer authority away from those who “paid the price of the revolution” to elected representatives. “They are afraid that an elected government will limit their voice,” says Milad al-Hawti, a recruit to the Benghazi branch of the Supreme Security Commission. If the thuwwar are to make a bid for power, their window of opportunity is now, while the NTC — with its less than solid legitimacy — still holds the constitutional reins.

Friction between the civilian and military arms of the revolution has been brewing since the first days of the February 2011 uprising, when a nascent civilian leadership, the NTC, struggled to establish a semblance of governance over liberated territories. To stand up its authority in the face of a plethora of anarchic rival groups of thuwwar under its wing, and prepare for a smooth transition, the NTC reached out to defecting old regime commanders and their forces. But what the NTC viewed as a professional corps, able to stabilize a post-Qaddafi era, the thuwwar saw as a fifth column riddled with Qaddafi loyalists bent on denying them ownership of the revolution for which they had risked their lives. In July 2011, militiamen killed Maj. Gen. ‘Abd al-Fattah Younis, Qaddafi’s former interior minister, whom the NTC had appointed commander-in-chief of rebel forces.

As relations spiraled downward, the thuwwar began to tar the NTC with the same brush. Spokesmen and leaders were denounced as pretenders and holdovers from jama‘at Sayf, Sayf’s gang, a reference to the coterie of apparatchiks who surrounded Sayf al-Islam, the late colonel’s favored son, and filled the ranks of the last Qaddafi-era governments. Determined to thwart the resurrection of the old order that had hobbled them, the thuwwar posed increasing challenges to the NTC’s self-appointed role as the revolution’s moral arbiters. For its part, the NTC viewed the militiamen less as liberators than as looters and hooligans, whose celebrations traumatized Tripolitanians for weeks with their firing of heavy weapons throughout the night. When the thuwwar finally conquered Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, the NTC stymied their plans for a triumphal march through Tripoli with the promise of a heroes’ welcome in Benghazi. The welcome never materialized, leaving the militias aggrieved and determined to settle the score. [Continue reading…]

Jamie Dettmer writes: Najat Taweel’s jet-black eyes fill with tears as she describes seeing her jailed brother, Abdul Taweel, shortly after his arrest. The Libyan mother of three had managed to talk her way into Tripoli’s notorious Ain Zara prison where 29-year-old Abdul was being held, charged with killing a fellow revolutionary this past February. Najat, 41, holds up photographs she says a fellow prisoner took of her brother, using a smuggled mobile phone. The pictures show a man whose back is covered with deep bruises and ugly wounds. Najat, 41, says Abdul told her he had signed a confession, but only because he couldn’t take the beatings anymore—and because his interrogators had threatened to rape and kill his family.

Libyan revolutionaries captured and killed Muammar Gaddafi more than seven months ago, but the dictator’s brutal tactics and antidemocratic ways live after him. Human-rights workers say that’s true not only within the high walls of the dictator’s former Ain Zara torture center but at other jails and penitentiaries across the country. Abdul is among at least 20 Ain Zara inmates whose relatives accuse guards of subjecting detainees to severe and regular beatings with everything from fists to sticks, metal rods, and chains. Family members say some of the prisoners have been repeatedly beaten on their genitalia, a form of punishment that—in addition to being excruciatingly painful—could leave its victims infertile. Others, according to relatives, have been tortured with Taser-style electroshock weapons.

Part of the problem may be that the country’s transitional government is only gradually managing to assert its authority over the patchwork of rival militias that overthrew the Gaddafi regime. Ain Zara remained under the control of one of those militias until less than four months ago. At the Feb. 2 handover ceremony, the facility’s new director—himself a former political prisoner at Ain Zara under the dictatorship—promised that the prison would break from its dark past and shake off its grisly reputation. “We no longer hit the detainees,” Burawi al-Guebaili declared, and he boasted of improvements such as hot meals and stalls with doors being added in the restrooms. Since then, journalists and human-rights investigators have visited the prison, but they have not been given the opportunity to speak alone with the 50 or so accused Gaddafi loyalists held there or any of the other inmates. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Buoyed by the winds of change sweeping the region, Libyan women are eyeing a far greater role for themselves after next month’s national assembly elections.

The June 19 poll – the first since the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi – will see the country electing 200 candidates to the body that will draft the country’s constitution.

Recent polls in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia have had mixed results for women, and the lessons are not lost on their Libyan counterparts.

In Egypt, parliamentary elections saw less than two per cent of the seats go to women – eight seats, compared to the 64 guaranteed to them by law. It was somewhat better in Tunisia, with 49 women getting elected.

Halloum al-Fallah, an independent candidate hopeful from the eastern city of Benghazi, said Libyan women are taking lessons from the Arab Spring in terms of how to fight for their place in politics.

“We are learning from the mistakes in Egypt and Tunisia, but also learning from what other countries are doing well,” said Fallah. [Continue reading…]

118 year old Nuwara Faraj Fahajan holds her vote registration card high in her right hand and the Victory sign by her left for the media and the admiring gathering to see, May 16 2012. Registration for voting in Libya is injecting new energy in all age groups in the country and providing them something to celebrate. (Tripoli Post)

CNN reports: Diplomats and other observers in Libya say that with elections one month away, the National Transitional Council is struggling to exert control over various militia prominent in the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

The situation is further complicated by tribal rivalries and a growing presence of Islamist militants in some areas.

One source briefed by Western intelligence officials said that of particular concern is the city of Derna on the Mediterranean coast some 160 miles (260 kilometers) west of the Egyptian border.

The source told CNN that hundreds of Islamist militants are in and around the town, and there are camps where weapons and physical training are provided to militants. He said one official had described the area as “a disaster zone.”

Tensions have grown between local people and the militants. Last month, a number of Derna residents went to a camp on the outskirts of the city, according to the source, and forced militants to leave.

There have also been a number of car bomb explosions in Derna in recent months, apparently as rival Islamist factions compete for supremacy in the area. One is said to have targeted Abdel Hakim al Hasadi, a former member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who spent time in Afghanistan in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Students from all over Libya come to study Islamic law and to memorize the Islamic holy book, the Koran, at the university and school built around the shrine [which houses the tomb of the 15th-century Sufi scholar Abdel Salam al-Asmar in Zlitan, west of Tripoli]. Now, numbers are down.

In the school halls, the voices of young boys and girls echo in unison.

“We usually have 600 girls a day come to memorize Koran, but the parents are now afraid the Salafis will attack so only 100 show up,” said teacher Wafa al-Ati.

Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam, dates back to the faith’s early days. Apart from the standard prayers, Sufi devotions include singing hymns, chanting the names of God or dancing to heighten awareness of the divine.

Sufis also build shrines to revered holy men and scholars and make pilgrimages to them. There are hundreds of the shrines all over Libya. Even Gaddafi, with his ambivalent attitude to religion, did not try to interfere in a practice that is so deep-seated in Libyan culture.

But since the end of Gaddafi’s rule, a new trend has emerged to challenge Sufi traditions.

Under Gaddafi’s rule, many Salafis were jailed for their beliefs and those not imprisoned spent years avoiding any outward manifestation of their beliefs.

Files from Gaddafi’s internal security agency, seen by Reuters after the revolt, show there was a special department set up to track hardline Islamists. Anyone suspected of affiliation was denied the right to travel abroad, enroll in university or take public sector jobs.

Since that system of repression collapsed, Salafis have become emboldened. Some have acquired weapons and used them to enforce their ultra-purist view of Islam.

The Salafis believe Islam should be followed in the simple, ascetic form practiced by the Prophet Mohammed and his disciples. Any later additions to the faith — including tombs or lavish grave markings – are viewed by them as idolatry.

They have alarmed many secularist Libyans by trying to enforce their strict moral code. The Salafis have burned down halls were parties are held and harassed women who do not cover their heads.

In the eastern city of Benghazi, organizers of a rap concert featuring a famous Tunisian artist were forced to cancel the event after being threatened by a Salafi brigade called Libya’s Shield.

Worried that the Salafis would attack their joyful annual parades to celebrate the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday in February, Sufi mosques sought safety in numbers and held a joint procession in Tripoli’s walled old city. The event, which Salafis also consider idolatrous, went off without incident. [Continue reading…]

The Economist reports: delegation of the National Transitional Council, Libya’s ruling authority, was all smiles as it flew back to Tripoli, the capital, after a day in Kufra, a trading post deep in the Sahara desert some 1,700km (1,056 miles) to the south. There tribal feuding in the past two months has left scores dead. The councillors were congratulating themselves for persuading tribal leaders to accept a ceasefire, to recognise the authority of the council in Tripoli, and to promise to uphold Libya’s unity. But no sooner had the jet that once belonged to the late Colonel Muammar Qaddafi taken off than fighting flared there again.

Since the dictator was ousted after 42 years in power, the national council has been struggling to assert its authority, which is meant to encompass the 6,000km of borders that make Libya Africa’s fourth-largest country by area. In the centre and south of the country, Berbers and black Africans have been battling with Arab tribes for control of the towns and outposts, along with their smuggling routes. Libya’s hinterland, from Zwara near the Tunisian border in the north-west to Kufra, which abuts Egypt and Sudan in the south-east, is awash with weapons looted from the colonel’s armouries.

Local identities and loyalties, long suppressed under the colonel’s rule, have re-emerged with a vengeance. Militias from the coast have arrived in the south to bolster hard-pressed Arab tribes. Sub-Saharan Africans have arrived from the other direction to reinforce the black Toubou tribes of southern Libya. Gun-running has fostered uprisings by the Tuareg (akin to Berbers) fighting for their homeland in Mali. Chad and Niger have also got caught in the post-Qaddafi backlash. Even Tunisia and Egypt have been peripherally affected.

Al Jazeera: Anger is growing in Libya over the spread of illegal weapons and the transitional government’s inability to control armed groups.

A funeral procession for a security force member who was killed during Tuesday’s attack on the prime minister’s office, turned into a protest against lawlesssness.

Among the mourners was the prime minister himself, not only to offer his condolences but also to harden publicly his stand against armed groups that are threatening the state.

The New York Times reports: One night last September, a prisoner named Naji Najjar was brought, blindfolded and handcuffed, to an abandoned military base on the outskirts of Tripoli. A group of young men in camouflage pushed him into a dimly lit interrogation room and forced him to his knees. The commander of the militia, a big man with disheveled hair and sleepy eyes, stood behind Najjar. “What do you want?” the commander said, clutching a length of industrial pipe.

“What do you mean?” the prisoner said.

“What do you want?” the commander repeated. He paused. “Don’t you remember?”

Of course Najjar remembered. Until a few weeks earlier, he was a notorious guard at one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s prisons. Then Tripoli fell, and the same men he’d beaten for so long tracked him down at his sister’s house and dragged him to their base. Now they were mimicking his own sadistic ritual. Every day, Najjar greeted the prisoners with the words What do you want? forcing them to beg for the pipe — known in the prison by its industrial term, PPR — or be beaten twice as badly. The militia commander now standing behind him, Jalal Ragai, had been one of his favorite victims.

“What do you want?” Jalal said for the last time. He held the very same pipe that had so often been used on him.

“PPR!” Najjar howled, and his former victim brought the rod down on his back.

I heard this story in early April from Naji Najjar himself. He was still being held captive by the militia, living with 11 other men who had killed and tortured for Qaddafi, in a large room with a single barred window and mattresses piled on the floor. The rebels had attached a white metal plate onto the door and a couple of big bolts, to make it look more like a prison. Najjar’s old PPR pipe and falga, a wooden stick used to raise prisoners’ legs in order to beat them on the soles of the feet, rested on a table upstairs. They had gotten some use in the first months of his confinement, when former victims and their relatives came to the base to deliver revenge beatings. One rebel laughed as he told me about a woman whose brother had his finger cut off in prison: when she found the man who did it, she beat him with a broom until it broke. Now, though, the instruments of torture were mostly museum pieces. After six months in captivity, Najjar — Naji to everyone here — had come to seem more clown than villain, and the militiamen had appointed him their cook. Slouching in an armchair among a group of rebels who smoked and chatted casually, Najjar recounted his strange journey from guard to prisoner. “One of the visitors once broke the PPR on me,” he told me.

“Naji, that wasn’t a PPR; it was plastic,” one rebel shot back. “You could beat a pig with a PPR all day, and it wouldn’t break.” Besides, he said, the visitor in question had a ruptured disc from one of Naji’s own beatings, so it was only fair. The men then got into a friendly argument about Naji’s favorite tactics for beating and whether he had used a pipe or a hose when he gashed Jalal’s forehead back in July.

The militia’s deputy commander strolled into the room and gave Najjar’s palm a friendly slap. “Hey, Sheik Naji,” he said. “You got a letter.” The commander opened it and began to read. “It’s from your brother,” he said, and his face lit up with a derisive smile. “It says: ‘Naji is being held by an illegal entity, being tortured on a daily basis, starved and forced to sign false statements.’ Oh, and look at this — the letter is copied to the army and the Higher Security Committee!” This last detail elicited a burst of laughter from the men in the room. Even Naji seemed to find it funny. “We always tell the relatives the same thing,” one man added, for my benefit: “There is no legal entity for us to hand the prisoners over to.”

Libya has no army. It has no government. These things exist on paper, but in practice, Libya has yet to recover from the long maelstrom of Qaddafi’s rule. The country’s oil is being pumped again, but there are still no lawmakers, no provincial governors, no unions and almost no police. Streetlights in Tripoli blink red and green and are universally ignored. Residents cart their garbage to Qaddafi’s ruined stronghold, Bab al-Aziziya, and dump it on piles that have grown mountainous, their stench overpowering. Even such basic issues as property ownership are in a state of profound confusion. Qaddafi nationalized much of the private property in Libya starting in 1978, and now the old owners, some of them returning after decades abroad, are clamoring for the apartments and villas and factories that belonged to their grandparents. I met Libyans brandishing faded documents in Turkish and Italian, threatening to take up arms if their ancestral tracts of land were not returned.

What Libya does have is militias, more than 60 of them, manned by rebels who had little or no military or police training when the revolution broke out less than 15 months ago. They prefer to be called katibas, or brigades, and their members are universally known as thuwar, or revolutionaries. Each brigade exercises unfettered authority over its turf, with “revolutionary legitimacy” as its only warrant. Inside their barracks — usually repurposed schools, police stations or security centers — a vast experiment in role reversal is being carried out: the guards have become the prisoners and the prisoners have become the guards. There are no rules, and each katiba is left to deal in its own way with the captives, who range from common criminals to Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the deposed leader’s son and onetime heir apparent. Some have simply replicated the worst tortures that were carried out under the old regime. More have exercised restraint. Almost all of them have offered victims a chance to confront their former torturers face to face, to test their instincts, to balance the desire for revenge against the will to make Libya into something more than a madman’s playground. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: As Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi fell last year with the help of the West and an interim regime took the reins, the hope among some oil companies was that they would receive new tax breaks and a better share of fields’ output in current and future deals.

But the interim government in Libya, as well as administrations elsewhere, largely plan to keep the same tough terms in place for most conventional fields, as governments are mindful not to appear to be selling out their countries’ crown jewels.

New opportunities lie mostly in so-called unconventional projects, which are especially expensive or require advanced technology to develop. Higher oil prices are needed for such projects to pay off, making them riskier and less profitable than those available to national oil companies.

For such projects in Libya, investment conditions “can be improved,” Libyan Oil Minister Abdulrahman Benyezza said in a recent interview.

For decades, many European companies had enjoyed deals that granted them half of the high-quality oil produced in Libyan fields. Some major oil companies hoped the country would open further to investment after sanctions from Washington were lifted in 2004 and U.S. giants re-entered the North African nation.

But in the years that followed, the Gadhafi regime renegotiated the companies’ share of oil from each field to as low as 12%, from about 50%. Libya’s state-owned National Oil Co. continues to get the bulk of the barrels produced in joint ventures with oil majors.

Just after the fall of the regime, several foreign oil companies expressed hopes of better terms on existing deals or attractive ones for future contracts. Among the incumbents that expressed hopes in Libyan expansion were France’s Total SA and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

The New York Times reports: The militia leaders who have turned post-Qaddafi Libya into a patchwork of semiautonomous fiefs are now plunging into politics, raising fears that their armed brigades could undermine elections intended to lay the foundation of a new democracy.

The militia leader from Zintan who controls the airport here in the capital has exchanged his uniform for a suit and tie and now talks about running for office — with his 1,200 armed men at his back. The head of Tripoli’s military council is starting a political party, and the military council in Benghazi is preparing its own slate of candidates for local office.

Regional militias and the ruling Transitional National Council have already blocked the city of Bani Walid, once a bastion of support for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, from choosing its local government. Other militia leaders are volunteering their armed support as the military wings of newly formed parties.

Five months after Colonel Qaddafi’s death, Libyans are counting on the ritual of the ballot box to end four decades of rule by brute force. The brigades formed to fight Colonel Qaddafi, and many others that sprang up after the fact, have thwarted the consolidation of a new central authority and become a menace to security, trading deadly gunfire in the streets of the capital, detaining and torturing suspected Qaddafi loyalists, and last week even kidnapping two members of the Transitional National Council for two days.

Libya’s interim leaders say they hope an elected government will have the legitimacy to rein in those militias, and the country is rushing to hold votes. The two largest cities, Benghazi and Tripoli, plan to hold local elections by May, while the Transitional National Council has promised elections in June for an assembly that will govern as it writes a new constitution.

Without a national army or police force, though, many civilians worry that the militias could bully voters, suppress votes or otherwise dominate the process, leaving Libya mired in internecine violence, torn by regional tensions or — as a recent poll suggests many Libyans may now expect — vulnerable to the rise of a new strongman.

Wolfram Lacher writes: “Eastern Libya declares autonomy.” In spite of international headlines such as this one, talk of the country’s impending disintegration is misleading. Although the participants at the March 6 Barqa Conference (Barqa is the Arabic name for Cyrenaica, or the region of northeastern Libya) claimed the right to speak for their region, the initiative for self-administration and the move toward federalism triggered furious reactions in Cyrenaica. Given this lack of support in the region itself, the push is unlikely to succeed.

Foreign media coverage of reactions to the initiative focused on anti-federalism demonstrations in Tripoli and the angry response of the chairman of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil. But this emphasis on the tension between the central government and proponents of northeastern autonomy is misguided. More important were the reactions against the decisions in the northeast itself. The local councils of the area’s major cities – Benghazi, Darna, Bayda and Tobruk, which also saw large demonstrations against federalism – all immediately made clear their opposition to the Barqa Conference’s declaration and refused to recognize its proposed regional council.

In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood – which has an important base in northeastern Libyan cities – called the declaration the work of narrow-based and personal interests. Furthermore, the initiative has not received significant backing from the disparate armed entities that are controlling the northeast. For instance, the region’s most powerful militia grouping, the Union of Revolutionary Brigades (Tajammu Saraya al-Thuwwar), opposed the conference, and the Barqa Military Council (an unofficial grouping of several army units situated in the region) distanced itself from the conference, declaring that it would not get involved in politics.

Proponents of federalism undoubtedly have an influence in Cyrenaica – perhaps more so than in other regions. Leading figures at the Barqa conference included tribal notables as well as intellectuals. The most prominent of these was Ahmad Zubair al-Sanusi. He is a member of the royal family that ruled Libya from 1951 to 1969, and was appointed to head the regional council. But without the local support of the region it claims to govern, the regional council has little chance of actually governing Cyrenaica.

The Washington Post reports: At the entrance to Tripoli’s main landfill, Mustafa al-Sepany stands in combat fatigues, wearing an expression that says no trash trucks will get past him. For four months, none has, leaving the country’s capital city wallowing in uncollected garbage.

Sepany is one of thousands of still-armed rebel fighters who ousted Libyan despot Moammar Gaddafi in last year’s bloody uprising. Now he is one of the residents near the landfill who are exercising their newfound freedoms by declaring they don’t want Tripoli’s trash. Anywhere but here, they say. And in post-revolution Libya, not-in-my-backyard fights come with automatic weapons.

“We will die before we let them open it again,” said Sepany, who was a notary before the revolution.

Libya, awash in cheery yellow wildflowers a year after the Arab Spring, is learning a bleak lesson: Unity does not bloom easily in a region where decision-making has long been concentrated in the hands of the few and where iron-fisted autocrats for decades papered over deep cultural, religious and ethnic differences.

In neighboring Egypt, the year since President Hosni Mubarak’s fall has been marked by breakdowns in law and order and by tensions between hard-line Islamists and secular liberals. In Syria, religious affiliation has emerged as an important dividing line as the army does battle with rebel forces, stoking fears of a broader war.

And in Libya, five months after the death of the man who managed to hold this country together by brute force, people are beginning to wonder whether there is any other way to do it. Clashes this past week between rival tribes in the southern oasis city of Sabha killed 147 people, officials said. Such has been the chaos that no one in Libya would be surprised if a trash spat ends in a gunfight.

Reuters reports: A week of fighting between rival tribes deep in Libya’s south has killed 147 people, the government said on Saturday, but it said it had brokered a fresh ceasefire agreement between the two sides.

The clashes in the desert oasis city of Sabha were between members of the Tibu ethnic group, many of whom are originally from neighbouring Chad, and local militias from Sabha.

The fighting underlines the fragility of the government’s grip on Libya over six months after a revolt ended Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, as well as the volatility of a country awash with weapons left over from the rebellion.

Minister of Health Fatima al-Hamroush said on Saturday that 147 people had been killed and 395 injured since the clashes broke out a week ago.

She said the government had sent 20 cars filled with medical supplies to the Sabha region and had transported 187 people from both sides of the clashes to Tripoli for medical care.

Interim prime minister Abdurrahim El-Keib told reporters a truce was now in force. The government has previously announced ceasefires over the past few days but these have collapsed.

Sean Kane writes: Benghazi is back in the headlines. On March 6, the capital of Libya’s 2011 uprising hosted a reported 3,000 tribal figures and leaders from the eastern half of the country. Seeking to marry eastern Libya’s status as the historical seat of the country’s pre-Qaddafi federal monarchy with local post-revolutionary anxiety, the conference provocatively announced the creation of the federal region of Barqa.

The reaction both within and outside of Libya has been swift. The ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) sharply criticized the declaration. Protests extolling national unity were held across the country and Libya’s leading mufti issued a fatwa against federalism. Meanwhile, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference issued statements expressing support for a unified Libya and rejecting federalism. An editorial in the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi even opined that Qaddafi and his family must feel “vindicated” in their predictions that the country would fragment without them.

The reality is more nuanced than the excited commentary would suggest. The gulf between the “federalism” called for by some easterners and the administrative decentralization broadly favored across Libya is most likely relatively narrow. And even in eastern Libya, support for the federal model advocated for by the self-appointed Interim Council of Barqa appears mixed.

AFP reports: Libya’s government said Wednesday it is preparing to take over control of its border crossings and airports, including in Tripoli, from former rebels that fought to oust Moamer Kadhafi.

Government spokesman Nasser al-Manaa said the topic was discussed at a meeting on Tuesday between the government, the ruling National Transitional Council and militia leaders.

After the meeting, “the thwars (former rebels) agreed to provide the airports and border points” to the authorities, Manaa told a news conference in the Libyan capital.

“The government will today begin the process of taking control” of these facilities, including Tripoli airport and the port of Misrata, in an “important step to strengthen confidence in the state,” he said.

BBC News reports: Two British journalists who were detained by a Libyan militia group last month have been handed over to the Libyan Interior Ministry.

Nick Davies-Jones and Gareth Montgomery-Johnson work for the Iranian news channel Press TV.

They were detained on 22 February and accused of working in the country illegally.

The UK embassy in Tripoli said it was following developments closely and providing full consular support.

The sister of Mr Montgomery-Johnson, Mel Gribble, said the UK Foreign Office had confirmed to her that the two men were no longer being held by the militia.

Bloomberg reports: Libya’s bourse, closed for more than a year as armed conflict ended Muammar Qaddafi’s four- decade rule, resumes trading of nine stocks today and aims to list at least three more in 2012 as the economy stabilizes.

The Libyan Stock Exchange, whose average daily trading totaled no more than 400,000 dinars ($318,000) a day prior to closing in February 2011, will trade most of the 12 previously listed shares such as United for Insurance, General Manager Ahmed Karoud said in an interview yesterday. Three to four initial public offerings are likely this year, he said.

Libya, North Africa’s biggest oil producer, has restored 75 percent of pre-war production levels, pumping as much as 1.2 million barrels a day, Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib said this month. The economy, which the International Monetary Fund said in January may have contracted by 60 percent last year, is projected to recover in 2012, “concurrent with an improvement in the security situation,” the fund said.

“There’s stability in Libya,” Karoud said in an interview at his office yesterday. “The stock market will be one of the economic activities in the coming period in order to reconstruct Libya.”

The bourse, located in the capital Tripoli, remains small, with a market value of about $3.1 billion compared with $65.8 billion for the Egyptian market, North Africa’s biggest.

While the tumble in growth may have slowed, political tension remain. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the National Transitional Council, said March 7 he is ready to defend national unity by force. His remarks came a day after political and tribal leaders declared a semi-autonomous region in the country’s oil-rich east.

“We are going to require more stability in the country — this is a must,” Rami Sidani, the Dubai-based head of Middle East and North Africa investments at Schroder Investment Management, said by telephone yesterday. “We perceive Libya as a great place that offers great growth potential eventually but we believe it’s at a very early stage given the political uncertainty we see at the moment.”