The Guardian reports: The Libyan leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has vowed to use force to stop the country breaking up after leaders in an eastern region declared autonomy.

“We are not prepared to divide Libya,” he said, blaming infiltrators and pro-Gaddafi elements for backing the autonomy plan. “We are ready to deter them, even with force.”

His comments come amid mounting evidence that Libya is slowly splintering into a series of rival fiefdoms controlled by competing militias, who increasingly follow their own agendas rather than acting in the national interest.

In February, the city of Misrata, which suffered a brutal siege by pro-Muammar Gaddafi forces, forged ahead with its own municipal elections, while the militia in Zintan is still holding Gaddafi’s son Saif.

Misrata has established a security zone that prohibits many Libyans from entering. It held the first city council elections in Libya last month, without the involvement of the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC).

The sense of growing instability in Libya was compounded by a recent Amnesty International report that the hundreds of militias vying for power in the country were out of control and increasingly behaving like mafia organisations.

Al Jazeera reports: Tribal leaders and militia commanders in oil-rich eastern Libya have declared their intention to seek semi-autonomy, raising fears that the country might disintegrate following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

Thousands of representatives of major tribal leaders, militia commanders and politicians made the declaration on Tuesday in a ceremony held in Benghazi.

They promised to end decades of marginalisation under Gaddafi and named a council to run the affairs of the newly created region, extending from the central coastal city of Sirte to the Egyptian border in the east.

Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston, reporting from the capital, Tripoli, said the announcement in Benghazi was only the beginning of a process.

“It is certainly significant, but we need to put it into context: first of all, they have announced the formation of a new regional council, and this will actually take a couple weeks to form,” she said.

“At this stage, they say they would like independence, but they have not declared independence. At this stage they haven’t even declared a degree of semi autonomy.”

The gathering in Benghazi also rejected an election law which allocated 60 seats for the eastern region out of 200-member assembly set to be elected in June.

Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC), the interim central government based in Tripoli, has repeatedly voiced its opposition to the creation of a partly autonomous eastern region, saying it could eventually lead to the break-up of the country.

Reacting to Tuesday’s declaration, Waheed Burshan, a senior NTC representative, said the tribal leaders were looking for political power, whereas ordinary people of the east wanted a unified Libya.

BBC News reports: Two British journalists detained in Libya are suspected of spying, the militia that is holding them says.

Faraj al-Swehli, commander of a Misrata brigade, said the men had entered Libya illegally and were carrying “incriminating evidence”.

He said the activities of reporter Nicholas Davies and cameraman Gareth Montgomery-Johnson were being investigated.

The men had been working for Iran’s English-language TV station Press TV.

Rights groups have called for their release.

The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse in Tripoli says that at a hastily convened press conference in the capital, reporters were shown video footage of what was purported to be the two journalists test-firing weapons.

Members of the militia also produced a field dressing that they said they had found in the journalists’ possession.

It was of a type, they said, used by the Israeli military.

I dare say these two journalists are not the only ones in Libya who thought it might be prudent to include the widely used, easily available Israeli battle dressing in their first aid kit. If this was supposed to be incriminating evidence, were the militia members not pressed to explain this improbable combination: journalists carrying Israeli supplies while working for an Iranian news outlet? Not only can anyone buy these bandages online; they also happen to be used by the US military.

The Independent reports: Almost a year after the start of the Libyan uprising that led to the ousting and killing of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, new research suggests more than a third of its citizens would rather return to being ruled by a strongman than embrace democracy.

Despite thousands of deaths in the revolt against Colonel Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, fewer than a third of Libyans would welcome democracy, according to the study published by the Institute of Human Sciences, at the University of Oxford, and Oxford Research International.

Libya is traditionally a tribal society and there are concerns that the vacuum created by Colonel Gaddafi’s removal in October could lead to clashes between the factions that toppled him. In recent weeks, medical and human-rights groups have complained that the situation in parts of country is getting out of control.

The deaths of 12 detainees who lost their lives after being tortured by the various militias running law and order in towns and cities across country are documented in an Amnesty International report released today. The study follows last month’s decision by Médecins sans Frontières to halt operations in Misrata after being asked by officials to treat prisoners midway through torture sessions, allowing authorities to abuse the victims again.

Still, the survey found 35 per cent would still like a strong leader in five years’ time, although more than two-thirds wanted some say in future governance.

Anthony Shadid reports from Tripoli: As the militiamen saw it, they had the best of intentions. They assaulted another militia at a seaside base here this week to rescue a woman who had been abducted. When the guns fell silent, briefly, the scene that unfolded felt as chaotic as Libya’s revolution these days — a government whose authority extends no further than its offices, militias whose swagger comes from guns far too plentiful and residents whose patience fades with every volley of gunfire that cracks at night.

The woman was soon freed. The base was theirs. And the plunder began.

“Nothing gets taken out!” shouted one of the militiamen, trying to enforce order.

It did anyway: a box of grenades, rusted heavy machine guns, ammunition belts, grenade launchers, crates of bottled water and an aquarium propped improbably on a moped. Men from a half-dozen militias ferried out the goods, occasionally firing into the air. They fought over looted cars, then shot them up when they did not get their way.

“This is destruction!” complained Nouri Ftais, a 51-year-old commander, who offered a rare, unheeded voice of reason. “We’re destroying Libya with our bare hands.”

The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution is foundering. So is its capital, where a semblance of normality has returned after the chaotic days of the fall of Tripoli last August. But no one would consider a city ordinary where militiamen tortured to death an urbane former diplomat two weeks ago, where hundreds of refugees deemed loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi waited hopelessly in a camp and where a government official acknowledged that “freedom is a problem.” Much about the scene on Wednesday was lamentable, perhaps because the discord was so commonplace.

“Some of it is really overwhelming,” said Ashur Shamis, an adviser to Libya’s interim prime minister, Abdel-Rahim el-Keeb. “But somehow we have this crazy notion that we can defeat it.”

There remains optimism in Tripoli, not least because the country sits atop so much oil. But Mr. Keeb’s government, formed Nov. 28, has found itself virtually paralyzed by rivalries that have forced it to divvy up power along lines of regions and personalities, by unfulfillable expectations that Colonel Qaddafi’s fall would bring prosperity, and by a powerlessness so marked that the national army is treated as if it were another militia.

The Guardian reports: Three months after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, concerns are mounting about the mistreatment and torture of prisoners held by Libyan militiamen who are operating beyond the control of the country’s transitional government, as well as by officially recognised security bodies.

Amnesty International warned that prisoners from Libya and other African countries have been subject to abuse. The warning comes against a background of anxiety in western capitals about Tripoli’s failure to tackle security and political issues.

This week’s fighting in Bani Walid, a former stronghold of the Gaddafi regime to the south of the capital, has fuelled fears that tribal rivalries and armed clashes could explode into a wider conflict. Last week, the president of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, was mobbed by demonstrators in his Benghazi office.

Ian Martin, the UN’s special envoy to Libya, told the security council on Wednesday that the Bani Walid fighting did not indicate a resurgence of pro-Gaddafi sentiment, but added this warning: “The former regime may have been toppled, but the harsh reality is that the Libyan people continue to have to live with its deep-rooted legacy.”

Navi Pillay, the UN human rights chief, said that more than 8,500 detainees were being held by militia groups in about 60 centres.

The aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières has added its voice to the chorus of concern by announcing that it had halted work in the coastal city of Misrata because staff were being asked to patch up detainees during torture sessions. “Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for more interrogation,” said MSF’s Christopher Stokes. “This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.”

Amnesty said its delegates in Libya had met detainees in and around Tripoli, Misrata and Gheryan who showed marks indicating they had recently been tortured. Injuries included open wounds on the head, limbs, back and elsewhere.

Oliver Miles writes: Since I returned from a week in Libya a few days ago there have been some bad headlines, for example “Protesters storm Libyan government HQ in Benghazi” and “Gaddafi loyalists seize Libyan town”. It was my first visit since the revolution, and I have already written about my impressions, which were favourable and sometimes inspiring. Was I wrong?

First, a word about the media situation. Foreign correspondents move freely in Libya. Ordinary Libyans have found their voice, and there is a flood of new Arabic language newspapers, which have yet to prove themselves. The National Transitional Council is lamentably weak in strategic communication and has failed to make public even basic facts like the names and number of members.

As a result, news stories have to be looked at critically. While I was there I heard two stories that never made the media: two people “executed” in central Tripoli, quite close to my hotel, and four international officials kidnapped in the far south. Neither story turned out to be accurate – the “execution” was of two would-be carjackers who happened to pick on a car full of armed militia, and the “kidnapping” was the temporary detention of four foreigners driving in an unmarked car in the desert without papers.

Bani Walid, the town reportedly seized by Gaddafi loyalists, is quite remote. It is also untypical, perhaps unique in Libya, in that its inhabitants are virtually all from one tribe. Since the first reports of what happened there a day or two ago, a more complicated story has begun to emerge (as reflected in more recent reports). A fighter with the revolutionary forces had claimed that Gaddafi loyalists were flying green flags in the central town, but it now appears that this is not true. We are left with a serious breakdown of law and order in which at least four people were killed.

The transitional government will only be in power until the summer. If plans work out it will then hand over to an elected government. It is not even a lame duck, because it never walked on two legs. It faces many interlinked problems, the most urgent being security, humanitarian relief and kickstarting the economy.

The Associated Press reports: Hundreds of angry Libyans on Saturday stormed the transitional government’s headquarters in the eastern city of Benghazi, carting off computers, chairs, and desks while the country’s interim leader was still holed up in the building.

Libyans have grown increasingly frustrated with the pace and direction of reforms in the country more than three months after the end of the civil war that ousted longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Those concerns spurred residents in Benghazi, where the uprising against longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi broke out in February, to begin protests nearly two weeks ago to demand transparency and justice from the country’s new leaders.

The melee at the National Transitional Council’s headquarters began after protesters broke through the gates using hand grenades and streamed into the grounds of the headquarters. They banged on the building’s doors and demanded officials meet with them.

In a bid to calm tensions, NTC chief Mustafa Abdul-Jalil tried to address the crowd from a second-floor window, but protesters began throwing bottles at him.

Protesters then torched Abdul-Jalil’s armored Land Cruiser and broke into the headquarters itself, smashing windows to get inside and cart off furniture and electronics.

A security official in the building said a team of some 50 guards dressed as civilians were trying to calm the protesters.

The official, who served as a revolutionary commander during the civil war, said Abdul-Jalil was still in the building and was refusing to leave. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Some of the protesters pitched tents weeks ago outside the NTC’s headquarters to protest a set of election laws they say were drafted by the interim leaders without consulting the public.

Sean Kane writes: After over 40 years of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya — a by design stateless society of purported direct rule by the popular masses — Libya’s political transition was always going to be sui generis. Other Arab autocrats may have subverted elections and ignored their constitutions, but in most cases at least the motions of representative democracy existed. This was not the case in Libya, where the law organizing the country’s first elections is scheduled for publication this weekend. As Othman El-Mugirhy, the chair of the committee that drafted the law eloquently put it, “Libya has no institutions, it is a state of ashes.”

One legacy of the almost perpetual administrative flux that Qaddafi’s unique governing model engendered is that individuals rather than political parties will likely contest Libya’s forthcoming elections. This has all sorts of unusual consequences, not least of which is potentially turning on its head the widespread belief in the region that early elections favor the Muslim Brotherhood.

Political parties come in for a particularly hard time in Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Green Book, which lays out his Third Universal Theory (the Brother Leader’s proposed alternative to capitalism and communism). Describing political parties as the abortion of democracy and their members as traitors, the Green Book makes the case that parties split society by ensuring “the rule of the part over the whole” and are the “contemporary model of dictatorship” intended to rob people of their right to govern themselves directly.

The decades of demonization of political parties by Qaddafi have left a lasting impact on the Libyan political scene. Many of the nascent political entities in the new Libya seem to prefer to call themselves “movements” or “alliances” rather than use the word party, which still frequently draws a visceral negative reaction.

Countrywide focus group research conducted in Libya by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in November 2011 tends to confirm this anecdotal impression. NDI found participants’ reactions to the idea of political parties “range from ignorance to skepticism to outright hostility.” Many were concerned that political parties are potentially divisive and could cause conflict among Libyans at a time when the country needs to be united. One participant repeated word for word a Green Book bromide that the larger the number of parties, the greater the divisions and struggle within society.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that the electoral law prepared by Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) is widely expected to propose a system in which voters would choose from individual candidates rather than party lists in selecting representatives for the country’s constitutional assembly. The closest international analogue to this type of electoral system is that used in Afghanistan, where its application has contributed to a parliament of individuals rather than parties.

In Libya, such a system makes it likely that candidates in June’s elections for the country’s constitutional assembly will rely on social institutions other than parties to attract votes. In other words, tribal, regional, and family networks are likely to trump political and ideological visions in the coming polls.

This has real implications for the prospects of Libya’s best-organized political party and the only one that scored name recognition in the NDI focus groups — the Muslim Brotherhood. Simply put, being the only political party that ordinary people can name might not be such a good thing among a population that has been acculturated to view parties as synonymous with hidden agendas and narrow interests.

Reuters reports: Scores of Libyan judges and lawyers protested in Tripoli on Wednesday against lawless behaviour in the capital by former rebel groups, whom they said should now leave the city and return to their home towns.

The disparate militias came together to oust Muammar Gaddafi and have filled the vacuum left by the collapse of his 42-year rule in the capital three months ago. The new interim government is pressuring them now to go home and leave the job of keeping order to the police and a new army it plans to establish.

Judges and lawyers said they decided to protest after an armed militia raided the offices of the prosecutor general on Tuesday.

The crowd of about 250, carrying placards reading “No to weapons; Yes to justice!” gathered outside Tripoli’s courthouse before marching to the central Martyr’s Square.

“We are protesting here to express our shame at what happened yesterday,” said Adel M’salati, a chief judge at the Tripoli court, referring to the attack on the prosecutor’s office.

“These are people who spent time in prisons. They left prison, put on the uniform of revolutionaries and have started to steal in the streets and attack police stations,” he said in a speech to the protesters.

“Now we ask the military to take its place and the police to take their place to provide justice and security for the country and the people,” said M’salati.

The New York Times reports: The marching can hardly be called crisp as the new Libyan National Army takes form in daily drills at an abandoned air force base here.

The soldiers do not yet march in step or even keep their formations straight. Some answer their cellphones when they should be taking orders. Some smoke in the middle of exercises. Others push and shove as personal disputes break out over one thing or another.

“You are not going to see a good, really good military,” Gen. Abdul Majid Fakih, an instructor at the military academy under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi who later defected, said as he supervised the training. “We are just beginning to build.”

Libya has never had a truly professional national army — a cornerstone in the building of a modern state — one that was not the personal tool of a king or dictator and purposely kept weak and divided to avert coups. And the effort at building one by the struggling new interim government may be its most difficult and important task.

Only a respected army will be able to persuade or force the various competing and heavily armed militias around the country to disarm and join together under a unified leadership. The challenge was underscored over the weekend when a militia from the town of Zintan captured Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and onetime heir apparent, without any help from the army, and then refused to turn him over to the central government.

The army is trying to build respect by holding parades around the country, complete with parachute jumps and fly-bys by Soviet-era MIG fighter jets and Mi-8 helicopters. But even the officers of the new force say they face challenges in building national veneration around the military, as well as in breaking old habits of officer cronyism and allegiance to one strongman or another.

The new army, which numbers a few thousand and includes many soldiers who deserted Colonel Qaddafi’s military, needs barracks, uniforms, vehicles, boots, radios, even flashlights, officers say. Rather than having a central unified command, it is being formed by distinct committees in different cities, following the model of the diverse bunch of militias that fought the war against the dictatorship. And perhaps most troubling, the militias across the country are already refusing to take its orders.