The New Middle East (57 page)

The drive I took around the capital the day after I met Professor Abughania illustrated their point.

‘Why is the rubbish piling up?’ I asked my driver, Farid Ali.

‘Because all the African people have run away,’ he said.

‘But if Libyan people don’t clean up the rubbish, who else is going to do it?’ I asked.

‘They are lazy, they are waiting for someone to come and clean.’

‘But that has to change doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he said seriously, ‘they are bringing Filipinos. But they are lazy. I saw they brought some Filipinos in Tajoura for cleaning but they are too slow, very slow, the people get angry [with them] there. And they have very small bodies. Not like Africans, Africans are very strong.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, it has to change, Libyans have to do those jobs don’t they? Do you think Libyans will do those jobs?’

‘I don’t think so. We always say we are much better [off] than Dubai or the Emirates. Our life should be much better than them. People say: “We are only five million, we have oil, we don’t need to work hard.” ’

On cue the cars on the road snarled to a stop. It was half past one in the afternoon and I was stuck in the rush-hour traffic. Most people start work at 8 a.m. and finish by 1 or 2 p.m., their working day over. Farid was speaking as a man who had done manual labour jobs himself, but in Copenhagen, not Libya. He worked in a Turkish restaurant there for ten years, starting as a dishwasher and moving up to be a cook before moving back to Libya two years before the revolution started.

‘Now some of my friends have moved from Tripoli to Copenhagen, and they phoned me and I said: “Ah now you are there you will wash dishes you bastard! You can do it there but you can’t do that in your own country.” ’ He was laughing, but during the war the inability of the Libyan people to carry out the basic industrial tasks created a food crisis in Benghazi and Tripoli.

‘Always the Tunisian and Egyptian people made the bread, and when they ran away really we had a big problem,’ said Farid, laughing out loud. ‘At that time there’s flour, there’s everything, but nobody can make the bread.’ He was right and it was something that World Food Programme officials in Benghazi privately fumed about during the war.

During Gaddafi’s rule the biggest ‘employer’ was the government. The Brother Leader’s edicts in the Green Book closed the private sector to most Libyans. The only people who were allowed to make money were his family, their friends and some of his most ardent supporters. Employment in the bloated government sector often meant jobs that didn’t even require people to turn up for work. ‘We had one and a quarter million people employed by the government and perhaps six hundred thousand of them were actually doing the job,’ a former government official told me. ‘The rest didn’t work at all.’

‘Civil society in Libya is in its infancy,’ said Professor Khashkusha from Tripoli University. ‘There is no clear definition of its role yet. It needs a lot of tutoring. It needs a lot of management. Civil society still thinks the state should supply them a place to have an office, salaries, a budget. Civil society [should be] totally the adversary of the state. It exists outside the state [structures], and to reach to that position we’ll need years.’

The collapse of employment by the state, the lack of a private sector and the end of the war left thousands of unemployed armed young men roaming the streets with nothing to do. I asked Professor Khashkusha what the best way was to get the militias back into society. He laughed out loud. ‘You tell us how and we’ll make a shrine for you. We’ll make a big square and we’ll build a statue for you!’

The best hope for the new Libya is the next generation. The challenge for the present one is to wean them off their guns and give them a future. Libya has already lost two generations. It can’t afford to lose another. The new government almost immediately gained access to the tens of billions of dollars the Gaddafi regime squirrelled away in foreign bank accounts. It used some of the money to pay off the gunmen, doubling the cost of public sector salaries compared to that under Gaddafi.
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That is a short-term necessity that needs to be replaced with a long-term plan. Unemployment is a huge problem. Libya needs to create new industries that provide real jobs.

At an open-air market in the remains of Gaddafi’s Tripoli compound I met Ibrahim Rabou. He was a high school teacher of Arabic language and Islamic studies. ‘My youth was wasted under Gaddafi. Forty years of my life was during that time. Our hope is for the coming generation because for us you know . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘We just hope everything will be all right,’ he said quietly.

What gave Ibrahim hope was what was going to happen the following day. ‘In my life, I never participated in any election. It is the first time that as a Libyan, a free Libyan, I can go and elect the people that I want, so of course everybody is happy because this is a very historic moment for all Libya.’

Sadaq Abdullah Baunny was unusual for a Libyan in that 7 July 2012 wasn’t the first time he was getting the chance to vote in a multi-party election. He had voted in the first one held by King Idris in 1952 and now, sixty years later, he was going to get a chance to do it again. He was at the gates of the Mohamed Mahmoud bin Otman school in Tripoli two hours before the polls opened. The enthusiasm in the capital that day meant he still didn’t get the coveted first place in the queue. That went to a young man who had fought on the rebel side and once occupied the school with his fighters during the battle for the capital. But unlike the young man, who was wearing just a yellow T-shirt, Sadaq, who was in his eighties, had dressed for the occasion. He wore a crisply pressed traditional white Arab robe and a white taqiyah, the short round cap worn by observant Muslim men. His white beard was neatly trimmed. Wrapped around his left arm was the old flag of independence. Sadaq said he had resolutely refused to work for any government during his sixty-five years in the clothing industry. He had twenty children, and as we stood in the shade waiting for the poll to open he reeled off their professions on his thick fingers. Most of them, like anyone with ambition in Libya under Gaddafi, had tried to get out of the country. Some lived in Canada, one was in Germany and another lived in Switzerland.

‘Allahu Akbar,’ the election monitor murmured quietly as the first vote was placed into the box. Then it was Sadaq’s turn. His left hand shook slightly as he placed his folded paper into the large plastic tub, but this was age, not nervousness. I asked him how he felt. ‘My feelings are I am nearly flying from happiness and I don’t feel the earth beneath my feet at all.’ Women and men voted in separate sections of the school. Sadaq’s wife was in a wheelchair, and now that he had voted he was going home to collect her so that she could do the same. ‘I voted for Jibril,’ he told me. ‘He’s an excellent man, the country was in deep trouble but he met with the Western leaders and he got us help.’

However the man he was talking about, Mahmoud Jibril, wasn’t personally standing in the July elections for the new General National Congress. The laws of the poll banned members of the NTC from running for parliament. Jibril though was the face of his party’s, the National Forces Alliance’s, campaign. He emerged from the vote as the country’s dominant political player and was immediately touted as a possible president.

Men and women of all ages streamed through the capital’s polling stations on that day. It was a trouble-free affair, with just one lone old man turned away because he forgot to bring his ID. ‘But you know me!’ he said to the election official. For Libya’s mostly young population, this was an exciting day. You could see it in their wide grins and the proud wave of their ink-stained fingers.

There was a complacent conclusion from those who had not spent much time in the country during the war that Libya’s elections would follow those of the other post-revolutionary states by voting in Islamists. It was not a feeling I shared, because I found very little sense of an Islamist insurgence on the various Libyan front lines I reported from during the war. And there is nothing like the prospect of imminent death to push you deeper into your religion, so if it was going to resurge it was likely to show up there first.

The Libyan people are religious. I haven’t met a single person in the country who was not. It is a fundamental part of their personal lives, but it does not define them politically. And so the Brotherhood’s candidates held very little appeal. They got just seventeen of the eighty seats allocated for parties. A voter described the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in the post-Gaddafi elections like this: ‘We don’t need anyone to lead us to Islam, we already have Islam, and ours is middle [moderate] Islam, even if we pray five times a day. All these other countries like Egypt, they have Christians and Jews and Muslims so they need a party for Islam.’

‘If you [the West] want to insist on labelling us as “liberals”, “conservatives” or “Islamists”, “non-Islamists”, it’s up to you, you can say whatever you like,’ the Libyan economist Ahmed A. al-Atrash told me. ‘But there is simplicity to the Libyan social fabric. We are all Muslims, we all practise Islam, to some extent and freely. Some of us pray one hundred per cent, others eighty per cent, others don’t practise at all but respect that there is a red line.’

The Brotherhood saw their failure as the direct legacy of their vilification and suppression during the Gaddafi years. Al-Amin Belhaj was among the leadership of the newly created ‘Justice and Construction Party’, which was the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood’s new political wing. ‘The Brotherhood in Egypt started a long time ago,’ he told me. ‘They had years in politics. In Tunisia, Ennahda started in 1988. They had about thirty years of political experience. In Libya we had just three months. That’s the most importance difference between what happened in Libya and what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. We are just starting in politics.’

During the election, to dilute voter suspicion, Belhaj’s party even tried to claim it wasn’t the Brotherhood at all, but a collection of like-minded individuals. ‘Libyans are moderate Muslims. Ninety per cent are moderate, that is one of the reasons why we did not create a “Brotherhood” party. But when you interview a Brotherhood member you will find a normal Libyan, you will find that their beliefs are almost the same. If you go through the party you can find some are from the Brotherhood and others are not, you cannot differentiate at all.’ It was a tough sell, particularly as he wanted to rush our interview because he told me afterwards he was off to catch a plane to Egypt to meet members of the Ikhwan there.

The murder of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, gave rise to a chorus of alarm that Libya was at risk of eventually being overrun by Islamist extremists. It is not. There are Salafists in Libya, and some of them are very hard-line, but they reflect a fringe of society, in a society that now knows how to fight back. Libya’s revolution was unique among the Arab Spring uprisings for its totality. Its elections were unique for their outcome. The same can also be said for the country’s prospects. Unlike Syria it is a largely homogeneous population of Sunni Muslims. Unlike Egypt its population is tiny and literate. Unlike Tunisia it has huge oil reserves. Unlike Iraq its oil industry survived the civil war largely intact and was back to work within weeks of the war’s end. Crucially it has no inherent strategic value to the wider world, and so it should be spared the buffeting winds of geopolitical gamesmanship. The Qataris tried to buy influence by funding the campaign of some rebel militia leaders and they got a drubbing in the polls. One Libyan official said privately: ‘In funding the Islamists, they are upsetting the balance of politics and making it difficult for us to move forward. They need to stop their meddling.’
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Libyans want to determine their own destiny.

Now that Gaddafi is gone, for the first time the Libyan people have access to their own money. By the end of 2012 the country’s oil export revenues were back up to pre-war levels of US$44 billion.
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The new Libya doesn’t need to go cap in hand to Western donors to rebuild the state. It will probably stumble its way through the next few years, but any mistakes it makes will be largely its own. It will not have to manage the social tensions created by an interfering foreign hand. It has miles and miles of incredible Mediterranean coastline and spectacular ancient ruins that could attract millions of tourists from around the world.

Libya may just work. In other parts of the region and in other parts of the world, after the shine of previous revolutions has worn off some have hankered for the old days. But life under Gaddafi was absurd. Any future nostalgia can be quickly cured by flicking through the increasingly rare copies of his Green Book. There will be periods in the coming months and years when that optimism looks wildly misplaced, but Libya has a clean slate on which to build a new nation and the income to do it. Year Zero is probably the best place for it to start.

8

Syria: The Arab World’s Broken Heart

The village sat nestled among cornfields and green pastures where sheep grazed in the crushing midday sun under the watchful eye of local shepherds. A dusty little road wound its way up through the surrounding fields to the small grey-brick homes sitting on a rocky outpost overlooking the countryside. As I entered the house from the dazzling light outside, it was difficult at first to understand why my boots were sticking to the ground in the dark little room. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw scattered shoes and fallen cups lying on the floor. The room was silent but for the flies, which had found the evidence of the massacre before I did. Their soft drone led to the corner of the room where a small squeegee mop was propped against the wall, the kind often used to scrape soapsuds off a window. It was not up to the task it had last been used for, so it stood abandoned in a thick pool of dark red blood.