Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The coziness between the authorities and many of those who railed against them continually surprised me. Some of this was simple pragmatism, but not all; it was more intimate than that. A person’s network of loyalties and connections was never predictable. I had a drink (of nonalcoholic beer) in the Tripoli planetarium with a professor who had previously claimed that the prime minister and Saif got drunk together and raped the country—and they were the good guys. We had joked about the government’s inefficiencies, and he had said darkly that no one who wasn’t Libyan had any good reason to endure such chaos. He had asked how I could hold on to my sanity when I was dealing with government offices.

Now he was beaming. “Hey, I’ve been given a job with the ministry.” He raised a hand up over his head in a gesture of pride and triumph.

I was surprised that he was so eager to join a regime that he loathed.

“Well,” he replied, “it also happens to be the only game in town.”

Of the many lessons I’ve learned against optimism, none other has been so bitter as Libya’s descent into chaos following Qaddafi’s ignoble end. The problem, it would seem, was not that the West supported the overthrow of Qaddafi. The problem was that we did not seek to ascertain or shape what would ensue. The elimination of a great evil achieves little without some coherent good to fill the vacuum. The murder of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and two CIA contractors in Benghazi on September 12, 2012, came as a rude awakening to just how dysfunctional Libya had become. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, was criticized for having denied requests for increased security in Benghazi, where she wished to maintain a low profile, apparently as a misguided show of faith in the incipient Libyan democracy. Since then, militants from ISIL (also known as ISIS or Daesh) have captured Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte and slaughtered Christians there. Armed conflicts have emerged in Benghazi, Derna, Tripoli, Warshafana, the Nafusa Mountains, and other areas. In the south, the Tuareg and Tebu ethnicities are slaughtering each other. People from sub-Saharan Africa flood through the uncontrolled desert borders hoping to cross the Mediterranean and settle illegally in Europe, usually under the supervision of human traffickers. Amnesty International maintains that among the hundreds of people assassinated by Islamist groups are atheists, security officials, state employees, religious leaders, agnostics, activists, journalists, judges, and prosecutors. There is no functioning legal system. Even my closest friend from Tripoli, Ashur Etwebi, who wanted to help build the new Libya at almost any cost, has fled with his family to Norway. Hasan Agili has gained UN refugee status—though not a residence visa or a work permit—in Lebanon. Those who can get out, no matter how much they love their country, are out. This misery is Qaddafi’s legacy; he had so destroyed his society that no human structures were left to sustain government without him.

In the primitive south of the country, tribal warfare is unbridled; in the anarchic north, kidnapping is a commonplace. The elected government—the House of Representatives (HOR)—which enjoys international recognition, has fled Tripoli and taken refuge in Tobruk, in the eastern area of the country. A competing government primarily of Islamists—the General National Congress (GNC)—has declared itself in Tripoli, which means Libya has, in the words of the French foreign minister, “two governments, two parliaments, and complete confusion.” The influence of the Islamic State is growing, and the UN’s attempts to form a GNC and HOR “unity government” will surely strengthen the Islamists, whose predecessor, the Libyan Islamic Brotherhood, lost roundly in the last two elections. The West supported the overthrow of elected Islamists in Egypt; the West now supports a role for Islamists in Libya, where they have never been elected. General Khalifa Haftar, the renegade who leads the HOR army, has threatened to form a third government wing of his own under the banner of Karama (Dignity), focused primarily on the fight against Islamists.