This diary is a follow-up to one I published here last week, here: http://www.dailykos.com/... Some readers suggested that I continue providing updates on the situation in Libya, and add a little color to the news reporting available elsewhere. The celebrations are starting to abate, people's lives are starting to return to normal and the whole society is starting to look around and contemplate what happened, why, and what it all means. This diary is less a news account than an attempt to provide a sense of Libya a week after the end of the war, and the process of remembering and forgetting that follows all wars.
A few days after the end of the war, the Tripoli city council replaced the huge flag hanging on the building overlooking the central square with banner about education, depicting a boy in Harry Potter glasses and a mortarboard. The message is pretty clear: 'OK, we got him. Now let's think about educating our kids'. The square saw days of military parades, sort of a Libyan equivalent of the Grand Army of the Republic passing in review. Days later, a rebel soldier still posed in the square with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck. However, instead of blasting off celebratory gunfire, another guy with a bubble machine was blowing soap bubbles on him. Make of it what you will in terms of this moment of transition from war to peace, but it seems to me an amazingly strange superimposition. Two guys are playing around with two machines, one that fires slugs of metal through the air at 2000 feet per second, and the other floats irridescent spheres of soap film at a foot per second. We are an odd species to even dream of either machine.
With the end of war comes a desire for normalcy, even if things have changed. The National Transitional Council leadership is comprised largely of civic minded technocrats and professionals, and they want to restore normal life and the basic structure of a civilized society as quickly as possible. That poster of the kid in school above? It's as much as a graphic prayer for sanity as a plea to convince parents to support education. Libyan parents need no convincing; they want nothing more than good education for their kids.
This desire for normalcy is both heartening and heartbreaking because it won't come so quickly or easily. Everyone I talk to says "shweya shweya, two or three years and it will be better". So may questions remain unanswered. There's a genuine desire on the part of everyone to make sure violence does not return, but those who did most of the fighting are not particularly well represented yet on the NTC. There are many who have a legitimate claim to participation in power, but few structures or plans on how to balance those claims. Regional, tribal and philosophical differences remain potentially explosive given how much is at stake in the distribution of Libya's considerable resources. The history of single resource oil-exporting economies is terrible in Africa but a little better in the Arabian Gulf, and everyone's thinking about Dubai rather tha Nigeria. But there are no political parties, no formal mechanism for resolving differences, and a sense on the part of each region of the country that they are not going to get screwed out of their share this time. The one thing that most people agree on is that Islam is going to be central to the next government. The rub is in what kind of Islam, and what specifically that means.
Should we be scared of Islam in Libya?
The NTC has said that the source of law will be Islam. But does this mean sort of a civic version of Islam-light, as is the case in Turkey, or a more radical vision such as several Iraqi political parties would like to embrace? On the one hand, it's hard to take some of the hardliners seriously when they can't even spell Allah Akbar (God is Great) and at least a couple of the most ignorant spray-paint “Allah kbar” on walls. On the other, the Islamists were prominent - almost certainly a majority - of the fighters, and this is a deeply Muslim country in which almost nobody questions the existence of God.
My best guess is that the government will end up embracing a slightly more conservative vision than Turkey, but still moderate in terms of the overall spectrum of possible choices. Religious extremists generally take over in response to perceived or actual external threats, with the exception of Saudi Arabia which is the inheritor of a late 18th century austere and fundamentalist Wahhabi movement. External threats are minimal right now in Libya, and NATO's involvement of the West was not seen as imperialist overreach. Gender is probably the area of most concern. The new government has said that it will permit polygamy. It has also expressed its commitment to the education of girls and women, and this is a society where many of the physicians are female and women routinely drive vehicles. I don't think this will descend into a Saudi-style society in which gender roles are utterly controlled by government policy. Libya has a Mediterranean legacy as well as an Islamic and Arab one, desiring greater connection and interaction with the whole region. The model will be more like Tunisia or possibly Algeria.
I think what people often miss, or misinterpret, is the power of outside ideas and the permeability of a culture and society like Libya's. Opportunistic politicians have spent the last decade depicting Islam as an alien and dangerous force, and people like Pamela Geller believe that we are already engaged in an existential war between Islam and the West. Few Libyans are thinking, even remotely, about war between Islam and the West. Those that do are as nuts as Pam Geller, and most people here know it. But there are people for whom their political identity as Muslims has become much stronger as a result of the war. They mirror the uncritical thought of conservative Christians in the US who embrace Christianity as a program that will solve societies problems perfectly, if only we practice religion perfectly. It's a danger and I don't want to make light of it but as long as the society here remains somewhat open to the outside, new ideas will migrate. For all the fear some in the US have of the "contagion" of Islamic ideas and extremism, the truth is, ideas are flowing in the opposite direction in a big way.
This bit of graffiti says "Natural evolution goes backwards!?!?". It reflects a widespread anger on the part of Libyans who claim that Qaddafi has made them more primitive. I'm not sure whether the person who made use of this archetypal image truly understands evolution by natural selection, but I do know that people have heard of evolution. In fact, the percentage of the population that accepts evolution by natural selection is roughly equal in Turkey and in the United States, and both have powerful religious movements that seek to deny the teaching of evolution in the schools. Powerful ideas takes on lives of their own and tend to spread, even in religiously conservative cultures.
The other thing that freaks out the Right in America about Libya is the concern that Islamists here might expand their Jihad to American soil. Of course, terrorism remains a risk and is an intrinsic evil. But the impact of migration on politics and security is not unidirectional at all:
One of the units that liberated Tripoli and Misrata was comprised of Libyan volunteers from the English Midlands. This is not a sign pained by people who hate the UK. Half these guys probably have the beards and beliefs that would place them squarely in the Islamist camp. But they have abosrbed a lot from the UK and this simple dichotomy of Islam vs West doesn't really hold true here. Beyond the military might of NATO and the US, the Arab diaspora in the West may well be more dangerous to repressive regimes than Islamic extremists are to our more open society.
Memory and Forgetting
The other palpable sense I have from being in Libya one week after the war ends, is that people struggle to balance the demands of memory and forgetting when wars end. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people couldn't wait to get rid of the physical structures of the old regime. Once Saddam was gone, his palaces and forts seemed to evaporate overnight. The exact same thing is occurring here. The Bab al Aziziya was Qaddafi's huge compound in the center of Tripoli. Like a black hole in the center of the city, everyone knew it, everyone orbited around it on the ring roads, but people avoided entering it and didn't want to think too much about what went on inside. (This extends to foreigners - Lonely Planet's guide neither mentions the Bab al Aziziyah nor includes it on its maps!) Even before cleaning up the rubble of war in the streets, backhoes converged like big insects on the Bab al Azizya and tore down kilometers of walls surrounding the compound.
The buildings inside are evaporating too. People and cats visit them while they still exist. Cats are orignally native to North Africa and they occupy every possible niche in this city. Hundreds of them have already taken over the huge compound, scent marking and fighting all night over buildings that will be bulldozed in the morning. People too are converging on the compound, grilling kabobs on the grass while their children play in the ruins of Qaddafi's house. This terrifies me a little, with all the broken glass and chemical residues. I hope there's no unexploded ordinance.
Missing persons notices are posted in public places throughout the city. Hundreds of them. The posters fade in the sun just as memories of these individuals grow more faint and families gradually lose hope. Ahmed al Hadad is the name of the missing man depicted on this poster, and he deserves to have a name and an identity attached to his image. He disappeared in Misrata on March 16th, at one of the most violent moments of the entire conflict, and the only thing that remains uncertain is whether he died suddenly in the fighting, or experienced much worse when captured. The poster on the wall, intended to locate him, now serves as an ephemeral memorial. Heroic pictures of Qaddafi have been replaced by sarcastic or humorus ones, and perhaps one measure of progress in Libya will be the rate at which these, too, fade in the sun and are forgotten.
The other night, I walked along the darkened quay past fishermen visible only by their glowing cigarettes, thinking about how one madman in power can affect so many lives on such a personal level. My father in law is a WWII vet, who lied about his age, enlisted, and fought across Europe while still a teenager. In ways subtle and less subtle, those profound traumas are more than mere memories. They affected his entire life. We are creatures of contingency... each of us is the product of accidents and chance events. How many couples never met because of Qaddafi? How many did? How many futures ended forever because of all the violence? What ripples have spread out from this madman to affect lives well into the future? At any rate, there's a lot of life-affirming behavior going on in Libya right now, as people put the war behind them and get on with the loves and losses of more normal life.