TRIPOLI, Sept 1: No end is in sight to the worst disruption to Libya’s oil industry since the civil war in 2011 as armed groups, security guards and oil workers with tribal loyalties shut down pipelines and oil ports across the country.

Central state power is already tenuous and separatist groups are exploiting the stoppages, but the government risks bloody clashes with tribal militias if it sends ill-equipped nascent army units to capture oil terminals held by armed groups.

“These militias are intoxicated with power,” said a senior Libyan official, adding that Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s strategy was to appease oil workers and apply tribal mediation with caveats and incentives to end the standoff.

Zeidan, accused of allowing corruption to flourish, can ill afford to prolong a crisis that the government says has already cost more than $2 billion, threatening Libya’s healthy foreign currency reserves, power supply and remnants of law and order.

Libya’s oil production has fallen to just over 10 percent of capacity due to a month-long disruption by armed security guards who shut the main export ports in the east and centre over pay demands. In the past week the strikes have spread to the western coastal ports and armed groups have also closed taps on pipelines from major oil fields, threatening the major north African oil producer with economic paralysis. “It’s a tribal war to terminate the political process.

They want a body that represents the tribes,” Noman Benotman, president of Quilliam, a counter-terrorism think tank, said.

“Practically the government is dead, technically it is still there.”

Calls for federal rule have become stronger since Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011, fuelled by complaints in the east that it has not been given a fair share of Libya’s wealth, and the weakness of the central government.—Reuters