TRIPOLI: At the entrance to Tripoli’s main landfill, Mustafa al-Sepany stands in combat fatigues, wearing an expression that says no trash trucks will get past him. For four months, none has, leaving the country’s capital city wallowing in uncollected garbage.
Sepany is one of thousands of still-armed rebel fighters who ousted Libyan despot Muammar Qadhafi in last year’s bloody uprising. Now he is one of the residents near the landfill who are exercising their newfound freedoms by declaring they don’t want Tripoli’s trash. Anywhere but here, they say. And in post-revolution Libya, not-in-my-backyard fights come with automatic weapons. “We will die before we let them open it again,” said Sepany, who was a notary before the revolution.
Libya, awash in cheery yellow wildflowers a year after the Arab Spring, is learning a bleak lesson: Unity does not bloom easily in a region where decision-making has long been concentrated in the hands of the few and where iron-fisted autocrats for decades papered over deep cultural, religious and ethnic differences.
In neighboring Egypt, the year since President Hosni Mubarak’s fall has been marked by breakdowns in law and order and by tensions between hard-line Islamists and secular liberals. In Syria, religious affiliation has emerged as an important dividing line as the army does battle with rebel forces, stoking fears of a broader war.
And in Libya, five months after the death of the man who managed to hold this country together by brute force, people are beginning to wonder whether there is any other way to do it.
Clashes this past week between rival tribes in the southern oasis city of Sabha killed 147 people, officials said. Such has been the chaos that no one in Libya would be surprised if a trash spat ends in a gunfight.
With the dump closed since December, Tripoli residents have taken to tossing their trash bags on the grounds of Qadhafi’s former palace. But at least another million tons of garbage is piled along city streets, creating a looming environmental crisis, according to Adnan El-Gherwi, the volunteer head of Tripoli’s Executive Council, which is attempting to run the city.The old landfill, built by Qadhafi 11 years ago, generated complaints among residents that it polluted waterways and bred disease. The city has promised to build a new, sanitary landfill as soon as possible and to pay for clean water, a health clinic and other aid to families near the old one. But El-Gherwi insists the old dump must reopen, at least temporarily. And he won’t rule out the use of force.
“You gave Qadhafi 11 years, and you don’t want to give even one year to your new government?” El-Gherwi said in frustration over the go-it-alone attitude at the center of this and many other standoffs. “We have got to learn to work as one people.”
Instead, rival militiamen, some of them intoxicated and most of them unemployed, battle over turf in the capital. In the western town of Tawergha, an entire population of black Libyans was evicted by fighters from a neighboring city. And calls by the oil-rich eastern part of the country for greater autonomy from the central government led to an armed clash in Benghazi, raising, for some, the specter of partition.
“Everything here is screwed up, we know that,” said Sadat El-Badri, deputy chairman of the Tripoli Local Council. “We went from complete dictatorship to complete freedom in one step, and everyone is doing just exactly what they want.”
Unlike Mubarak in Egypt, Qadhafi left behind no scaffolding of working ministries to build on, no effective civil servants to repurpose for an age of accountability.
‘The farmer is dead’
“There were no laws, no rules. It was just the word of one man,” said Almabruk Sultan, a computer science professor in the eastern city of Benghazi who is a popular blogger and commentator. “In government terms, Libya was a farm. And the farmer is dead.”But not forgotten. A common refrain among Libyans: “Qadhafi is still in our heads.”
Protesters are in the streets daily, demanding services and accusing council members of being as corrupt as their Qadhafi predecessors. Officials are similarly quick to describe protesters as puppets of pro-Qadhafi elements.
The Transitional National Council, hastily formed during the early days of the revolt by tribal elders and local leaders, is struggling to replace itself with a representative government.
Its flow chart of reforms describes a 20-month process from the drafting of a new constitution to the election of a national legislature.
But Libyans are not in a methodical mood. In Misrata, which saw some of the war’s most intense fighting, the local militia booted the Transitional National Council and held its own election months ahead of schedule.
In Tripoli, the traffic lights work, but are universally ignored.
“Why do you need an AK-47 to tame the traffic?” Sabri Issa, a petroleum services company owner, asked while watching four young militia fighters gruffly directing the clots of cars around Martyrs Square, their automatic rifles waving at windshield height. Two police officers sat in their car a few yards away. “They do nothing to control these guys,” Issa said. “We have a government in name only.”
Militia members from Tripoli have taken over the towering Grand Hotel. Others guard the airport. And although fewer dead bodies from revenge killings are discovered each morning, gunfire still echoes nightly.
Interior Ministry officials acknowledge they have no power over the looting and shooting. Criminal courts are paralysed. When fighters are arrested, their comrades break them out of prison. With unemployment near 30 per cent, and higher among young men, the Transitional National Council has scratched together a one-time payment of about $1,600 to eachfighter, in the hope of drawing some of them off the street.
By arrangement with the Washington Post/Bloomberg News Service