Libya embarks on the path to development

* Iman al-Badri (left) attending a Unicef seminar for prosecutors and legal advisers on children’s rights in Tripoli. Standing at right is Lebanese lecturer Ghassan Chalil, who is teaching 20 Libyan judicial officials the procedures they need to apply in their daily work to comply with the UN Children’s Rights Convention.

The bulging garbage bags piled three deep in front of the razed concrete walls of the Bab al-Azizia compound — residence of former Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi until the summer of 2011 — look like sandbags with gun slits from a distance.

But fighting has ended in the Libyan capital Tripoli — aside from sporadic terrorist attacks and local disputes sometimes settled with firearms.

The eccentric dictator’s compound will reportedly soon be demolished to make room for an amusement park.

Meanwhile, local residents are not amused by the underperformance of their rubbish collectors, who have yet to pick up the bags. The traffic police do not get good grades either. At mid-day every day, endless lines of motor vehicles roll through the dusty streets.

Bypassing the bottlenecks, impatient motorists barrel down the sidewalks and slalom around trees. The central government and local councils left over from the Libyan revolution are unable to keep order.

Many of the young revolutionaries numb the emptiness of their return to civilian life with drugs. A drug baron recently drove a tank into a central intersection during a row with police.

The corruption endemic under Gaddafi has not gone away since his violent death at the hands of rebels in October 2011.

“Many public officials are accustomed to collecting bribes for every contract awarded by their office. This makes our work much more difficult,” lamented Abdullah Doghaim, 58, a grammar school IT instructor and, since May 2012, member of Benghazi’s first elected city council.

In December, the interim government in Tripoli sent the council emergency budgetary funds of 100mn Libyan dinars (about $79mn), which do not go far in a city of 800,000 inhabitants whose infrastructure has been neglected for decades by central authorities.

A street is being freshly paved in front of the El Fadeel Hotel. Broken windows and defective toilets are being replaced in some schools. The militias formed in Benghazi during the revolution still control the city’s various districts and take orders from no one — not from the city council, nor from the interim government in Tripoli.

On a recent day they were more visible than usual on the streets of Libya’s second-largest city. A column of khaki-coloured SUVs mounted with machine guns rolled down the road to the airport.

After a car bombing wounding several people on April 23 outside the French embassy in Tripoli, all armed units in Libya went on alert — regular soldiers as well as freelance fighters.

Awad al-Baraasi, Libya’s deputy prime minister, has to perform a difficult balancing act. During the week he tends to his cabinet duties in Tripoli, and on weekends he listens to citizens’ complaints in his hometown Benghazi.

In contrast to many of his compatriots, bred to passivity during the Gaddafi era, al-Baraasi, 46, is decisive and dynamic.

Clean-shaven, he does not look at all as if he were a member of the Justice and Reconstruction Party, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood. He wears a monogrammed shirt — no party badge — and speaks as easily with women as with men.

Al-Baraasi attended university in Canada and has worked in Dubai. He headed the Ministry of Electricity in Libya’s first two transitional governments, which he said he liked because people were able to see the results of his work.

“It was hard persuading foreign companies to come back and get our power supply going again, but we succeeded,” he remarked.

While al-Baraasi is more of a manager type, Prime Minister Ali Zidan tends to resemble an old-school dissident.

After a cabinet meeting on a recent afternoon, he awkwardly squinted as he exited the cabinet room, which was flooded in bright artificial light. As always, security had topped the agenda. The government building had not been attacked by armed, malcontented Libyans for weeks.

Zidan’s chief of staff has an engaging smile. He does not look like a man who was kidnapped for a few days just a short time ago.

“This government is a crisis government,” explains Amel Jerary, who heads the prime minister’s media office.

She has a short, stylish hairdo and makes some of the old hands and flip-floppers in the Libyan state media uneasy. They respect her, though.

Jerary was in Benghazi just once, and only for a few hours. “Our plane landed and I was looking everywhere for the airport,” she quips.

Benina International Airport, which lies outside the city, hardly has terminal. It resembles the waiting room of a run-down African bus station. Jerary’s bluntness is not understatement.

This reporter saw piles of rubbish in the centre of Benghazi even higher than those in Tripoli. Rubbish collectors had been on strike for three days running to press their demands for weeks of unpaid wages.

At an intersection, a heap of household rubbish has been shamelessly dumped under an advertising sign that admonishes: “People don’t need clean streets to be decent, but streets need decent people to be clean.”

Shots can sometimes be heard in central Benghazi, and sometimes screams and ambulance sirens as well.

This does not seem to upset anyone, however — not the rubbish collectors, who were demonstrating on the coast road, nor the female teachers in colourful headscarves chattering cheerily as they streamed out of a boys’ middle school.

“If Benghazi doesn’t calm down, Libya won’t either,” warned Jalal al-Galal, spokesman for the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) during the revolution. Focused on his business activities, he has little to do with politics these days.

While the transition to a pluralist, democratic state is running behind schedule, at least progress has been made.

In July 2012, after a delay of several weeks, Libyans elected an interim parliament, the General National Congress (GNC), made up of approximately equal numbers of liberals and conservative, middle-class Islamist MPs.

The few radical Islamist Salafists on the ballot were unable to win seats.

The GNC tasked Zeidan in late October with forming a government. About a month later, the first elected interim government took up its duties. The next step is election of a constitutional assembly, which will likely have 90 members — 30 each from the country’s South, East and West.

As soon as a constitution has been passed and adopted by referendum, a new parliament is to be elected. By then, at the latest, the deadlock must be broken on the contentious issue of which government officials during the Gaddafi era (1969-2011) are to be banned from further participation in politics.

The next government must also decide whether Libya can still afford to spend more than a third of its budget — provided mainly by proceeds from oil and gas sales — on salaries and pensions.

Salwa el-Deghali, a combative lecturer in law from Benghazi and member of the NTC under Mustafa Abdul Jalil, which was dissolved in August 2012, thinks the transitional government is terrible.

“The elections went really well, but we simply elected the wrong people,” she said. “We should learn from this mistake.”

El-Deghali staunchly supports a so-called “political isolation bill” for Gaddafi-regime officials. One reason it is being debated so hotly is that it could force out a number of current MPs and government ministers.

A proposal under discussion would politically sideline for 10 years all onetime Gaddafi ministers and government agency directors, possibly also Gaddafi critics who responded to offers of rapprochement by his son Saif al-Islam in the last years of his rule.

There is one legacy of the dictatorial regime that el-Deghali wants to preserve, however. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves: progress was made in women’s rights during the Gaddafi era,” she said. “We should take care that it’s not lost.”

Cover photograph: Awad al-Baraasi, Libya’s deputy prime minister, is decisive and dynamic. He has to perform a difficult balancing act. During the week he tends to his cabinet duties in Tripoli, and on weekends he listens to citizens’ complaints in his hometown Benghazi.