Jockeying for power may intensify as bullet swapped for ballot box

JOCKEYING for power among Libya’s well-armed and fractious new leadership may intensify after the death of deposed autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, an anxious and, for many, joyous moment in a country hungry for stability and impatient to swap the bullet for the ballot box.

The interim government will be determined to ensure that lingering pro-Gaddafi forces are prevented from launching rearguard guerrilla insurgency from the countryside that could destabilise the north African OPEC member and its oil industry.

One of Gaddafi’s most politically influential sons, Saif al-Islam, and his security chief Abdullah Sanussi are apparently still at large and may still be able to recruit armed followers.

But perhaps the most important test for the interim National Transitional Council will be to manage the enormous expectations of Libya’s six million people, now freed definitively from the fear that Gaddafi could ever reimpose his long, strongman rule.

“There is now this massive expectation. Up to now they’ve had an excuse that they are running a war. They don’t have that now . . . Everything now has got to happen,” said John Hamilton, a Libya expert at Cross Border Information. “That’s a hard task. They have to deliver for the people . . . On the other hand, this may renew the honeymoon they enjoyed when Tripoli fell, if they can put a decent government together in a short time.”

The news of Gaddafi’s capture and killing came minutes after reports that his hometown Sirte had fallen amid raids by NATO warplanes, extinguishing the last significant resistance by loyalist forces.

The capture of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi means Libya’s ruling NTC should now begin the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gaddafi’s rule, had fallen. Some fear instability may linger and unsettle that process.

“Gaddafi is now a martyr and thus can become the rallying point for irredentist or tribal violence — perhaps not in the immediate future but in the medium-to-long term,” said George Joffe, a north Africa expert at Cambridge University.

“The fact that NATO can be blamed for his death is worrying, in terms of regional support, and may undermine the legitimacy of the National Transitional Council.”

But the interim NTC authorities are also faced with a possibly more critical task, namely getting under control a clutch of anti-Gaddafi armed militias competing, so far peacefully, for ample share of funding and political representation in a post-Gaddafi Libya.

Libya expert Alex Warren, of Frontier MEA, a Middle East and north Africa research and advisory firm, said the death of Gaddafi “is clearly a momentous event and far more than just a symbolic one.”

But he added, of the NTC militias: “These groups need to be carefully disbanded or integrated into the armed forces.

“Questions remain about who these militias answer to and what their demands are.”

Under rules drawn up by revolutionary forces who overthrew Gaddafi in September, the fall of Sirte will lead to an official declaration that Libya is liberated, which will set in motion a process towards democratic elections.

Picture: The entrance to the sewer in which NTC soldiers said they found Gaddafi hiding. The Arabic graffiti in blue reads: "This is the place of Gaddafi, the rat.. God is the greatest." Picture: AFP/Getty