Libya after Qaddafi

Free of Qaddafi and with the war now over, the people of Libya rejoiced. Public services were gradually restored in most areas, and oil production recovered fairly quickly to near prewar levels. Uncertainty about the future nevertheless hung in the air. More than a million Libyans remained abroad in neighboring Tunisia or Egypt, unable – or fearful – to return. Libya was about to begin a long and difficult process of reconciliation with its past. It would do so under trying circumstances. The end of the Qaddafi regime was ultimately just an opening toward a richer and more meaningful kind of freedom that might allow Libya’s new citizens to go about their lives with less fear and greater dignity. Realizing this future would be a major task. The NTC struggled to get its footing and suffered from continued apprehension about its basic legitimacy to govern, in no small part because so many of its members were either exiles with little connection to Libya or early defectors who only a year earlier had been regime loyalists. The NTC had been the face of the revolution to the outside world, but it was Libya’s new government only by default. A new, more representative government of the people, however, would have to await elections and these would take several months to prepare.

Weak and fearful of alienating the population, the NTC proceeded with great caution on all fronts. This was not helpful, given the vast number of reconstruction and state-building tasks that loomed ahead. Initial hopes for rapid change began to fade in the face of Libya’s daunting, though hardly uncommon, postconflict challenges. The spontaneous emergence of a myriad of small civil-society organizations across the country to deal with a range of problems offered some reason for optimism, but Libya had no formal institutions to work with. Qaddafi left behind a hollow state whose administrative and governing institutions barely functioned before the war, and were now half emptied of functionaries fearing retribution for ever having been part of that state.