Libyans were still optimistic. It was Feb. 17, 2013, the second anniversary of the NATO-backed, popular uprising that ousted “the mad dog of the Middle East,” as Ronald Reagan famously dubbed Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Democracy activists were quelling their doubts about the future. Anything and everything was still possible. Libya would become refreshingly modern and develop into the Arab Spring’s big success story, despite the Benghazi attack five months earlier in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans had been killed.
I had gone from Martyrs’ Square, formerly known as Green Square, where Libyans were celebrating the uprising’s anniversary with plenty of fireworks, blaring revolutionary music, and bursts of dangerous automatic gunfire. I sat down with a plaintive Libyan lawmaker in Tripoli’s infamous Rixos Hotel, the grandiose pile where Gadhafi corralled Western journalists as he pondered whether he should use them as human shields.
“All these foreigners arrive with different model constitutions we should adopt, and they have grand ideas about governance,” the lawmaker complained, gesturing towards earnest Americans and Europeans bustling in the lobbies. “But they forget we are a conservative nation lacking in basic expertise and we need someone to explain the mechanics of how simply to get from A to B.”
Now another February is upon us, and Libya is no nearer fulfilling the democratic dreams and meeting the revolutionary expectations of 2011. The fractured country remains ensnared in a Mad Max world of militia violence. Those exasperated words about mechanics, and of the simple need to make things work or else everything would fall apart, have remained with me as revolutionary anniversaries have come and gone.
The lament contrasted with the ebullience I’d witnessed earlier in Martyrs’ Square on that second anniversary. “Today means everything for Libyans, especially for me. I am so happy for this day. Because everybody is going around with flags celebrating the revolution. This is the freedom of Libya,” a bright-eyed 22-year-old student named Nabila told me.
Rising lawlessness, a surge in drug use and crime, the machinations of warlords, and the remaining resentment of Gadhafi loyalists pointed, alas, in another direction, as I reported at the time. Then organized jihadists arrived, eager to establish an Islamic “emirate” to mimic the “caliphate” set up in Syria and Iraq.
Libya’s golden opportunity, though, was lost in many ways in the first year after Gadhafi’s fall. Sheer incompetence doomed Libya. We all like to complain about bureaucrats and public servants, the mechanics of government, but without them, or without them working efficiently, things fall apart.
Libya’s descent into militia warfare and regional factionalism was foretold when the post-Gadhafi National Transitional Council couldn’t even get trash picked up, couldn’t repair the potholed roads, and couldn’t keep electricity flowing. What chance, then, did the the council have of meeting even bigger challenges such as disbanding the militias?
Libya is an extreme case. Under Gadhafi, ministries were just shells, existing only in name, having been hollowed out and ignored for decades. There weren’t any experts or mechanics around; they were all dead or had rotted in jail or grown old in exile.
You don’t need experts when government is guided only by whim and fantasy or is based on a quixotic mix of Karl Marx and the Quran.
“Libya’s challenges can really only be solved by Libyans themselves,” lectured then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to one of Libya’s several hopeless post-Gadhafi prime ministers. Up to a point, that was true and remains so.
In quieter moments, Libyans themselves recognize they are to blame for squandering the opportunity that the West handed to them when Gadhafi was ousted. But we could have given them a much more practical helping hand. It is a lesson we would do well to remember when considering a post-Maduro Venezuela.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
