Tribal Revenge a Worry in Post-Gadhafi Libya

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

If a man is known by the company he keeps, it doesn’t say much for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who will apparently allow his new best friend, Moammar Gadhafi, to seek asylum in his country.

I suspect even Chávez’s other comrade, Fidel Castro, is embarrassed.

After an inconclusive six months of battle, the opposition in Libya is finally on the verge of defeating the mad tyrant of Tripoli.

But now the real work will begin.

Libya is little more than a notional state.

Most people’s loyalty is first and foremost to their own tribal group. Many Libyans have traditionally relied on tribal connections more than civil society for justice and security.

In recent weeks, anti-Gadhafi insurgents in Libya’s western mountains and around Misrata have attacked civilians whose tribes supported Colonel Gadhafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighbourhood.

The city of Yafran, southwest of Tripoli, has become the easternmost outpost of a cultural and linguistic reawakening of the Amazigh, the Berber people long oppressed by the Gadhafi regime.

Amazigh cultural and political leaders have framed a set of public demands for a post-Gadhafi Libya.

As part of their vision, their native language, Tamazight, will have an equal standing with Arabic.

But at the same time, the houses in Yafran of the Mashaashia, a tribe whose members supported the Gadhafi dictatorship, were burned.

There were similar reports of arson against the tribe in other towns in the region.

As well, General Abdul Fattah Younes, one of the commanders of the opposition forces, was murdered by some rebels, apparently in revenge for his previous role as Gadhafi’s security chief.

In response, the head of his tribe, the Obeidi, threatened to retaliate against those responsible, setting off a crisis in the opposition’s ranks.

Members of the tribes close to Colonel Gadhafi, such as his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, may face the greatest danger from “tribal revenge,” George Joffe, a specialist on North African politics at Cambridge University, told the New York Times.

Reprisals have been a source of embarrassment for the Transitional National Council, the de facto rebel authority, but with much of Libya close to anarchy, there is little they can do about it.

Meanwhile in Syria, another dictator fights to hold on to power.

Will Bashar al-Assad be the next to go?

It’s going to get crowded in Caracas.