Libya's new policymakers fiddle while tribal elders are hurtling down the country's road to perdition, predicts Gamal Nkrumah It used to be the indomitable Bedouins of the Libyan wastelands who revolted against oppressive alien invaders. Now the Brother Leader Muammar Gaddafi has demonstrated that he was not the politician to grasp so poisonous a nettle as humiliating defeat at the hands of the "rats" he spurned along with their foreign backers. Gaddafi's message is no gaffe. Even as Al-Ahram Weekly went to press, the ousted Libyan leader's henchmen are holding out in strategic cities such as Bani Walid and Sirte, his hometown. The lesson of history is never to make light of Muammar Gaddafi. He may well change the course of his country's history in his own quirky fashion. Ignore Gaddafi at your own peril. Loyalists of the deposed Libyan leader are mounting a heroic, albeit desperate defence of Gaddafi's few remaining strongholds. The humanitarian catastrophe in Sirte and allegations that the warring protagonists are using civilians as human shields has aroused international condemnation. All this will doubtless foment more trouble in Libya as the country prepares for its first multi-party elections scheduled to be held next year. Even so, it has taken anti-Gaddafi forces too long to adapt to the post-Gaddafi environment. It is, after all, important to be clear about what democracy means. Truly, the tribalists are a toxic breed in Libya -- a point grasped by a majority of the country's youthful activists. Tribalism threatens the very fabric of a post-Gaddafi Libya searching earnestly for national identity. The West, or NATO, may help in the hunt for Gaddafi from the air, but it cannot assist in the search for a cohesive Libyan national identity. This week, a tribal council of eastern clans was hurriedly convened in Al-Bayda, the hometown of Gaddafi's wife's Safiya's people in Cyrenaica. Images of the tribal council were, to say the least, ominous. Not a single woman was in sight. Tribal elders in billowing traditional robes sat cross-legged and sour-faced rather uncomfortably with the overzealous youth sporting Kalashnikovs that mingled among them. There was hardly a vestige of a constructive spirit. This glaring lack of Libyan post-Gaddafi national unity has not stopped pleas for help from the West by leaders of the National Transitional Council (NTC). Some want to see less Western political influence in internal Libyan affairs. Others are insistent on a more prominent role in domestic Libyan politics by the tribal elders. It is hard to see which of the country's many problems they are going to solve. It will also mean inescapably a call for some sort of federalism. Anything less, several key tribal elders warned, will confuse the political picture now emerging of a post-Gaddafi Libya. Other members of the NTC see that as a recipe for disaster. The siren song of federalism has reached a crescendo of worrying magnitude. Tribalism is the very antithesis of the Arab awakening. Tribalists and militant Islamists within the NTC are failing to convince the Libyan people that they have the answers to their country's problems. Underneath, however, lies a deeper political confusion. The two most plausible visions of a post-Gaddafi Libya as far as the pessimists are concerned are a loose, tribal-based and decentralised confederation of sorts dominated by tribal elders on the one hand, and a theocracy where militant Islamists hold sway, a premonition prophesised by Gaddafi just before his fall. Indeed, one of the staunchest anti-Islamists, or at least one who poses as such, is NTC Chairman Mahmoud Jibril, Libya's de facto prime minister, who announced that he has set plans to step down from his official post after the fall of besieged Sirte. "I will not stay in any official post after the liberation," Jibril declared. Islamists within the NTC constantly challenged his authority. Ismail Al-Sallabi, a prominent Islamist military commander of the NTC's Liberation Army openly declared that Jibril launched a campaign against Islamists, a term he himself refutes. "We are nationalists who happen to be Muslim, because Libya is predominantly Muslim. We must stop being fixated about personalities and focus on the wider picture," Al-Sallabi stressed. Where there is a real problem for the NTC is in the southern periphery. The NTC managed to patch up differences with the Tuareg tribesmen of southern and western Libya, a non-Arab, Amazigh ethnic group, widely regarded as Gaddafi loyalists. Gaddafi's vision of Libya as both Pan-African and Pan-Arab devoid of tribal affiliations now lies in tatters. Worse, Gaddafi's shattered phantasm leaves a dangerous void in the Libyan people's discussion of their democratic future. The collapse of Gaddafi's chimera should give Libyans and the NTC little comfort. Gaddafi today finds himself the hunted one, badgered by his adversaries but still fiercely fighting for his proper place in history. There are no plausible alternatives to Gaddafi's progressive, non-tribalist, Pan-African and Pan-Arab notion of a contemporary Libya. How to deal with those who shared Gaddafi's values haunts NTC stalwarts. Gaddafi's former prime minister Al-Baghdadi Al-Mahmoudi was recently arrested in Tunisia where he sought political asylum. Libya's tribal, regional and ethnic rivalries are now coming to the fore. Freeing the country from Gaddafi's grip will not automatically deliver political emancipation. The constant menace is of a vengeful bloodbath that will pit one tribe against another and make a mockery of a contrived Western-style democracy in Libya, or even one that derives its chief inspiration from the "moderate" Islamists of Turkey. Gaddafi loyalists in Sirte and Bani Walid have held out for so long because of tribal considerations. Libya is no Turkey, and the tribal networks that Gaddafi so cleverly manipulated will endure. Yet an entire generation of Libyans has now reached voting age which gets its news from the Internet and social networking. They have shown little appetite for the tribalism of their elders, a straightjacket that hampers Libya's social development and political reform. Empowering the youth has been a central tenet of the Arab awakening, the Libyan uprising not excluded. But is Libya's youth for secular, Western-style multi-party democracy or for political Islam either moderate or militant? Much to the West's frustration, Libyans in the post-Gaddafi era would not yield easily to Western assumptions and misguided calculations. The politics of aspiration does not sit comfortably with tribal politics as we have seen in Al-Bayda this week. Tribal councils do not, cannot and will not in the foreseeable future satisfy the political aspirations of the youth of Libya.
