The history of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi spanned a period of over four decades from 1969 to 2011. Gaddafi became the de facto leader of the country on 1 September 1969 after leading a group of young Libyan military officers against King Idris I in a bloodless coup. The name of the country was changed several times during Gaddafi’s tenure as the leader. At first, the name was the Libyan Arab Republic. In 1977, the name was changed to Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and in 1866 as Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
In early 2011, a civil war broke out in the context of the wider “Arab Spring”. The anti-Gaddafi forces formed a committee named the National Transitional Council, on 27 February 2011. It was meant to act as an interim authority in the rebel-controlled areas. After a number of atrocities were committed by the government, with the threat of further bloodshed, a multinational coalition led by NATO forces intervened on 21 March 2011 with the aim to protect civilians against attacks by the government’s forces.
Gaddafi was ousted from power in the wake of the fall of Tripoli to the rebel forces on 20 August 2011, followed by the subsequent killing of Gaddafi, marked the end of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Democratic Process and Challenges: Nine months after the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Libyans went to vote for the first time since 1965, a major step towards a more pluralistic Libya. The country held the free and fair elections in a state of relative peace and public enthusiasm.
Despite 40 years of dictatorship, little training in participatory policy, low levels of education, and fragmented politics, Libyans themselves ensured the success of the elections by flocking to the polls. The roadmap for Libya’s political transition, established in August 2011, said that the election of a Constituent Assembly would be held within a year. A few months ago the National Transitional Council (NTC), which has governed Libya since the first few weeks of the revolt in 2011, announced that the assembly would not draft the constitution itself but instead ppoint a 60-member committee to draft it.
Yet, a few weeks ago, the NTC changed policy again at the last moment, declaring that the members of the constitutional committee would not be appointed by the assembly but directly elected by the people, though it’s not clear when. A successful election is just the start of dealing with one of Libya’s most important challenges right now: national unity. Regional and local claims and jockeying for power threaten to undermine the legitimacy of and support for the national government.
A few thousand inhabitants of the eastern provinces care calling for a federalist state, if not of outward secession. While this is definitely a minority position, it is a very dangerous one because it could easily, at the administration’s first real difficulty, split the government and the people, thus slowing or even reversing Libya’s progress toward stability. Most Libyans, as well as the interested Western nations, are rightly happy with Libya’s progress toward becoming a stable, unified, democratic state.
But if they want that progress to continue, they’ll all have to work together. Conclusion: Libyans are struggling to transform their country into a stable, secure, and functioning democracy. The government is having difficulties disarming various armed militias around the country, and ordinary Libyans are impatient with the slow pace of the transition and struggle on a day–to-day basis with an economy that has yet to show signs of recovery—despite the country’s significant petro-wealth.
The stunning breakthrough of the election, however, carries no guarantee that democratically accountable systems will emerge in their wake though some initial improvements appear to have been made in areas like freedom of expression and freedom of association. But rebuilding basic institutions like the justice system, law enforcement agencies, and regulatory frameworks for the media and civil society, all of which have been warped and corrupted by decades of authoritarian rule, will require many years of effort.
