The revolution unravels

I saw a murder one afternoon in central Benghazi. The victim was a tall, heavily built man in his thirties wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt. Three quick shots rang out to our left, my driver pulled the car in and there the man lay, one leg still moving as a slick pool of very red blood ran down the tarmac from his head.

The city courts, used as offices by the rebels’ Provisional Transitional National Council since its ascent to power in Benghazi in mid-February, were just five minutes away. For all the judicial authority they had over the murder scene, with its guns, gangs and absence of police, they might as well have been in another country.

The victim was a local man irritated by the sound of shooting in his apartment block doorway, where the killer had stood firing aimlessly in the air: a regular pastime in the city. He had asked the gunman to go elsewhere. Instead, the man shot him three times in the head and throat and then fled, pursued by passersby. Over the next two hours, the victim’s family seized the killer’s brother and a friend, who was blind, as hostages. Then two pickup-loads of rebels tried to storm the apartment to release the men but were driven off by heavily armed family members and residents. Guns and rage determined the outcome, not law. I left without seeing it end after the fury became too much to endure.

Revolutions are tumultuous, and it would be naive to expect a smooth establishment of law and order in Benghazi so soon after the frantic violence that accompanied the populist uprising of the early spring. But Libya’s revolution is regressing, despite the air strikes by the Nato-led coalition. Observers who call it a stalemate miss the point. That term implies an equal and balanced standoff. It suggests that UN resolution 1973 might yet have a positive outcome in this instance if Nato maintains its pressure. The reality on the ground suggests something different. “Stalemate” seems too optimistic a prognosis for a revolution that is in real danger of imploding. Such a failure would undermine the case for intervention and strengthen the cause of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

As its name implies, the revolution’s Provisional Transitional National Council was never meant to last. Formed mainly of Benghazi lawyers and academics in the wake of the 17th February uprising, it was designed as an interim representative body, with a full government to be formed only after Tripoli had fallen into rebel hands. Gaddafi’s survival, however, and the dashing of any reasonable hopes for a quick resolution of the war, have exposed the paralysis and division within the PTNC, which has been forced toward a government role for which it was never intended.

Rather than adapt its strategy, the PTNC has descended into crisis. Meeting in secret at changing locations for fear of assassination, members are at odds over whether they should alter their interim constitution and try to form a government now, or stand by its terms and wait until Gaddafi falls. Through all its dithering and lawyerly debate the council has lost its way—and with it the ownership of a revolt that is now threatening to fracture.

Daily life in Benghazi has deteriorated. Food prices have doubled since the revolution began. Up to 90 per cent of the city’s workforce was employed by the state, and few have been paid since 17th February. Schools stay closed. Cash in banks is running out, with the maximum allowance for daily withdrawals dropping weekly. Power supplies and city services are erratic, and most of the migrant workers who manned the local factories and construction sites fled at the start. Hospitals have been especially hard hit by the exodus of expatriate doctors and nurses; medical students and hastily trained volunteers fill the gaps.

As yet, there has been no major breakdown in law and order in the city, which remains mostly calm. But a sense of imminent collapse is more obvious on the frontlines, where Gaddafi’s forces have recaptured much of the territory they lost since air strikes against them began in mid-March. Toppling domino-style from one setback to the next, the rebels have become sceptical that foreign intervention can even help them beat Gaddafi.

Libya’s opposition meanwhile, is made up of many different layers—none of which the PTNC seems to control, let alone unify. The shabaab, the youth, are armed volunteers who have shed most blood so far. Many are from the Facebook generation—teens and twentysomethings with genuine democratic aspirations. Others are serious young Islamists, mobilised to fight a regime that persecuted them. There are a few soldiers who defected out of real zeal for change, and still others commanded by regime officers such as Abdul Fatah Younis, Gaddafi’s former interior minister and general, whose democratic credentials seem dubious. Finally, on the fringes, there is the group no one in Benghazi cares much to discuss, and whose future role is so far undetermined: the veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which sent hundreds to battle US forces in Iraq.

The moment these factions start infighting, the revolution is finished. Conflict has not yet broken out, but is very possible given the PTNC’s lack of direction and the rivalry caused by the power vacuum. On the evening of the 31st March a group of shabaab, enraged by a sense of abandonment on the battlefield, stormed the PTNC offices- in search, it seems, of someone to give them orders. That week, dropping by the military headquarters to interview a rebel commander, I watched two groups of fighters embroiled in a mass punch-up. In the melee, the only bullets fired were in the air. That could easily change.

Leaving Libya after three weeks in Benghazi, I stopped for lunch in Derna, the eastern town with the distinction of having sent the highest proportion of citizens to fight in Iraq of anywhere in the Middle East. The restaurant, almost empty, was suddenly “secured” by half a dozen gunmen acting as bodyguards for three important guests: Christopher Prentice, the former British ambassador to Iraq, and two other British officials. I presumed their mission, which involved meeting the PTNC in Benghazi, had been secret or at least low key. We ignored each other, until one of their bodyguards rested his Kalashnikov on his shoe and accidentally blew a hole in his foot. A scramble followed as the others rushed him to hospital, leaving Prentice and colleagues without protection. The debacle—its comedy, embarrassment, good intentions and hopeless amateurishness—seemed the perfect symbol for relations between rebels and their foreign allies.

“Kids with guns,” Prentice mused as he introduced himself. The words might yet be the revolution’s epitaph.