Ann Marlowe

Libya’s Amazigh Debate Their Future

3:50 PM, Nov 11, 2011 • By ANN MARLOWE

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/libya-s-amazigh-debate-their-future_607992.html

Obari, Libya

“Why are the people in the north getting petroleum when you are living over it and getting nothing?” said Hisham Hamadi. The plump, energetic lawyer was addressing a conference of activists drawn from Libya’s three Amazigh (or Berber) communities—those from the Nafusa mountains, the West Coast city of Zwara, and the Tuareg of the Sahara desert. And it was the Tuareg that the Nafusan Hamadi was appealing to when he spoke of the injustices visited on them here in their de facto capital, Obari.
Libya

This dusty city of 50,000 in the Western Sahara, closer to Mali and Algeria than Tripoli or Benghazi, was nearly the last city in Libya to be liberated by the rebels. Many outsiders, including other Amazigh, charge that Obari supported Qaddafi until the end. Several of the speakers countered that the Tuareg never backed the dictator, but the fact is that the Libyan Army and the two Obari-based paramilitary brigades controlled by Qaddafi’s cronies were among the few employment options in this impoverished area. One local Tuareg activist, Abu Bakr Akaty, contended that 138 Tuareg soldiers were killed for refusing orders to fire on civilians. But perhaps as many as 300 Obari men were slain fighting for the old regime, some in Qaddafi’s brutal assault on Misrata and others defending Tripoli from the revolutionaries.

It is telling that all speakers at the conference gave their talks in Arabic; the Amazigh dialects are not mutually intelligible. There are racial and cultural differences as well. The Tuareg, tall, lean, and dark-skinned, don’t appear to be from the same stock as the Amazigh from Zwara and the mountains, with their Mediterranean coloring and more diverse body types. Culturally, the northerners are far more integrated into the modern world, and those at the conference wore Western business suits. Many of the southerners sported traditional floor-length tunics, made in Mali, in a rainbow of colors. Perhaps ten percent covered their faces.

Some of the Saharan activists disavow the idea of national boundaries, pointing out that they are scattered among Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and other African countries. But though Amazigh readily display their pan-national flag—often to the chagrin of their Arab neighbors—an Amazigh homeland isn’t geographically feasible. Even in Libya, the two main areas of settlement are separated by almost a thousand kilometers.

Conditions are generally dire in Libya’s south. Qaddafi went to high school 200 kilometers from here in majority-Arab Sebha, a city of 350,000, but if he showered any largesse on the city, it’s hard to find. Sebha is best described as a garbage dump with the basic appurtenances of a city—stores, cafes, hotels, banks. The two-lane road between Sebha and Obari is in rough condition. The better road from Sebha, north to Tripoli, is barely signposted, with no service stations for stretches of over 150 kilometers.

Obari is much cleaner and more attractive than Sebha. But its sparse commercial district resembles Afghanistan more than northern Libya’s decrepit Mediterranean cities. Small boys sell delicious round flatbreads made by their mothers, while withered desert Amazigh women crouch on the sidewalk selling small piles of traditional stick toothbrushes, spices and mysterious powders from further south. A disconsolate crowd of men gathers every morning in front of the only functioning bank, trying to withdraw their direct-deposited salaries (they are limited to taking out 750 dinars or about $600).

The Bangladeshi owner of one of the city’s men’s clothing shops told me that the apparent poverty of the locals is belied by the thriving business in human trafficking. The Tuareg bring African workers from Mali and Niger north in a two-day truck journey through the desert from the Niger border. Some of the traffickers have enough to spend 450 dinars at a throw on traditional clothing at his store, where the basic traditional dress runs 70 dinars or $50. He also insisted that “99 percent of the people” here supported Qaddafi.

The Libyan south doesn’t seem the most likely place for democracy to take root, and one sign of this is the role of women. Very few women are on the street in Sebha or Obari, and even the innocuous women’s charitable organizations thriving in the north are absent here. There are only 22 women in Obari’s 60-person civil society group Taminek (“unity” in Tamazight). Sonia Khamina, 20, said that women “don’t have any rights” in Tuareg culture.

At the conference, the Tuareg, who claim to number 500,000, complained of decades of discrimination. There were no Tuareg ministers or ambassadors under Qaddafi, and one local complained that he knows of only one Tuareg employee in the powerful ministry of foreign affairs. “We must talk about our nationality,” said Mustafa Al Ansari, a young Obari man in the revolutionaries’ khaki uniform. “It is written in the Acacus Mountains,” he said, referring to the world-renowned prehistoric art in the Acacus Mountains a few hours’ drive southwest.

Over the traditional desert meal of iftat —big pieces of lean lamb over a casserole of shredded clay-oven bread—Abu Bakr Akaty said that 69 percent of Libya’s oil reserves were used during the Qaddafi years, making it crucial to allocate the remaining wealth fairly. Even within the Amazigh community, the Tuareg seem to have got the short end of the stick though they far outnumber the 180,000 or so Nafusa Amazigh and Zwara’s 50,000. Akaty claimed that he was the only Tuareg on the Libyan Amazigh Congress for 32 years, and said that now there are only 3 others.

The main order of business on November 1 was mustering Amazigh to demand Libya’s emerging government recognize them as a minority and their Tamazight language as a national language, to receive government financial support, and to be given a place in school curricula. Many activists view the language issue as crucial, because after 42 years of Qaddafi’s repression, few Libyans can read and write the 3,000-year-old Tiffinag script. So far, the National Transitional Council has proven noncommittal, as it has on most other issues. In an August statement, the NTC stopped short of recognizing Tamazight as a “national” language,” and instead declared it an “official” language, which leaves the issue of financial support unresolved.

At the small but exuberant performance of Tuareg “desert blues” that concluded the proceedings, Ben Khalifa Fathi, president of the World Amazigh Congress, explained that official recognition in the as yet unwritten Libyan constitution is the most important issue for the Amazigh right now. “Amazigh identity is a serious thing, a question of life and death for us,” said Fathi, who after returning from an 18-year exile in Morocco was treated like a celebrity. “The Arabs still can’t understand this problem. We have no time to lose. We gave a lot to our country in the revolution and we helped the transitional council with foreign contacts.”

Another attendee from Zwara, Senussi Mahrez, a major general in the Libyan army who led a rebel brigade in the revolution, agrees with Fathi that it is important “to look after our Amazigh culture,” but questions the priorities of some of the other Amazigh. “It is not the time to trouble the government about the oil,” says Mahrez. “Now is the time to build up the country.”

Othman Ben Sasi, who represents Zwara on the NTC, also differs with Fathi’s approach. I reached him after the conference, when he argued that most Libyans are Amazigh, whether they admit it or not; there are very few Libyans of Arab descent. (A quip has it that Libya is “an Arab country without Arabs”.). So he sees the struggle to save the Tamazight language as one of bringing all Libyans to see that it is part of the national heritage, to be offered in all Libyan schools. “Berber must be for all Libyans or not at all.” But he thinks setting up a Tamazight curriculum is going to take a long time.

“We don’t have teachers or books. We need to teach the teachers first, and prepare the curriculum. In Morocco it took 15 years, and it is not finished.”

Mr. Ben Sasi sees a “just and modern constitution” as the best hope of the Amazigh. “We have to be organized as a democracy.” All Libyans, he says, and not just the Tuareg, were deprived of their fair share of the national wealth by Qaddafi.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/life-libya_607778.html

Life in Libya
So far: less poor, less nasty, and less brutish than under Qaddafi.
Ann Marlowe
November 14, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 09

Tripoli

Life in post-revolutionary Libya is not quite normal yet—and Libyans are just beginning to work out what that new normal is going to look like. Shops are mainly open and well stocked, though most carry the sort of low-quality goods more common in places like Afghanistan and Mali than a rich oil state like Libya.

Then again, the country’s finances are shaky right now. A number of banks have shut down, and those still open have set a limit on how much people are allowed to withdraw—which amounts to 750 dinars (a little more than $600) every two weeks. Given these restrictions, people are understandably afraid to deposit their cash in banks, a caution that exacerbates the currency shortage. The National Transitional Council’s plans to redesign the currency—without Qaddafi’s face—also make people nervous about holding onto the notes currently in circulation, especially the large denominations that Qaddafi printed when he needed cash in recent years.

Libya is not only newly on the path to democracy, but also just 60 years removed from desperate poverty and illiteracy. There’s a rocky road ahead, even if Libya is able to develop into a viable democracy. And the signs so far are mixed.

For instance, the transitional city councils created by local neighborhood committees are highly undemocratic in one key respect: They have no women. There isn’t one woman on the councils in Sabratha, Tripoli, or Zuwarah, which between them have about 2 million citizens. Amal Bugaighis, a prominent female lawyer in Benghazi, says the same is true in that city of 800,000. The odds are that, even when the local transitional councils are phased out, women will still be underrepresented when elections for the four-year city council jobs are held in eight months. There are just two or three women on the National Transitional Council itself.

Another issue is the role of Islam in the future Libyan constitution. The population is almost entirely Muslim, and when National Transitional Council head Mustafa Abdel-Jalil announced October 23 that Libyan laws must be in accord with the Koran, he expressed a popular, though not entirely universal, opinion. And yet the fact is that even self-described liberals sound a lot like the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood. For example, Essa Ali, a member of the relatively liberal Association for Democracy and Equality, says that what is in the Quran is “an order from God.” Still, he is at pains to distinguish his party from the religious fundamentalists.

Libya is a web of loosely, and eccentrically, connected city-states that reflects tribal alliances and rivalries. For instance, Tripoli is a commercial city that was nourished by the Qaddafi regime, while Benghazi, hated by Qaddafi, was starved of government spending. It’s hardly surprising that Benghazi is now exultant in the wake of Qaddafi’s downfall and death and Tripoli less so.

There are other winners and also-rans in the post-Qaddafi order. In Berber regions like Zuwarah in western Libya, the revolution won locals the freedom to express their indigenous culture. In the revolution, fighters from Misurata and Zintan paid dearly. (The latter, a town of perhaps 60,000, may have lost more than 200 men.) And now these cities seem to be trying to parlay their losses into political power. The rebels from Zintan refuse to withdraw from Tripoli, and are confiscating, or stealing, goods and property.

Accordingly, Libya’s biggest worry is the omnipresent bands of young men with assault rifles and truck-mounted antiaircraft guns. In Sabratha, for example, locals in the quiet, conservative town of 100,000 worry because the three different brigades of revolutionaries based there answer to different commanders. Disarming these revolutionaries in order to avert civil conflict is a big concern for every Libyan who isn’t one of them. One Libyan diplomat says he’s worried that the country might not even get to the point of holding elections before violence erupts.

The country’s emerging security establishment recognizes the urgency of the situation. Mustafa al-Sagezli, Libya’s deputy interior minister and the deputy commander of the 17 of February brigade, has a $10 billion plan for getting the weapons and fighters off the streets. First, says the American-educated computer entrepreneur, Libya has to register all those who fought for the revolution, which he figures is about 100,000 men. There will be opportunities for about 20,000 men to join new internal security forces and another 20,000 to patrol the borders and secure the oil fields. Others will join the national army, which, says Sagezli, has to be rebuilt “on a professional basis.” Qaddafi gutted the Libyan armed forces for years while he created parallel brigades reporting to him or his inner circle that were better equipped and paid than the army.

Of the other revolutionaries, some will go back to the jobs they had before. The many who had marginal or no employment will be offered business opportunities, the chance to continue their studies, including at technical schools abroad, and subsidies for housing and marriage. This integration and rehabilitation plan is costly, much more than the estimated $2 billion that Washington chipped into the NATO effort. Meanwhile, $150 billion in regime assets remains frozen, including most of $37 billion frozen by the United States.

“There is a big role for our foreign friends to help Libya control the weapons,” says Colonel Bashir al-Madhouni, a former tank commander in the Libyan Army who defected to the rebels. Of course, most Libyans, and many foreigners, would say that if a reasonable democracy results, the cost will be repaid a hundredfold by the benefit of Libya’s example to the Muslim world.