Alison Pargeter elegantly summed up the problems facing the newly appointed GNA ministerial list in a piece on Thursday the 21st for the Washington Review. She echoes concerns I have voiced on this blog and in my most recent articles, particularly that Libya is apolitical, that a zero-sum competition for power is shaping the interaction of forces on the ground and that appeasement is yet again the order of the day in the way that bargains are struck and ministries are handed out. She concludes and I strongly agree that 'But to keep on throwing the same solution at a seemingly intractable problem, as the international community is doing, will lock Libya in a perpetual state of chaos and instability that serves no one, least of all the Libyans themselves.' For me this means the international community needs to move from offering the same carrots and making the same appeasements to switching to the sticks of sanctions and punishments for spoilers and getting their hands dirty.
Despite Libya’s tiny population of just 6.4 million inhabitants, this new ‘expansive’ government comprises a whopping 32 ministers, this being the only way to appease all the different constituencies vying for a piece of the pie. That this Government of National Accord should have been composed in this way reflects the uncomfortable reality that Libya is no longer a single unit. Despite the endless protestations that it is still one country, one consequence of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath is that Libya has fractured not just on a regional level but locally too.The situation is made worse by the fact that Libya is devoid of politics. If Qadhafi worked for forty years to depoliticise Libya, then the revolution of 2011 has buried politics completely. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the new Libya has not witnessed the emergence of meaningful political parties, let alone political activism or even any ideological debate. The role of Sharia that is has polarised Egypt and Tunisia since their revolutions has hardly raised its head in Libya. The 17th December political agreement upholds the principle that “Islamic Sharia is the source of all legislation, and that all that contradicts it shall be deemed null and void” did not attract even a ripple of debate. And the competing forces of today are divided not by ideas but by a struggle for control. Indeed, the new freedom that has accompanied the fall of the Qadhafi regime has unleashed an urge to fight rather than an urge to debate.To read the whole article click here.