Libya has all but disappeared from the news, yet what is taking place there is of deadly importance. The Libyan National Army, under the leadership of Khalifa Haftar—a former general who defected to the exiled opposition in the mid-eighties, and who returned, in 2011, to take part in the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi—is battling Ansar al-Sharia, a Benghazi-based militia that has expressed deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic views. Benghazi, the second-largest city in the country and the capital of the fraught eastern region, is seeing more extreme violence than it has since the Second World War.
Many of Benghazi’s 1.3 million inhabitants have abandoned their homes for comparatively safer neighborhoods. Prices of everyday goods have skyrocketed. Long lines at petrol stations, bakeries, and charcoal vendors have become the norm. Chronic power shortages have meant that charcoal is now a necessity. The whole eastern region, from Ajdabiya to Tobruk, is suffering from severe power cuts. Benghazi has endured its worst week yet. On average, the city’s electricity supply is on for only four hours per day. Water, too, has been only intermittently available. “This energy crisis has crushed whatever was left of our souls,” one Benghazi resident told me.
The violence has killed off the local media that flourished after the overthrow of Qaddafi. After four decades of censorship, there were suddenly more than a hundred newspapers, magazines, and journals. Now those publications have disappeared, and all foreign human-rights groups have had to leave the country. Nearly no foreign journalists go to Libya. This week, in response to the kidnapping of two Tunisian reporters, a group of Libyan civil-society organizations and activists issued a statement about the severity of the violence against journalists. “In the past year alone fourteen journalists were assassinated” and “dozens more kidnapped and remain missing,” they said.
Such targeted attacks have become part of daily life in Benghazi. “Death is now familiar,” a human-rights activist told me. “It doesn’t even make us stop. When I hear someone I know has been shot, I take a deep breath and carry on.” Over the past year, there have been more than two hundred assassinations in the city. Most of the victims have been members of the Army, police officers, journalists, human-rights activists, and lawyers. Although responsibility is rarely claimed for the attacks, they are thought to be the work of Ansar al-Sharia.
During Libya’s revolution, arguably the most absolute of all those in the region, nearly every power structure was challenged or dismantled. Even teachers no longer had the same authority. As a result, schools have been regularly disrupted since 2011. But now, as Benghazi collapses, education there and in the surrounding towns and villages has come to a complete halt. I spoke to a teacher who has worked at several of Benghazi’s schools, academies, and universities over the past two decades. “Every single educational facility I have ever taught at is now either bombed, burned, or destroyed,” he told me.
Parents have been trying to teach their children at home. An online option, BenghaziSchool.com, began operating six weeks ago and has attracted a significant following. The Red Crescent has one school in Benghazi, offering elementary classes, but they are heavily oversubscribed, and the organization is only able to run two of the normal seven daily sessions. Between the blackouts, a student who ought now to be finishing her first semester at Benghazi University (the campus was bombed and burned) wrote me an e-mail. “Sometimes, I tell myself I should leave, at least just to study and finish my degree, then I say how can I leave Benghazi?” she asked. Like many Libyans her age, she is being asked to choose between abandoning her country and losing out on the future.
There is potentially a larger and even more dangerous confrontation ahead. The Misrata Dawn militia, which controls the capital, has aligned itself with the self-declared government in Tripoli. Neither accepts the legitimacy of the elected parliament, now sitting in the far east of the country, in Tobruk. Qatar appears to back the new rulers in Tripoli, while Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt seem to be throwing their weight behind Haftar and the Libyan National Army. Haftar has so far accepted the legitimacy of the democratically elected and internationally recognized parliament and government. This toxic mix of internal conflict and foreign meddling is pushing the Tripoli and Tobruk governments closer and closer to armed conflict.
Despite the grimness of the situation, Libyans remain determined to see through the original aspirations of their revolution. Poll after poll has confirmed that the overwhelming majority of the population wants non-religious, democratic governance that enforces the rule of law. Hope, although diminished and weary now, persists. This week, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) is hosting a new round of talks, in Geneva. It claims, “The decision to convene these talks follows extensive consultations with all the major Libyan stakeholders.” However, the self-appointed government, in Tripoli, is threatening to boycott the meeting. Many think that this is Libya’s last chance.
