Christian Lowe
Behind Libya's flare-up of violence and protests in the past five days lies a quandary.How do you share out power in the new Libya when the jumble of tribes, militias and interest groups do not trust each other and, even worse, when the people supposed to be acting as neutral referees are widely mistrusted?

It would be a tough problem to solve for any country. For Libya, with a lack of institutions that its people view as legitimate, it seems - for now at least - to be insurmountable.

And so people are tempted to resort to violence in defence of their interests, especially when militiamen with anti-aircraft guns and beyond the control of government are already roaming the streets.The risk is that Libya could slip from being the triumph against dictatorship that was trumpeted just a few months ago by Western powers to a maelstrom not unlike Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003.

"Comparisons to Iraq circa 2004 are tempting," said Geoff Porter, of North Africa Risk Consulting. "Factional fighting, a government whose legitimacy is being openly challenged and no immediate prospect of the return of a peaceful society."He said there were important differences between Libya and Iraq, however. In particular, Libya has no occupying power and many of the country's oil fields are back on stream and bringing in cash for the government.

But on the evidence of the past seven days things could get worse. Libya's interim ruling body, the National Transitional Council (NTC), was pitched this week into its biggest crisis since Mummar Gaddafi was overthrown nearly six months ago.In the eastern city of Benghazi, cradle of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, crowds disappointed with the performance of the NTC stormed an office building when the council's leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, was inside. His deputy later resigned.

Two days later, the town of Bani Walid, home of the country's most powerful tribe, the Warfallah, took up arms and forced the militia stationed there by the NTC to flee.
That came against a background -- almost routine for Libya since Gaddafi's rule ended -- of regular gunfights between rival militias in Tripoli and turf wars between neighboring tribes. Each of these flare-ups were triggered by their own set of circumstances but they have a common theme: a lack of faith that Libya's transition will deliver an equitable distribution of power and a fair share of its oil wealth.

Libya is caught in a Catch-22: the country needs an election to create legitimate institutions, but without a legitimate institution to oversee the election, the process will not work.
Mustafa Fetouri, a Libyan writer and academic originally from Bani Walid, said underlying the revolt in the town was a fear that the Warfallah tribe is going to be deprived of its rightful place under the new order.

"In numbers the Warfallah dominates Libya and if there is going to be one man, one vote and if this tribe along with a couple of others .... get organized then they will dominate political life for decades to come," he said. But there are signs the tribe is being squeezed.

In Tripoli, the influential players are from cities like Benghazi, Misrata, and Zintan, which led the fight against Gaddafi's forces during the nine-month civil war.
In Bani Walid, which held out for months against the anti-Gaddafi forces before suing for peace, the atmosphere is one of neglect. In the main square, buildings smashed in battles last year are unrepaired, and the town hospital does not have mattresses for all its beds.

"The NTC has played a negative role ... The goal is to teach Warfallah a lesson," Fetouri said. "It will be bloody and fruitless. Warfallah will never give in. Not in a hundred years. They will keep trying to assert their own authority."
In Benghazi, the protesters who at the weekend smashed their way into the NTC leader's office, are at the other end of Libya's political spectrum. This was the city which started the rebellion in February last year.

Yet in Benghazi too, people have taken to the streets because they  feel unable to trust the opaque political process.The NTC, a collection of lawyers, defectors from the Gaddafi administration, civil rights activists and tribal elders, is recognized by the West but it has never been elected.It was hastily cobbled together in Benghazi at a time when Gaddafi's forces were shooting at protesters in the streets, and since then it has expanded to include representatives from other parts of the country.

Local councils in each area -- themselves unelected -- nominate people to sit on the NTC, but some areas are entitled to more nominees than others. One of the biggest, Benghazi, has seven NTC members, while 20 districts have nominated no one. The council has 57 sitting members, yet its Internet site lists the names of only 43 of them. Its sessions are held behind closed doors. Key decisions are delegated to committees but little is known about how they were created. "The NTC takes decisions by themselves.

They sell 1 million barrels of oil a day and nobody knows where the money is going," said Najat al-Moghirbi, a professor of dentistry at a protest in Benghazi's Shajarah square.
The writer filed this analysis from Algiers

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