Recently
it has been reported that Libya’s interim Prime Minister —
Abdurrahim el-Keib — has named a line-up of secularists as part of
his interim cabinet at the expense of Islamists, running counter to
the expectations of many analysts. Most notably, Osama al-Juwali,
the chief of the military council in the small town of Zintan in
western Libya, was appointed defense minister instead of Abdelhakim
Belhaj, the Islamist head of the Tripoli Military Council.
What are the reasons behind these surprising appointments?
Do they show Libya is on the path to true liberal
democracy?
The most important point to appreciate is that the
country’s transitional leaders are keen to avoid an impression of
acting at the behest of a foreign power. For the Islamists,
therefore, backing from Qatar has now proven to be a hindrance
rather an advantage in the struggle for power. On more than one
occasion, figures in the National Transitional Council (NTC) like
the Libyan
ambassador to the UN have rebuked Qatar for what is perceived
as excessive interference by the Gulf nation in Libyan
affairs.
This is hardly
an unjustified criticism. Qatari aid has circumvented the NTC
and besides the close ties to Belhaj, one Libyan Islamist cleric
supported by Qatar is Sheikh Ali Sallabi, who presently resides in
Doha.
Even now, Ali Tarhouni, who
has said he refused an offer to join the transitional cabinet
on the grounds that the members are not representative of the
country as a whole, could well have been alluding to Qatar — as
suggested by a journalist and something to which he did not object
— when he was speaking of outside nations that had interests in
backing the rebels in Libya, “some which we know and some which we
don’t know.” In a somewhat similar vein, Mustafa
Abdul-Jalil, head of the NTC, slammed Qatar earlier last week for
interfering in Libya.
Linked to this rejection of Qatari interference is a
desire to placate factions based around Misrata and Zintan that are
deeply
suspicious of the likes of Belhaj, were responsible for
capturing and handing over Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, and have grown
alarmed at the Islamist presence around Tripoli.
Accordingly, they have been
competing with Islamist militias for control of the harbor and
airports of the Libyan capital. Thus, the interim government
naturally feels a need to calm tensions in the western parts of the
country and maintain some degree of stability.
The transitional leaders are also undoubtedly eager to
restart economic ties with the West: particularly Western Europe.
Given Libya’s dependence on oil and a virtual halt in petroleum
production on account of the civil war, the interim government
evidently fears that a significant Islamist presence in cabinet
positions could jeopardize potential business deals with Western
companies to revive Libya’s economic growth by increasing oil
output to pre-civil war levels.
So do these cabinet appointments mean that my predictions
that Islamism would probably be the dominant ideological force in
Libya are all wrong? Not necessarily. To begin with, the Islamists
may well decide that it is better to maintain a low profile to
avoid triggering outside alarm, and therefore devise a de
facto arrangement similar to that which existed in Mubarak’s
Egypt, whereby the Islamists might be snubbed formally in the
higher ranks of government but their ideology permeates at the
ground level.
Such an arrangement included numerous concessions to the
Muslim Brotherhood, such as the glorification
and teaching of jihad in Egyptian school textbooks,
discrimination against the Copts, and the promotion of discourse on
television with Brotherhood clerics calling for the
extermination of Bahais in Egypt and inciting mob attacks
upon them in villages.
Furthermore, as Michael
Rubin notes, “a Brotherhood sympathizer took Koran
scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd to court in Egypt. To appease the
group, the court — with Mubarak’s consent — declared Abu Zayd an
apostate and forcibly divorced him from his wife, because a Muslim
woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim man in Egypt.” Another
clear instance of enforcement of Sharia norms in Egypt.
In this context, it is worth pointing out that
Abdul-Jalil’s pronouncements that Sharia would be the
principal source of law were more likely an indication of his
feeling intimidated by Islamists rather than sincere ideological
convictions on his own part. Yet this sense of intimidation is
precisely the problem, for Libya’s transitional leaders have
already felt the same impulse to pander to the Islamists, above all
in the debacle involving
David Gerbi and his attempts to rebuild Tripoli’s abandoned
synagogue.
Meanwhile, Belhaj — Libya’s leading Islamist — has been
sent by the Libyan authorities to meet with the Free Syrian
Army in Turkey, seeking to provide money, weapons and perhaps
training for Syrian rebels.
It is also noteworthy how the interim cabinet appointments
have completely excluded the Islamists’ most vociferous opponents
and advocates of liberal secularism in Libya: the Berber minority,
prompting justifiable outrage on their part. Indeed,
the contrast between the generally liberal mores of
the Berber town of Zwara and the dominance of Islamism on the
ground in the neighboring “Arab” (in reality just Berbers who have
been Arabized over the centuries) city of Sabratha could not be
more apparent.
In short, therefore, the cabinet appointments of
“technocrats” (as is being widely reported) are not automatically a
cause for optimistic hope of liberal democracy in Libya. Islamism
in Libya does not appear to be going away anytime soon, and could
well entrench itself even more deeply in the country in the coming
months.
