Happy birthday, Libya

February 13, 2012 by admin

It 'started the countdown to celebrate the first birthday of the new Libya - February 17, start of the popular uprising against Muammar Gaddafi - and here in Tripoli is already around a waving flags, with a few fighters in rewriting that seek to regulate the traffic of the center and some team of volunteers who tries to clean up the city, now dirty as to be frightening. And to celebrate the coming of the new authorities to keep us very demonstrates the growing number of checkpoints of the militia, as well as the call to arms for all ex-combatants of the Tripoli Brigade, ready to assist the army and police, which remain frighteningly under staffed. There is therefore a state of alert, in Tripoli as in the rest of Libya, to avoid unpleasant surprises which could spoil the party and discredit the National Transitional Council.

The dangers, in fact, are remote. And perhaps they are more in retropensieri of Libyans who in reality. It 'true that there are still areas where the new authorities are struggling to establish itself and so-called "loyalists", that is loyal to Gaddafi and his clan, they are still able to or drawn a certain passive resistance. Just to make names: 1) the area of Bani Walid, where friction with the Warfalla are continuous, 2) the "black triangle" between Rigdalin, Jumael and Al Ajealat, on the border with Tunisia, and 3) the city who have paid the price of heavily sold at the end of the conflict, such as Tawarga, now reduced to a ghost town, with the survivors of punitive expeditions orchestrated by the clans of Misrata piled up like refugees on the outskirts of Tripoli.

However, there is a "green strength", as claimed by Saadi Gaddafi - who throws proclamations from his golden exile in Niger - and how you ranting on some sites online. Neither there are actions organized against the new Libyan authorities by groups and clans who would like to restore the power of the Gaddafi family and their court dissolved. Rather, there are bursts of tribal violence, the result of the instability persists, and a lot of settling accounts, personnel or family members, inevitable after a fratricidal war like the one just ended. All in a rapidly changing context, which sees the CNT increasingly difficult political, incapable of delivering on the promises and the hopes raised by the Revolution.

What loyalists that might upset the festivities on February 17, is therefore a ghost than a real fear. And 'the ghost of a clan, a family, of a regime that, having done the good and the bad weather for 42 years, could today, with a last gasp, smudge the image of the new Libya in the eyes of the world . But he put his mind at rest loyalists and Western supporters of Gaddafi: the past does not come back.