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TRIPOLI: One young fighter accidentally shoots himself in the foot as others fire wildly in the air, while a truck narrowly misses bystanders as it careers past.
It’s a typical night of celebration for the men who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi.
Disarming the fighters, intoxicated by victory and imbued with a sense of entitlement, will be a big task for Libya’s new leaders, who will have to find the jobs and political representation for the men after months of war.
Many fighters have banded into brigades affiliated largely to their home towns, and while there is now an abundance of good will between groups, potential fault lines are plain to see as eyes turn Libya’s economic and political future.
”It’s a good thing, but everything has its price, and the price is chaos,” said Saoud al-Hafi, a coordinator of the uprising in the capital Tripoli, commenting on the young mens’ celebrations in the city’s Martyrs’ Square.
A large banner at the square prohibits firing in the air.
”I know a lot of these people and they are willing to give up their arms. But they want to see jobs, security. Jobs are very, very important. It’s one of the things that ignited the revolution,” he said.
Like the young men who overthrew authoritarian leaders in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, the fighters who took up arms after a Feb. 17 revolt cite a lack of good jobs and a poor economy as one of the main reasons for the uprising.
OPEC member Libya is wealthy, with little debt and a relatively small population of around six million people, but Gaddafi did little to diversify Libya’s economy away from oil, concentrating the country’s wealth in his family’s hands.
”The reason for the revolution is poverty. A few controlled everything. It will take one or two years for the economic situation to improve,” said Nizal al-Tayari, 26, one of the anti-Gaddafi fighters at the square.
”If there’s no change, we can have another revolution,” he added, dismissing comparisons with Iraq, which eight years after the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein has made relatively little progress rebuilding its economy and infrastructure.
The young fighters in theory answer to local military councils, which themselves answer to a national military council, which in turn answers to Libya’s new leaders at the National Transitional Council (NTC).
But the chain of command is loose, and the young men volatile, said Hisham Buhagiar, a senior commander who led fighters from Libya’s western mountains into Tripoli. (UNI)