I mentioned a week ago it was starting to look more like a civil war than simply a democratic uprising... and it looks even closer now. The jockeying of the tribes for power has been going on for over 150 years. Cyrenaica tribes want democracy, or as one astute observer called, their return to control "over what is rightfully theirs" - rule over all the other tribes of Libya ( http://theclearview.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/libyas-tangled-opposition/).
But many other tribes have no intention of giving up their power and spoils obtained at the expense of the eastern tribes. We are now seeing more tribes sabotaging the rebels, not only in Sirte (Gaddafi's hometown) and Tripoli, but in Bin Jawad and other western towns.
"We got calls from the people of Bin Jawad telling us to come through and that all was well. Then we were ambushed," said Hani Zwei. "I can't believe our own countrymen would do that." ( http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE7250MM20110307)
Meanwhile the mythology of Gaddafi's "black African mercenaries" continues apace, in what HRW calls "lazy, irresponsible journalism on the part of the mainstream media who publish rumors as truth". The myth is used by the rebels to inflame the historical racial violence in Libya toward the dark-skinned Libyans from the Fezzan tribes, also supporters of Qaddafi. ( http://theclearview.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/gaddafis-african-mercenaries-or-are-they-libyans-from-fezzan/ ).
Is this starting to seem like a "be careful what you wish for" uprising?
-PF
"Behind Libya Rifts, Tribal Politics" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703883504576186802702758340.html
BENGHAZI—On Saturday night, rebel fighters charged into the Libyan coastal village of Bin Jawad, stronghold of the Hasoony tribe, after residents there assured them the town would welcome forces opposed to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Instead, rebel fighters say, they walked into an ambush. Hasoony tribesmen—who leaders from other tribes said had been armed and paid off in recent days by Col. Gadhafi—opened fire. Rebels suffered at least a dozen deaths, according to various accounts, and retreated.
The Hasoony tribesmen's decision to back Col. Gadhafi illustrates how tribal allegiances are helping to guide the battle to control a fractured Libya. Many members of the new ruling class taking shape in eastern Libya are from long-privileged tribes that were relegated to second-class status under Col. Gadhafi.
The Libyan leader, in more than four decades of power, empowered some tribes, weakened others and employed a divide and rule strategy, say Libya experts and tribal leaders. Now, both Col. Gadhafi and his opponents are competing for tribal loyalties to tip the balance in their favor.
"Having the tribes on your side means you have the people," said Maj. Gen. Ahmed el-Ghatrani, a defected Libyan army commander now serving the rebel forces.
The dynamic was visible days before the Bin Jawad ambush, when rebels repulsed Col. Gadhafi's forces when they tried to take Brega, an oil-refinery city just east of Bin Jawad.
Rebel fighters credited their fighting prowess for Brega's defense. Tribal sheikhs in eastern Libya offered a different explanation: Col. Gadhafi had in recent days tried to woo either the Zuwawa or Mughariba—two tribes who have for years feuded over land and other resources—with aid, money and weapons that would give them the leg up against the other. Both resisted.
"The two tribes united for the first time," said Hamad Gobaily, a resident of the area and rebel volunteer. "That was the key to our success."
Leaders have for centuries derived power and legitimacy from the tribes in this stretch of North Africa. The Senussi religious order that for more than 150 years effectively ruled eastern Libya—as well as parts of Chad, Niger and Sudan—owed its success to its ability to unite the region's tribes under a flexible vision of Islam that made space for different tribal customs.
The Senussis' success in eastern Libya—a region known as Cyrenaica—partly explains why the Italians struggled as colonial ruler there from 1911 until World War II. In what is now western Libya, tribes waged separate struggles. But in the east, tribes mounted a unified opposition to Italian rule. Historians say the Italians, in repressing the eastern rebellion, were responsible for the death of about half of eastern Libya's population, many of them in concentration camps outside Benghazi.
Col. Gadhafi's predecessor, King Idriss Senussi, maintained power with the support of his privileged castle guard, known as the Cyrenaican Defense Force. Their ranks were filled almost exclusively with members of eastern Libya's Saady tribes.
Early in his reign, Col. Gadhafi targeted Libya's powerful eastern tribes, redistributing their land to others and awarding them few influential posts.
The backbone of Col. Gadhafi's regime instead came from three tribes—his own small Gadhafa tribe, based in the town of Sirte, which had occupied a marginal place in Senussi society, as well as the Mugharha, concentrated in Sebha, and the large Warfalla tribe in the country's west.
The Warfalla fell out with the regime in the 1990s when members were implicated in a coup attempt. Sirte and Sebha remain the two Libyan regions most firmly under Col. Gadhafi's control.
These weaker tribes' empowerment helps explain why Col. Gadhafi's supporters appear to be clinging to power more desperately than their counterparts in Egypt or Tunisia, where tribes play a less prominent role. "These guys know they aren't going to fare very well if the regime goes down," said Jason Pack, a Libya scholar at Oxford University.
Before standing up to rebel forces at Bin Jawad, members of the Hasoony tribe had a taste of what may lay in store in a post-Gadhafi Libya.
Early in the uprising, armed rebels stormed the farm of the Hasoony tribe's leader in Benghazi, Hillal Hasoony, and killed him, say tribal leaders and local officials. Rebel officials say Mr. Hasoony helped Col. Gadhafi's intelligence chief, Abdullah Senuissi, to slip out of the city as the regime's hold collapsed last month.
"The Hasoony had problems with the youth, and then Gadhafi came and paid them a lot of money and gave them arms in Bin Jawad," said Sheikh Mohamed al-Idrissi, the leader of the Harabi Tribe in Benghazi. "Gadhafi is offering the tribes anything they want in exchange for their support."
Other senior Hasoony members have fled Benghazi, and tribe leaders couldn't be reached for comment. Col. Gadhafi has said he enjoys broad support among Libya's people and tribes.
Mr. al-Idrissi's Harabi tribe is a historically powerful umbrella tribe in eastern Libya that saw their influence wane under Col. Gadhafi. The Libyan leader confiscated swaths of tribal members' land and redistributed it to weaker and more loyal tribes, Mr. al-Idrissi said.
Many of the leaders now emerging in eastern Libya hail from the Harabi tribe, including the head of the provisional government set up in Benghazi, Abdel Mustafa Jalil, and Abdel Fatah Younis, who assumed a key leadership role over the defected military ranks early in the uprising.
"If you scratch the surface, you'll find a lot of the new leaders, a lot of those who defected to the rebels early, are from old tribes and families who served the Senussi monarchy," Pack said. —Margaret Coker in Tripoli, Libya, contributed to this article.-- Peter Fay http://theclearview.wordpress.com