TRIPOLI: The appointment of a new interim Libyan government is due to be announced by Prime Minister Abdurrahim Al-Kib on Sunday, according to officials from the National Transitional Council (NTC), just two days ahead of a deadline set by the TNC's charter.
The appointment of a new government is required within 30 days of the declaration of Libya's liberation. That happened on Oct. 23. Al-Kib who was elected prime minister by the 51-member NTC on Oct. 30 in place Mahmoud Jibril who had resigned has been holding a series of meetings with existing ministers and prominent figures for several days.
It is reported in Tripoli that he has had difficulty finding suitable ministers to serve in the interim administration.
According to a number of sources in the Libyan capital including lawyers, local government officials and foreign diplomats, one of the reasons for the delay is an NTC rule preventing ministers from standing in next year's elections. They say those who could serve do not want to rule themselves inadmissible for standing in the elections for the constituent assembly next June. A close colleague of one prominent Libyan who was widely expected to replace Ali Tarhouni as oil minster told Arab News last week that the person concerned had refused because he wanted to be a candidate in June.
"Many people are saying that is also why (former prime minister) Jibril resigned," he added.
In fact there is confusion over the issue.
Article 29 of the "Draft Constitutional Charter For the Transitional Stage" issued in March states that no member of the NTC or of the interim government or of local councils would be able to nominate anyone or stand for elections to the 200-member constituent assembly. In the current version, approved on Aug. 3, the clause has disappeared. "The ban is no longer there," said Abdurrahman Sewehli, head of a prominent Libyan family and increasingly politically involved in the new Libya. However, others, including officials, say that the ban still stands.
Al-Kib's statement last week that the new government will contain mainly technocrats is seen as reflecting the difficulties he has had in finding prominent Libyans to serve. Al-Kib is himself a technocrat.
The lack of a new interim government has created something of a power vacuum. However, that did not stop a number of existing ministers from heading 100 km southeast of Tripoli to the hillside town in Msallata in the eastern edge of the Nafusa Mountains on Wednesday to take part in a major political anniversary.
It was in Msallata on Nov. 16, 1918, that a group of Libyans opposed to Italian colonial rule, among them Sewelhi's grandfather, Ramadan, met in the local mosque and declared the creation of a Tripolitanian Republic. The declaration of independence had to be made in the hillside town, famous for its centuries-old olive oil industry and as a center of Islamic learning, because Tripoli was under firm Italian control by then.
The event is seen as having major historic significance in post-Qaddafi Libya. Not only was it the first republic in the Arab world, it drew together all sections of the country's society at the time -- tribal leaders, the urban elites and representatives of the former provinces of Fezzan and Cyrenaica as well as Tripolitania all three of which Turkey had ceded to Italy in 1912. The only reason it was called the Tripolitanian Republic was that the notion of Libya did not exist at the time. It was the Italians who first used the old Greek name for the east of the country for the whole of it in 1929. The republican movement was following the example of Algeria, named after the chief city Algiers, and Tunisia after Tunis.
The Tripolitanian Republic also bridged communal divides. The first, and only, president, Suliman Barouni who vies with Omar Mukhtar as the other great Libyan hero in the struggle against the Italian colonists, was a Berber from the Nafusa Mountains.
At the stadium on Wednesday a poster in Arabic read "No east, no west; Libya is one. No Berber, no Arab, we are all united under wise leadership." Apart from the name Libya, it could have been written for the 1918 declaration of independence.
The republic finally fizzled out in 1923, as the Italians consolidated their power in the country. Many of those involved had to flee to Egypt and did not return until after the second Libyan state became independent in 1951.
With Libya looking back to roots that the Qaddafi regime erased from the history books, the brief episode of the Tripolitanian republic has assumed a new importance despite its failure. It is now being presented as a precursors of the new Libya, along with the kingdom between 1951 and 1969. There is further aspect of the Tripolitanian Republic that resonates with the fall of Qaddafi. In 1918, the creation of the republic was a local response not only to Turkey ceding the three provinces to Italy; it was also a response to the changed international order following the First World War. New nations were being born out of wreckage of the empires that had ruled Europe and the Middle East -- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Yugoslavia. The Tripolitanian Republic believed it should be one of them. Barouni wrote to the then war victors, US President Woodrow Wilson and the French and the British governments, asking for recognition and support. The response was silence. This year, it was very different. The US, France and the UK came to Libya's aid.
Around 2,000 people attended Wednesday's celebrations in Msallata's sports stadium although, it seemed that more were interested in the display of parachutists and the parked helicopter that ferried in ministers than in the speeches from the podium. As well as a sprinkling of ministers including Sheikh Hamza Bufarish, the minister of religious affairs and waqf, Mahmoud Shaamam, minister of Information, and Mohamed Alagi, minister of justice, there were several would-be politicians in evidence at the gathering and making their presence obvious. Among them was the politically ambitious Abdel Hakim Belhaj, head of the Tripoli military council and former fighter in Afghanistan who has joined the new moderate Islamists led by Ali Al-Salabi. Also pressing the flesh was Mohamed Hrezim one of the Tripoli representatives on the NTC and Gen. Khalifa Hifter who briefly served as the NTC's military commander in the early days of the uprising. The need to be seen at public events is being learned fast in the new Libya.
© Arab News 2011
