Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Libya Fragmenting?

A conference of about 3,000 delegates in Benghazi installed Ahmed al-Senussi, a great nephew of Libya's former king, as head of the new Cyrenaica Provincial Council.

It proposed that an eastern region should run its own affairs apart from foreign policy, the national army and oil resources, which would be left to a federal government in Tripoli.

The province would cover nearly half the country, from central Libya to the Egyptian border in the east and down to the borders with Chad and Sudan in the south.

The announcement aimed to present a federal system as a fait accompli before the struggling National Transitional Council in Tripoli.

The goal is to revive the system in place after the Second World War under King Idris, when Libya was divided into three states: Tripolitania in the west, Fezzan in the southwest and Cyrenaica – or Barqa, as it was called in Arabic – to the east.
I don't see this as fragmentation as much as a desire for a federal system of government. Whether Libya fragments will more likely rest on whether the Council recognizes the region as a province or state, or decides to force too strong of a national government on the region.

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