Libyans hope Syrians fare better than they did

Libyans watched the fall of Syria's Bashar Al Assad with a mixture of apprehension and hope, wishing "their brothers" in the Levant a better outcome than their own.

Ten years after the downfall and death of Libyan leader Muamer Qadhafi, the North African country remains plagued by division and instability.

"It's now been 14 years since the people of Syria have been waiting for their turn to come," said 47-year-old history and geography teacher Al Mahdiya Rajab.

"Their Arab Spring was stopped in its tracks" in 2011, she told AFP. "At last they have been delivered from more than half a century of tyranny."

After a lightning 11-day offensive, a rebel coalition dominated by the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham group in Syria swept into Damascus to end more than 50 years of rule by the Assad clan.

As in Libya in October 2011, when the death of Qadhafi was announced after he had ruled for 42 years, Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the "victory of the revolution."

Residents of Libya's capital Tripoli, like 55-year-old activist Sami Essid, drew comparisons between Syria and the first days of the post-Qadhafi era.

"In the beginning there was hope," he said. "The people were satisfied, peaceful and happy."

In 2012, Libya held its first ever free election, choosing 200 members of the national congress or parliament. This was followed in 2013 by municipal elections. Both polls were considered to have been a success. But then in August 2014, after weeks of violence, a coalition of militias seized Tripoli in the west of the country and installed a government, forcing the elected parliament into exile in the east.

Despite Fayez Al Sarraj being appointed premier in December 2015 under a UN-mediated deal, the east-west split only deepened.

In parallel, armed militias and foreign interference mushroomed. Some cities saw a surge in militant organisations, including Daesh group.

'Rising up against tyranny'

Essid told AFP the main thing Libya and Syria have in common is "the people rising up against injustice, tyranny and dictatorship."  But in Libya, he said, "we discovered that the struggle for power and the country's riches were the objective all along."

"We hope we will not see division and militias emerge in Syria, as happened in Libya," he said.

"The danger in Syria is that there are different faiths, and this can lead to power struggles and communities being divided."

Today Libya — which has the largest hydrocarbon reserves on the African continent — has two governments.

It is divided between a UN-recognised government based in the capital Tripoli and a rival administration in the east, backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar who also controls the south.

"Now we know the outcome of the revolution in Libya," Essid said. "But no one yet knows what will happen in Syria after the revolution there."
But for civil society member Motaz Ben Zaher, "although they both aimed to overthrow a regime, there is no real common ground between the Libyan and Syrian revolutions."

"The contexts differ profoundly, whether in terms of the scale of international intervention or geography," said the 50-year-old.

He added that because Syria borders Israel, the situation is "far more delicate than that in Libya," but hopes "Syria will learn from the experiences of other nations before it."

For the teacher Rajab, who lives in Zawiya some 45 kilometres west of Tripoli, nostalgia for the country's past is a mistake.

She said Libyans who long for the comparative stability under Qadhafi have forgotten "the more than four decades of tyranny during which all the institutions of a state born after independence were systematically sabotaged." "I hope it doesn't come to that for the Syrians and wish them a better experience than ours."

Agence France-Presse