Here in Zwara, just a week after Libya’s “Berber capital” was being shelled by Moammar Khadafy’s forces from three sides, the local 13-man Crisis Management Group is already planning to transfer power to a civilian council that has been operating for several months from Djerba. Last Friday, the CMG organized a citywide cleanup day, member Hafid ben Sesi said. Zwara’s 50,000 citizens removed war debris and ordinary trash and repaired houses and shops damaged in the war.

Although many of Zwara’s schools now house revolutionary fighters or Khadafy prisoners, they will be cleared so that school can reopen Sept. 17. Perhaps most important for future security, the CMG is moving to disarm its own rebel forces and prohibit the carrying of the rebels’ ubiquitous assault rifles within the city.

Libyans are a resilient lot, not given to complaint or malingering. The contrast to post-invasion Iraq is dramatic. In May 2003, Iraqi shopkeepers asked me why America didn’t pick up the trash accumulated outside their shops. But in Libya, the do-it-yourself ethic prevails. “I cleaned outside my shop,” explained computer-repair-store owner Khellid ElFathily in Sabratha. A burnt-out Khadafy militia car opposite his Attar Street shop was being removed by a bulldozer that day, just a week after the fierce battle that liberated Sabratha.

All agree that the country faces huge tasks. The Libya that Khadafy left is a strange mixture of Third World and First World infrastructure -- and culture. In Zwara and Sabratha, the hospitals are antiquated -- and unfinished replacements have stood as shells for 20 years. Yet Libyan doctors working there include sophisticated specialists trained in Britain.

Global Arab Network

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