Erstellt am: 6. 7. 2012 - 16:00 Uhr

The long road to peace and democracy in Libya

Reality Check: Elections in Libya and veteran press freedom hero Raymond Louw.

EPA

Election posters in Tripoli. Photo: Amel Pain/EPA

Elections in Libya
Saturday is a milestone in the history of Libya. It’s nearly a year and a half since the beginning of protests against the rule of Moammar Gadhafi. Those protests escalated into an uprising and then civil war, which culminated in the death of Gadhafi in October last year. In the more than four decades of Gadhafi’s reign, Libya had no parliament and Gadhafi regarded anyone who tried to organize a political party as a traitor to be punished with death.

On Saturday 2.8 million Libyans will be able to vote to choose the 200 members of the transitional parliament. The assembly will elect a new transitional government to replace the one appointed by the National Transitional Council, which led the rebel side during the eight-month war and has governed the country since the end of the war. But there are many challenges ahead. There have been protests by groups demanding greater autonomy for eastern Libya. Unruly militias operate independently, and deepening regional and tribal divisions erupt into violence with alarming frequency. Human rights groups have documented reports of widespread torture and killing of detainees.

The main parties in the race are the Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and Construction party; former prime minister Mahmoud Jibril's secular Alliance of National Forces; Al-Watan, an Islamist party founded Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a former rebel commander and a jihadist who once fought the Russians in Afghanistan; and and the National Front party, one of Libya’s oldest political groups, which is credited with organizing several failed assassination attempts against Gadhafi. But no-one can predict who the election winners will be.

Shashank Joshi, a doctoral student at Harvard University and associate fellow at the UK defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute, sums up the situation in Libya today:

Raymond Louw
Raymond Louw is a veteran champion of press freedoms. During South Africa's apartheid times he worked for the Rand Daily Mail, renowned for its investigative journalism into clampdowns by the authorities. His actvism has not been diminished over the years and he's in the studio to tell us about how events of the past relate to present day human rights' challenges.

Listen to the programme after the show via Podcast or at fm4.orf.at/realitycheck.