The death of the American ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, which took place in the US consulate in Benghazi in the night between 11 and 12 September last on the eve of the appointment of the new Libyan premier Abu Shagur, casts new and disturbing shadows on the country's political transition in following Gaddafi's departure from the scene. In the city symbol of the fight against the Gaddafi regime – the same one where the Muslim Brotherhood had in the past set fire to the Italian consulate to protest against the anti-Islam shirt of the Northern League Calderoli – a crowd of protesters from the Ansar Al-Sharia militia attacked with grenades and firearms the US consulate. The protest was directed against the film Innocence of Muslim, made by an Israeli-American, Sam Bacile, supported by the American pastor Terry Jones, known for having burned some copies of the Koran in the past. The American ambassador would have died from inhaling the fumes caused by the fire. In addition to Stevens, three other people lost their lives.
This is an episode of extreme gravity, which modifies the picture of the democratic process underway and its future developments and brings to mind the Sirte war of '86. Then the American president Roland Reagan bombed the Tripoli barracks where Gaddafi was. This is undoubtedly a bad story for the American president Obama, who, after his 2009 embrace of the young reformist Muslims of the Al Ahram university, had then concentrated his attention on domestic politics and Asia, abandoning Europe and the Middle East to his fate Orient. Now anything can happen and the course of events will inevitably put relations between Italy and Libya back into play.
Seems like a lifetime ago and instead it was only August 30, 2010. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi landed at Ciampino, with thirty Berber horses in tow, to celebrate the second anniversary of the Italian-Libyan friendship and cooperation agreement signed with the "friend" Silvio Berlusconi (the one who, a year later, will comment on his death with an indecipherable «sic transit gloria mundi»). Everything seemed to be going well. Italy, after years of back and forth, had fifinally paid the price requested by Tripoli (5 billion dollars) for that "grand gesture" defiof reconciliation essential to erasing the colonial past. At the same time, Rome welcomed Libyan investments in Unicredit, Eni and Finemeccanica and became a privileged interlocutor for all lucrative affars of the Jamahiriya on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, oil and non-oil, with some more than secret appendix of parallel business, much talked about but absolutely untraceable, including Colonel Gaddafi, Prime Minister Berlusconi and perhaps also the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. An alliance was stipulated on cinema and television but above all on the management of energy resources (which would have greatly irritated Germany and France), Eni-Gazprom-Noc, behind which a new network of supranational (and personal) power shone in the backlight which united in the same fate political subjects distant from history but even more from geography . An anti-colonial revolutionary leader who became a despot, a populist premier theoretician of anti-politics and of the "party of love", a former KGB agent who became an essential counterweight of the new nationalism in the struggle between oligarchs in today's Russia.
Yet, secret agreements aside, that "system" of alliances seemed unshakeable. On 30 August 2010, that "carousel" of Arabian horses in the Tor di Quinto Carabinieri barracks in Rome (de!ENI's managing director Paolo Scaroni only gave Gaddafi a "cloak". liquidated) could appear to have culminated in long years of negotiations under tents in the Bab el Azizia barracks in Tripoli (bombed by the Americans in 86) or in Sirte, when Gaddafi he dismissed his Italian interlocutors, after interminable waits, giving them some old men and rusty musket 91 from the colonial period – a way like any other to underline the wound of the Italian occupation, carefully kept open by Jamhayiria to feed an otherwise non-existent feeling of national unity between the three different territorial entities of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan.
It seems, just a lifetime ago. Why now, almost a year after 20 October 2011, the date of the capture and death of the Rais, even the latest atrocious images of his corpse mocked by militiamen after his capture in Sirte have lost much of their emotional impact. Everyone - political forces, observers and Libyan civil society (or whatever is behind this vague defition is hiding in that country) - they are already making bets on what will be the tipping point of the formation of the new government, democratically elected after 42 years of dictatorship, and on the s!de who await the 200 members of the Parliament born from the elections of 7 July. This was a hot summer of negotiations between the most representative political formations - in particular the victorious (38 seats) Alliance of National Forces of the liberal Mahmud Jibril, possible future prime minister, and the list of the Muslim Brotherhood of Justice and Reconstruction - and the 120 independent deputies who respond to logics of tribal rather than political affiliation, often unknown even to the leaders of the major groups.
On closer inspection, the Libyan context appeared in some ways indecipherable !n from the first moves of the new anti-Gaddafi insurgency established in the spring of 2011. Only the oil economy can explain why the Libyan revolution was absolutely different from other "Arab Springs", to the "Jasmine Revolution" of Tunis and even more to the "Tahrir Square" of Cairo. In those realities, the dictatorships of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had produced andffdevastating effects on the standard of living of large sections of society. This was not the case in Libya, where an economy entirely centered on oil revenues succeeded support a very generous welfare system. An apparent stability that could have misled, just as it misled the Italian foreign minister of the time, Franco Frattini, who in February 2011, when the first fires were already being lit in the Arab squares (absolutely misunderstood or underestimated by the international community and above all from France and the United States), in an interview with «Corriere della Sera» indicated precisely in the "Libyan model of Gaddafi” a solution for the new Tunisian and Egyptian leadership.
Of course, young Libyans, it has been said, have played an important role. The people of social networks in Tripoli, as already in Tunis and Cairo, considered the suspension of democracy and freedom by the regime intolerable. The post-election controversies against the "Leopards" of the old elites, first raised at the court of Gaddafi and now ready to present themselves as reformers, they are also rebounding in recent days, but they are not such as to represent a serious threat to the process of democratic reforms underway. Only now, with the new government, will it be possible to begin to understand what it isffectively it wants to become Libya: if a great Qatar that defends its oil (and the resulting income), affsecure on the Mediterranean and in a privileged relationship with the European Union and above all with the old friends-enemies – i.e. the Italians – or something different, closer to the geopolitical context of North Africa and the Maghreb.
In fact, the political and above all economic relations with Italy will also depend on the new connotations that the new Libya will assume. At stake is the future of investment financial assets present in our territory and attributable to the old regime and the Libyan sovereign wealth fund, as well as the reactivation of that Berlusconi-Gaddafi agreement which was only frozen, but not cancelled, by the interim government. However, it is comforting to know that when Berlusconi kissed the hand of the Rais, not everyone bowed to the same logic. Not only the returnees from Libya who had an account opened with Gaddafi, but also the pilots of the Frecce Tricolori who in 2009 rifiutarono of effcarry out the evolutions in Tripoli with the green of the Jamahiriya instead of the tricolor, as well as the ufficials on horseback by the carabinieri who, in August 2010, in the Caserma D'Acquisto in Rome, did not want to perform together with the Berber knights, demanding a separate carousel just for them. At least the charge of Pastrengo - that alone - then remained safe and inviolate.
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