Flames of change smh.com.au/world/flames-o… ... #Libya
The new order in Libya faces a tough battle to unite a deeply divided and brutalised country. Anthony Ham reports.
COLONEL Muammar Gaddafi may have ruled Libya for more than 42 years, but in the final reckoning, it took just six months for his regime to unravel. And as with all dictatorships, the brutality that had sustained his rule would ultimately prove to be his undoing. In mid-February, with Tunisians having swept their government from power and with Egypt in an advanced stage of upheaval, a small group of protestors gathered in Benghazi. Their aim was modest: to demand justice for the families of the more than 1200 prisoners massacred on Colonel Gaddafi's orders at Abu Salim prison in 1996. As had become customary in Gaddafi's Libya at the merest hint of unrest, soldiers fired into the crowd with live ammunition. In the past, time and again, such a response had served the regime well, silencing its most vocal critics and perpetuating a climate of fear that kept ordinary Libyans in their place. But Libya - and the wider Arab world - in early 2011 was a radically different place to the one on which Colonel Gaddafi and his kind had come to rely.
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