Ansar al-Sharia, the Libyan Islamist militia publicly blamed for the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last month, has disappeared from the city's streets. Not all locals are happy about that.

But to Fadya Bargathi at Benghazi's El Jala hospital, the designated culprits in the consulate attack are something else: saviors.

“Before Ansar al-Shariah took over security here our lives were hell,” says Ms. Bargathi, a hospital administrator. “People would walk in and out of the hospital with their weapons, and if they didn’t get treatment immediately they would put a gun to a doctor’s head.”

The story of Jala hospital and Ansar's role in restoring order there captures the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Militias, some Islamist, some not, are frequently the first line of security, other times the threat themselves.

Ansar al-Sharia is alleged to have been both. While many in Benghazi are skeptical the group ordered the attack on the US consulate, and see them more likely as a convenient scapegoat, US and Libyan officials have been pointing in their direction.


http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/1012/In-Benghazi-militias-may-promote-security-one-day-threaten-it-the-next

I guess they need the rest after driving off the black Africans.

There are some differences.

One was that Qaddhafi didn't forcibly mix tribes and ethnicities like Saddam did. Saddam pursued the Ottoman policy of encouraging or just relocating people. So Libya, apart from large cities, are large tribal blocks. Probably there's some tribalism in the cities, but Saddam had a pro-tribal policy and encouraged highlighting tribal affiliations after education and urbanism had eroded them for decades. That led to attempts at ethnic cleansing in Iraq and a struggle to prevent it.

Another is that the central government isn't insisting on imposing central top-down control. So there's no local power struggle, locals vs federal power.

And the third is that there are no outsiders to shift all the blame on. Given the choice of blaming foreigners ("outsiders&quot or fellow Libyans, it's better to blame outsiders for everything from birth defects to bad tasting water to a village outbreak of scabies.

Tribe only trumps nation when it matters. If it's painless, it's like students in my class. They have no strenuous objection to seeing good things happen to others as long as it doesn't hurt them or require any action on their part. (This they generously call "empathy." I call it "just this side of clinical sociopathy".)