Libya Looks to Spain as Model for State-Building
Organized by Sudel, a one-year European program aimed at supporting democracy in Libya, the Libyan delegation met with former prime ministers of Spain, Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, as well as with leaders of Spanish institutions. Mr. González, for example, was a key player in shaping democratic Spain after the dictator Francisco Franco died in November 1975.
Having lived under a dictatorship with few state institutions since 1969, Libyans are trying to do more than introduce democracy to a country with existing, if autocratic, structures, as pro-democracy activists in Tunisia and Egypt are seeking to do. Libya’s 200-seat Congress, which assumed power in August, is starting from scratch as it drafts the guidelines that will define the new constitution and the future state.
“Libya is in political nursery school,” said Ahmed Fraishek, 27, editor in chief of a small newspaper in Zawiya, in northwestern Libya. “For 42 years Libya didn’t have a constitution, government, institutions or anything that made it function like a state. So we are all still getting our feel for the political process. For this reason we are here in Spain, which had a transition from dictatorship to democracy in a peaceful way in a short period of time.”
(One) issue bogging down Libya’s state-building is what to do with the hundreds of thousands of Libyans who worked in Colonel Qaddafi’s regime — some as simple government workers but including others who maimed and killed innocent people. The question of reconciliation divides the population into several camps. Some say that anyone associated with the regime should be banned from the new political process. Others say they favor a temporary ban, no ban, or some other sanction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/world/middleeast/libya-looks-to-spain-as-model-for-state-building.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
It is good that Libyan democratic activists are trying to learn from the experiences of others in how to transition from dictatorship to democracy.
As acknowledged in the article "these aren’t things you can copy and paste into different contexts, but talking about the Spanish experience helps them think about the different options for the type of state they want to create". Hopefully democratic Libyans can use the Spanish experience (and others) as this transition to good use.
