Libyans try to get back property seized by Gaddafi

[alp227]

Source: The guardian

Dhahra Street in central Tripoli isn't much to look at. On one side is the state-owned Mellitah oil company – a Gaddafi-era concrete eyesore in green and white stripes. Opposite is an unprepossessing three-storey block of faded stucco where Wissam al-Aqari's little grocer's shop occupies the corner unit.

Legend has it that Mussolini once drove down Dhahra during colonial times. But what catches the eye these days is an Arabic sentence scrawled in red paint across a wall next to the shop: "This building is the rightful property and inheritance of Muhammed al-Jafairya,"

Such claims of ownership can be seen all over Tripoli and across the country, alongside triumphant slogans hailing the fall of the man they simply call "the tyrant". And just how the original owners will get back – or be compensated for – the billions worth of lost properties is one of the biggest and toughest questions facing Libya's new rulers.

The issue of restitution goes back to the late 1970s when tens of thousands of homes, offices, workshops and other premises were confiscated under law No 4 – and were given, sold or rented cheaply to new occupants whose rights were legitimised by the homespun revolutionary truths of Muammar Gaddafi's Green Book.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/04/libya-gaddafi-property-restitution-demands

[Igel]

1. This'll go badly.

It's gone reasonably badly in other countries that tried to unredistribute real wealth. The only reasonable way out was for the government to compensate the person who doesn't wind up with the land.

The difficult thing was making sure that those who benefitted didn't just become obscenely wealthy; to keep those of reasonably modest means who are left holding the once-confiscated property from being bankrupted because years before they didn't bank on the unlikely happening; and to keep those abroad from profiting from the local change in affairs. In the case of Libya, this will often mean "Jews," making it not just a localist/emigrant squabble but one with religious overtones.

It's also difficult to figure out what a person should be reimbursed. Should it be reimbursed for what it would have cost on the open market on the day it was confiscated, with some sort of knock-on amount to account for interest (either bank interest, the average increase in GDP, or something else)? After all, it's not a given that the property would have been held by the former owners or that it would have been developed in precisely the same way with the same benefits. Perhaps it would have been worth more now, perhaps it would have been worth far less.

Most of the real winners in unredistributionist schemes were those who originally had far more land than needed--those who many on DU would argue, a la Chavez, that their land/wealth should have been redistributed (a lot of the Green Book sounds eerily like Chavez). Many of those whose property was confiscated were forced to leave, as well, or suffered other kinds of tribulations beyond the mere loss of property--and had they remained, they'd still have become impoverished. It's easy to find enough less-well-off folk who remained local to fire up a media compaign, but a more comprehensive set of data usually isn't desirable for such a purpose.

There's also the sheer injustice of restoring property when many other suffered. Take the Czech Republic. If you lost an apartment building in the '50s, you'd get it back. But if you lost your job, your status, your source of income, and were hounded and your family rendered destitute for nearly 40 years there was no significant compensation.

Snarly kind of problem. It was a topic of long debate in the former non-USSR Comecon countries, with a lot of caveats and exceptions and an acceptance that there'd be no just solution. Everybody acquiesced or the courts were able to make exceptions for especially meritorious claims. There wasn't the ethnic rivalry, the aggrieved sense of a need for revenge, the kind of chaos we see in Libya or the squatting and re-taking of property by force majeure. Undoing the latest round of injustices commited in the name of justice will be the hardest--there's a strong "to the victor goes the spoils" seen in the looting, the cleansing, the violence, and the attempt at even-handed undoing of the redistributionist policies will be hard to replicate.