The 2011 Libyan uprising that toppled the country’s longtime ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi devastated the oil-rich nation, believes a Tunisian journalist, who has been covering the conflict extensively.
And now a decade down the line, the future still looks bleak as the threat of the country's split is looming.
In December 2010, when Khaoula Ben Kias, a young Tunisian journalist was covering the eruption of the mass protests in her country that later turned into a tsunami known as the Arab Spring, she could not imagine that the wave of violent clashes would soon spill into Libya.
"The situation in Tunisia has been turbulent and unclear. There was accumulated frustration, the streets didn't calm down, and the masses wanted to change the reality," she relays, recalling the events that paved the way for the ouster of the longtime Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country in mid-January, leaving with his family for Saudi Arabia.
Back then, Libyans' literacy rate stood at more than 88 percent, the concept of gender equality was protected by law, the country had no external debt, and the security situation was relatively stable, primarily due to the fact that Gaddafi was ruling the country with an iron fist.This was the reason why Ben Kias believed Libya, with its prosperity and stability, would avoid that fate of mass protests."Many of us [journalists] didn't think that Libya needed that revolution. Of course, [just like others] they didn't have the freedoms and the democracy but they were a wealthy country that didn't require that upheaval," she says.
According to the same 2016 report, the death of Libya’s longtime strongman resurrected "long-simmering political, regional and ethnic divisions" and allowed terrorist organisations to rear their heads.On the political front, the civil war that erupted led to the division of the country. Economically the revolution caused the destruction of part of the country's infrastructure and almost halted oil production, dealing a devastating blow to industry, given that the sector has been a major source of income for Libyans. And now almost ten years down the line, Ben Kias says the future of the North African country, which has ever since been divided between several armed factions, still looks bleak.
"I think that eventually Libya will fall apart and will be divided between the East, the West and the South. Peace is remote there not only because of the external interference but also because of the absence of educated elite and the lack of national figures, who would be able to steer the country through this crisis.
Source: Sputnik News