Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi's appearance before the camera lenses in Bab al-Aziziyah last night may be repeated by his father the Colonel or one of his brothers, just as bloody confrontations may erupt in Tripoli among other pits where Gaddafi's brigades have not yet surrendered to the rebels. But Libya has definitely entered the post-Gaddafi stage, whether through the field control achieved by the rebels with NATO's support, or the full international recognition of the national transitional council. Gaddafi has lost the military confrontation inside Libya and the diplomatic battle outside of it, and now, what he will leave behind are the stories about how he wasted billions of dollars on fictive wars around the world, about the systematic pillaging of his country's wealth, the corruption of his entourage, the memory of his anecdotes and the journalists' recollection of the performance he put up whenever he saw a camera lens, especially during the conferences he attended and his foreign visits with his tent and camels. Gaddafi's era has ended, after he worked throughout forty years – and with unparalleled energy – to strip Libya of anything related to the state and its institutions, and of all its human capabilities, thus offering bribes in the form of oil and investments to a fierce Eastern and Western capitalism that has no consideration for human rights and only cares about profit. Gaddafi, based on his Bedouin intuition, used this capitalism to squander Libya's wealth, displace its elite and impose an unmatched tyrannical rule. And until a few months before the eruption of the popular protests in the country, he was still receiving heads of states from the West and the East to earn high-priced contracts, even if at the expense of the Libyan people's freedom and dignity. It is likely that the national transitional council will become a similar place of pilgrimage and that the foreign officials and presidents with reconstruction and developmental plans will flock to meet with it, relying on the oil-rich Libya's need for all infrastructural projects. This will constitute a major challenge to the new rulers in Libya, considering they will firstly have to face the reconstruction priority while avoiding the trap of taking the offers and contracts lightly. Consequently, the latter rulers might need the administrators of the former regime in order to manage public affairs and reconstruct the state's apparatuses. This will constitute yet another challenge, i.e. achieving concord between the construction of the modern state and its institutions and dealing with the remnants of the deposed rule. And while the military battle against Gaddafi's forces has become quasi settled, a political battle which is no less complicated and dangerous will impose itself in the presence of an army of beneficiaries from the former regime and employees in its apparatuses whose fates have become linked to it, and will have to seek ways to reintegrate them in the new authority. Still, the most important challenge is related to the nature of this upcoming rule, considering that the forces which participated in the toppling of the old regime carry different opinions and ideologies, ranging from the utmost liberalism to the utmost fundamentalist extremism. Therefore, there are definitely political divergences prevailing over their vision of the future. After four miserable decades, the time has come for the Libyan people to enjoy peace, freedom and a decent life. So, will the vision of the future be determined by the map drawn up by the transitional council and will it lead to elections and democratic pluralistic choices? Or will the Libyan revolution – just like the previous ones – eat its own children and go from being a battle between the revolutionaries and Gaddafi's brigades today, into one among these revolutionaries themselves, thus leading to an authority that is very far from the goals that were set? At least, and except for a few mysterious incidents such as the assassination of Brigadier General Abdul Fattah Younis, the revolutionaries showed a high level of maturity, whether at the level of the military operations or at the level of the political stand. This enhances the possibility of seeing a peaceful transition toward a pluralistic and democratic civil rule, which everyone is claiming to seek.
