Reuters “No To Tribalism,” declare the now tattered posters put up by rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, a defiant riposte to an Arab autocrat who magnified tribal cleavages with a policy of divide and rule. But rebels also daubed walls with the place names “Misrata” “Zintan” and “Zawiya”, suggesting that loyalty to hometown will be a far more potent force than kinship in post-Gaddafi Libya. Nursing bitter memories of tribal manipulation, Gaddafi's immediate successors are working to give a technocratic gloss to their caretaker administration and minimize the influence of ancient kinship ties in the emerging political landscape. Libyans, diplomats and political analysts say this effort may be pushing at an open door. The country's scores of tribes carry weight in Libyan society, but less so in its politics. Unlike in Yemen or Iraq, tribal leaders in Libya tend not to be household names, in part because Gaddafi worked assiduously over decades to sap their power by playing off one against the other. But extended families and clans - smaller units than tribes -- have a big role in arbitrating property and business disputes, in career advancement and in mediating compensation demands arising, for example, from deaths or injuries in traffic accidents. Corrupt or brutal police, and a chaotic bureaucracy, under Gaddafi meant Libyans had to fall back on such kin networks to obtain daily needs. These hometown networks, developed among immediate family and friends in hometown settings, are now making themselves felt in the political realm as cities make loud demands on the caretaker National Transitional Council (NTC) administration for funds for reconstruction. In this effort, larger tribal networks tend not to be invoked. “Libya is an urban society. And for young people, the whole tribal thing doesn't compute,” said Libyan political scientist Mansour El-Kikhia. “The NTC has been put together on the basis of professional expertise rather than family. And even when fellow rebels have criticised it, they've done so on the ground of professional failings rather than on other criteria.” __
