Libya’s Parliament dumps PM Zeidan, Elects al-Thinni, over Oil Tanker Crisis

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/parliament-thinni-tanker.html

Libya’s Parliament dumps PM Zeidan, Elects al-Thinni, over Oil Tanker Crisis
By Juan Cole | Mar. 12, 2014

In a series of dramatic political moves, the Libyan General National Congress on Tuesday carried out a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Ali Zeidan. Zeidan, identified as a liberal nationalist, has been targeted since his election in 2012 by the Muslim Brotherhood bloc in the elected Libyan parliament, but they had lacked the votes (120 out of 194 members of the assembly) until now. The Muslim fundamentalists were clearly joined in this vote by liberals or nationalists who had grown weary with Zeidan not on ideological grounds but because he was seen as increasingly ineffective and perhaps corrupt.

Libya now risks fighting between militias loyal to the central government in Tripoli and the rebel autonomists in the east. It also risks a coup by Muslim fundamentalists in parliament.

The trigger for the vote of no confidence was the taking of three ports in the east of the country by rebel autonomists and their capture and launching of a North Korea-flagged oil tanker by the regional rebels, despite central government opposition. Eastern separatists or autonomists are not a majority in that part of Libya, and crowds have often mounted big demonstrations in Benghazi and elsewhere in favor of national unity. But given the lack of central authority and the inability so far to rebuild a national army, even small militia forces in the east have been able to act with impunity.

Zeidan was unable to restore security in the country, with militias acting increasingly lawlessly (last fall a militia briefly kidnapped Zeidan himself but then let him go). His inability to keep order began affecting oil receipts, the primary source of income for the government and the country. Some facilities were paralyzed by strikes by oil workers, who maintained that they had been poorly paid in the Gaddafi era and that their situation had not improved after the revolution. In other cases, regional autonomists from the east took control of oil facilities, maintaining that their proceeds should go to the eastern region rather than to the center. (Libya is historically divided into Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the West, and Fezzan in the southwest, but has been ruled as a unitary, non-federal state for many decades; the Gaddafi dictatorship deprived the East of resources because it had a feud with Benghazi and other eastern cities, centers of Muslim fundamentalist politics that opposed Gaddafi).