TRIPOLI, (Reuters) – Invading Libya’s biggest international airport was embarrassingly easy: the attackers cut the wire perimeter fence in broad daylight, and then drove onto the tarmac while airport security chiefs stood and watched.
The occupation of Tripoli airport for several hours on Monday by an armed militia force has compelled policymakers in Europe and the United States to ask what sort of country they helped create when they joined the campaign last year to force Muammar Gaddafi from office.
Libya, home to Africa’s biggest proven oil reserves, is free from Gaddafi’s repression, but it is a chaotic country where nearly a year on from the end of the revolt, the state still barely exists.
Garbage piles up uncollected in suburban streets, drivers park their cars in the middle of highways, and, as incidents like the attack on the airport underscore, rag-tag militias who answer only to their own commanders are more powerful than the police and army.
“How can these people … close the airport like this?” asked Adel Salama, a civil society activist in Zintan, a town whose fighters used to control the airport before handing over to the central government back in April.
“Where is the state?”
Yesterday, the militiamen who had attacked the airport were gone and staff were at their posts. An Austrian Airlines jet took off for Vienna, the first departure since the attack.
Yet foreign investors, who already knew Libya was a risky place, are now likely to be even more cautious. The incident at the airport happened the same day that Libyan Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur was in the United States trying to persuade companies there to come and invest.
“It’s a worrying thing for someone who wants to come and do business here,” one foreign businessman visiting Tripoli said. “I am just happy my investors were not here themselves when this happened.”
SECURITY FAILURES
The attack on the airport was carried out by members of the al-Awfea brigade, a volunteer militia from the town of Tarhouna about 80 km (50 miles) south-east of Tripoli.
They believed their leader had been detained by security forces in the capital and their aim was to take the airport as a way of pressuring his captors into releasing him. They pulled out of the airport late on Monday after negotiations.
Details emerged yesterday of how close the incident came to endangering passengers.
