"Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The General National Council has announced a new name for the country Mummar Qaddafi called the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the name he gave it when he dissolved the republic in 1977. The new official name is now "The State of Libya." However, that name may be changed again with the adoption of a new constitution.
By any name, Libya is still struggling for stability and control after the revolution completely overthrew the repressive state that ran a country with few other civil or political organizations for more than 40 years.
For example, the Libya Herald is reported Wednesday that the murder rate in Libya has soared by more than 500% in two years. The number of murders in 2010, the last year before the uprising, was 87, in 2012, it was 525. Other crimes have increased in a similar manner with thefts from shops and offices increasing from 143 to 783, a 448% increase. Thefts from private homes saw an increase of 30% and car jackings have also increased.
It should go without saying that there are criminal elements in any country that will seek to take advantage of any breakdown in law and order. It should also be clear that no state can be overthrown without some temporary disruption of the state mechanisms of law enforcement. Those mechanisms are inevitably so integrated with the mechanisms of state repression that it is largely impossible to take down one without disrupting the other. Such a crime wave should be considered one of the birth pangs of a new society.
The one saving grace to these statistics is that even with this increase, which is expected to be temporary, it is much lower than in many other places. Chicago, IL had 506 homicides in 2012, almost the same as Libya in the year after the repressive government was overthrown, even though Chicago has less than half the population of Libya. Does that mean that the United States should be considered a "failed state?"
The murder rate in Libya is nothing like that of another country already a dozen years into a revolutionary makeover. Venezuela, population 29 million, saw more than 19,000 murders last year as the Chavez government grapples with a crime rate that has made his country one of the most dangerous places in the world. That is a murder rate ten times what Libya has suffer in its first year of revolutionary government.
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