Opportunity and destiny in Rashid Street

On a recent trip to Libya, I cast around in my mind for a metaphor, an image, which could capture the social swirl around me. I found my image in Rashid Street.

Rashid Street is the high street of the popular quarters of Tripoli. A short walk from the sophisticated commercial centre, it leads to the sea. On its side is the medina, the old city, and towering over it is the glamorous new Corinthia hotel.

Rashid Street is a street of double parking, of shop stalls encroached on the road itself and a great bus and taxi area at its end. Sudanese women squat on the ground selling perfumes and powdered body paint; in a food arcade Moroccan women sell ftira and do not miss an opportunity to tell a foreigner, in rapid French, that they are looking for a job; Algerian men hawk imitation watches, flashing key chains and cheap shoes. An international monti.

The regular shops represent a variety of goods: kitchen ware, shoes, radio cassettes, clothes. An Italian outfit bought in First September Street might cost the best part of a month's salary for a graduate starting employment with the government. The clothes in Rashid, from China and Turkey, cost a third of those in First September.

Many of the traders venturing to China and Turkey are those Libyan youths who, during the UN sanctions, used to come to Malta to buy their goods. Then, the restrictions on free trade, the ensuing high inflation, together with the cheap sea-trip (now no longer running), offered an opportunity of a good profit for small-time middlemen and petty traders - a box of Pringles bought in Malta could be sold in Tripoli for twice the price.

Not any more. The Malta route - a feasible economic survival strategy that was accessible to many ordinary Libyans - is much less profitable than it used to be. The lifting of sanctions has had - unintentionally but not untypically - a negative initial impact on those less well off. Inflation is down; trade requires less petty middlemen; the Libyan dinar has been officially revaluated. Personal economic strategies now require a greater outlay - as those youths who now go to Turkey and China know too well.

So Rashid Street helps explain the paradox of post-sanctions Libya: prices are down - sometimes a third or less of what they used to be - but ordinary people are finding it more difficult to cope economically. Rashid Street points to one reason: the normalisation of trade has restricted petty but highly significant opportunities to make money.

Rashid Street is also a metaphor of a more visible inequality in the country. I was initially surprised to see the new Corinthia hotel so close to it - its boundary wall bordered the street itself. On trying to enter the hotel, however, I found that the entrance was elusive - in fact, I would have needed a taxi to reach it. The people in Rashid can see the best hotel of the capital but not its entrance.

Of course, inequality is not new: the Revolution was motivated by the social inequality that the young Muammar al-Qaddafi had been a victim of; and it had never been completely eliminated. However, throughout the 1980s, the revolution had pressed an egalitarian ethos, with low official wage differentials, price controls, and little scope being offered for public ostentation. No private health care or education was available in Libya, for example.

The sanctions changed all that, as Tim Niblock, a shrewd observer of Libya, has argued. To let the population obtain the goods it needed, the state permitted the development of a parallel economy and this has led to the development of a new commercial elite.

Some international reports suggest that Libya's new elite is a very restricted group. I doubt it. First September street includes some 115 clothes shops (at least 150 if you count those in the immediate side-streets), 12 jewellery shops and three perfumeries. The parallel Migharyef Street has some 16 clothes shops, five perfumeries and seven shops selling watches. These shops do not as yet have a busy trade but they cannot survive on a tiny elite.

Moreover, there is a range of new services available - not only but not least the internet cafès. Scout them out and you will see even young boys spending pocket money there - some six Malta cents for a 15-minute spree.

What we are seeing, rather, is a classical polarisation of social status. It is leading to a significant change in the labour market: some Libyans are now taking up jobs - say, serving in cafès - that 12 years ago they would have scorned and left to other Arabs. Now people are talking about the need to impose visa restrictions on all foreigners, including other Arabs - the sort who have found a kind of refuge in Rashid Street.

The normalisation of international relations with Libya has enabled the Libyan universe to expand. Two weeks ago this column spoke of Tripoli as a city sensing, dreaming of, a significant corner about to be turned. That dream was related to me by various people - in the guise of an interpretation of news, as an optimistic career plan, as a hope.

However, expanding social universes bring about unequal outcomes as well as great opportunities. Malta, soon with a voice at the EU table and an obligation to offer development aid, should devise a programme of knowledge-aid that will help Libya address some of those unequal outcomes and make them more manageable.