The February revolution was popular and spontaneous. No one planned it and no one led it. It began as a popular and categorical protest against the oppression and the brutality of the authorities to become an all-out confrontation.

According to official reports, the Libyan state has not organised any legal tenders since 2008- Mokhtar Ishan Aziz

The revolution spread to different regions of Libya simultaneously without human interference

Libya, a country laying on a lake of oil, situated on the beach opposite to the rich industrialised Europe, could not be missed by the eyes of international players.

As events accelerated, the West saw it inevitable to work diligently in order to contain the revolution and tighten control on its reins.

Therefore, the bet was made on people who do not enjoy homogenous compatibility, and among them were the elite of the old promoters of Saif Gaddafi’s project who declared their innocence and washed their hands from the relationship with the illegal crown prince after his father deprived him from his dream to accede to the throne.

Some of this elite group tried to use the tribal entrance although tribal issues are mainly linked to social and political symptoms and pastoral economy. These dated back to the nineteenth century, where an individual used to entrench himself in his tribe to protect the borders of the pasture lands that belonged to the tribe.

There was a match or an association between the tribe and its belonging to a specific region, or by shifting economic activity towards the agricultural, commercial and non-pastoral activity with its unstable and mobile nature, changed the status of the majority of the population since the beginning of the 20th century, and made the tribal affiliation match the correlation with the region it belonged to.

This is an indication why the city of Tripoli, which had a population of 20,000 in the nineteenth century, grew to two million inhabitants in the 21st century.

The challenge was that the dictator had earlier tried to break the harmony of the social fabric of the cities by stirring the tribal ties. Now came some of those who used a parachute to drop in to try to tame the revolution, using this portal to gain a foothold in contemporary Libyan revolution.

The second issue consists of the link between some of those so-called elite and the period that saw the biggest corruption in Libya’s contemporary history, the period when Saif Gaddafi took over to dominate the resources of the state and its resolutions.

According to official reports, the Libyan state has not organised any legal tenders since 2008, noting that biggest projects have been contracted during the years 2009 and 2010, under the guidance and supervision of Saif Gaddafi and his ilk, and that most of these contracts reflect visible cases of corruption.

Today’s Libyan reality calls for an honest management not linked to corruption, to examine those contracts and fight corruption and restore their balance, especially since the total value of these contracts exceeds billions.

The third issue is that the so-called elite of ‘the tyrant who lost his throne’ started by opening fire on the intermediate moderate currents who participated in the revolution and were part of the actual combat, accusing them of Islamic extremism, and so on; slogans that appeal to certain Western circles, repeating the same allegations used by Gaddafi before losing his throne. These end up producing a spiral of divisions and remoteness, which other Arab societies before Libya had suffered from.

In this congested artificial atmosphere, the zonal local councils had their say; and announced through statements their rejection of all attempts to steal the revolution and monopolise its decisions, banning attempts to exclude and confiscate the right of the people to participate in their homeland, revolution, sacrifice, authority and resolution.

They demanded that tyranny would become the revolution’s main contradiction and its first enemy, and that all the spectra of people must struggle to fight it, so no one would inherit the tyranny of Gaddafi, which disappeared with no regrets.

Mr Aziz is the chairman of the Arab- European Forum/Malta.