up of violence and protests in the past five days lies a quandary. How do you share out power in the new Libya when the jumble of tribes, militias and interest groups do not trust each other and, even worse, when the people supposed to be acting as neutral referees are widely mistrusted? It would be a tough problem to solve for any country. For Libya, with a lack of institutions that its people view as legitimate, it seems - for now at least - to be insurmountable. And so people are tempted to resort to violence in defense of their interests, especially when militia men with anti-aircraft guns and beyond the control of government are already roaming the streets. Libya's interior minister, Fawzi Abdel A'al, acknowledged the pressure for a more accountable government. “In many places protesters say ‘We do not need the Gaddafi way of appointing officials. We need elections',” he said on Tuesday. An election should relieve the pressure by giving Libya a governing body with legitimacy and a popular mandate. But the process of holding an election is itself a minefield. Whichever voting system is chosen stands a good chance of angering one or several of Libya's competing interest groups. A one-man, one-vote system would favor the Warfallah tribe and squeeze out the groups which made the biggest contribution to the revolution, especially the cities of Benghazi, Misrata and Zintan. Handing equal representation to each of Libya's administrative areas would give influence to sparsely populated patches of desert and leave urban centers under-represented. Libya does not have any precedent to fall back on because Gaddafi, in power for 42 years, banned elections. He argued that they were “dictatorship ... garbed in the guise of democracy”. However, Gaddafi may have realized that holding an election in Libya was fraught with too many problems. __
