Muslim Brotherhood

A new law that excludes former officials of the Moammar Gadhafi era from public office is dividing Libya and deepening the turmoil plaguing the country since the 2011 civil war that ousted the erratic leader.Passed by parliament Sunday essentially at gunpoint — heavily armed militias were parked outside government buildings and refused to leave until it was approved — the law bans from politics not only those who held office but clerics who glorified the dictator and researchers who worked on his notorious ideological tract, the Green Book.The measure is one more symbol of the divided society that has emerged after Gadhafi in the oil-rich North African nation, stalling its troubled transition to democracy.The collapse of central state authority and the already weakened military under Gadhafi has left successive governments without strong and decisive law enforcement bodies and forced them to lean on militias, formed initially from rebel forces that fought Gadhafi, to fill the security ...

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