Libya: policing the middle of nowhere | Alex Warren

The ease with which the convoys left Gaddafi's Libya highlights the difficulty of controlling the country's south to the distance

Each year, only a handful of hardcore tourists or business people who may intrepid Ghat, a town that seems to be on the edge of the known world. From here you can see the Jebel Acacus mountain range that crosses the south-western Libya. A fortress of the Ottoman period occupied by the French shortly after World War II to a mass of mud houses abandoned its former residents who now occupy new bungalows in this part of Sahara one south.

Through this forgotten corner of the country in a caravan of Mercedes carrying Muammar Gaddafi wife, daughter and two son came less politically active in Algeria in late August. Last week, another armed convoy - this time carrying senior members of the Gaddafi regime - probably through Ghat road in Niger

two trips to demonstrate that remote areas of southern Libya still largely beyond the control of Tripoli, which not only complicates the search for Gaddafi, but the new government's efforts to impose its authority the across the country. While the National Transitional Council (CNT) focuses on the stabilization of the capital and crush resistance in Bani Walid and Sirte, the southern regions may become even more chaotic than they were before.

The bottom half from the border with Libya, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Algeria and Egypt. The region has a mixture of plains monotonous landscape of another world and mythical oasis captured the imagination of explorers across the Sahara for centuries.

Vacuum

is one of its defining characteristics. The governor of Kufra, border with Sudan to the southeast, officially with 0.1 people per each of its 433,611 km square of land. With few paved roads, travelers should be well worn trails 4x4, GPS, satellite phones and knowledge of local pilots to navigate between remote sites, without running out of fuel or water.

The area is also very difficult to control. Some have questioned how NATO could have failed to see the caravan of vehicles crossing the border with Niger last week. However, the battered fleet of trucks have crossed the porous borders of Libya for years, trade in human cargo along what is essentially a caravan route of the 21st century. Confidence without spotters on the ground - practice on the coast, to a lesser extent in the desert - is difficult to say whether they are friend or foe

In June, it was reported that the Sudanese army had intervened in the ground to help dislodge the forces of Gaddafi in the town of Kufra, which is closer to Khartoum, which is Tripoli. There is little love lost between the Sudanese government and Gaddafi, who is accused of aiding anti-government rebels in the troubled region of Darfur, which borders Libya.

• As the newly appointed President of Niger, Mahamadou Issouf said this week it is impossible to simply "close the border." On the one hand, most of the perimeter of the sea straddles the Niger Libya Murzuq sand, an area of ??sand dunes epic is about the size of Switzerland. In addition, Niger is one of the poorest and most unstable of the world, they do not have the considerable resources to effectively monitor the border.

informal economy dominates

most southern Libya. Incomes are lower and unemployment higher than on the coast. However, the government of Qaddafi had undertaken ambitious plans to develop tourism in a region that had become a hot spot for European adventure travelers and a collection of prehistoric rock art in the Jebel Acacus, one of five sites in the World Heritage Site of UNESCO in the country.

Libya under the construction of the railway network has been designed to operate on the south side of Sebha, and finally, Niger, providing an export route for landlocked sub-Saharan Africa . Deep aquifers in the desert, artificial feeding of the great river, vital water supplies of major cities in northern Libya.

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