The images of Muammar Gaddafi’s final day were ugly; captured alive, his stringy hair caked in blood, he is manhandled briefly by his captors, and then gunshots ring out.

The next pictures we see of the fallen tyrant show a bullet hole in his head; he is definitively dead. But for those who wanted to see for themselves, his body was washed, his hair neatly trimmed and he was laid out for four days in a meat locker in Misrata, one of the many towns in Libya to claim a special dislike for him.

Why did so many families line up to see the decomposing body? Certainly, Libyans have been inured to violence.

The cruel violence of the Italian occupation, during which half the population died or fled the territory, provided a backdrop to Gaddafi’s own pitiless vengeance against those who did not subscribe to his revolution starting in the 1970s, when his regime began to hang opposition figures in university gymnasiums, in spectacles televised for all to see, and hunt down “stray dogs” overseas.

This end was predictable and in it are both troubling signs for the future and reasons for hope. As many in the international community — and even some in the new Libyan political circles — acknowledge, building the rule of law should start with law-abiding treatment of the old regime.

There should be no impunity, but neither should there be summary justice. In rebuilding their society, it will be exceptionally difficult for Libyans to distinguish the very guilty from the only mildly guilty, to condemn the first and forgive the second; succumbing to the temptation to revenge merely prolongs the cycles of retribution.

All need to be reminded that no one is above, or beneath, the law. Yet perhaps mercy should start here: for many Libyans, Gaddafi really was different. He had grown larger than life in Libya, a demon-like figure, terrifying even to his followers. It was inevitable that someone would need to drive a stake through his heart, as though vanquishing a vampire, and that everyone would be called to witness it.

The deed is now done, and with any luck the country will move on to a place where magnanimity prevails, where there is pride in law, and honour in mercy. Although it does not sit well with the norms of justice and human rights to which we all hope Libya will subscribe, in fact, this recuperation and recovery will be infinitely easier with Gaddafi and his unnerving reign of terror definitively dispatched.

Libya’s collective memory of devastation needs to be recognised without fortifying the thousands of individual grievances and sorrows. Years of artificially induced scarcity produced widespread corruption, decades of capricious cruelty led to generalised and deep-seated suspicion.

In the absence of any public sector bureaucracy, family ties had provided access to goods and services, and it was along tribal lines that the society fractured when the regime’s capacity to divide and rule began to unravel.

Armed force had been distributed across a deliberately confusing and uncoordinated array of police, army, revolutionary guards and other special services.

There are a lot of scores to settle in Libya, plenty of weapons, and much temptation to exact revenge.

And for these reasons and others, the restoration of order, the reestablishment of daily commerce, the rebuilding of ordinary public life, the resumption of the quotidian rhythms most communities enjoy unconsciously, is the project for the post-Gaddafi era.

Libya’s first challenge will be the restoration of security and the introduction of law and order, which had been missing in Libya for decades.

From there the revival of trust across clan and provincial cleavages, the reconstruction of a public administration, the building of organisations — parties, media outlets, NGOs — for civic and civil public debate will be the challenge, and it will not be simple nor at the outset, necessarily, democratic in any formal sense.

The years of isolation during international sanctions has meant that the generation now in its 30s and 40s is not particularly knowledgeable about these practices and they are as yet poorly equipped to assume the responsibility that awaits them in a new regime.

At another moment, one might have hoped that Libya would find support for its reconstruction from its neighbours, but Tunisia and Egypt have their own urgent preoccupations, including the waves of returned, newly unemployed Tunisian and Egyptian workers and Libyan refugees.

It is still to be hoped, however, that Libya will receive the technical assistance it will need from donors who are familiar with the social structure that has sustained its people, who are aware of the challenges of building high-quality education, healthcare and cultural institutions almost from nothing, who have experience with the charlatans and swindlers who descend upon oil-producing governments like vultures.

There are not many such donors, and none of them are perfect. But if Qatar sustains the support it provided to the Libyan resistance during the war, using its hard-earned experience of the coordinating technical assistance, vetting offers of help, drafting requests for proposals, assessing contracts and otherwise offering the sort of experience few people have and money cannot buy, it will have come into its own as a full and constructive member of the international community.

The writer is President of The American University in Cairo and an expert on Libya