Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Few Libyans are inclined to test what civil liberties they may have. Giumma Attiga, a human-rights lawyer and one of the founders of Saif’s Qaddafi Foundation, said, “The fear is very intense, very deeply ingrained. The highest official could tell people to speak freely and openly, with every guarantee that it was safe to do so, and the words would stick in their throats.” In fact, it is a felony entailing a three-year prison sentence to discuss national policy with a foreigner, and although such offenses have been less frequently prosecuted recently, most Libyans speak of these matters anxiously. The atmosphere is late Soviet: forbidding, secretive, careful, albeit not generally lethal. I was asked not to mention names on the phone or in e-mail. Several people asked me not to write down their phone numbers, lest my notebook be “lost.” “I am speaking from my heart,” an outspoken woman told me. “Carry it in your head.”

  Surveillance is pervasive in Libya. I was warned that the cabdriver who had been helping me get around was reporting to the security services, and I understood that my cell-phone conversations were not to be considered private. All the same, I was surprised when a press officer questioned me about shades of meaning in a personal e-mail I had written home a few days earlier. Someone from Saif’s office called me indignantly one day and said, “You were heard in the hotel unfairly saying that you were unhappy with the help we’ve given you.”

  One night, I had dinner with a bureaucrat who complained about local politics. He told me that he had been questioned at length after a recent conversation with a foreigner. “Our interrogators were trained in brutality, cruelty, and sneakiness by the best—people from Cuba, East Germany, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt,” he explained.

  When we had finished our meal, the waiter cleared all our dishes, then came back and redeposited the sugar bowl.

  “What’s with the sugar?” I asked the bureaucrat.

  He gave me a bleakly mischievous look. “The other one ran out of tape.”

  * * *

  For the most part, when Libyans talk of democratization they envision not elections but more personal privacy, greater educational opportunities, and expanded freedom of speech. “Democracy here is a word that means the Leadership considers, discusses, and sometimes accepts other people’s ideas,” said Zlitni, the chief economic planner. Qaddafi views electoral democracy as the tyranny of 51 percent—he has memorably written that citizens of Western-style democracies “move silently toward the ballot box, like the beads in a rosary, to cast their votes in the same way that they throw rubbish in dustbins”—and recently announced, not for the first time, that Western democracy was “farcical” and “fake.” He declared, “There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet. Countries like the United States, India, China, the Russian Federation, are in bad need of this Jamahiriya system.”

  For most Libyan pragmatists, political reform is about changing the mechanisms of Qaddafi’s control, not about relaxing it. One government minister told me, “In most European countries, there are many parties, and in the US only two. So here it is only one! It’s not such a big difference.” Even reformers seldom express much enthusiasm for electoral democracy. Most aspire to a sort of modernizing autocracy: their ideal is closer to Atatürk or the Shah of Iran than to Václav Havel. “There are no democracies in the Arab world,” said Ahmed Swehli, a young businessman who had recently moved back to Libya from England, where he was educated. “We aren’t going to go first. What we need is a really good dictator, and I think Saif al-Islam might be just that. And maybe he’ll be that and be elected, too, though I can’t think why he’d bother.” Others are less cynical about electoral democracy as an ideal, but no more hopeful about its implementation.

  One reason that many Libyans are leery of elections is their fear that, in a highly tribal society, the larger tribes would win control and everyone else would be squeezed out. Less intimate and specific than families, tribes are a second layer of identity, stronger for some people than for others. Especially among the less well educated, groups based on kinship and descent—tribes and their various subsets (subtribes, clans)—provide both a social network and a safety net: members of your group will get you a job or help you if you have money problems or mourn you when you die even if they didn’t like you much while you were alive. “Better Qaddafi, a tough leader from a minor tribe, than one who represents his own tribe a hundred percent,” one Libyan intellectual said.

  Meanwhile, the Basic People’s Congresses provide at least a theater of political participation. They are open to any Libyan over eighteen and meet for a week or two, four times a year. In principle, you can discuss anything at a Congress, though an agenda is set from above. When in session, the 468 Basic People’s Congresses meet daily. Afterward, a brief report is sent from each Congress to a Central Committee. (Libya is committee heaven—there is even a National Committee for Committees.) A typical Congress includes about three hundred members. Most educated people who are not trying to climb the political ladder do not go. The format is town hall with touches of Quaker meeting and Alcoholics Anonymous.

  The Basic People’s Congresses were in session while I was in Libya, and I repeatedly asked, in vain, to visit one. Then, by chance, I mentioned my interest during an interview with the director of the National Supply Corporation (NASCO), which administers the subsidies that are a mainstay of the Libyan economy; he said a meeting would be held at its offices at noon and invited me to attend.

  I had hoped to sit quietly in a corner; instead, I was escorted to the front row, and someone scurried in to serve me tea. A voluble woman made an impassioned speech asking why Libya imported tomato paste when there was enough water to grow tomatoes. A discussion of tomatoes ensued. The officials introduced issues of economic reform. My interest was more in the session’s dynamic than in its content, so I was paying scant attention when my translator shifted from phrases such as “openly traded equities” and “reallocation of subsidy funds” to something about how “we are lucky to host a prominent American journalist”—and just as I was registering this new topic, he said, “who will now address the Congress on the future of the US-Libya relationship,” and I was handed a microphone.

  While each of my sentences was being translated into Arabic, I had a fortunate pause in which to think of the next, so I gave a warm and heartfelt speech, saying that I hoped we would soon see full diplomatic relations between our countries, that I had loved meeting the Libyans and hoped they would feel similarly welcome in the United States, and so on. I received a protracted ovation, and thereafter every speaker prefaced his remarks with kind words about me. I was just settling into the comfortable glow of new celebrity when my translator said, “We have to go now,” and took me outside, where three journalists from Al Shams wanted to interview me. We wandered through fairly predictable territory, and then they asked my opinion of Qaddafi’s efforts to broker peace in Darfur. (Qaddafi has publicly met both with rebel leaders and with the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir.) I said that anyone working on that situation deserved support. I also said that Qaddafi’s opposition to terrorism would appeal to Americans.

  The following day, Al Shams ran a nearly full-page story with three large photographs of me at the congress, under a double-banner headline that said, “The World Needs a Man Like Muammar Qaddafi to Achieve Global Peace,” and, below, “The American People Appreciate Muammar Qaddafi’s Role in Easing the Pain Inflicted by September 11th.” The morning that the piece was published, I received my long-awaited invitation to the Qaddafi compound.

  * * *

  A minder from the International Press Office called to tell me that I was in for “a surprise” and that he would pick me up at my hotel at 4:00 p.m. At the International Press Office, near Green Square, I joined some twenty other “international” journalists, all from Arab countries, and talked about why Qaddafi might want to see us. I was solemnly told that one never knows what the Leader wants: “One comes when asked.” Finally, at about six forty-five, a mini
bus appeared. We drove twenty minutes and then stopped by a vast concrete wall, at the perimeter of Qaddafi’s compound. The car was searched and we were searched, and then we drove through a slalom course of obstacles and another security gauntlet before being ushered into an immense tent with a lavish buffet. Within the next half hour, four hundred or so people piled in, many in traditional robes.

  One of my new journalist friends said that “the event” was about to start, so we went over a knoll and into a polygonal structure with exposed rafters, which bore some resemblance to a rec hall at a summer camp. Hanging on the walls were sayings of the Leader’s in huge Arabic and English type (“The United States of Africa Is Africa’s Future” and “One African Identity”), flanked by poster-size photographs of Rosa Parks. It was the fiftieth anniversary of her refusal to move to the back of the bus, and that, we finally understood, was the occasion for the gathering. At the front of the room, on a dais, stood a gigantic Naugahyde armchair with three microphones beside it. A man in medical scrubs came out and swabbed down the chair and the microphones with gauze pads, to protect the Leader from infection.

  Some African-Americans were seated in the row in front of us. I introduced myself to one, and he dourly explained that he was Minister Abdul Akbar Muhammad, the international representative of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who had been in Tripoli earlier but had returned abruptly to the United States for health reasons. Qaddafi has long been one of the Nation of Islam’s funders.

  Then the speeches began. The speakers stood at a lectern off to the side, keeping the dais free for Qaddafi. The first was a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. “We Libyans cannot accept the prejudice of Americans against Africans,” he began, to applause. “Those who were seven or eight when Rosa Parks was being shoved to the back of the bus are now fifty-seven or fifty-eight and are leaders of the United States. They still carry this mentality. The new generation inherited this, and it is still going on.” He worked himself up into rhetorical paroxysms, as though Jim Crow laws were still in effect. “We must fight the hatred of America for Africa.”

  When he stepped down, Abdul Akbar Muhammad took the lectern to speak about American racial injustice, mentioning that, under segregation, blacks and whites had had to use separate hammams, or public steam baths (a detail previously lost on me). “We cannot count on the Zionist-controlled American media to tell our story,” he said. “Zionists in the US won’t show how the leader of the Al-Fateh revolution is in sympathy with us and us with him.”

  The Leader never emerged, apparently having decided that, if Farrakhan wasn’t making an appearance, he wouldn’t, either. Still, the event reflected his fixation on establishing Libya as more an African than an Arab country (even though most Libyans are contemptuous of black people, who do the manual labor that Libyans disdain and are blamed for all crime). Qaddafi’s early dream of pan-Arab unity fizzled, and when other Arab nations observed the UN sanctions against Libya in the nineties, while many African countries did not, he turned southward. By African standards, Libya seems wealthy and functional; Arab nations, even North African neighbors, have little affection for Qaddafi. He has backed groups opposed to the Saudi regime, and Libyan agents were implicated in a 2003 plot to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (Saif suggested to me that the Libyans were hoping, in his coy phrase, for “regime change” but didn’t necessarily know that their Saudi partners intended physical attacks on the royal family.)

  Qaddafi always sleeps in a tent, true to his bedouin roots. When he went to Algeria recently, a local cartoon showed a tent pitched at the Algiers Sheraton. One man is saying, “Let me in, I want to go to the circus!” The other says, “There’s no circus here.” The first rejoins, “But I was told that there’s a clown in that tent!”

  * * *

  For modernizing reformers such as Shukri Ghanem, Libya’s major problems are poor management and isolation, and the solutions are better management and global integration. “The world has changed,” as Ghanem put it, “and, like other socialist states, we recognized that we had limited means and unlimited needs.” The Internet and satellite television—the dishes are so ubiquitous that landing in Tripoli is like descending on a migrant storm of white moths—have brought further pressure for reform by making that larger world visible. “The change has been inevitable since Oprah came on our televisions,” a leading Libyan poet said to me ruefully. What Libyans mainly relate to, though, is the standard of living in other oil-rich states, as displayed on Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern channels. Libya seems dusty and poor in comparison, and they wonder why.

  Earnings from oil exports account for about 80 percent of the national budget. In the heyday of Libyan oil production, the country produced 3 million barrels a day. That number has dropped to 1.7 million, but the National Oil Company plans to get it back up to 3 million by 2010. Libyan oil is of high quality, low in sulfur, and easily refined. Libya has proven reserves of about 40 billion barrels of oil, the largest in Africa, and may have as much as 100 billion. Several major oil companies have ranked Libya as the best exploration opportunity in the world. The Libyans have lacked the resources to conduct extensive explorations themselves. In the fifteen years since foreign companies left, Libya’s extractive resources have been seriously mismanaged. “If Dr. No were trying to muck up the Libyan oil economy,” a British adviser to the Libyan government said, “there is nothing he could think of that hasn’t been done.”

  Still, oil money continues to make possible Libya’s subsidy programs—the socialism in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya concept. NASCO pays twenty-six dinars for a 110-pound bag of flour and sells it to bakers for two dinars; you can buy a loaf of bread for two cents. Rice, sugar, tea, pasta, and gasoline are also sold for a fraction of their cost. Economic reform will involve scaling back these subsidies (which currently amount to about $600 million a year) without impoverishing or starving people—which is all the more difficult given that wages have been frozen since 1982. Meanwhile, little credit is available in Libya: no Libyan-issued credit cards can be used internationally; no financial institution meets international banking standards.

  “The oil absorbs all the mistakes, of which there have been many,” one Libyan official told me. “The oil money means that there is stability, and it makes the country easy to run. It’s this little country with all this oil—it’s like if you decided you wanted to open a 7-Eleven and you had a billion dollars to back it.” The oil is a curse as well as a blessing. The SPLAJ system has produced a population unhampered by a work ethic. Libyans work five mornings a week, and that’s it—assuming that they have jobs. “If they were willing to take jobs in, say, construction, there would be jobs for them,” Zlitni said sternly. “But we’re a rich country, so the youngsters don’t want to work hard.” Economies based on resources such as oil generate few jobs unless they diversify. Many university students I spoke to were convinced that, for all the talk of reform, their talents would remain unexploited. “When I finish my MBA, chances are that I won’t be able to get a job,” one complained to me. “The whole country runs on oil, not on employment. The wealth doesn’t come out of anything you can get by working hard, which I am prepared to do, but what’s the point?”

  “If we hadn’t had oil, we would have developed,” the minister of finance, Abdulgader Elkhair, told me. “Frankly, I’d rather we had water.”

  For him, and for aspirants to Libya’s emerging private sector, the main outrages are the sclerotic ministerial bureaucracy and its endemic corruption. The nonprofit organization Transparency International gives Libya a Corruption Perceptions Index of 2.5, ranking it lower than Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. The Heritage Foundation’s 2006 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Libya 152nd out of 157 countries evaluated. “You need twenty documents to set up a company,” Elkhair told me, “and even if you bribe all the right people, it will take six months.”

  One day, I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic with a Libyan human-ri
ghts activist who gestured in despair at the roadwork and said, “They dig it up and close it and dig it up again, for enormous sums of money every time and with no other purpose. This corruption makes me late for my meetings. Necessary things are not done here, and unnecessary things are done over and over.” I met the previous head of the National Cancer Institute, described to me by other doctors as the best oncological surgeon in the country, who had been removed from his job to make way for a friend of the Leader’s. The displaced doctor is now working at a small clinic without essential equipment. The administrator who served under him sells fish at a roadside stand nearby.

  “Qaddafi is very happy to have corrupt people working for him,” a Qaddafi insider said to me. “He’d much rather have people who want money than people who want power, and so he looks the other way and no one threatens his total control of the country.” (Tribal loyalties, which intersect with simple cronyism, also play a role here: Qaddafi has filled many high-level military and security posts with members of his bedouin tribe, the Qathathfa, along with members of a large tribe to which the Qathathfa have long been allied, the Warfalla.) A Tripoli lawyer added, “Corruption is a problem, and sometimes a solution.”

  I attended the opening of a United Arab Emirates trade fair in Tripoli, which was held in a tent and was full of international goods presented with a smile. You could get samples of everything from medication to cookware and industrial equipment, and a select crowd of Libyans passed through with shopping bags. Many business cards were exchanged. “Look, this country is so rich you can’t believe it,” Ahmed Swehli, the English-educated businessman, told me, glancing around. “Right now, it’s like we’re the kids of the richest man in the world, and we’re in rags. The corruption, the bloat, is impoverishing.”