Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  If things in Tripoli were bad, they were even worse in Benghazi. The Leader, who was always suspicious of the east (not least because it was where the country's monarchy had sprung from), developed a particular antipathy towards the eastern regions, after they were the centre of an Islamist uprising in the mid-1990s. Benghazi was made to pay for its rebellious streak, and the city was put under siege. What followed was years of neglect, leading the city's inhabitants to feel as though they were being treated as second-class citizens. Prior to the 2011 uprisings, Benghazi already resembled a kind of post-conflict zone. Buildings in the desolate city centre were simply left to crumble, and some of its streets were littered with rubbish and piles of rubble. The main lake, where families went to picnic, had untreated human waste pumped straight into it, so that the surrounding air was heavy with the stench of sewage. The housing shortage was so acute that, in some of the poorest districts, entire extended families were crammed into falling-down apartment blocks, the countless satellite dishes on the roofs the only testimony to any connection with the outside world. It is hardly surprising that a surly resentment and suspicion could be read on the faces of some of Benghazi's inhabitants.

  It is easy to understand, therefore, why the 2011 revolution began in the east. The region had long been restless, and the Arab Spring was simply the spark that ignited the fire. Yet even so, Libya's revolution still came as a surprise. Even the most seasoned of Libya-watchers were stunned that the Libyans were finally able to shake off the fear and to rise up en masse. But this sense of shock was in part testimony to the fact that Qaddafi and his repressive security apparatus had always seemed so all-encompassing. It was somehow inconceivable that the multi-layered security apparatus that Qaddafi had employed so effectively against the country's six million people for so many years would not be able to force the Libyans back into submission. In fact, this judgement was not too far off the mark. Had NATO not entered the conflict when it did, it is likely that the rebel forces would not have been able to dislodge Qaddafi from the west of the country and would not have prevented him from re-taking the east.

  Yet this shock was also related to the fact that the Colonel had succeeded in creating such a cult of personality around himself, and had survived so many previous challenges, that he had taken on a quasi-immortal aspect. For many, Libya without Qaddafi was almost unthinkable. Thus Libya's revolution was all the more remarkable and brought an end not only to a regime, but to a dictator who presided over what was surely one of the strangest experiments in political history.

  This book is an attempt to chart the rise and fall of Muammar Qaddafi and his regime. It traces the origins of the young idealist and his 1969 revolution and follows the Colonel through the early years of his rule, when he was at his most experimental. It looks at the 1980s, when Qaddafi carved out his reputation as an international pariah, and then chronicles the crises of the 1990s, when his revolutionary ardour came back to haunt him in the spectre of international sanctions, an Islamist rebellion and an increasingly restless population that had become utterly disengaged from his radical ideals. The book also tells how the regime pulled itself out of these crises and succeeded in securing its rehabilitation within the international community in 2003. It shows, too, how the opportunities provided by this rehabilitation were squandered in the period that led up to the 2011 uprisings, not least by members of Qaddafi's own family. And finally, it recounts the story of the 2011 revolution and looks at the challenges facing Libya's new leaders as they try to rebuild the country.

  Drawing on my years of research on Libya, my visits to the country, the interviews I have carried out with Libyans from all walks of life and the conversations I have had with Libyan friends over countless cups of coffee, this book is an attempt to tell the story of a man and of a country. It is a bid to explain how a simple Bedouin from the desert came from nowhere and almost single-handedly put an entire nation at his service. It examines the tools he used to transform the country into the outward expression of his youthful ideals, and it explores how he ceaselessly adapted his revolution to ensure that everything stayed the same. It also explains why the events of 2011 unfolded in the way they did, showing how the brutality of the final struggle was a direct result of the extremity of four decades of Qaddafism. It explains, too, why Qaddafi's legacy will cast long shadows over Libya for many decades to come.

  CHAPTER 1

  Land of the Conquered

  Writing in 1934, Italian colonial civil servant Angelo Piccioli described his first sighting of Tripoli as he approached by steam boat across the Mediterranean:

  Today as we came to this white town crowned with palms and girdled with serenity, as we gazed at Tripoli rising from the sea among the light mists of morning, our hearts were filled with a strange joy, confident and thoughtful … Bright, solemn and silent stood the ancient uncouth city; time here seems to have stopped, and the city keeps intact its Islamic, medieval soul. It looked as though it were suspended in an airy domain of its own, like a block of carved marble between the twin brilliance and immensity of sky and sea.1

  Anyone making the same approach to Libya's capital city today would be greeted by a rather different sight. Modern-day Tripoli boasts a large and bustling industrial port, a perilously busy motorway that runs along the seafront, and a somewhat unprepossessing strip of reclaimed land that separates the city from the sea. Indeed, the view of the old city, rising up from the water, is marred by these testimonies to the progress of the Libyan revolution of 1969. Moreover, Tripoli has sprawled out far beyond its old city, and even beyond the colonnaded, tree-lined streets of its Italian-built centre. Tripoli's suburbs, some comprising street after street of well-to-do villas and others packed with concrete high-rise government housing projects, now extend so far that they are beginning to merge with other towns along the coast. The city centre also now boasts a hotchpotch of gleaming new office blocks and towering five-star hotels.

  Yet beyond this evidence of the modern Libyan state, Tripoli's old city retains some of the characteristics Piccioli describes. Under the intense Mediterranean sun, its white buildings and minarets still rise up in sharp contrast to the piercing blue of the sea and the sky. There is an eerie quietness about the old town, or medina, at certain times of the day, when the burning heat forces its residents inside. Time really does seem to be standing still, particularly in the sand-covered alleyways and unspoilt souqs (enclosed markets) where men still beat copper by hand and where gold is still weighed out on old-fashioned scales.

  Yet the medina, with its faded charm, has not escaped all the trappings of the modern world. Young men, with their rap music and smart training shoes, hunch up against the walls, staving off the boredom of having nothing to do. There is also the modern, Italian-style café, serving lattes and cappuccinos on its smart terrace, as well as a handful of touristic restaurants and hotels – reminders of the Qaddafi regime's last few concessions to the Western world. Prior to the 2011 revolution, some quarters of the old city were inhabited almost entirely by African immigrants, unable to afford the rents elsewhere in the capital. It was the sound of West African beats, rather than Arabic pop music, that belted out of barber-shop doorways along the narrowest alleyways and the most run-down parts of the old city. Most of these immigrants, along with those from other parts of the Arab world, fled as soon as the 2011 conflict broke out, leaving Tripoli and its inhabitants to their fate.

  Yet Libya is about more than Tripoli. It is a vast land covering 1.7 million square kilometres, most of which is desert. There are no rivers and it rains rarely and sporadically, making much of the land unsuitable for cultivation. Prior to the discovery of oil in the 1950s, pastoralists and nomads in much of the country eked out a living as best they could from the unyielding dry land. Before the country struck ‘black gold’, it was one of the poorest nations in the world. Because of the harsh landscape, Libya's main population centres are located on the coast, in two main clusters on the west and the east of the country. Bu
t these centres are separated by huge expanses of empty desert. There is no railway connecting the cities of the west and the cities of the east, and not even a motorway joins these two main population centres; unless time is no object, the only way to travel between the two is by air.

  This lack of connectivity between the two centres reflects one of the defining characteristics that have shaped the country. Libya has always been a land of three distinct parts, each with its own particular identity. There is Tripolitania in the west, which includes Tripoli and other towns such as Al-Zawia, Misarata and Tajoura; Cyrenaica in the east, which comprises the regional capital of Benghazi, as well as smaller towns such as Derna, Al-Baida and Tobruq; and the largely desert area of the Fezzan in the south, whose main town is Sebha.

  That these three regions continue to have their own sense of identity is hardly surprising. Libya only came together as a country in the 1950s, at the time of independence from colonial rule. Even that coming together was an accident of history. Libya was a child born of the machinations of the victorious Allied powers, as they readjusted to the new realities of the post-Second World War world. Yet even after the country united under a single flag, it still struggled to overcome regional differences. While these divisions have lessened in recent decades, largely as a result of rapid urbanization and the modernization that accompanied it, they have not disappeared altogether. Libya's history has, then, always been a story of regions.

  The east, known for its tightly preserved tribal structures, has always had its face half turned towards Egypt, in part because many eastern Libyan tribes extend across the border into the deserts of its neighbour. Despite Benghazi's being a port, the city – and the east more generally – has remained somehow closed off from the outside world, and its inhabitants have a reputation for being more traditional and socially conservative than their western counterparts. This may be something of a fallacy, as urbanization touched the east as much as it did the west. However, the remnants of tribalism, and the traditions that go with it, are still more deeply ingrained in the east. Tripolitania, meanwhile, has its face turned firmly towards the Mediterranean, and its encounters with the various peoples that have come from there, either as conquerors or as traders, seem to have left a legacy of a more open people. Tripolitanians or Tarabulseen, as they are known in Arabic, are proud of what they consider to be their more worldly take on life; the city is certainly more cosmopolitan than its eastern counterpart, which sometimes feels as though it is a place that time forgot.

  The Fezzan, on the other hand, is Libya's overlooked region. It is so sparsely populated and so far from the main cities of the coast that it somehow never generates the same interest as its northern counterparts. Yet Fezzan is the Libya of the desert, of caravans and of the Tuareg and the Toubu – nomadic peoples whose tribes straddle the borders with Mali and Niger, and with Chad, respectively.

  Yet in spite of themselves, these three regions came together to form the history of what we know today as Libya, a term first used by the Ancient Greeks to denote all of North Africa west of Egypt. It is, first and foremost, a history of invasion: a story of successive civilizations forcing themselves on this arid, empty land of Berbers – the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa. Invasion has been such a feature of Libya's experience that in one of his memoirs Qaddafi recounts how, when he was growing up, men feared the sea, refusing to settle near it, because of the conquerors it might bring on its waves.2

  Yet what these conquerors had in common was that they nearly all struggled to impose themselves beyond the coastal areas, failing to tame the tribal hinterlands whose tough inhabitants refused to submit to the will of successive colonial administrations. In many ways, this failure only reinforced the sense of regionalism already created by geographical boundaries. It was also accentuated by the fact that, at many points in Libya's history, one set of colonizers ruled over the west of the country, while another controlled the east.

  All of these factors meant that, when Qaddafi came to power in 1969, Libya had still not managed to develop any real sense of unity or nationhood; this left him an almost empty playing field upon which to impose his own unorthodox brand of nationhood.

  Early conquerors

  Libya is a country that wears its history on its sleeve. Not only can visitors to the country amble along colonnaded, Italian-built streets, but they can also marvel at ancient Greek temples, breathtaking Roman archaeological sites and exquisite Ottoman mosques and houses. Indeed, the country boasts some of the most magnificent archaeological remains anywhere in the Mediterranean. Many of these relics are the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, who, fleeing drought in their native Thera (Santorini), conquered eastern Libya in 630 BC. The Greeks founded Cyrene – from which the name Cyrenaica is derived – a place that became one of the most renowned intellectual and artistic centres of its day.

  For all their power, the Greeks were never able to expand down into the deserts of the Fezzan that were controlled by the famed Garamantes – a tribe of either Berber or Tuareg origin. Greek historian Herodotus describes the Garamantes in his famous Histories: ‘to the south of this region … that is teeming with wild animals, are the Garamantes, who shun all human intercourse and contact’.3 Herodotus also tells of his encounters with other Libyan nomadic tribes and of their curious practices. Many of these tribes used to cauterize the veins on the top of their children's heads with hot grease, which they extracted from sheep's wool. This was done to prevent the children from coming to harm from the ‘down flow of phlegm from the head’.4 If the children went into convulsions during this procedure, they would be cured by having goat's urine sprinkled on them. Such practices led Herodotus to describe the Libyans as ‘the healthiest people in the known world’.5

  The Greeks were followed by the Romans, whose main settlements were at Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Oea – the three towns from which Tripoli takes its name (from the Ancient Greek tri polis, literally ‘three cities’). These settlements became thriving Roman centres, which supplied wheat, barley and olive oil to Rome. Although they were unable to conquer the Garamantes in the south, in 74 BC the Romans did extend their empire from Tripolitania into Cyrenaica, uniting the two regions politically for the first time. However, this union was short-lived and the two areas separated again when the Roman Empire split in two, with Tripolitania being run from Rome and Cyrenaica coming under the control of the Byzantine Empire.

  The Romans were eventually pushed out of Libya by the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that arrived in AD 429 and that wreaked havoc on the local landscape, until it was usurped by the equally unpopular Byzantines around a hundred years later. However, like the Greeks, the Romans left behind some remarkable archaeological sites that remain astonishingly intact to this very day. Walking around the magnificent amphitheatres, bath houses and mosaics of Leptis Magna and Sabratha, set against the sparkling backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, it is easy to imagine oneself back in the bustle of a prosperous Roman centre. The Roman presence can also be felt in Tripoli, where the imposing Marcus Aurelius Arch still stands proud, and where ancient Roman columns have been built into some of the dwellings in the old medina.

  Yet while these wonders of the ancient world enthral the handful of tourists who make it to the country, many Libyans today feel little connection to them. It is as if, by their non-Islamic heritage, these testimonies to Libya's past are not really part of the country's history or soul. They are viewed as part of the European world and something that is alien to the country's identity. A former tourism minister, Ammar Mabrouk Al-Lateef, used to describe the Roman remains as ‘Christian tourism’, and one piece of graffiti carved into the amphitheatre at the stunning Sabratha site goes so far as to proclaim: ‘See what befell the idol-worshippers!’

  The Romans failed, then, to leave any really lasting impression on the native population, and it was the Arab forces, which came in two waves in the seventh and the eleventh centuries, that were to completely alter the complexion of what we now call
Libya. These forces, the first group of which crossed into Cyrenaica from Arabia in 642, were a hardy lot. Made up mainly of poor, illiterate Bedouins, they made their way westward, meeting with little resistance until they reached Tripolitania. It was here that they came up against the fierce Berber tribes of the mountains. One of the best-known Berber resisters during this period was the queen and prophetess, Dahlia, who is still lauded by the Berbers today for having fought so hard to repel the Arabs. Legend has it that the imposing Dahlia sent her tribe to destroy local towns, cut down trees and burn down woods to ensure that there were no spoils for the Arab armies to loot and no cities for them to take over. However, Dahlia ultimately proved no match for the new conquerors, who took Tripolitania and who even went on to triumph over Gerama, the Garamantes capital in the south, in 663.

  Yet it was not only physically that the Arabs succeeded where earlier invaders had failed. These new conquerors brought Islam with them – something that was to have a lasting effect on the whole of North Africa. The indigenous Berbers absorbed this new faith with surprising willingness and speed. That is not to say that there was no resistance to the invaders themselves: although the vast majority of local inhabitants readily converted to Islam, many were still resentful of the Arab newcomers and their bid to subjugate the locals. The Arabs insisted, for example, on still taking jiziya (a tax paid by non-Muslims living in an Islamic state) from those Berbers who had converted to Islam – on the grounds that their new faith was not heartfelt!