Finally convinced that the plot was going ahead, Al-Meheishi rushed to the airport in order to get to Tripoli; but to his dismay, when he got there he found that there were no seats left on the plane. He only managed to get onto the flight by pulling strings with an employee he knew in the airline. After arriving at Tripoli airport at 9.30 p.m., with just hours to spare before the coup, he eventually found someone to take him to Tarhouna; but in his rush to get to his base, he left his revolver and ammunition in the car.
On the eve of the coup, Qaddafi insisted that the revolutionaries carry out their usual duties until noon – the end of the working day – and try to act as normal as possible. He recalled: ‘I didn't allow enthusiasm or fear to show.’45 However, some of his fellow revolutionaries were less able to contain their emotions. As Qaddafi described it:
[Emhamed] Magrayef46 seemed worried and from time to time he moved to try to get my attention but I deliberately ignored him. As for Abdelfatah [Younis Al-Obeidi],47 his enthusiasm was such that he looked drunk to the point of being paralysed. As for Kharroubi, the signs of faith appeared upon him and he looked like a believer who was approaching martyrdom.48
Qaddafi was later to attribute some of his calmness to his belief that the divine was on his side. On the night of 31 August, after all the preparations were in place, he and Mustafa Kharroubi lay on the same bed in his room and listened to the Voice of the Arabs radio from Cairo as they awaited the ‘zero hour’ of 2.30 a.m. The station broadcast some Qu'ranic verses that included the line: ‘Allah will not deny the faithful their reward.’49 Taking this as a sign, Qaddafi explained: ‘These verses made us secure and calm. We started repeating the last part of them over and over to ourselves, “Allah's help is all-sufficient for us. He is the best protector” and we were assured of success.’50
Needless to say, the actual operation was as peppered with mishaps as the years of preparation had been. Khweildi Al-Humaidi, another loyalist who was to remain at the very core of Qaddafi's regime, could not find the Tripoli radio station that the movement was supposed to occupy. When some other revolutionaries drove him there, a group of soldiers opened fire on them, believing that they were Israeli invaders who were trying to ‘re-enact their raid on Beirut’!51 Meanwhile, the tank commanded by Abu Bakr Younis [Jaber], which was packed full of explosives and ammunition, burst into flames because of a short circuit. As the flames licked the side of the tank, Younis only just managed to disconnect the wire in the tank in time, preventing the whole lot from exploding.
Even Qaddafi was caught up in a misadventure of his own. As the soon-to-be leader was driving his jeep at the head of a convoy on its way to take over the radio station in Benghazi, he came to a fork in the road. Qaddafi took the left turn, as planned, expecting the train of vehicles to follow him. However, in the excitement of the moment, the other drivers went hurtling off down the right fork. He later recounted:
I had stopped my jeep to await the rest of the column when I suddenly saw all the other vehicles tearing like demons towards the main road. It then dawned on me that the entire Gar Younis Barracks were streaming along in the one direction and that the drivers in their enthusiasm were following one another without worrying much about where they were supposed to be going.52
Indeed, despite the meticulous planning, some of the revolutionaries displayed a kind of recklessness. Yet for all the sense of farce, one should not underestimate the bravery of these young men, who were ready to risk their lives to bring about change. Nor should one underestimate their determination. Few would have believed that this group, which started out as little more than an idealistic gaggle of schoolboys, would ever actually achieve its dream.
As it turned out, the revolutionaries met with little real resistance; most of the regime simply melted away. The Cyrenaican Defence Force, an elite force built up by King Idris to protect the monarchy, fell with remarkable ease after its commander, Brigadier Sanussi Fezzani, was arrested at home in bed. Even the head of the Libyan army, Colonel Abdul Aziz Al-Shelhi, put up no resistance. When Al-Meheishi and Abu Bakr Younis went to his house to arrest him, the military chief dived into his swimming pool in his pyjamas, flummoxing his captors, who were unable to discover his hiding place until the next morning. The king, meanwhile, was still away on his summer break, while the crown prince simply turned all the lights in his palace out and hid on his own in the dark, causing the rebels to believe that he had deserted the building. It took two different sets of rebels to actually discover and arrest him.
Upon hearing of the coup, Idris is alleged to have dismissed it as a ‘trifling affair’ and vowed to return to take over again. The king was clearly banking on getting help from the British; he sent a special emissary to London the day after the coup to request assistance. However, he had not understood that times had changed. As one of his former prime ministers aptly noted, his greatest mistake was to believe that history moved extremely slowly.53 By this point Britain was fully engaged in the policy of Harold Wilson's government of ‘progressive withdrawal’ from its former colonies. As early as 1961, Britain had concluded that ‘it would be most impolitic for us to use British troops for the purpose of maintaining a particular Libyan regime in power, which would entail interfering in Libyan politics and possibly killing Libyans.’54
With no foreign power to defend it, the whole country fell quickly and with minimal bloodshed. Even Cyrenaica, the home of the monarchy and all that it stood for, put up almost no fight at all. Yet this reflected the fact that, by 1969, the regime had become so inert that there was a gaping political vacuum that was waiting to be filled. Moreover, although the success of the coup was largely due to the incompetence of the old regime, Qaddafi and his Free Unionist Officers had tapped into the mood of the time, as reflected by the popular demonstrations that were to erupt on the streets as news of the demise of the old regime spread. Although they were still largely unknown, these young revolutionaries, with their nationalist ideals, appeared to be the very embodiment and articulation of the desire for change that was felt by so many Libyans at this time.
Thus it was that, at 6.30 a.m. on 1 September 1969, Libyans awoke to the unfamiliar voice of Qaddafi breaking onto the airwaves. In a rousing proclamation, which he claimed to have jotted down at the very last moment, the young Qaddafi, who had first dreamed of this moment a decade earlier, proudly declared:
People of Libya! In response to your own free will, fulfilling your most heartfelt wishes, answering your incessant demands for change and regeneration and your longing to strive towards these ends; listening to your incitement to rebel, your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the reactionary and corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened and horrified us all … From this day forward Libya is a free, self-governing republic … She will advance on the road to freedom, the path of unity and social justice, guaranteeing equality to all her citizens and throwing wide in front of them the gates of honest employment where injustice and exploitation will be banished, where no one will count himself master or servant, and where he will be free, brothers within a society in which, with God's help, prosperity and equality will be seen to rule us all.55
Libya had finally embarked upon a new dawn.
CHAPTER 3
The Rise of the Jamahiriyah
As dawn broke on the morning of 1 September, Libyans had no idea who had toppled their king, yet alone what they stood for. However, as the identities of the twelve-strong Revolutionary Command Council (RCC)1 emerged four months after the coup, it became clear that the country's new leaders were of a very different breed from the established political elite. In stark contrast to those who had prospered under the king, most of the RCC, as well as the wider circle of Free Unionist Officers, came from minor tribes and were either from lower middle-class stock or from poor families. The majority were the children of nomads or lowly cultivators; most were part of the upwardly mobile generation who had benefited from the nascent education policies established by the monarchy an
d who sought a better lot in life than their parents.
Qaddafi was no exception. Born into a Bedouin family in a small desert village in Qasr Bu Hadi, south of the coastal town of Sirte, the future leader had a tough beginning. Although undeniably beautiful, the Libyan deserts are harsh, with freezing winters and relentlessly hot summers. They are also subject to the Ghibli – the hot, dry, dust-bearing desert wind that has a dramatic effect on the landscape, moving vast quantities of sand and making life even more difficult for the desert dwellers. Little grows on the surface of the golden sand where ‘the blue dome of the sky seems to seal off the entire landscape in an absolute silence’.2 It was into these harsh and silent surroundings that Muammar Abu Miniar Al-Qaddafi was born. It is not clear in exactly which year he made his entrance to the world; he maintained that it was in 1941, although others have suggested it may have been later, possibly in 1943.
Muammar was the only son of goat herder Abu Miniar and his wife Aisha Ben Niran, both poor, illiterate tent-dwellers. Qaddafi was the youngest child and had three older sisters. The family was part of the Qaddadfa, an Arabized Berber tribe comprising several sub-clans that are spread across the country. The tribe, whose name means ‘to throw’, traces its roots back to a well-known wali (saint), Sidi Qaddaf Al-Dam, who is buried in Gharyan, south of Tripoli.3 It is no coincidence that Gharyan proved loyal to Qaddafi during the last days of his regime.
The Qaddadfa moved away from Gharyan over two centuries ago. Some parts of the tribe settled in the lush pastures of the Cyrenaican plateau, but were subsequently driven out to the barren deserts around Sirte by an alliance of eastern tribes led by the Bara'asa and the Magharba.4 Although originally a small tribe by Libyan standards, following the move out of Cyrenaica the Qaddadfa became one of the largest and most dominant in the Sirte region. However, it was still essentially semi-nomadic and impoverished. Qaddafi himself describes how the inhabitants of the little hamlet of tents he grew up in used to go out looking for scrap metal, empty ammunition casings and other remnants of World War II that could be used as improvised household articles.5 Things were so difficult that Qaddafi's father was forced to migrate with his herd to the south in the winter in order to survive.
We do not know very much about Qaddafi's early life. However, from the snippets available, the young Bedouin comes across as a serious boy, who was on a higher plane than those around him. He is also portrayed as a figure for whom leadership was somehow preordained. As his father described him: ‘He was so different from the others! … Of course he planted and sowed like the rest of us; he looked after the goats and the camels. But he was so serious, so quiet; not sulky, no, on the contrary he was always smiling. Yet he didn't much enjoy playing; aloof from his cousins, he seemed always to be musing.’6 Similarly, his old history teacher at secondary school, Shalan Abdelkhaliq, recalled: ‘Always Muammar was seen during the break standing alone in the courtyard of the school as if he was an individual island.’7
One should, of course, be careful about taking such descriptions too literally. Qaddafi's childhood and early years were carefully reconstructed after the revolution to create an image that befitted his position as leader. The Colonel's early experiences became an integral part of the narrative of the revolution; so much so that scenes from his youth were immortalized in garish colours on enormous billboards that were erected in public spaces across the country. Thus it is sometimes difficult to distinguish truth from fiction.
However, it is clear that, as the only son, Qaddafi held a special place in his parents' hearts, and his father was keen for the little Muammar to get an education. There was no school in the oasis where the family lived, but his father arranged for the local roving faqi (religious teacher), to come and teach his son the basics. It was at the hands of this faqi that Qaddafi learned some Qu'ranic verses by heart.8
Qaddafi seems to have had an appetite for learning; in 1954 he persuaded his father to allow him to attend primary school in Sirte. The family's knowledge of educational matters was such that, when the eager, curly-haired boy turned up to begin his studies, he was disappointed to discover that it was already exam time and almost the end of the school year. However, he returned a few months later and was enrolled in the second year on account of his knowledge of the Qu'ran. It was a tough existence for a small boy. As his father recounted, ‘I had no money to pay for lodgings! He slept in the mosque, where else?’9 Qaddafi went back to his family home every weekend, walking the 30km or so each way. He also returned to the family every harvest time, interrupting his studies to help out at home.
Qaddafi was marked out immediately as different from his peers. Not only was he older than the other pupils in his class, but he was of Bedouin stock. This brought no end of abuse. His cousin, Muftah Ali Subaya Qaddafi relates: ‘There were three or four of us Bedouin at the school, and we were held in utter contempt. We were so poor that we often had nothing to eat at break. What an atmosphere for children!’10 Yet in a sign of his resolve, such taunting seems to have spurred the future leader to work even harder. As Qaddafi commented, ‘My motivation to learn was huge, especially when the pupils confronted me with their comments deriding this desert dweller.’11
After a couple of years at school in Sirte, Qaddafi's family moved to Sebha, in the south of Libya, which his father described as a place that ‘seemed forgotten in a sea of sand’.12 Qaddafi enrolled at the local secondary school, and it was here that the young pupil began to develop a political awareness. Like many young men of his day, Qaddafi's imagination was fired by the nationalist revolution in Egypt, and he loved to listen to the Voice of the Arabs radio station. Qaddafi became so captivated by President Nasser that he began memorizing the Egyptian leader's speeches and reciting them in front of his classmates.
Despite his youth, Qaddafi was clearly already a charismatic figure; his fellow pupils took to carrying around a small stool for him that he would stand on in order to deliver his speeches. He also began organizing little demonstrations against the colonialist powers; he led his fellow pupils in a general strike every 2 December to protest against the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British statement supporting the establishment of a home for the Jews in Palestine. The young Qaddafi also convened regular protests outside the French consulate in Sebha, where, from his stool, he would deliver speeches about the injustices the French were committing in Algeria and elsewhere.
But it was not just the imperial powers that Qaddafi protested against: he also railed against Libya's ruling elite. Inflamed with his newfound political consciousness, he led a little band of schoolboys as they smashed the windows of a Sebha hotel because it served alcohol – something they considered symptomatic of the morally lax, westernized and un-Islamic behaviour of the ruling class.13 Ironically, such actions were more in line with the Islamist groups that at the time were challenging the Nasser regime in Egypt than they were with the ideology of the nationalists, who tended to have a more liberal outlook. Yet they reflected Qaddafi's puritanical streak, something that was part and parcel of his Bedouinism.
After being expelled from school in Sebha for his outspoken attacks against the British and American bases, Qaddafi continued to make an impression at his new school in Misarata. The leader was becoming increasingly hardened in his hatred of the weak monarchy and the imperialist powers behind it, and he was not afraid to let it show. One target for his invective was the English school inspector, Mr Johnson, whom Qaddafi dismissed as ‘no more than an agent of imperialism’.14 On one occasion, Qaddafi refused to stand up when Mr Johnson entered the room and, in a provocative gesture, waved a key chain bearing an image of President Nasser at the haughty inspector. Upon being ordered to leave the room, Qaddafi coldly told the inspector, ‘You are the one who should leave for good, not this room but the whole country.’15
The future leader's entry to military college in Benghazi failed to tame his rebellious streak: if anything, it seemed to spur it on. The new cadet refused to learn English – the language of t
he occupier – and went out of his way to be rude to his superiors.16 A visit in 1966 to Britain, where he was sent for signals training at Beaconsfield, only served to increase his hostility towards the ‘imperial power’. The proud young nationalist, who was remembered for his aloofness and general disdain for British society, seems to have revelled in the challenge of being in the land of the colonizer. He later remarked: ‘I put on my Al-Jird [Arab robes] and went to Piccadilly … I was prompted by a feeling of challenge and a desire to assert myself.’17
It was at the Benghazi military academy that Qaddafi's more sinister side came to the fore. A British officer at the academy, Colonel Ted Lough, described the young revolutionary as ‘inherently cruel’.18 By Lough's account, Qaddafi was responsible for the murder of a young cadet at the Benghazi military academy who was accused of committing a sexual offence, possibly involving homosexuality.19 The terrified cadet, his hands and feet bound, was dragged to a firing point, where Qaddafi and a group of other cadets began shooting at him, before a Libyan officer finished him off with a coup de grâce while the others laughed.
However, Qaddafi also experienced his share of punishment at the academy. He was regularly penalized for insolence, and on one occasion was forced to crawl on his hands and knees across gravel, a rucksack filled with sand on his back and the harsh sun beating down. Such humiliations can only have strengthened the young revolutionary's determination to unseat the system and its colonial backers.
Indeed, reconstructions of his past aside, Qaddafi was clearly a man of charisma who, from a young age, marked himself out as someone who was going to follow his own destiny. He was always a larger-than-life figure; so much so that the history of modern Libya reads like a biography of his ambition and the lengths he was willing to go to fulfil it.
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