Qaddafi to the fore
If Qaddafi was no ordinary man, the events of 1 September 1969 were no ordinary coup d'état. This was to be more than a simple military putsch: it was to be a full-scale revolution that would not only replace Libya's corrupt and complacent elite, but would also transform the country's entire way of being. It was a revolution that was to eat into every part of life, and that would shake the country to its core.
There was never any question of who would lead this transformation. The whole revolution had been Qaddafi's brainchild right from the start, and it was always going to be his project. This Bedouin from the desert was determined to mould the backwards, reactionary kingdom into his own vision of what a progressive and modern Arab state should be. Not that this vision was conceptualized into any real plan as yet; that was to come later. However, at the outset there was no doubt that the enigmatic Qaddafi would lead the way and that his fellow revolutionaries were more than happy to follow. As one of his former comrades, Mohamed Belqassim Zwai remarked, ‘everything from start to finish always revolved around Gadafi’.20
How Qaddafi was going to persuade the rest of the population to follow his lead was another matter. It is true that, in the first days after the revolution, the country's new leaders were greeted by throngs of enthusiastic supporters. It is also true that the humble origins of most of the young revolutionaries in the RCC separated them in the minds of Libyans from the privileged and corrupt elite that was associated with the monarchy. This gave the RCC a special legitimacy that Qaddafi was keen to play up right from the start, telling the French newspaper, Le Figaro on 30 September 1969:
The officers have the conscience to recognise the people's claims better than others. This depends on our origin which is characterised by humbleness. We are not rich people; the parents of the majority of us are living in huts. My parents are still living in a tent near Sirte. The interests we represent are genuinely those of the Libyan people.21
Yet, for all their claims to represent the people, these new revolutionaries were still an unknown quantity. They had not been born out of a popular liberation movement, and to most Libyans they had literally come from nowhere. Moreover, they could not escape the fact that they were essentially a group of naïve young men with no political or worldly experience. All were in their late twenties or early thirties, and none had progressed education-wise beyond secondary school and the first years of military training. Aside from Qaddafi, most had a strong suspicion of intellectuals, considering their humble origins enough of a qualification to rule. They took up the reins of power with little more than a zealous belief in Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism.
Aware of their lack of experience, the young revolutionaries looked immediately to Egypt. A surprised President Nasser immediately dispatched his trusted advisor, Mohamed Heikal, to Benghazi to ascertain the lie of the land. Heikal was stunned at what he encountered, reporting back that Libya's new leaders were ‘shockingly innocent’ and ‘scandalously pure’.22 He was also surprised when, in all simplicity, Qaddafi told him: ‘We have carried out this revolution. Now it is for Nasser to tell us what to do.’23 Nasser was to be no less shocked by Qaddafi's naivety when he met him in person. The Egyptian President recounted one occasion when the young leader was served a shrimp during dinner: a horrified Qaddafi asked: ‘What are these? … Locusts? Do you eat locusts in Egypt?’ Nasser patiently explained that they were shrimps and a kind of fish, but Qaddafi flatly refused to eat them, allegedly declaring that they had not been slaughtered in a halal (Islamically permitted) fashion.24
Aware of the need to take this nascent nationalist republic under its wing, Egypt sent a contingent of its security forces to help guard against any kind of counter-coup, as well as a special advisor, Fathi Al-Deeb, to guide Libya's new leaders. Al-Deeb was no less astonished at the inexperience of the young revolutionaries, but set to work trying to steer them in the right direction. The main focus was on turning what was essentially a military coup into a full-scale revolution. Abdelsalam Jalloud later reflected that many of the policies adopted by the RCC in the early years were designed to achieve precisely this.25
One of the first tasks in this respect was to rid the country of the vestiges of the former regime. The revolutionaries set about weeding out those who were loyal to the former king, who was still abroad and who was tried and sentenced to death in absentia. Members of the royal family, politicians and prominent officials were arrested, as were hundreds of senior army and police officers.26 Many suffered the humiliation of being subjected to televised trials, although – belying the brutality that came to characterize the Libyan regime in later years – the sentences were generally light, and there was little sign of retribution.
The RCC also worked to break the power of the country's traditional tribal leaders who had worked as a prop for the monarchy, moving against a number of tribal chiefs, especially in Cyrenaica and Fezzan. They also redrew administrative borders so that they no longer followed tribal boundaries, and local governors and mayors, whose positions were linked directly to their tribal standing, were dismissed and replaced by a younger modernizing class with more humble backgrounds. At the same time, the RCC did its best to break what was left of Sanussiya influence over the eastern parts of the country: in November 1970, for example, they closed the Sanussi Islamic University at Al-Baida. They also bolstered the army, and Qaddafi was persuaded by the Egyptians to enlist some personal bodyguards.
Getting rid of the past was one thing, but the revolutionaries also had to build a present. They knew that one of their first tasks in this respect was to establish some sort of ruling body that would go beyond the RCC. Their plan had always been to hand power back to civilian rule; this had been agreed upon at a meeting in March 1969, when the revolutionaries decided that they would declare a civilian government within a month of taking over.27 It was with this in mind that, one week after the coup, the revolutionaries set up a government. They brought in new faces from outside the RCC, five of them civilians and two from the military – both of them officers who held higher rank than they did themselves. They also appointed a civilian as prime minister – Mahmoud Suleiman Al-Maghrebi, a Palestinian with strong left-wing tendencies.
While the plan may have been to hand power over to this civilian-dominated government, Qaddafi had other ideas. It was no coincidence that, at the same time as the cabinet was formed, he promoted himself to the rank of colonel and made himself commander of the armed forces. He also insisted that all cabinet decisions had to be approved by the RCC, meaning that the military body continued to be the main focus of power.28 Indeed, it became increasingly apparent to Qaddafi's fellow revolutionaries that this man from the desert had no real intention of handing power over to anyone, let alone a civilian government. His stance frustrated those in the new government; so much so that the two military officers in it – Colonels Adam Hawaz and Musa Ahmed – tried (and failed) to stage a coup in December 1969. Qaddafi's refusal to go with the original plan also angered some within the RCC, especially Mohamed Najm, who was perhaps the strongest advocate of democracy among the group. Yet at this stage, the other revolutionaries were still so dazzled by Qaddafi that they largely went along with whatever the Colonel decided.
Moreover, the revolutionaries were consumed with putting their nationalist agenda into practice. They embarked upon a series of populist gestures, first closing down the hated foreign military bases and expelling the colonizing forces: the last British troops left Tobruq in March 1970, and the Americans evacuated the Wheelus base a few months later. The revolutionaries also expelled what was left of Libya's Jewish community, as well as the last of the Italian settlers, appropriating their land and assets in the name of anti-imperialism – an act that prompted a triumphant Qaddafi to declare: ‘the feeling of holy revenge runs today in our veins’.29 Libya could no longer be accused of being subservient to the imperial powers. The revolutionaries also applied their nationalist ideas to the economy, undertakin
g a number of measures to ‘purify’ the country of foreign influence. More than half the capital of foreign banks operating in the country was seized and oil distribution networks were nationalized. Although some of these measures may have appeared harsh, such moves went down well with the population, who welcomed them as an assertion of national pride and independence after the ineffectual, soggy days of the monarchy.
In line with Qaddafi's purist Bedouin principles, the RCC also moved to invest some religious authority in itself. Given Qaddafi's devout religious beliefs, Islam was always going to be a core part of the revolutionary discourse. The RCC clamped down on pleasures associated with ‘Western vices’, closing down casinos and nightclubs and banning alcohol. In 1972, the payment of zakat (compulsory charitable donation) became a formal legal obligation, and shortly afterwards sharia law and sharia courts were integrated into what had been a largely secular legal system. The following year, Qaddafi established the Islamic Call Society – a missionary body that served as a mass propaganda machine that was pumped full of oil money to promote Islam and Libya internationally. He also restored the Islamic calendar and insisted that both Christian and Islamic dates be used on all official documents. This return to Islamic values was reassuring to a population that was still largely illiterate and that was struggling to come to terms with the modernization that had accompanied not only the colonial experience, but also the oil boom.
Less reassuring may have been the new regime's efforts to ensure that there could be no challenge to the revolutionary state. In the interests of conformity, all political activity outside the official framework of the state was banned – something that culminated in the controversial Law No. 71 of 1972, which made engaging in party politics a crime punishable by death, and which remained in place until the fall of the regime. Unofficial trades unions were also barred, and the new unions that were established all came under the supervision of the Ministry of Labour. The press was also emasculated, with ten newspapers having their licences suspended, and even the main state newspaper Al-Thawra (The Revolution) periodically being stopped from going to press when its content did not meet with the approval of the new leadership. Indeed it was clear from very early on that there was only going to be one way of doing things.
However, it would be wrong to think that these moves were part of any coordinated or coherent plan. Beyond the populist gestures, little thought had been given to how actually to manage the day-to-day affairs of what was a relatively new state that was still finding its feet after independence. Having got rid of the most competent officials after taking power, Libya's inexperienced new leaders were essentially grappling in the dark; they talked for hours, but could agree on nothing. So nothing got done and the country slipped into a kind of chaotic stasis: the economy ground to a halt, unemployment began to rise and planned projects failed to get off the ground. Libyans, who had hoped for so much from this group of young soldiers, began to have their doubts.
It was in this tense and shambolic atmosphere that Qaddafi began to differentiate himself from those around him. He took to behaving as though he was far above the rest of the RCC, and began venting his frustration at the way things were going on around him. The camaraderie of the pre-coup days dissolved, as the new leader turned on his fellow revolutionaries, blaming them for the chaos and openly insulting them; he regularly admonished them in public, telling them in the most disparaging of terms that they ‘didn't understand anything’ and that they were not up to the job. Within a few weeks of the coup, he also began undermining them in front of their staff, cancelling decisions they had made and accusing them of incompetence.
This did not go down well with his fellow revolutionaries, who were hurt and troubled by this sudden change of behaviour. Despite their loyalty to him, they became increasingly irritated, too, as Qaddafi took to lording it over them. He began convening meetings and then making them wait for hours before he deigned to turn up (or sometimes did not turn up at all). These meetings were often held at 2 a.m., a time that suited his unorthodox hours, but that left others struggling to keep awake. The new leader also expected the rest of the RCC to adopt his rather austere lifestyle. So ‘pure’ was Qaddafi that he refused to stump up the cash for two RCC members, Khweildi Al-Humaidi and Abdelmonem Al-Houni, who travelled to Cairo in 1970 for medical treatment. The indignant revolutionaries were forced to go cap in hand to the Libyan embassy in Cairo to borrow money from the officials there.30 The RCC members were so fed up that they regularly complained to Al-Deeb that their leader, who refused to have his own chauffeur, was a miser.
RCC members became increasingly frustrated, too, that Qaddafi took to behaving like a spoiled and sulky child when he did not get his own way: he stopped talking to his colleagues for two or three days at a time if they upset him, and regularly stormed off and sat at home, threatening to resign unless he got his own way. Sometimes his outbursts were over the most trivial of matters. On one occasion, Qaddafi insisted that all RCC members should wear military uniforms and carry pistols at all times. Abdelmonem Al-Houni objected to this decision and turned up to the next meeting wearing civilian clothes.31 This prompted a furious Colonel to disappear into the deserts of Sirte in a huff for an entire week. On another occasion when things were not going his way, Qaddafi announced dramatically that he had decided to leave Libya to go to fight alongside the Palestinians in Jordan. Needless to say, this turned out to be another empty threat, aimed at getting his own way.
While such outbursts were difficult enough for Qaddafi's fellow RCC members, what really upset them was that he took to taking unilateral policy decisions. Showing scant regard for their views, he forged ahead as he saw fit. In May 1970, for example, he took a group of soldiers and closed down two casinos that were still in operation, arresting and imprisoning the foreign artistes and customers he found there. When the RCC complained that sch a heavy-handed approach would misrepresent the revolution abroad, Qaddafi retorted by telling them that they didn't understand a thing.32
Sometimes the other RCC members only learned what the Colonel was up to by tuning into the radio. This was the case in 1970, when he paid a visit to Algeria. There he struck a number of agreements with Algerian President Houari Boumedienne to work towards unifying the two countries. This move shocked some of the RCC members, who were suspicious of Algeria's real intentions. Indeed, while the RCC was largely supportive of Arab unity, some members were concerned at the speed with which the young Qaddafi was recklessly trying to forge ahead with it. Abdelsalam Jalloud in particular believed the Colonel's rush to try to forge unions with other Arab states to be ill-advised.
Yet Qaddafi was a man with a vision. Indeed, it was clear very early on that there was only going to be space for one man and that no one was going to hold him back. As he declared while holding his gun aloft during a speech in Misarata in 1971, ‘We will achieve unity even if it is only me who does so, even by the force of this gun.’33 All this was becoming too much for some of his fellow revolutionaries. On another occasion, after Qaddafi had made a fiery public speech in which he attacked the rest of the RCC for not being sufficiently keen on Arab unity, Omar Al-Meheishi exploded in his face and pointed a machine gun at him.34 According to Al-Houni, Qaddafi, who was himself armed with a pistol, was only saved when Al-Houni and Jalloud pounced on the furious Al-Meheishi and wrestled the gun away from him.
Qaddafi's behaviour pushed some RCC members over the edge: Mukhtar Abdullah Qarawi was so fed up with the insults that he resigned in 1972, followed by Mohamed Najm the following year. One group of RCC members went further. In 1975 Omar Al-Meheishi (who, thanks to his intellect and more middle-class origins, could have been a powerful figure in his own right) tried to stage a coup against the Colonel with two other members, Bashir Hawadi and Ali Awad Hamza. The plot was uncovered, and the men were forced to flee, along with Abdelmonem Al-Houni, who was also accused of involvement.
Yet such extreme episodes were rare within the RCC. For all that they may have be
en infuriated by Qaddafi's behaviour, the rest of his fellow revolutionaries remained loyal, many of them until the very end. Mustafa Kharroubi, Khweildi Al-Humaidi and Abu Bakr Younis Jaber, for example, stayed with their leader even when it became apparent to all that his days were numbered. Their unswerving loyalty may have been because, deep in their hearts, they knew that it was Qaddafi who had made them: the Colonel had picked them out when they were simple schoolboys from lowly tribes and had lifted them out of their surroundings. Indeed, without him they were nothing. As Al-Houni was later to reflect, the RCC members were essentially ‘mundane’ and their mental capacity was far below the historic task they had been given.35 Even Qaddafi himself callously described them as ‘lackeys’.36 As such, those from the RCC who remained loyal were little more than a bunch of followers who were in no position to challenge the unstoppable force that was Qaddafi.
In any case, almost from the beginning, the wily Colonel had begun to sideline the RCC by bringing in and relying on others whose loyalty and obedience he could be assured of. These included groups of Free Unionist Officers who had not previously been part of the inner circle. They also included members of Qaddafi's own family and tribe. Al-Deeb reported back to Cairo in the early 1970s how Qaddafi's relatives, especially Hassan Ishkal and Khalifa Hannesh, were playing a major role, and how this was upsetting some RCC members. Yet Qaddafi had understood early on exactly what he needed to do in order to build his dream.
However, consolidating his power structures was not enough to turn the coup into a revolution. Despite the Colonel's best efforts to rally the masses with his populist rhetoric, the Libyan people were still not seriously behind (or even engaged with) the revolution, particularly on the ideological level. This came as a bitter disappointment to the young Qaddafi, who was becoming increasingly frustrated that the Libyan people were failing to live up to his lofty ideals. The youth were not enlisting in the army as they had been instructed to do; agricultural and resettlement schemes had been set up, but Libyans were refusing to work in remote parts of the country; and university ‘perverts’ were engaged in subversive activity.37 The Colonel was clearly running ahead of his population, failing to appreciate that, while most Libyans were happy that the old regime had been toppled, they were not ready to make a complete break with the past and to accept his new-fangled ideas.
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