Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  It was becoming clear that the reality of this ‘classless society’ was that the state moved in to take control of everything. From 1979, private traders and small merchants were squeezed out through a series of measures culminating in Law No. 4 of 1984, which abolished all private commerce and trade.26 An entire merchant class found itself disenfranchised almost overnight, as the state took over all import and export distribution networks and became solely responsible for the sale of goods. State supermarkets were set up across the country, and Libyans were given ration books entitling them to buy certain goods from these outlets every month. However, the goods on offer were not up to much, and with all the country's imports controlled by just ten state import agencies, which purchased everything from oil technology to basic foodstuffs, supplies were limited.

  These state supermarkets were grim places, in which the people of this oil-rich country suddenly found themselves scrabbling for sub-standard goods in the most humiliating fashion. One Libyan woman paints a very depressing picture of this time:

  Despite the fact that the goods were bad, we saw people pushing each other out of the way to get hold of them, as there was nowhere else to buy the things they needed, like clothes and furniture. People stood in arbitrary queues in front of these markets, especially during Eid. We would see closed bags that contained some clothes which were unsuitable both in size and quality being thrown at them. Some people who had a bit of money were forced to travel to Turkey and Syria to buy goods that weren't available in Libya. Children at that time didn't even know bananas or apples because the state markets only distributed necessary goods such as sugar and flour.27

  Consumer shortages became commonplace at this time. Qaddafi glibly told the New York Times in 1986: ‘Sometimes we make items disappear to force people to work harder and produce them.’28 But the real reason behind the shortages had less to do with a policy of deliberate deprivation and more to do with bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption: these public markets were sometimes burned down by those running them, in a bid to cover their tracks after they had looted the goods inside for sale on the black market.29 Such incidents left the local population temporarily bereft of even these paltry second-rate supplies.

  Private professional activities were also prohibited. As part of Qaddafi's grand egalitarian vision, doctors and lawyers were prevented from practising privately and were forced to work for the state. With private activity banned, everyone turned to the public sector to provide them with a living. Secure in its oil revenues, the regime was happy to keep on expanding the state, finding it a useful way of buying acquiescence. The ordinary budget, which covered salaries and wages, increased from 583 million Libyan dinars (LYD) in 1977, to LYD 950 million in 1980 and to LYD 1.52 billion in 1983.

  Most Libyans opted for office jobs in this mushrooming state sector. But because the majority were not properly qualified, foreign nationals still had to be brought in to fill managerial and professional positions. Foreign labour was also imported for the manual jobs that Libyans did not want to soil their hands with. Indeed, the state became like an enormous paper towel, absorbing all and sundry, regardless of their expertise. The growth of the public sector also bore no relation to actual need. Workers got paid for simply turning up, and several people were employed to do the same job. This was a feature that was to endure up until the 2011 revolution; changing just a small amount of foreign currency into Libyan dinars was a laborious process that could take several people, all fully engaged in discussion about the task in hand, well over half an hour!

  However, having a job in the state sector did not mean that Libyans' needs were satisfied. It is true that the regime had set up an admirable and comprehensive welfare system. One of the plus sides of Qaddafi's socialist-style vision was that everyone was provided with a place to live, access to education and healthcare, and even their own car – all at the state's expense. This was significant progress from the poverty-stricken days of the monarchy. Yet people were still struggling. State salaries were generally low and were always paid late.30 To make matters worse, the regime introduced Law No. 15 of 1981, which froze all public sector wages. With inflation running at around 20 per cent throughout the decade, making ends meet was becoming increasingly hard. Many professionals, including those of senior level, were forced to double up as taxi drivers in the evenings – something that was common right up until the fall of the regime. Others engaged in black-market activities – something in which almost every Libyan family found itself inadvertently involved, just in order to survive.31 Incredibly, this freeze on public sector pay remained in place until the late 2000s.

  The result of all these economic directives was chaos. This was hardly surprising: Qaddafi's was an economy driven by ideology rather than by sound economic planning. Indeed, the regime ended up investing in all sorts of ludicrous and costly schemes in order to turn the Colonel's dreams into reality. In the bid to achieve self-sufficiency, for example, the state invested in a number of large-scale agricultural projects that made bad financial sense. These included a project to irrigate several thousand acres of soil at Kufra using advanced technology, with the aim of producing wheat. Although grain was produced at the project, just the transport costs of getting a tonne of the grain to the coastal areas were some 10–20 times higher than contemporary world prices for a tonne of wheat.32 Agricultural production dropped during the 1980s as a result of the regime's encouragement of mechanization, which led to over-irrigation and which lowered water tables in a country thirsting for water.33 For Qaddafi, such trivialities were unimportant; this was mere detail when set beside the greater effort of establishing his revolutionary ideals. As far as he was concerned, his grand vision would be enough to carry the country forwards.

  Qaddafi was equally reckless when it came to military spending. The Leader wanted a military arsenal that was worthy of his Jamahiriyah, and buying weapons became a kind of personal obsession that started early on. Omar Al-Meheishi, who once referred to Qaddafi as a ‘dangerous psychopath’, recounts how, in 1973, Abdelsalam Jalloud had come to him one day with a terrified expression on his face.34 The reason for Jalloud's alarm was that Qaddafi had just written to the Kremlin asking for 6,000 tanks, 1,000 warplanes and 200 naval ships. Despite his best efforts, Jalloud was unable to convince the Colonel to reduce these ridiculously huge requests. Things got worse: from the late 1970s, Qaddafi embarked upon a period of unrestrained military spending, buying up military kit as if it were going out of fashion. Defence spending soared from $709 million in 1982, to $1,149 million in 1984.35 Many of these purchases were from the Soviet Union, and in 1979 there were some two thousand Russian military advisors in Libya.36

  All this buying meant that the Libyan army was unable to absorb all the weapons being thrown at it. In 1979, there were only 150 competent pilots for over 160 operational warplanes, when the norm was at least two pilots per aircraft.37 Such was the mismatch that Libya was forced to bring in foreigners from a host of countries – including Pakistan, Cuba and the Czech Republic – to man and maintain its newly acquired military equipment. Yet, as was so often the case with the Colonel, image was more important than substance. It was all about projecting the greatness of his Jamahiriyah to the rest of the world. So much so that Qaddafi even sought to acquire a nuclear weapon – something that would put his Jamahiriyah on a par with the big nations of the world. To this end, Libya made official approaches to China, France and India; all of them were politely turned down.

  Never one to think small, Qaddafi also set about militarizing the whole of Libyan society, in a quest to turn the Libyan people into soldiers for his ideas. Although a number of Arab dictators employed military-style discipline in support of their regimes, Qaddafi took things to a whole new level. In the early 1980s, he began militarizing the country's schools: school uniforms were replaced by military uniforms, and military science became a compulsory subject. Pupils were suddenly at the mercy of military officers, who took over from school heads and t
eachers, and these new ‘teacher officers’ dished out military punishments at whim. These chastisements included leaving disobedient students out in the scorching sun for long periods. Pupils were likewise forced to go on military marches and parades, displaying their loyalty to the new Jamahiriyah.38

  These grand schemes were all bankrolled by the country's vast oil reserves. Indeed, it was thanks to the abundance of energy supplies that Qaddafi was able to use the country as a grand laboratory, frittering away cash as each hare-brained experiment took his fancy. Compared to his fellow Arab leaders, Qaddafi had it easy. Libya's small population and enormous wealth made it possible for him to enforce conformity and to stamp his personality on the country to an extreme degree.

  Yet even energy economies need careful planning, as well as regulation. This fact appears to have eluded the young revolutionary, who was too caught up in himself to worry about such trivialities. With his constant spending, Qaddafi seemed to pay no heed to the fact that global oil prices fluctuate.39 Due to the world decline in oil prices in the early 1980s, Libyan oil revenues plummeted from US$24 billion in 1980 to less than US$14 billion in 1981.40 Yet Qaddafi was a man who lived in the present, and he certainly was not going to let a simple drop in income stop him from realizing his Jamahiriyah.

  That is not to say that there was no economic planning at all: the regime came up with a series of five-year economic plans, laying out a blueprint for the economy. However, the planning that did go on was hampered by the sheer lack of experience of those in charge. It was also hindered by administrative chaos, made worse by Qaddafi's habit of suddenly issuing grand pronouncements about what shape the economy should take. This left his inexperienced officials scratching their heads as they tried to fathom out how to implement the unrealistic ideas. As if that were not enough to contend with, the Colonel kept changing his mind about how many secretariats (ministries) there should be in the General People's Committee (cabinet) and what their responsibilities should be. While the energy sector was generally left alone – since it needed to function in order for the regime to survive – other portfolios, including those related to the economy, were renamed, merged or dismantled every couple of years.41

  Coming up with any kind of stabilized economic policy in such an environment was clearly impossible. No one knew who was responsible for what, and the secretariats were too busy trying to deal with their own structural changes to be able to issue or implement policies with any coherence. Things were so bad that these secretariats were unable to collect even the most basic of economic data that could provide them with the economic indicators necessary for making policy. Data about inflation levels, internal and external trade figures, types of consumption and income levels just were not available.42 Moreover, without any clear direction from the top, regulation was almost non-existent. It was not that the regime did not try to regulate the economy; rather, the situation was so chaotic that everyone began issuing monitoring decisions, many of them completely contradictory, meaning that actual regulation got lost. Libya became what one analyst has aptly coined a ‘centrally unplanned economy’.43

  Yet this lack of planning and regulation had its advantages: it enabled Qaddafi to distribute largesse and to buy people off whenever he saw fit. The regime soon got into the habit of dishing out special perks and benefits to those whose allegiance it wanted to secure. The revolutionary committees, for instance, were given their own farms in the countryside, where members would go at the weekends to relax amidst the fruit trees and date palms; the security services were provided with top-of-the-range cars, which they sold on for a tidy profit. In this way, Qaddafi was able to build a faithful ‘army’ of ideologues, ready to do whatever it took for his Jamahiriyah. Yet perhaps the greatest irony in all this is that, by the mid-1980s, the new revolutionary regime, which had taken power promising to strip away the ‘backward’ practices of the past, had come to operate in a fashion not entirely dissimilar to the way the monarchy had worked. Here was Qaddafi and his coterie of close advisors bypassing the official institutions of the state and relying on patronage to buy loyalty. Had Libyans not seen this somewhere before?

  What was different, however, was that the end result of the adoption of these extreme revolutionary economic policies was that every family became reliant on the state for almost every aspect of life. In this ‘stateless society’, the state had become everything. This in turn meant that, whatever Qaddafi's dreams of making Libya completely self-sufficient, it became ever more dependent on its energy sector. Indeed, Libya became a distributive state par excellence. While all this may have had short-term political advantages – ensuring that every family had a stake in the future of the revolution – its longer-term consequences were to prove disastrous for Qaddafi in the coming decades.

  Qaddafi as messiah

  Not only did the revolution seep into every pore of Libya's political and economic life, but it also took a grip on the most sacred of areas – the country's religious life. It is no surprise that Islam was to be at the very core of Qaddafi's revolution: the deeply pious Bedouin was profoundly committed to his faith and saw Islam as an essential component of his idealized Jamahiriyah. It was also integral to his mission to cleanse Libyan society of the corrupt moral practices of the ‘aristocratic Sanussi’ of the past. Therefore, while for the other Arab nationalist leaders of the day, Islam was predominantly a legitimizing force, for Qaddafi it was so much more.

  In fact, Qaddafi saw himself as a religious leader, as much as he considered himself a political thinker. As early as 1971, he shocked the ulema (religious scholars) by leading prayers for the holy celebration of Eid Al-Fitr in Tripoli's large Moulay Mohamed Mosque. This was highly unusual practice for a political and military leader, yet alone for someone so young, who should have known his place in matters of the faith. Yet Qaddafi's precociousness was driven by his unswerving belief that he had the divine on his side. This lowly desert dweller, who spent a lifetime comparing himself (albeit indirectly) to the Prophet, believed himself to be a kind of modern-day messiah, emerging from the vast empty sands with a new truth.

  This new messiah certainly had an unorthodox take on Islam. Stunning the entire Islamic world with his boldness, the eccentric colonel took on some of the more heterodox ideas that were doing the rounds in Arab intellectual circles at the time. In doing so, he was to set himself at odds with the entire tradition of Sunni Islam. Most fundamental was Qaddafi's assertion that the Qu'ran, as the revealed word of God, was the one and only basis of true Islam. As far as he was concerned, the second source of authority in Sunni Islam, the Sunnah (the acts and the sayings of the Prophet, as told by his companions), was not essential to the faith. Qaddafi viewed the Sunnah as human rather than divine, while for him only the Qu'ran represented the pure foundation of Islam. He also argued that Sharia (Islamic law) was a normative set of laws that had been made by humans.44 Such assertions were hugely controversial. To almost deny the Sunnah as the second source of authority of Sunni Islam was deeply offensive and sacrilegious to many Muslims. It is difficult to express just how shocking this denial was to Sunni Muslims at the time (and indeed today). Yet for Qaddafi it was part of stripping Islam back to its basics, instilling it with a Bedouin simplicity that was pure and untainted by humanity.

  Qaddafi set out his highly provocative ideas to a stunned audience at a speech to mark the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet in the pink-domed Moulay Mohamed mosque on 19 February 1978. As well as insisting on the Qu'ran's being the only true basis of the faith, the Leader went so far as to almost accuse Muslims of polytheism and of idolizing the Prophet rather than God, declaring: ‘If I say Mohamed, you all jump to say “Peace be upon him”, but if I say Allah, you say nothing. This is a kind of paganism … This means we are more frightened of the Prophet than Allah and the Prophet is closer to us than Allah.’45 These were scandalous words for the leader of a Muslim country. Yet Qaddafi pressed on, seemingly taking pleasure in the challenge. Indeed, the Colonel lov
ed to swim against the tide, to be the lone voice, struggling to be understood. He also revelled in the role of teacher and wise man, believing it was his mission to uncover the truth for the rest of the world.

  Five months later he presented the same electrifying ideas to an international audience, at a stormy meeting of Arab religious scholars, who spent several hours trying to force him back into the ways of orthodoxy.46 But Qaddafi was not to be persuaded. Nor was he to be dissuaded from his heterodox views by the unforgiving condemnation of religious groups and individuals, who were horrified at his reductionist ideas. What Qaddafi, with all his Bedouin simplicity, saw as extreme purity, others saw as little more than heresy. The militant group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which had a small presence in Libya in the 1970s, was so outraged that it accused him of being kafir (heathen) and an enemy of Islam.47 Yet it was not just extremist groups that condemned Qaddafi in this way; by the early 1980s a series of fatwas had been issued against him, including one from the highly influential Council of Senior Ulema in Saudi Arabia, which proclaimed him a heathen.

  This was a devastating indictment and a label that Qaddafi was never to overcome. However, the ever proud ‘visionary’ remained undeterred. Refusing to bow down to conformity, he continued to mould Islam to suit his revolution, in moves that verged on the narcissistic. In 1979, for example, casting centuries of tradition aside, the Brother Leader declared that the Muslim calendar would no longer be dated from the time of the Prophet's migration from Mecca to Medina; instead it was to begin ten years later, from the time of Mohamed's death – an event he deemed to be far more important in the Prophet's life. Not only was this shocking to most Muslims, but its practical application left the country reeling.

  To say that Libya's traditional religious establishment was deeply uncomfortable with the Leader's unorthodox views is an understatement. They were horrified. They were particularly unnerved, too, by his assertion, aimed directly at undermining them, that man could have a direct relationship with God. As he once reflected, ‘People are the masters on earth. They decide what they wish. Allah is in heaven. There is no intermediary between us and Allah.’48 With this reasoning, Qaddafi was not only extending the egalitarian spirit of his revolution to the realm of Islam; he was driving a stake right into the heart of the religious establishment, emasculating it at a single blow.