Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  Some members of this religious establishment dared to challenge Qaddafi – and they often came to an unsavoury end. In 1978, after the revolutionary committees had been charged with purifying certain mosques and putting an end to the activities of certain preachers, the ninety-year-old Sheikh Tahir Al-Zawi, Mufti of Libya, who had resigned in protest at Qaddafi's unorthodox ideas, was placed under house arrest. Two years later, the popular imam of Tripoli, Sheikh Mohamed Abdelsalam Al-Bishti, who had articulated his disapproval of Qaddafi's denial of the Sunnah, was to meet a worse fate. On 21 November 1980, a group of revolutionary committee members burst into the Al-Qassar mosque in Tripoli and dragged the imam away. Soon afterwards a petrified Al-Bishti was shown on television publicly confessing that he had been part of an armed group that had been receiving money from Saudi Arabia to spread the Saudis' rigid Wahabist interpretation of Islam.49 Al-Bishti was never to be seen again. Although the exact circumstances of the imam's death are not clear, Qaddafi's son, Saif Al-Islam, asserted in 2008 that Al-Bishti had been killed at the hands of security men in one of Libya's forests.50 Mosques, meanwhile, were closed down. This included the tiny mosque of Sidi Hammouda, which was symbolically blown up to make way for the enlargement of Tripoli's main square – renamed Green Square – a space that, when it was not being used for large celebrations, was to become a giant car park.

  The mindless destruction of this little mosque represented the extreme iconoclasm and violence that characterized this first, blood-stained revolutionary decade. For all his lofty ideals, Qaddafi had essentially created an authoritarian state of extreme proportions, in which the cult of personality knew no bounds. Libyans came to understand that once again they were to be merely spectators in their own history, as the country was violently transformed into the outward expression of all that was in Qaddafi's head. As all the foundations of what constituted a normal state were stripped away, the country was plunged into an all-encompassing idiosyncrasy that was to last until the regime's dying days. It was also what made Libya so ill-equipped to deal with its own transformation to the post-Qaddafi era in 2011.

  CHAPTER 5

  Foreign Adventurism

  Libya was always going to be too small for Qaddafi; he believed himself a revolutionary of international proportions, and Qaddafism was not about to be confined to the domestic sphere. With a self-belief that knew no bounds, the prophet of the desert immediately set about projecting his revolution beyond Libya's borders. The world became the Colonel's oyster, as he employed the immense oil wealth at his disposal in the quest to put himself and his revolution on the map.

  While some of this foreign adventurism was about seeking domestic legitimacy – winning over the masses with bold and rabble-rousing anti-imperialist exploits – it was also about creating a foreign policy that befitted a leader of world-class calibre. It was about establishing, too, a distinctive foreign policy, free of interference from other quarters; Qaddafi was not content to simply slot himself into one of the two Cold War camps, choosing instead to forge his own path and to take up the mantle of leader of the weak against the strong.

  That is not to say that there was any clear strategy about his litany of foreign exploits. The intense personalization of the foreign policy process in Libya meant that, while grounded in a set of ideological principles – Arab nationalism, Islam and anti-imperialism – Qaddafi's foreign policy was as arbitrary, contradictory and whimsical as the man himself. It also meant that ambition took over all sense of reason, as the Colonel crashed through successive foreign policy adventures, wreaking havoc and destruction wherever he went. So much so that Qaddafi's foreign policy reads rather like a catalogue of calamities, for which Libyans were to pay a heavy price.

  The first arena in which Qaddafi sought to project himself was the Arab world. Arab nationalism had always been at the core of Qaddafi's revolutionary discourse, and it was his first and enduring passion. It was also the ticket upon which he had come to power and was a sure way of bolstering his popular legitimacy. It was only natural, therefore, that he should turn first to the Arab world, where he dreamed of uniting Arab peoples into a single Arab nation that would regain the glories of the past.

  Unfortunately for the Colonel, his fellow Arab leaders were not so enthusiastic. They were wary of this rough and ready revolutionary who had emerged from Libya's deserts, big on dreams but short on experience. While they may have appreciated his sincerity (and his ready supply of petro-dollars), the seasoned rulers of the Middle East were not about to be swept up by the ideas of the zealous young upstart. They were certainly not over-impressed when, less than a year after the coup, Qaddafi and his foreign minister, Saleh Busair, embarked on a tour of the Middle East, touting a military plan to bring Arab forces together to annihilate Israel. To the Colonel's crushing disappointment, the simplistic plan, which smacked of the inexperience of those who had drafted it, met with derision and even resentment from states, such as Syria and Jordan, which understood what it meant to be at war with Israel. The plan met with equally short shrift in Egypt, where they were told that they may have understood revolutions but they did not understand military plans.1

  The leaders of the Arab world were even more shocked in June 1970, when they gathered in Tripoli for a celebration to mark the evacuation of the Wheelus airbase. Reflecting the fact that Qaddafi was always a populist before he was a statesman, the Colonel got so carried away during his speech that he began threatening his guests. He warned that if the meeting failed to achieve unity, he would tell the Arab masses what their leaders were really like, so that they could launch revolutions against them. Qaddafi's inopportune comments prompted a severe reprimand from his hero, the Egyptian president. Nasser was so furious that he brought his fist down hard on the table and warned the young upstart that if he did not shut up, he, Nasser, would tell the Libyan people just how disrespectful their new leader was.

  Nasser's admonishment did not deter the eager revolutionary; quite the opposite. With his desert upbringing and limited experience of the world, Qaddafi seemed to have a completely unreal sense of his own limitations. It seemed perfectly obvious to him that, following Nasser's death in 1970, it would be he who would inherit the role of leader of the Arab nationalist struggle. Hardly had the dust settled than the young revolutionary muscled in on the act: at the Egyptian leader's funeral, Qaddafi surprised his fellow mourners by joining President Numairi of Sudan and Palestinian leader, Yassir Arafat, in receiving the official condolences of the attending delegations.2 Despite his youth and the fact that he had seized power seemingly overnight in a backward state of just a few million people, Qaddafi clearly believed himself to be the next ‘Father of the Arabs’.

  More than that, the Colonel also believed he could go beyond Nasser. Imbued with his own sense of greatness, this ‘visionary’ genuinely thought he could do what no other Arab leader had done before him: bring the Arab world, with all its complexities and divisions, together under his leadership. As he exclaimed in 1971,

  I envisage that this small people will play the role that Prussia played in the unification of Germany, and that the Libyan people will play this role in the unification of the Arab nation. I also feel that this small people and this small republic will play the role that Piedmont played in the unification of Italy.3

  The preposterousness of these comments demonstrates the extent to which the raw revolutionary had failed to comprehend the world around him. While his fellow Arab leaders may have lauded the concept of pan-Arabism, using it as a useful rallying cry to bolster their popular standing, they were in no mood to actually unite their political systems. With all his naivety, Qaddafi had failed to discern that it was solidarity, rather than union, that his fellow Arab leaders sought. The Colonel had also failed to understand that, by the time he came to power, the heyday of Arab nationalism was already over. Following the Arabs' shattering defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, the nationalist project fell into decline, and by the early 1970s the new ideas in the reg
ion were being forged around Islamist rather than nationalist agendas. The Colonel had missed the boat. This was not lost on some young Libyans. One Islamist-leaning student told the Colonel after one of his speeches to the medical college in Benghazi in May 1972: ‘Brother Muammar, there is no call for nationalism in the Qu'ran. The Qu'ran didn't say, “oh Arabs”, not even once and the mention of the Ummah [nation] in the Qu'ran is the Islamic one.’ A shocked Qaddafi did not take kindly to the challenge; he shouted at the student: ‘No, no, you are sick! I blame this college … you are sick and you have to be treated … and we must put you in a clinic … You are not suitable to be a doctor. You have to leave and go and read the Qu'ran.’ The young student was arrested, and two days later appeared on television meekly repenting.

  Qaddafi's car-crash insistence on swimming against the tide soon began to irritate those around him, who were sometimes forced to engage in rapid damage-limitation exercises, mopping up the mess he had left in his wake. One could never afford to rest on one's laurels when Qaddafi was around. In 1972, while speaking at a popular rally in Tunis, the Libyan leader surprised his hosts by suddenly calling for union between the two countries. The panicked Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba, who was at home listening to a live broadcast of the speech, was forced to hurry to the rally to put the impudent newcomer in his place. The veteran Bourguiba, a heavyweight by any standards, took the microphone and, in a withering putdown, declared that the Arabs had never been united, that Qaddafi's ideas about Arab unity were misplaced, and that Libya itself was fragmented and backward.4 Although Bourguiba flirted briefly with the idea of union with Libya in 1974, the Tunisian president ultimately rejected the notion of harnessing Tunisia to Qaddafi's experimental state.

  This was no isolated case. Time and again, the Colonel's attempts to link Libya with other Arab nations, including Syria and Egypt, proved an unmitigated disaster. Yet Qaddafi was not content to accept the realities of the world around him. If others were not going to come round to his way of thinking, he was going to force change in whatever way he could – even if that meant doing so in an underhand manner. In 1976, he was accused of being behind an assassination attempt on Tunisian Prime Minister Hadi Nouira; four years later, he was accused of training a group of Tunisian rebels, who launched an attack on the mining town of Gafsa in the south of Tunisia, near the Libyan border.5 After France and the US rushed in to provide Tunis with additional military assistance, Libya permitted angry mobs to attack and burn the French embassy in Tripoli and the consulate in Benghazi. This was looking seriously like the politics of revenge.

  Similarly, after taking a personal dislike to the Moroccan king on account of his ‘royal behaviour’ at the Rabat Arab Summit in December 1969, Qaddafi voiced his support for an attempted coup by senior Moroccan army officers in July 1971, announcing on state radio that Libyan troops were ready to fly to Morocco to fight on the side of the people.

  The story in Egypt was no different. When things were not going his way, Qaddafi took to trying to foment subversion and unrest among the tribes of Egypt's western deserts. He had never got on with President Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, believing the new Egyptian leader to be unqualified to lead Egypt, let alone the Arabs. The Colonel also disapproved of Sadat's more pro-Western orientation. For his part, Sadat, who once dismissed Qaddafi as ‘a boy’, was deeply suspicious of the new regime's massive build-up of arms. Tensions reached such a point that, in July 1977, the two countries embarked on a four-day war, after the Egyptians launched ground and air raids across the border. Who would have thought that, less than a decade after the revolution, Libya would have locked horns with the state that had been its guiding light in the run-up to the coup and after it?

  Demonstrating just how much Qaddafi had already alienated others in the region, Sudan and Saudi Arabia rushed to Egypt's defence. Both states were keen to quell this new and decidedly disconcerting Libyan adventurism. Sudan, in particular, wanted to put a stop to Qaddafi, whom it accused of having trained up rebel mercenaries to launch a bloody coup against the regime in Khartoum in July 1976.

  Their efforts to subdue the young revolutionary were short-lived, and the experience did not give the Colonel pause for thought: in his desire for perpetual revolution, there was to be no space for reflection. The only way was forward, and he took to backing and bankrolling whichever movement or faction he believed would further his revolutionary objectives at any given time. Sometimes these objectives appeared utterly contradictory. Flying directly in the face of his cherished Arab nationalism, for example, he supported the Iranians in their long war against Ba'athist Iraq in the 1980s. Given that Saddam Hussein was one of the foremost Arab nationalist leaders in the region, one might have expected Libya to take the side of the Iraqi president against the non-Arab enemy. Yet for Qaddafi, the Iranian revolution's anti-Westernism and its Islamic credentials made Tehran a more worthy recipient of support than Arab Baghdad. Qaddafi also had a soft spot for the Iranian revolution of 1979, which he had supported at the time, viewing it as the first real expression of popular revolt against the West.

  Yet there was another reason why Qaddafi favoured Persian Iran over Arab Iraq: he could not abide Saddam Hussein, whom he regarded as little more than a thug. His dislike for the Iraqi leader began even before the famed Ba'athist became president. In the mid-1970s, when Saddam was still deputy president, Qaddafi had gone to Baghdad to try to convince the then Iraqi president, Ahmed Hassan Bakr, to get rid of Saddam.6 When it came to choosing sides in the Iran–Iraq war, therefore, a combination of personal considerations and blatant opportunism overrode Qaddafi's ideological concerns. These personal considerations also drove him to support the Iraqi Kurds in their struggle against the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad, making him the first (and only) Arab leader ever to champion the Kurdish cause. Although the Colonel came up with a fitting Arab nationalist pretext for supporting the Kurds – claiming that he wanted to prevent them from falling into Zionist hands7 – the real reason was to agitate against Saddam Hussein. Backing the Kurds also played into Qaddafi's quest to be the leader of revolutionary causes, and suited his penchant for supporting the oppressed against the oppressor. Arab nationalism could play second fiddle when it had to.

  However, the one Arab nationalist cause that Qaddafi remained true to throughout his rule was that of the Palestinians. That he latched onto this cause was hardly surprising: Palestine has always been the great cause célèbre of the Arab world, with nationalist regimes and opposition elements alike competing to demonstrate their commitment to it as a means of securing domestic legitimacy. Qaddafi's positing himself as the champion of the Palestinian cause was therefore predictable enough for a nationalist leader of his ilk.

  Yet there was nothing ordinary or straightforward about Qaddafi's approach to the Palestinian issue. The Colonel not only wanted to champion the cause; he wanted to be the cause – and, more importantly, to control it. To this end, he employed a typically scattergun approach, supporting a host of competing liberation groups, playing one off against the other as it suited him. Among those into which he channelled Libya's oil money were George Habbash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. He also backed the notorious Abu Nidal, leader of the Fateh – Revolutionary Council, who was accused of being behind a string of terrorist atrocities, including the bombing of Vienna and Rome airports in December 1985. His support for these more militant groups was not coincidental. While he backed factions across the board, he and his fellow revolutionaries favoured those elements that took a more radical stance, which dovetailed with their own hardline attitude towards the Israeli state. Indeed, so intent was Qaddafi on leading the struggle against the Israelis that he readily opened military camps inside Libya to train Arabs to fight against the Jewish state. He also set up a special Jihad Fund, dedicated to supporting armed struggle in the usurped Palestinian territories. Sometimes the Leader looked as though
he was trying to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.

  Qaddafi's backing of these militant factions did not preclude him from providing support to those groups that took a less hardline stance. This included Yassir Arafat's Fateh movement – the most important representative of all the Palestinian bodies. However, Qaddafi's relationship with Arafat was a turbulent one. The Colonel rejected what he believed to be Arafat's sell-out of the cause, especially following Fateh's 1974 drafting of a Ten-Point Programme that sought a peaceful resolution with Israel. For the Colonel, the Palestinian leader's stance amounted to a betrayal. As if to make his point, Qaddafi consistently supported those factions that broke away from Fateh, such as a group led by Abu Musa, which split from the movement in 1983.

  The other reason why Qaddafi came to have such stormy relations with Arafat was that he was unable to control the veteran Palestinian leader. Qaddafi seemed to believe that being paymaster meant he could manipulate the recipients of his largesse, forcing them to comply with his revolutionary vision. But Arafat proved a less than willing lackey. In the late 1970s, the Palestinian leader refused to allow Qaddafi to set up revolutionary committees among Palestinian fighters in Lebanon. A petulant Qaddafi responded by closing down Fateh's offices in Tripoli. The Colonel also expected Fateh's leaders to do his bidding. Arafat's second man, Salah Khalef, known as Abu Ayad, who had a particularly antagonistic relationship with the Colonel (not least because the Libyan leader tried to spread rumours that he was Jewish), complained: