Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  The breathtakingly long list of groups that received his support over the years represented a wide range of political persuasions. They included the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Italian and Japanese Red Brigades, the Basque separatist movement ETA, the Moro National Liberation Front of the Philippines and a host of Latin American movements, including the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. He also supported the infamous Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan who was behind the 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people and was followed by a string of attacks on Western targets. The political orientation of these groups seemed not to matter; what was important was that they were anti-imperialist. Supporting them fed into Qaddafi's image of himself as patron of the great struggle, leader of the weak against the strong.

  Qaddafi's determination to support these groups was too much for America to stomach. By mid-1976, the Ford administration had begun to suggest that Libya supported and financed international terrorism, and was refusing to sell weapons to the Libyan regime. By 1977 the Pentagon had placed Libya, along with Cuba and North Korea, on a new list of potential enemies, on the grounds of ‘irresponsible support for terrorism’ and material and political support for Palestinian guerrillas, the IRA and other terrorist groups.22

  Relations continued to be strained during President Jimmy Carter's time in the White House. Although Qaddafi had hoped that this Democrat and former peanut farmer might provide the opportunity to get relations back on a better footing, he was to be sorely mistaken. The Carter administration continued to refuse to sell military equipment to Tripoli and sided with Egypt in its 1977 skirmish with Libya.23 Things were to get worse: Carter's sponsoring of the Camp David Accords in September 1978 was anathema to Qaddafi, while Washington, already unhappy with Libya's intervention in Uganda in 1978, accused the Libyan government of not doing enough to protect its embassy in Tripoli, which was sacked and burnt by angry crowds during the Iranian hostage crisis of December 1979.

  However, it was under the presidency of Ronald Reagan (whom Qaddafi loved to dismiss as a ‘second-rate actor’ who read not books, but ‘cheap Hollywood scenarios’) that US–Libyan relations deteriorated almost to the point of no return. From the outset of his presidency in 1981, the hawkish Reagan was convinced that the man he famously went on to label the ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ was little more than a Soviet puppet who should be eliminated.24 Wherever he saw Qaddafi, Reagan saw Soviet hands. This was all the more worrying for the US president, who came to power intent on rebuilding American influence in the Middle East and Africa, where Qaddafi was meddling right, left and centre.

  Reagan was also deeply anxious over Qaddafi's backing of revolutionary movements and regimes the world over. Some of this support was getting alarmingly close; in the early 1980s Qaddafi had taken to providing economic and political support to a number of left-wing regimes in Central America, including in El Salvador and Nicaragua. As far as Reagan was concerned, Qaddafi was working against US interests in every conceivable way.

  The president decided to act quickly. Four months after taking office, he closed the Libyan People's Bureau (embassy) in Washington and broke off diplomatic ties with Libya. In November 1981, he ruled that Libyan diplomats to the United Nations were to be restricted to a twenty-five mile radius of the UN headquarters in New York. More seriously, Reagan proved willing to use force against the ‘pariah’ Qaddafi: in August 1981, the US shot down two Libyan planes in the Gulf of Sirte, following a disagreement over sovereignty of the bay.25 The provocative assault on what the Colonel deemed to be his own territory outraged Qaddafi, who used the attack as one of the justifications for the mass militarization of Libyan society that began the same year.

  The Gulf of Sirte attack, US media reports that Reagan wished to see Qaddafi assassinated, US support for Libyan opposition groups abroad – none of these had the desired effect on the mercurial Libyan leader. He refused to alter the direction of his foreign policy and continued to support whichever groups he believed would further his ambitious objectives of being the champion of revolutions everywhere. The visionary from the desert was not going to kow-tow to anyone, least of all the leader of the Western world. Indeed, the higher the stakes, the more Qaddafi, with his restless revolutionary spirit, seemed to rise to the challenge and to positively revel in his provocative behaviour.

  However, Qaddafi did not understand that he was up against a man who was almost as extreme as he was. Reagan became almost as ideological about getting rid of Qaddafi as Qaddafi was about standing up to him, and he singled the Colonel out as the major threat to the Western world, declaring in 1986: ‘Qaddafi deserves to be treated as a pariah in the world community.’26 The US president also accused the Libyans of complicity in a host of terrorist attacks, including the seizure of an Egypt Air jet in November 1985, in which fifty-nine people were killed, and the December 1985 attacks on Vienna and Rome airports by the Abu Nidal group. Although Qaddafi certainly had ties with the extremist Abu Nidal group, there was no concrete evidence at the time of actual Libyan involvement in the attacks. However, by this point there was a growing body of opinion within the Reagan administration – including Secretary of State George Shultz – that the only way to deal with this rogue state was by military force.

  Although force was not yet an option for Reagan, he was determined to make Qaddafi pay for his foreign adventurism. In March 1982, the US imposed an embargo on oil imports from Libya and introduced export licence requirements for all US goods destined for the country, except for food, medicine and medical supplies. This was a major blow to Qaddafi, whose revenues were cut by a third overnight. However, the situation was not disastrous: European importers readily stepped in to fill the gap. Indeed, many European countries, which relied heavily on Libyan oil supplies, favoured a more pragmatic approach towards the unpredictable colonel and criticized Reagan's dogged determination to corner him at any cost.

  Such criticism was not limited to Europe; Reagan had his fair share of critics in the US, who accused him of picking on Libya because it was a soft target. As one observer wrote,

  The despicable Qaddafi was a perfect target, a cartoon character Americans loved to hate … Libya was neither strategically nor militarily formidable. Taking Qaddafi on was the counterterrorism equivalent of invading Grenada – popular, relatively safe, and theatrically satisfying.27

  Furthermore, in many ways Reagan was helping to build the myth of the Colonel, propelling his influence and importance far beyond what he could ever have achieved himself. It is surely ironic that the man who put Qaddafi on the map was the man who sought to bring him down.

  Such criticisms had little impact on this most hawkish of presidents. In November 1985, his administration banned all imports of Libyan petroleum products; the following year it froze Libyan assets in the US and stopped providing loans and credits to the country. It also prohibited all financial transactions between US and Libyan citizens. However, it was in 1986 that Reagan found his justification for teaching Qaddafi a lesson he would not forget. In the early hours of the morning of 5 April, a bomb placed under a table near the disc jockey's booth exploded at the La Belle disco in West Berlin. The club was popular with US servicemen posted nearby, and the attack killed two US personnel and one Turkish woman, and injured scores more. The US rushed to blame Libya, asserting that intercepted messages between Tripoli and agents in Europe made it clear that Qaddafi had been the brains behind the attack. Just ten days later, Reagan took his revenge.

  At 2 a.m. on 15 April 1986, eighteen US F-111 bombers that had taken off from bases in the UK dropped sixty tons of munitions on a range of Libyan targets, including a Tripoli airfield, a naval academy and Qaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya compound. Some of the bombs missed their targets, hitting residential areas, a centre for the disabled, and some foreign embassies. A number of civilians were killed in the attack – supposedly including Qaddafi's four-year-old adopted daughter, Hana, although there have been repeated alleged sightings of Hana in rec
ent years.

  The Colonel himself narrowly escaped death. Although Jalloud maintains that Qaddafi was hiding out in one of his underground bunkers, the Leader claimed to have been at home in bed at the time of the attack. The Libyans had, in fact, been warned of the attacks one or two days in advance by Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who had sent word via the Libyan embassy in Rome. However, the bombing still seems to have taken the Colonel by surprise. He asked a US reporter after the raids: ‘Why didn't you tell me they were going to bomb my home?’28 Qaddafi's son, Saif Al-Islam, who was fourteen years old at the time of the attack, remembered the close call the family had had:

  It was a very difficult night. I was asleep; the bombing started approximately 40 km away from us. I went quickly to my sister Aisha and then hastened to wake everyone up and I took them, one by one to the shelter. After that the bombing reached where we lived. If I hadn't done what I did, I don't know what would have happened.29

  The bombing was a sharp wake-up call for Qaddafi in more ways than one. For all his provocations, the Libyan leader never believed the Americans would go so far as actually to strike Libya, yet alone to hit his own Bab Al-Aziziya compound. More importantly, the raids demonstrated to the Colonel that, despite the massive military arsenal he had been building up since the start of the revolution, when it came to it, he was unable to defend himself. His military, already destroyed and disheartened by the failed adventures in Chad, proved useless: Libyan guns opened fire ten minutes after the raid had started, when most of the planes were already on their way home, and terrified military officers fled their posts at the crucial hour.30 Even more humiliating was the desperate attempt at retaliation: fifteen hours after the attacks, the Libyans launched two Soviet-built missiles at the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, 290 kilometres north of Libya. The missiles both failed to hit their target – a US Coast Guard radar navigation installation on the island – dropping pathetically into the sea.

  To make matters worse, there were rumours of power struggles being played out in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, with speculation about prolonged gun battles and possible coup attempts. Although much of this appears to have been overplayed, not least by the Americans, who were jubilantly announcing to the world that elements of an army battalion had attempted a mutiny, there certainly appears to have been, in the words of one Western diplomat, ‘a manoeuvring and testing after the US attack’.31

  Of greater note was the fact that the US raid also highlighted just how far the Colonel had isolated himself. No one rushed to his defence. It was as if all Qaddafi's foreign policy exploits of the previous decade and a half had come back to haunt him at one fell swoop. Even at this time of crisis, his fellow Arab leaders stood back. Although there were popular demonstrations against the attacks in some Arab capitals, and although a handful of Arab leaders issued condemnations of the bombing, there was no unified response, nor any hint of practical measures being taken against the West. Worse for the Brother Leader, there was no real mobilization against the attacks inside Libya itself. The Colonel must have hoped for some outpourings of popular support for the revolution, but these never materialized. In fact, in the days following the attacks, state television was forced to air reruns of a 1977 rally in Derna, although this was eventually replaced by broadcasts of a defiant and upbeat Qaddafi, sporting a white suit and clutching a handful of pink flowers, as he visited the injured in hospital.

  Two months later, when the immediate panic had died down, there were still no signs of public support for the Leader in his time of adversity. Jalloud recounts how, on the anniversary of the expulsion of US forces in June 1986, he and Qaddafi went by car to the celebrations that had been organized at the former US airbase, just outside Tripoli: ‘We found no large crowd at the celebrations. There were [the Palestinian leaders] Abu Musa and Ahmed Jibril, but the number of Libyans attending was very small.’32

  Yet if Reagan hoped that the raids would precipitate the end of the Qaddafi era, he was to be sorely disappointed. The Leader responded to the challenge like a wounded lion whose roar would not be silenced. He stepped up his verbal assaults against the US. In September 1986, for example, while attending the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Harare, the Colonel lambasted the US in the most strident of tones. Cutting a dashing figure in his red high-necked shirt and flowing robes, he declared that he would form an international army of tens of thousands of troops, which he would ‘spread all over the continents of the world to put fire under the feet of the United States’.33 In a similar vein, in a speech to the General People's Congress in 1987, he threatened that he would unleash freedom fighters, who would become martyrs in the struggle against the US and Britain. At the same time he proclaimed: ‘The Yankees have no morals; they have no conscience. They should not be treated as humans. They constitute a threat to the future of mankind.’34 He called on every Libyan to help defend their nation by spending LYD 200 ($600) on a Kalashnikov. This was the Colonel at his theatrical best.

  Somewhat ironically, what the US did through the bombings was to hand Qaddafi a symbol that he could draw on time and time again, as proof of his long-held insistence that the West was out to humiliate, subjugate and crush the Arabs. Qaddafi routinely took journalists and visitors to the bombsite at Bab Al-Aziziya, where he erected a grotesque statue of an enormous gold fist crushing a US fighter plane. It is no coincidence that when the NATO raids began in 2011, Qaddafi delivered a number of speeches from the highly symbolic site. After Tripoli fell, rebel forces from Misarata carted the great gold fist off to their hometown, erecting it there as a war trophy.

  Bravado aside, the 1986 attacks were a sobering reflection on what seventeen years of foreign policy Qaddafi-style had reaped. Libya was held up to the world as the ultimate example of a pariah state, and the country was left more isolated than ever. For all Qaddafi's cherished dreams of unity and greatness, by the mid-1980s he had locked the country into a seemingly never-ending downward spiral. As ever, it was the ordinary Libyans who were to carry the burden.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jamahiriyah in Crisis

  Two months after the US raid of 1986, an already unnerved Qaddafi had another startling experience. He and Jalloud travelled to the tiny village of Harawa, in the scrubby deserts near the Colonel's birthplace of Sirte. The two revolutionaries sat with the sheikhs of the powerful Awlad Suleiman tribal confederation. After sharing a convivial lunch, the sheikhs brought a five-year-old girl to the Colonel. Plucking up all her courage, the girl stepped forward to tell the Brother Leader: ‘Uncle Muammar … for the last five years I haven't eaten a single apple.’1 More ominously, one of the sheikhs then warned: ‘Oh Muammar … if we told you that ten or fifteen per cent of Libyans are with you, we would be lying to you. So be careful.’2

  This was shocking stuff for the Colonel, who still believed that his Jamahiriyah was the pinnacle of all human achievement; all the more so because he was on home ground, in staunch pro-Qaddafi territory. Yet Libyans had good reason to be disillusioned. Their leader had transformed Libya into an international pariah, shunned by governments the world over. He had also turned the country upside down with his relentless revolutionary experimentation: Libya was enveloped by chaos, and all semblance of normality had become little more than a distant memory. Fear and intimidation had also become part of daily life, with Libyans afraid that the scruffy young zealots of the revolutionary committees would emerge out of the shadows at any moment to haul them off to an uncertain fate.

  The country was also facing growing economic difficulties: the US sanctions that had been imposed a few years before were beginning to take their toll, as was the fallout from the global decline in oil prices. With prices dropping from $26.92 per barrel in 1985 to $14.44 per barrel in 1986, revenues had dropped significantly, creating serious budget shortfalls.3 With all their inexperience, Libya's young revolutionaries did not know how to deal with the problem. In a panic, they adopted a series of rash measures: they ran down foreign currency
reserves, temporarily suspended the payment of trade debts, slashed imports and tried to swap oil for imported goods.4

  These short-sighted policies had a direct impact on the Libyans. The decrease in imports was particularly painful – the already sparse state supermarkets now had even fewer goods on display. A journalist visiting in 1986 found that the entire ground-floor food section of one of these surreal monuments to Qaddafi's economic vision stocked only ghee and powdered milk.5 Another visitor to the country in 1987 found that state supermarkets in Ajdabia and Sirte carried little other than enormous quantities of Dutch milk powder, Italian suits and Chinese tea.6 Indeed, these state outlets had become as tired as the revolution itself; so much so that illegal traders had taken to setting up shop inside these cavernous symbols of progress. Egyptian traders could be found amidst the dust-caked shelves, broken-down escalators and empty aisles of the local supermarket in Tripoli's Souq Al-Juma district, for example. On sale underneath the portraits of a grinning President Hosni Mubarak were Egyptian-manufactured Philips light-bulbs, air freshener and furniture polish.7 Meanwhile, just making ends meet was becoming more difficult for ordinary Libyans; salaries were still low and were regularly paid late, medicines were in short supply and the cost of goods on the black market was rocketing. Things were so bad that some army officers were reduced to hawking onions in hotels in the evenings just to get by.

  Qaddafi may have been totally wrapped up in revolutionary fervour, but he was astute enough to feel the tension in the air. Nor could he ignore the sporadic attacks that were being carried out against his security apparatus. These included the killing in 1987 of powerful revolutionary committee stalwart Ahmed Al-Werfelli, who was hated in particular because he routinely prevented vegetables from reaching the inhabitants of Benghazi, as a kind of siege against the population there. The gap between the regime and the masses was getting wider, and Qaddafi knew it. Indeed, even if he believed that the problem was not with his perfect vision, but with its implementation, in his heart of hearts he knew that the sheikh's sobering warning rang true.