Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  Qaddafi was also concerned about the growing cooperation between opposition groups outside the country, and, more importantly, about their links to the United States. In April 1988, a senior army officer, Colonel Khafter, who had defected during the Chad war and who was now receiving a supply of arms from Baghdad, announced that he and his band of loyal followers were joining forces with the NFSL – a movement that had ties to the US intelligence services. Despite all his efforts to silence the opposition abroad, Qaddafi was still unable to tame this beast that ate right into his deeply embedded sense of paranoia.

  Faced with this host of challenges, the Colonel had to act. For all his restless revolutionary spirit, Qaddafi was shrewd and practical enough to know that he had to make some concessions to his uncompromising vision, if he was going to ensure the survival of his Jamahiriyah. Presumably influenced by the perestroika that was under way in the Soviet Union, Qaddafi decided to embark upon his first flirtation with reform. It was time for another revolution within his revolution. The first targets of this shake-up were the revolutionary committees. Aware that the brutal excesses of this movement had got completely out of hand, the Colonel sought to rein in its members. Among other things, he dissolved the reviled revolutionary courts that had enabled these ideologues to act with almost total impunity, replacing them with the slightly less ominous ‘people's courts’.

  More importantly, however, Qaddafi took to distancing himself from the movement. He began publicly criticizing the young ideologues, whom he used to refer to as the new prophets and who had spent the past decade doing his dirty work for him. In May 1988, he acknowledged publicly: ‘They deviated in conduct or in ideology. Especially in their conduct … They deviated, harmed, tortured … No one has immunity … at all if he has deviated. The revolutionary does not practice repression.’8 Unwilling to condemn the philosophy behind the movement, which he declared was still ‘one hundred per cent correct’, the Colonel laid the blame on the revolutionaries themselves. It was they who, in the words of one senior Libyan official, had ‘distorted the revolution’.9 This way, Qaddafi could portray himself as a paternalistic saviour figure, rescuing the Libyans from the excesses that his Jamahiriyah had unleashed in some of its most ideologically committed followers.

  As if to hammer the point home, Qaddafi accompanied the reining in of these forces with a series of highly theatrical gestures. On 3 March 1988, in front of a crowd of diplomats and supporters who had been summoned to Tripoli's Furnash prison, the Colonel climbed onto a bulldozer and began ramming the gaol's iron gate. The demolition job did not go quite to plan and the scene unfolded rather like a farce: the gate would not give way, and so Qaddafi started ramming the prison wall instead. When the barbed wire-topped wall finally collapsed, it did so outwards, forcing the gathered diplomats to beat an unseemly retreat in clouds of dust, and causing a faulty sewage pipe to rupture.10 Four hundred prisoners clambered out of the prison to freedom, as the Colonel proudly proclaimed: ‘Peoples don't triumph through building prisons and raising their walls even higher.’11

  A few days later, the Brother Leader appeared on state television at the immigration office, personally tearing up the blacklists of people who had been prohibited from travelling abroad. He announced, too, that Libyans would no longer need exit visas to leave the country. To demonstrate the point, he clambered up onto his bulldozer again and set about demolishing a security post at Ras Al-Jadir on the Tunisian border. As if to cement these changes, Qaddafi penned a new treatise, the Great Green Charter of Human Rights in the Era of the Masses, which was issued by the General People's Congress in June 1988. While this charter may have contained noble clauses about the sanctity of human rights, in essence it was another meaningless tract, amounting to little more than a reaffirmation of the basic principles of the Jamahiriyah system.

  While Qaddafi's changes on the political front consisted primarily of showy gimmicks, the Leader did take more concrete steps in the economic sphere. In a televised speech in March 1987, he introduced a series of new directives that represented a backtracking on the socialist-style economic policies he had implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among these directives was a new ruling that enabled Libyans to become partners in small businesses through a system of tasharaqiat (cooperatives). What this meant was that anyone who owned a small concern, such as a farm, could now hire workers, so long as the profits were shared equally between the owners and the workers. This was a welcome move for many. Even Qaddafi could see the utter ludicrousness of some of his earlier economic directives. In a speech aired on state television in 1987, the Brother Leader described how, during a two-month stint in the countryside, he had come across a once prosperous farm that had fallen into disrepair when its owners became too old to work.12 With both sons having left home, the couple had no choice but to let the farm fall into decline because, under the regime's insistence that wages were a form of exploitation, they were prohibited from employing workers who could look after the farm's upkeep. As the farm deteriorated in front of their eyes, the couple had to claim handouts from the state in order to survive. Under the new directives, anyone in the same position as this couple would be able to bring workers in as part of a cooperative – provided they could all share in the rewards.13

  Qaddafi also understood the pressing need to sort out the problem of consumer shortages. As he rather ineloquently expressed it,

  People queuing for macaroni is something which does not belong to socialism or revolution and there is no benefit in it … The revolution never says there should be queues for macaroni in Libya. How can one who went to the market say ‘I have returned without macaroni?’ I have made studies in the past two months. I went to the market and I returned without macaroni … The Libyans … have money and cannot find anything to buy.14

  Qaddafi's solution was to reopen the doors to private trade. Law No. 8 of 1988 abolished the state's monopoly over imports and exports, enabling Libyans to set up shop once again. This was a major U-turn for the Colonel who, just a few years before, had so relentlessly dismantled the country's entire merchant class, although, in typically Qaddafiesque manner, he singled out the elderly, the physically handicapped, widows and divorced women, and those who were on social security or who were unemployed as the most fitting to engage in such activities. Meanwhile, coffee-shops, restaurants and hotels could now be established privately; doctors, lawyers and other professionals were also allowed to practise privately, although the state still set the fees they were allowed to charge.15

  The Colonel continued, too, to make space for the black market. The parallel economy was an important, albeit expensive, means for Libyans to acquire basic goods that they could not access through state distribution networks. Qaddafi was not about to clamp down on this important outlet. Yet, while turning a blind eye to black-market activities as a vent for public pressure may not have been that unusual for an authoritarian regime facing tough times, Qaddafi went further. The quixotic Colonel actively sought to turn the black market to the service of his revolution. In a speech to the revolutionary committees in 1988, he declared:

  You may think that black-markets are negative. On the contrary. As far as we are concerned as revolutionaries they show that the people spontaneously take a decision and without the government make something which they need; they establish a black-market because they need it … What are black-markets? They are people's markets.16

  Those officials in charge of steering Libya's economy must have been left scratching their heads.

  On the surface at least, these laws began to change the face of the Jamahiriyah. The rows of small private shops began to raise their regulation green shutters once again, and farming initiatives could now sell direct to the people. Libyans were also able once more to get their hands on consumer goods: razor blades, light-bulbs and other such luxuries reappeared on the market. However, this private sector activity remained limited; Libyans, who had witnessed the large-scale confiscation of businesses in the
1970s, were not about to risk getting their fingers burnt again. Moreover, there was no push by the regime to actually create a more dynamic and sustainable private sector that went beyond the retail, service and import and export sectors. This was hardly surprising: as in the political sphere, the changes were not meant to be truly transformative; the Colonel had simply made space for the private sector to step in and plug the consumer shortages.17 This whole reformist effort was just the Colonel's way of extricating himself from an immediate socio-economic crisis.

  While plastering over the cracks may have been a way for Qaddafi to ease the domestic pressures that were biting at the end of the 1980s, the 1990s were to bring a much more sustained set of challenges, which plunged Libya into the most extreme of circumstances and which were to require more creative responses.

  The roots of this crisis go back to 21 December 1988, when a Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) flight on its way from London to New York exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers on board, as well as eleven people on the ground. For the first two years after the bombing, the investigation focused on Iran, which, it was believed, had hired the Syrian-sponsored Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to carry out the attack in revenge for the US's downing in July 1988 of a civilian Iranian Airbus over the Strait of Hormuz – an action that had killed 290 passengers. However, attention turned to Libya in 1990, after it was discovered that a computer chip lodged in the bomb's detonator matched parts in ten detonators that had been found on two Libyans who had been arrested in Senegal in 1988. Furthermore, the same type of detonator and the same kind of Samsonite suitcase used in the Lockerbie bombing had also been used in an attack on a French UTA airliner that was brought down over the deserts of Niger on 19 September 1989, purportedly at Libyan hands.

  In November 1991, the US and Britain charged two Libyan citizens, Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah with the Lockerbie bombing. The former was head of security at the Libyan Arab Airlines office at Luqa airport in Malta, and the latter was a security agent. Both men had been identified by a Maltese shopkeeper, Toni Gauci, who claimed he remembered selling them clothes that had been found in the suitcase which contained the bomb. Investigators determined that the device had travelled in the suitcase from Malta to Frankfurt, then onto London, where it was put on the Pan Am flight at Heathrow. London and Washington immediately demanded that the two suspects be handed over for trial in Scotland or the US.

  Qaddafi was outraged. He insisted that Libya had had nothing to do with the attack, asserting: ‘The evidence against Libya is less than a laughable piece of a fingernail.’18 He scornfully claimed that the indictment against Al-Megrahi was a case of mistaken identity, while Fhimah was just ‘a simple person who has nothing to do with politics or with the secret services’.19 Predictably enough, this was a position that the Colonel was to hold throughout his time in power. However, he was not the only one to question the allegations against Libya. A full discussion of this issue lies outside the scope of this book; however, there is a body of opinion which contends that there has never been sufficient evidence to conclude that Al-Megrahi – or even Libya – was solely behind the plot.20 This includes Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died in the attack.

  While we will probably never be able to piece together the events that led up to the bombing, if one is to believe Libya's former foreign affairs secretary (minister), Abdelrahman Shalgam, there are serious questions to be raised about Libya's role in it. Following his defection in 2011, Shalgam, who readily acknowledged that the Libyan intelligence services had been behind the UTA bombing, told the Al-Hayat newspaper: ‘Lockerbie was a complex and complicated process. At the time there was talk about the role of countries and organizations. The Libyan security was party to it but I believe that it wasn't purely Libyan made.’21 While Shalgam admitted that all his attempts to open an investigation into the affair inside Libya during his time as foreign affairs secretary were met with a stony response from the upper echelons of the regime, he was clear that, even among his closest confidants, Qaddafi always insisted that Libya was not responsible for the atrocity.

  Thus, Qaddafi viewed the whole affair as a political move by the imperialist powers to curtail his Jamahiriyah. All the more so as, on 27 November 1991, the British and Americans issued a joint declaration demanding not only that Libya surrender for trial those charged with the crime, but also that it accept responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials, disclose all it knew of the crime, allow full access to the evidence, and pay appropriate compensation. Despite the fact that the trial had not yet taken place, this statement seemed to be a strong assumption of guilt.

  Yet for Qaddafi, the issue went far beyond the political; it was personal. The Colonel was utterly convinced that the imperialist powers were out to get him and that they would stop at nothing. As the general secretary of the General People's Committee, Abu Zeid Dorda, announced when the indictment was issued, ‘The prime target of the United States is Colonel Gaddafi in person and as a regime because he never accepted to bow to its threats and pressures.’22

  For all his fears, the Colonel rose to the challenge with typical aplomb; like a cobra rearing up and spreading its neck, Qaddafi unleashed another tide of populist venom against the ‘corrupt’ Western powers:

  The issue is not Pan-Am, Lockerbie or even Kuwait. The West wants to enlist its capabilities to destroy the Arab nation so that the state called Israel, the West's creation, dominates the Arabs, because there is an historic racist attitude towards them from Andalusia, the Roman conquests, the crusades and from Western neo-colonialism and the establishment of Israel.23

  Indeed, Qaddafi used the Lockerbie issue to portray himself as the wronged victim of Western aggression and the heroic champion of Arabs and oppressed peoples everywhere.

  There was no way that the restless revolutionary was going to simply roll over and comply with Western demands to hand the suspects over. Taking the role of defender of the two men, Qaddafi declared: ‘the Libyan people would say, “these two men are our compatriots … You cannot take them and give them to another country … We are not sheep that he [Qaddafi] would dispose of us in this way, handing two, three or four of us out.” ’24 His comments were not far off the mark. For all that Libyans may not have supported Qaddafi, most were deeply uncomfortable with the idea of surrendering two of their countrymen to the US and Britain like lambs to the slaughter. Moreover, Al-Megrahi came from an important Libyan tribe – the Megraha – that had proved a loyal ally of the regime. The Megraha were also the tribe of Qaddafi's right-hand man, Abdelsalam Jalloud – something that only added to the pressures on Qaddafi to resist demands for the men to be handed over.

  In the months that followed the November 1991 indictment, Libya, Britain and the US locked horns in a period of intense diplomatic wrangling.25 As Washington and London tightened the screws and talk of sanctions became increasingly commonplace, a desperate Qaddafi tried to avoid crisis by coming up with face-saving ways of making it look as though Libya was willing to cooperate. First, he proposed that Libya would try the two men itself – a suggestion that was quickly dismissed by Britain and the US. Then, in February 1992, terrified of the prospect of sanctions, the Colonel informed the UN that he would consider handing the two men over for trial in a third country, such as a fellow Arab state or Malta. He also made a series of conciliatory gestures: he announced that Libya would comply with French demands over the UTA affair, and that it would sever relations with terrorist groups that targeted innocent civilians. Tripoli even went as far as to share details of its past support for the IRA with the British government.26 Who could have imagined that the fiery world revolutionary of the early 1980s would have bent to such a degree?

  But at that point Britain and the US were having none of it, and, along with France (which was still trying to get Libya to comply with its demands over the UTA bombing), brought the issue before the UN Security Council. On 31 March 1
992, Qaddafi's worst fears were realized: the UN Security Council passed Resolution 748, which instructed member states to impose sanctions on Libya. The embargo covered a host of prohibitions: air links were to be cut, the supply of parts or servicing to Libyan aircraft was to be banned, and the provision of arms-related material, advice and assistance was to be prohibited. Member states were also to reduce levels of Libyan diplomatic representation and to ban all Libyan Arab Airlines offices from operating on their soil. Furthermore, they were to expel or deny entry to all Libyan nationals suspected of terrorist involvement. A special sanctions committee was formed that was tasked with reviewing the measures in the resolution every 120 days. This committee was to prove a special source of anxiety for the Libyans, who, at the end of each review period, feared that the sanctions regime would be tightened. Things got even worse the following November, when the Security Council passed Resolution 883, which provided for the freezing of Libyan assets abroad and banned the export to Libya of selected equipment for downstream operations in the energy sector.

  Luckily for Qaddafi, however, the embargo was not as devastating as it could have been. Against the wishes of the US, the sanctions did not prohibit Libya from exporting oil. This was because a number of European states, especially Italy, Spain and Germany – all keen importers of Libyan energy supplies – lobbied hard to ensure that Tripoli could continue to sell its most valuable resource. Ironically, Libya produced and exported more oil in the 1990s than it did in the decade before. In 1989, for example, it produced 940,000 barrels per day, whereas by 1995 this figure had risen to 1.130 million barrels.27 Furthermore, although the freezing of its assets was a major setback, Libya had anticipated the move and shrewdly moved many of its liquid assets into safe havens before the UN resolution came into force.28 Therefore, while the imposition of international sanctions was a serious blow, in financial terms it was not crippling – at least in the early days.