Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  Such arguments between father and son were not unusual. As Saif Al-Islam explained, even from his childhood, ‘If I were to upset him [Qaddafi], he would not speak to me or see me for a full month. That is why his psychological punishment was more severe than physical punishment.’65 Yet the constitution episode reflected the fact that, regardless of his ambitions, Saif Al-Islam's reformist project was always going to be constrained by his father. As he acknowledged in August 2007, there were four lines in Libya that could not be crossed: Islam and the application of sharia law; the security and stability of Libya; national unity; and, most importantly, Muammar Qaddafi. While Qaddafi senior was willing for Saif Al-Islam to be the reformist face of the regime, he was not about to give him free rein to do as he pleased. So long as there was Qaddafi, there would be a Jamahiriyah.

  Yet the big unknown that was increasingly coming to preoccupy those inside and outside Libya was for how long there would be a Qaddafi. Although he was not yet old – and though he may have believed himself to be immortal – even the Brother Leader could not go on forever. The Colonel never spelled out what he wanted to happen after he died or was forced into retirement. However, it was clear to all and sundry that the stage was being set for some kind of hereditary hand-down of power. It was also clear that Saif Al-Islam was the most likely candidate to take over. Though that is not to say that some of his brothers were not vying for the position of heir apparent; Moatassim, in particular, who had become the darling of the old guard on account of his hardline stance, was keen to muscle in on the scene. However, it was generally presumed that Saif Al-Islam was being groomed to take up the reins when his father eventually gave up the ghost. The favoured son already had large sections of the country in his hands, both in the political and economic sphere. It was he, for example, who had brought Baghdadi Mahmoudi to the post of general secretary in 2006, and according to his brother Saadi, by the time of the uprisings of 2011, he was all but ‘running the country’.66

  Saif Al-Islam always rejected the suggestion that he was being groomed to take over, repeatedly condemning other states, such as Syria, for going down the dynastic route. Yet one could not help noticing that Saif Al-Islam seemed to be preparing himself for power. He was making a concerted effort to consolidate his position within the country, courting key tribal leaders and members of the security services, while simultaneously trying to sideline the revolutionary committees and regime ideologues. As one Libyan who worked with him closely explained, ‘Saif was obsessed by the desire to shake up the traditional balance of power and to put an end to the mobilization of the revolutionary committees.’67 He even made special efforts to court the east, reaching out a hand to try to heal the decades of bad blood, including by announcing the establishment of a large eco-tourism project in the Green Mountains – another project that failed to get off the ground.

  What was noticeable, too, was that Saif Al-Islam increasingly came to replicate his father. As he grew in confidence, the Leader's son moved to create a personality cult of his own. He took to holding his own annual celebration on 20 August, and, just as his father insisted that he had no formal position and was merely the leader of the revolution, so Saif Al-Islam kept repeating that he was simply leader of Libya's civil society. For all his talk of democracy, like his father he held no official position that could render him accountable, yet he was moving everything behind the scenes. Furthermore, just as the Jamahiriyah revolved around one man, so the whole reformist initiative revolved around Saif Al-Islam; without him it had no momentum of its own.

  This personality cult became all the more pronounced when Saif Al-Islam triumphantly brought home the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi, from the UK on 20 August 2009. This gave the impression that the Leader's son was able to move mountains. Saif Al-Islam seems to have interpreted the whole event as some kind of divine intervention, declaring: ‘I told them that I would get Abdelbasset out on 20 August and I told them that if he left the prison on 20 August this would be a sign from Allah that I am walking on the right and correct path … Even this date is a message from Allah.’68

  Saif Al-Islam also seemed to share his father's desire to be seen as something more than simply a politician. The young Qaddafi, who listed painting as one of his hobbies, took his ‘works of art’ on a prolonged global touring exhibition. Despite the comments of one art critic, who acerbically observed that Saif Al-Islam's ‘sentimentality is only exceeded by his technical incapacity’,69 these exhibitions were extravagant affairs, at which no expense was spared. The opening of the London exhibition in 2002, held in an enormous tent in the grounds of the Albert Hall, was a spectacle to behold: the pink champagne flowed all evening, guests were entertained with traditional Libyan music and dancing, and a white-suited Saif Al-Islam, sporting gleaming leopard-skin shoes, gave a guided tour of his works.

  However, one way in which father and son differed was that Qaddafi senior retained a kind of purity until the very end. Qaddafi was always the Bedouin of the desert, true to his roots, who shunned ostentatious wealth and the trappings of the westernized life. Perpetual revolution was his enduring passion. Even as he grew older, his appetite for extending his revolution showed no signs of diminishing, as he expended more and more effort on promoting himself and his ideas. The Colonel could be found presiding over enormous ‘conversion to Islam’ ceremonies in Africa, where he also took to courting traditional leaders – unlike the governments of the continent, these people gave him the respect and adoration he had always craved. In 2008, two hundred traditional leaders gathered to crown the Colonel ‘King of Kings’.

  In contrast, Saif Al-Islam, like the rest of his siblings, increasingly indulged in amassing wealth. The Leader's children all used Libya's new relative openness to the West to build enormous financial empires of their own. Despite his populist calls to clamp down on the country's ‘fat cats’, Saif Al-Islam was behind a mind-boggling array of business ventures – from the health sector to the aviation industry to the energy sector. In the early days, much of the business was channelled through his One Nine Investment company. He was also the driver of many of the ambitious development projects that the regime embarked upon in its last years – several of them totally unsuited to Libya's needs. Mohamed Zeidan, who was transport minister under Qaddafi, described how Saif Al-Islam and his ally, General Secretary Baghdadi Mahmoudi, were behind plans to build a new airport in Tripoli that would have a capacity of 20 million passengers a year and would cost some $2 billion. When Zeidan suggested that this was excessive and that a capacity of 8 million passengers would be sufficient, the project was promptly taken away from him and handed to a specially created ‘Body for Implementing Transport Projects’. The former minister reflected that his suggestions had been rejected because ‘the important thing was to sign the contract … the bigger the contract, the bigger the commission’.70

  Such stories were typical. It seemed to matter little whether these big contracts were for anything that the Libyan people – who were still struggling to make ends meet – might actually want or need. The population at large had no use for the flashy showcase government buildings or new port that were being planned, or for the towering new hotels that were springing up at breakneck speed (and that would bring yet more Westerners to Libya and further line the pockets of the rich). What Libyans wanted was services, affordable housing and jobs. As one man commented after Saif Al-Islam initiated a highly publicized and ill thought-through scheme to provide a million laptops to schoolchildren, ‘I don't think a Libyan needs a mobile or a laptop whilst his feet are wading through sewage.’71

  But Saif Al-Islam and his siblings were intent on carving up the whole country between themselves, with little thought for the consequences. Qaddafi's eldest son from his first marriage, Mohamed, had the entire communications sector in his pocket, controlling Libya's two mobile telephone companies and a host of other businesses. As Shalgam noted, ‘Mohamed was specialized in making lots of money. He was one of th
e richest men in Libya.’72 Hannibal (famous for getting Libya embroiled in a major diplomatic spat with Switzerland after he and his Lebanese model wife were accused of abusing two members of their domestic staff) controlled the maritime transport sector. Saadi, who was head of Special Forces, controlled the sports sector, but also had a raft of business interests, especially in the construction and car hire sectors. Moatassim and Khamis – both army men – also made small fortunes in their own way. Qaddafi's only daughter, Aisha, was also engaged in a series of business ventures, some of them through her Watasimu charity. Wherever there was a business in Libya, nine times out of ten it was a safe bet that one of the Qaddafi children had a hand in it somewhere.

  In acquiring these businesses, they often ran roughshod over senior officials. Moatassim was appointed Libya's national security commissioner in the mid-2000s. This entitled him to be present at meetings of the General People's Committee, where he would regularly insult the ministers present. He also used to demand that NOC head Shukri Ghanem should give him oil fields,73 and on one occasion he even sought to take over the NOC building for himself. Ghanem bravely rejected his demand, declaring that he would cut off his own hand before giving up the building. Moatassim is also believed to have assaulted Musa Kusa after the two clashed over some aspect of the security portfolio.

  Saif Al-Islam likewise had a habit of insulting officials when it suited him. Shalgam complained how, on one occasion, the favoured son openly attacked one of Libya's ambassadors, dismissing him as a ‘backwards child’.74 Yet there was little these officials could do beyond complaining to the father – the Colonel himself.

  As if dividing up the country in this way was not enough of an insult, the children took to frittering away Libya's money on vulgar displays of wealth and on lifestyles that were completely alien to the socially conservative Libyan population. Libyans were horrified at the stories and photos that appeared on the internet of wild, alcohol-fuelled parties in the Caribbean or other such destinations, where the Qaddafi boys could be seen cavorting with women on luxury yachts, or paying top Western stars (such as Beyonce, or the rapper 50 Cent) vast sums of money to perform for them. Even Aisha's engagement party was far removed from the simple Bedouin lifestyle that her father had always lauded: dressed in an expensive white suit, she and her fiancé sipped champagne and canoodled to Western-style pop music. The children's spouses were at it, too: Hannibal's wife even chartered a private jet for her dog, so that it could be brought back to Libya from Beirut.75

  While Qaddafi did not like his children's behaviour (and often backed his officials when they complained to him about it), he seemed unable to control them. This revolutionary, who had come to power so full of self-righteous purity and anti-Westernism, had ended up creating what many Libyans viewed as little more than monsters, whose primary passion was making money and indulging themselves in the westernized pleasures he so abhorred.

  All this was too much for ordinary Libyans, who became increasingly repelled by the antics of Qaddafi's offspring. As far as they could see, all that the country's rehabilitation had done was to concentrate even more wealth and power in the hands of the Qaddafi family. For all the regime's talk of change, it was clear that the entire reformist project had amounted to little more than a series of showy stunts and cosmetic changes, aimed at proving to the world that Libya was open for business. Reform, it turned out, meant fiddling around the edges while the Jamahiriyah ground on, edging ever closer to disaster. Ordinary Libyans remained as burdened as ever by the heavy yoke of the chaos-inducing Jamahiriyah. People were feeling angrier and more cheated than ever before. As Qaddafi was soon to discover, it would only take a spark for this anger to ignite into something that even he could not control.

  CHAPTER 8

  A New Dawn

  At 3.30p.m. on 15 February 2011, seven cars from the general security directorate drew up outside the modest home of Fathi Terbil, a young and unassuming lawyer from Benghazi. Some twenty security personnel entered the building and set about ransacking the place, destroying Terbil's possessions and assaulting his mother. They then arrested the young lawyer and carted him off to the general security directorate in Benghazi. Little did Terbil know it, but his arrest was to be the spark that ignited Libya's revolution.

  The softly spoken Terbil was a well-known face in Libya's second city. He had been representing the families of the victims of the Abu Slim prison massacre of 1996, an atrocity in which he had lost his brother, cousin and brother-in-law. Emboldened by Saif Al-Islam's reformist project, the victims' families had taken to demanding that the regime come clean and provide them with details of how their loved ones had died. They had also started protesting in Benghazi on a weekly basis, and the case had become something of a cause célèbre in the city. For the regime, the families were proving a major source of irritation and a headache it could well do without. By choosing to represent these families, therefore, Terbil was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in the new era of ‘reform’ and ‘openness’.

  Yet it was not Terbil's involvement with the Abu Slim families that prompted his arrest. His crime had been that he, along with a group of young Libyans, had been in the process of organizing a ‘Day of Rage’, planned for 17 February. This Day of Rage was to comprise a mass demonstration, in which Libyans were to take to the streets to call for reforms, including the introduction of a constitution. The date of this planned day of protest was not insignificant: it was on 17 February 2006 that fourteen Libyans had been killed when popular protests erupted in Benghazi. These protests had started out as a demonstration against the Italian MP Roberto Calderoli, who had incited outrage by announcing that he intended to print T-shirts bearing reproductions of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed that had appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper and that had sparked such fury across the Muslim world. Indignant Libyans had descended on the Italian consulate in Benghazi and begun hurling stones and bottles at the building in disgust. However, it was not long before the protesters turned their wrath against the regime. Angry youths began attacking state buildings, including the tent-like mathabas of the hated revolutionary committees. In their panic, the security services opened fire on the crowd, killing eleven and injuring scores more. Other protesters were arrested and summarily carted off to Tripoli.

  Although the security services were able to put down the unrest easily enough, it still represented the largest and most serious outbreak of public protest that Libya had witnessed in decades, and it shook Qaddafi and his regime to the core. This was not what rehabilitation was supposed to be about. The situation was made all the worse for the regime, as images of the violence were broadcast around the world in moments, bringing Libya's claims to have reformed its ways into serious doubt. The 17 February, therefore, was a deeply significant date for Libyans, particularly those in the east, and a highly sensitive one for the regime.

  Although the planned Day of Rage was not intended as a call for the overthrow of Qaddafi, recent events in the region were on everyone's mind. In January 2011, the Tunisians stunned the world when, seemingly out of nowhere, they succeeded in ousting ageing President Ben Ali from power in a popular revolution. A few weeks later, the Egyptians followed suit, with popular protests forcing an utterly bewildered President Hosni Mubarak to step down from office. These revolutions brought about an entirely new mood in the region; it was dawning on people that these all-powerful tyrants who had held their countries to ransom for so many decades were not invincible after all. Bit by bit, ‘people power’ was breaking the fear that had reigned – in many cases since independence. The Arabs were on the march.

  Libyans proved no exception. Despite the fact that they were living under what was arguably one of the most repressive regimes in the Arab world, the Libyans were not going to be left out of this blossoming Arab Spring. Indeed, Libyans had tried to become a part of it as soon as Ben Ali was unceremoniously forced into exile. In what now looks to have been a kind of dress rehearsal for th
e real thing, immediately after Tunisia's ‘Jasmine Revolution’, Libyans began posting messages on the internet and on social networking sites calling on people to take to the streets. Some heeded these calls: protesters in certain eastern cities attacked government buildings and private companies, and there was even some rioting. One young Libyan, Ahmed Lebderi, went so far as to emulate the Tunisian stallholder Mohamed Buazizi, who had unleashed the Tunisian uprising by setting himself alight.

  What was more worrying for the regime, however, was that in unprecedented scenes Libyans went in their thousands to occupy empty and half-finished blocks of flats in government housing projects across the country.1 The protesters vented their anger and frustration not only at the general housing shortages, but also at the regime's failure to allocate the units in these projects in a fair or timely manner. As with other schemes that were supposed to help the poor, those with the right connections had been given the flats in the new blocks, leaving ordinary Libyans to carry on camping out with their extended families. The new flats became yet another source of bitterness: Tripolitanians regularly grumbled that the only ones who could even dream of living in them were the ‘desert people’ from Sirte, a reference to Qaddafi's family and tribe.

  While the regime succeeded in containing these demonstrations, it was utterly stunned by this mass demonstration of public disobedience. It should not have been: protests were becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the rehabilitated Jamahiriyah. These spontaneous expressions of public discontent were mainly localized affairs, related to specific matters (such as the non-payment of salaries or the taking over of public land by those linked to the regime) and, as such, were easily containable. However, they were symptomatic of the burning anger and seething resentment that had been building in the country for decades, but that had worsened in recent years. All the more so in the east, which continued to be made to feel as though it was Tripoli's poor relation. Indeed, the years of systematic neglect meant that, by the time the Arab Spring arrived, Benghazi was on a knife-edge, ready to explode.