Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi Read online

  To my children, Alex and Laila

  Copyright © 2012 Alison Pargeter

  The right of Alison Pargeter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pargeter, Alison.

  Libya : the rise and fall of Qaddafi / Alison Pargeter.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-13932-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Qaddafi, Muammar. 2. Qaddafi, Muammar—Influence. 3. Qaddafi, Muammar—Political and social views. 4. Presidents—Libya—Biography. 5. Dictators—Libya—Biography. 6. Libya—Politics and government—1969– 7. Political culture—Libya—History. 8. Political persecution—Libya—History. I. Title.

  DT236.Q26P27 2012

  961.204'2092—dc23

  [B]

  2012014819

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  2016 2015 2014 2013 2012

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Land of the Conquered

  Chapter 2 Ripe for Revolution

  Chapter 3 The Rise of the Jamahiriyah

  Chapter 4 Jamahiriyah in Practice: A Revolutionary Decade

  Chapter 5 Foreign Adventurism

  Chapter 6 Jamahiriyah in Crisis

  Chapter 7 The Chimera of Reform

  Chapter 8 A New Dawn

  Conclusion

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1. Benito Mussolini during a visit to Tripoli, March 1937 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  2. King Idris arriving to open an oil terminal at Marsa Al Hariga, February 1967 (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

  3. Muammar Qaddafi taking tea in his father's tent in the deserts of Sirte, August 1973 (© Genevieve Chauvel/Sygma/Corbis)

  4. Qaddafi addresses Libyan students, Tripoli, August 1973 (© Genevieve Chauvel/Sygma/Corbis)

  5. Qaddafi poses in yellow robes, 1984 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  6. State supermarket, August 1981 (© Eric Preau/Sygma/Corbis)

  7. Qaddafi with Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, Moscow, April 1981 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  8. Qaddafi with Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia, August 1983 (© Alain Nogues/Sygma/Corbis)

  9. Saif Al-Islam and Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi returning to Tripoli, 20 August 2009 (© AP Photo)

  10. Qaddafi with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, July 2007 (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

  11. Qaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya residence destroyed, February 2012 (© John Hamilton)

  12. Benghazi residents celebrate the liberation of their city, 25 February 2011 (© Bryan Denton/Corbis)

  13. Libyans queue to view the bodies of Qaddafi and his son Moatassim, Misarata, October 2011 (AFP/Getty Images)

  1 Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, carrying the ‘Sword oflslam’, presented to him during a visit to Tripoli, March 193 7.

  2 King Idris arriving to open the BP-Nelson Bunker Hunt oil terminal at Marsa Al Hariga, near Tobruk, February 1967.

  3 A young Muammar Qaddafi taking tea in his father's tent in the deserts of Sirte, August 1973.

  4 Qaddafi addresses Libyan students, Tripoli, August 1973. On Qaddafi's right is his second in command, AbdelsalamJalloud, and on his left is fellow RCC member Khweildi Al-Humaidi.

  5 Qaddafi poses in yellow robes, 1984.

  6 State supermarket, with slogans taken from the Green Book on the walls, August 1981.

  7 Qaddafi with Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, at a welcoming ceremony at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, April 1981.

  8 Qaddafi with Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, in Monastir, Tunisia, August 1983.

  9 Saif Al-Islam accompanies convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi as the latter returns to Tripoli following his release from Scotland's Barlinnie prison on compassionate grounds, 20 August 2009.

  10 Qaddafi stands with French president Nicolas Sarkozy at his Bab Al-Aziziya residence, July 2 007. The giant gold fist commemorating the 1986 US attack on Libya can be seen in the background.

  11 Qaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya residence, destroyed after the fall of Tripoli in August 2011.

  12 Benghazi residents celebrate the liberation of their city, 25 February 2011.

  13 Libyans queue to view the bodies of Qaddafi and his son Moatassim in Misarata, October 2011.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank a number of people who helped make this book possible. Firstly thanks go to my Libyan friends who have given me their help and support over many years, particularly given the difficulties of carrying out research on Libya under the Qaddafi regime. These include Ashur Shamis, Noman Ben Othman, Guma Al-Gumaty, Mohamed Abdelmalek, Alamin Belhaj, Giuma Bukleb, Hassan Al-Lamushe, Hassan Bergali, Amal Obeidi and Mohamed Zahi Mogherbi. I thank them all for their kindness and frankness, and the key insights they have provided. I would like to thank, too, Mohamed Belqassim Zwai and Abdel Ati Al-Obeidi for helping me to secure visas to Libya and for being such willing interviewees. Special thanks go to the late Mohamed Tarnish, the former head of the Libyan Human Rights Association, who sadly passed away in 2011 and who provided me with such valuable assistance during my time in Libya. I would like to thank, too, my editor at Yale, Phoebe Clapham, for her invaluable comments on the manuscript and for her enduring patience.

  Libya

  Introduction

  In February 2011, Libya's little-known eastern capital of Benghazi erupted in a popular uprising. Within a matter of days, the whole of the eastern region had fallen into rebel hands. After almost six months of intense fighting and an international military campaign led by NATO, Tripoli, the capital, also fell. By October, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the mercurial leader who had been at the helm of the country for over four decades was found hiding in a stinking sewage pipe, having narrowly escaped a NATO strike on his convoy. The dazed and dishevelled dictator was dragged from his hiding place and subjected to a brutal attack, before being summarily executed by the young rebels who had discovered him. In just eight months, Libyans had succeeded in doing what no one believed they could ever do: they had taken their fate into their own hands and overthrown what was one of the most repressive regimes, even by Middle Eastern standards.

  This revolution did not occur in a vacuum. It was inspired and spurred on by the momentous events that were shaking the entire region. The Arab Spring, which started in neighbouring Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt and beyond, provided Libyans with the extraordinary courage they needed to rise up and change the course of their own history. The reasons why Libyans took to the streets were not difficult to find. The resentments and grievances that had fuelled the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were just as present in Libya. Libyans wanted jobs, services and an end to the mafia-like state that had terrorized a
nd humiliated them for decades. They also wanted a future. As one Libyan ruefully commented, ‘Under Qaddafi, we Libyans didn't even dare to dream.’1

  But Libyans had other, more specific reasons to rise up. For forty-two years, their leader, who had taken power in a military coup in 1969, had used Libya as a giant laboratory for his own personal philosophy. Qaddafi had subjected his people to a litany of bizarre whims and half-baked political and economic experiments, which had plunged the country into a permanent state of chaos. Libyans were forced to live their lives by the mantra of his famous Green Book – the treatise, published in the mid-1970s, that laid out his political, economic and social vision. This youthful and idealistic vision was based loosely on the principles of Socialism, Arabism and Islam, the three ideas that underpinned his revolution. Indeed, Qaddafi believed himself to be an intellectual, destined for higher things than the ‘simple’ business of ruling. He was a perpetual revolutionary, a man of action, for whom radical ideals took precedence over building a functioning and economically dynamic state.

  Theoretically at least, Qaddafi placed the masses at the heart of his philosophy, arguing that the unique political system he had created – the Jamahiriyah, or ‘State of the Masses’ – was the very embodiment of ‘people power’. In reality, however, Qaddafi created one of the most personalized and authoritarian systems anywhere in the Middle East. He filled every space, moulding the entire country around himself. He believed he was Libya – that his fate was inextricably intertwined with that of the land of sand and oil he had come to lead. As far as he was concerned, there was always only ever room for one man in the Jamahiriyah; Libyan society was to be faceless, totally consumed within his eccentric political philosophy.

  Qaddafi also displayed an unbridled contempt for the Libyan population, lashing out at them whenever his madcap schemes went wrong, or when they failed to live up to his lofty ideals. To add insult to injury, while he ran one of the most repressive regimes in the region, Qaddafi always maintained that he was nothing more than a guide, a point of reference for his glorious revolution. It was for this reason that he insisted on being called the ‘Leader of the Revolution’ or just ‘Brother Leader’, and refuted any suggestion that he was head of state.

  But Qaddafi's ambitions went beyond Libya. The Colonel sought to project his revolutionary ideology far and wide, believing his Jamahiriyah to be the pinnacle of human achievement. With his inflated sense of self-importance, the Colonel invested enormous efforts in trying to convince the rest of the world to adopt his unique system. He also sought to turn himself into a world leader, taking on the mantle of champion of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against the oppressor. It was for this reason that the ‘Brother Leader’ took to supporting a mind-boggling array of national liberation movements, not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Europe and Latin America. The Colonel also gave his backing to a number of terrorist groups, seemingly going out of his way to befriend figures such as Carlos the Jackal (the Venezuelan who achieved notoriety for his 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, which killed three people) and the infamous Palestinian fighter Abu Nidal, who once boasted: ‘I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing … nightmares.’2

  This unstinting commitment to challenging imperialism wherever it reared its head put the Colonel on a direct collision course with the West, where, for many years, he came to be personified in the international media as a kind of super villain. Descriptions such as ‘quixotic’, and ‘erratic’ abounded – to say nothing of the less flattering ‘Mad dog of the Middle East’, as US President Ronald Reagan once dubbed him. With his overextended sense of flamboyance and showmanship, Qaddafi both repelled and fascinated simultaneously. Yet challenging the West was all part of the Colonel's revolutionary ideology. He had come to power on an anti-imperialist ticket, vowing to rid Libya of the vestiges of a monarchy that had been little more than a ‘puppet of the colonialist powers’. As a young man who had come from nowhere, and whose revolution had not been born out of a national liberation struggle, anti-imperialism was a key source of legitimacy for this simple Bedouin from the desert. It also tied in with his unstinting Arab nationalism – a passion that, for all its bitter disappointments, was to endure.

  It was this incessant need to challenge the dominant world order that landed the Colonel in very hot water. Not only was the country subjected to an attack by the US in 1986, but Libya was also placed under international sanctions in 1992 for its refusal to hand over the two suspects accused of being behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. The embargo was to plunge the country into further isolation. It also placed greater pressure on the regime, which by this point was struggling against an increasing number of domestic challenges, not least of which was an Islamist insurgency. It was largely as a result of these pressures that Qaddafi decided to temper his ideology with Realpolitik. At the end of the 1990s, in a bid to find a way out of isolation, he began trying to restore Libya's tattered relations with the West – a process that started with the agreement in April 1999 to hand the Lockerbie suspects over for trial in The Hague and that culminated in the December 2003 announcement that Libya would abandon its weapons of mass destruction programmes.

  So it was that Qaddafi turned his back on his old ways, ditching his support for terrorist groups and doing his best to demonstrate to the outside world that Libya really had changed. This former ‘pariah’ suddenly found himself with a new collection of friends, all hailing his courageous decision to re-join the international fold as they tripped over each other in the rush to take advantage of the new opportunities opening up in the country's revamped energy sector. The Colonel even hosted British prime minister Tony Blair, and Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, in his trademark tent.

  While no longer deemed a ‘super villain’, the reformed Qaddafi continued to capture the world's imagination, although more often than not, vilification gave way to ridicule. Rarely was there an article in the Western media that did not comment on the Colonel's appearance or his more idiosyncratic aspects. In August 2009, the US magazine Vanity Fair went so far as to run a special tongue-in-cheek piece entitled ‘Dictator Chic: Colonel Qaddafi – A life in fashion’.3 Yet, derision aside, Qaddafi had successfully turned his fortunes around and given his regime a whole new lease of life.

  Many Libyans hoped that this return to the international fold would prompt the Colonel to shed some of his revolutionary philosophy and turn the country into something more akin to a conventional state. There were certainly high hopes that he would open up the country's tightly guarded economy. However, Libyans were to be sorely disappointed. While there were some moves towards economic reform, these were few and far between and did little to benefit the masses. The regime's unwillingness in this respect prompted no small degree of resentment among the Libyans, especially since, given its tiny population and vast energy reserves, the country should have been the jewel of North Africa. Indeed, Libyans often remarked bitterly that their country should have resembled Dubai.

  Yet as one walked around Tripoli before the revolution, it was clear that this was no Dubai. Despite the fact that foreign investment was once again flooding into the energy sector, there was little real evidence on the ground that the lives of ordinary Libyans had improved much. It is true that, in the years before the February 2011 uprisings, Tripoli had begun to sport shiny new buildings, as well as smart cafés, five-star hotels and private businesses that sat rather incongruously alongside the fading public buildings, dilapidated houses and rubbish-strewn streets. However, this was little more than evidence of a new entrepreneurial elite that was bound tightly to the regime and that was benefiting from the new economic opportunities that rehabilitation had brought. For most Libyans, life had changed very little. The system was as dysfunctional as ever, and, as the rich got richer, most people still struggled to make ends meet.

  To make matters worse, those who were benefiting most from the country's
new wealth were Qaddafi's own children. His various offspring, who ran roughshod over the population, set about amassing huge personal fortunes in almost every sector. The fingers of one or other of them were in every pie – from energy to the security sector; from health to aviation and maritime transport; from communications to the construction sector. Some of Qaddafi's sons also gained a reputation for bad behaviour. Libyans – known for their social conservatism and traditional outlook – abhorred the stories that emerged in the international media of the Qaddafi boys cavorting with models and Western pop stars at lavish, alcohol-fuelled parties held in exotic locations. Qaddafi's failure to rein in his children was a serious cause of resentment.

  Libyans were also angered at the fact that, despite the regime's repeated promises of reform, there was no serious effort to really open up on the political front. While Qaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam engaged in some reform initiatives related to governance and human rights, these were primarily propaganda efforts, carefully crafted to convince the rest of the world that Libya really was changing. Although there was some loosening, and although people were given space to criticize the formal institutions of state, Libyans were still frightened to speak out against the Leader, his family and the upper echelons of the regime. Grim-faced security agents still skulked around corners and uniformity was still the name of the game. It was not by chance that the doors, shutters and window frames of all publicly owned properties were still painted the standard shade of regulation green – the colour of Qaddafi's 1969 revolution.

  Moreover, one could never forget who was boss. Garish giant portraits of Qaddafi in various poses still stared out from public buildings, street corners and public spaces. Revolutionary slogans, many of them taken from the Green Book, were hung all over Tripoli. The Brother Leader was everywhere, in one guise or another – something that contributed to the city's slightly surreal quality. In fact, the whole atmosphere remained utterly stultified. It was near impossible to get hold of copies of local newspapers, let alone the foreign press, and most of the city's bookshops were stocked with little more than dusty volumes spouting regime propaganda. Internet cafés had sprung up, offering some window to the outside world; but these were carefully monitored by the regime, so that their most common use (for those who could afford it) was for some online flirtation. Although the sanctions had been lifted, Tripoli still seemed somehow introverted and at one remove from the rest of the world.