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Libya: The Past of a Regime
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Feb 21, 2011 (110221)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Libya ... resembles a protection-racket run by a family group and
its associates who wrested control of a state and its people by
force and then ruled for forty years with no attempt to secure
popular legitimation. ... [it] is a state of robbers, in formal
terms a kleptocracy. The Libyan people have for far too long been
denied the right to choose their own leaders and political system
- and to benefit from their country's wealth via oil-and-gas deals
of the kind the west is now so keen to promote. The sooner the form
of rule they endure is consigned to the past, the better." - Fred
Halliday, writing in 2009 on the Libyan regime's 40th anniversary
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the text of this commentary by
Fred Halliday, which appeared in OpenDemocracy in 2009. Halliday,
one of the most experienced and astute progressive analysts of the
Middle East, died in April 2010.
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin sent out today contains several
reports and commentaries from the last few days, and is available
at http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/lib1102a.php
For regular updates, see the live Libya blog now being hosted by Al
Jazeera, at http://tinyurl.com/4cn4hbh
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Libya, see
http://www.africafocus.org/country/libya.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note++++++++++++++++++++
Libya's regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy
The protection-racket formation that has ruled Libya since 1969 is
now being embraced by western businessmen and diplomats. But it
belongs to the past, says Fred Halliday.
(This article was first published on 8 September 2009)
openDemocracy
http://www.opendemocracy.net
About the author
Fred Halliday was ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona
Institute for International Studies
The fortieth anniversary of the Libyan "revolution" of 1969 - more
accurately a coup d'etat by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and some of his
associates and relatives - brings to mind a conversation I had just
after that event with a friend who was (and remains) a senior
Algerian diplomat. The Algerian government had been as surprised
and bemused as any other about the emergence of this bizarre,
radical and eccentric regime in a fellow north African state. The
then Algerian president, Houari Boumedienne, had asked my friend to
visit Tripoli and assess the new leadership there.
When my friend's mission was completed, I asked him how he had
found the Libyan leaders, who at the time included Major Abdessalem
Jalloud, a long-term ally of Gaddafi (who was eventually, in 1993,
excluded from power after an alleged coup attempt) as well as the
colonel himself. The Algerian diplomat's response, in elegant
French, was unforgettable: Ils ont un niveau intellectuel plut“t
modeste. In more Anglo-Saxon terms, they were pretty stupid.
A state of misrule
There are many ways to enter the strange story of al-Jamahiriya
("the state of the masses"), whose originating event was marked on
1 September 2009 by a spectacular celebration in Tripoli filled
with extravagant stage-management and kitsch special-effects. The
event was seen in much of the world outside Libya against the
background of the concurrent media and diplomatic controversy over
the release from a Scottish jail on 20 August 2009 of the only
person convicted of any part in the Pan-Am 103 bombing over
Lockerbie in December 1998, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi (who,
incidentally, belongs to an influential branch of the Magariha
tribe, which links him to Major Jelloud). As a result, the
experience of these four decades in Libya's history - and their
impact on the Arab world and beyond - has been somewhat
overshadowed. A pity, for these offer some sobering lessons in the
politics of illusion.
Indeed, these forty years have done little - if anything - to
invite any revision in the Algerian's judgement. True, Libya's
maximum leader and his cohorts have throughout much of this period
deluged the world with rhetoric about the country's supposed "third
way" as codified in the colonel's two-volume Green Book (1976 and
1980) - a collection of platitudes that helped attract to Libya a
similar breed of leftist and "third-worldist" radicals as that
which was seduced by Mao Zedong's "red" predecessor a decade
earlier. The mutation in the state's official titles reflects its
leaders' evolving grandiosity: from the "Libyan Arab Republic" of
1969 to the eulogistic "Socialist People's Libyan Arab
al-Jamahiriyah" of March 1977, further qualified as "Great" in
April 1986.
During these decades, the Libyan elite's vaunting ambition led it
to seek to establish leadership over the Arabs (before then
shifting attention to Africa); it even for a time appeared to
present a provocative and in part anti-clerical interpretation of
Islam.
There are many measures of the regime's failure. Its manipulations
of language and its administrative incoherence are but two
(interestingly paralleled by that far shorter-lived "third-world"
experiment in making the world anew in the late 1970s, namely Pol
Pot's Cambodia).
The first I witnessed during a visit to Tripoli in 2002, whose
official programme inevitably included a visit to the "World Centre
for Green Book Studies " (though it was a pleasant surprise to find
in a bookshop near my hotel that of the thirty-four translations of
the book made available, the most prominently displayed were those
in Hebrew and in Esperanto). Colonel Gaddafi was so enamoured of
the idea of "green" that he even considered naming the main
government building in Tripoli the "Green House", until its English
gardening connotations were pointed out. More reminiscent of other
revolutionary trajectories was his renaming of the months of the
year (the Roman words being too reminiscent of the Italian imperial
yoke), and his attempt to replace all English words by Arabic (even
such good friends of the people as "Johnny Walker" [Hanah Mashi]
and "7 Up" [Saba'a Fauq].
The second measure, administrative chaos, has proved one of the
most costly aspects of the Libyan revolution. Again, I recall
during that 2002 visit being told in an embarrassed fashion by some
officials and academics - those who did not engage in lengthy
disquisitions on The Green Book - that their country had
"management problems". Between the lines, the reference to
Gaddafi's style was unmistakeable.
Many members of Libya's elite at the time were educated in the west
(one professor reminisced fondly about a Durham pub); their
knowledge of the world, and citizens' access to Italian television,
intensified the evidently widespread (if resigned) frustration. The
chaotic management system then prevailing was revealed in the
announcement that on a particular Sunday there would be a meeting
of ministers, in effect a cabinet meeting: but since Libya
officially has no capital city, no one knew where this would be
held, and senior officials and their advisers spent hours driving
around the desert from one place to another trying to find out
where they were supposed to meet.
A tight embrace
Al-Jamahiriya has survived many periods of international tension
and crisis - from the bombing by United States forces in April
1986 to the Lockerbie saga itself. Its rehabilitation by the
international community came after 9/11, when Libya took a strong
rhetorical stand away from its earlier use and endorsement of state
terrorism; the process was reinforced when in a deal agreed in
December 2003 led to it abandoning its effort to develop weapons of
mass destruction.
Since the early 2000s it has become common to argue that Libya is
changing. Libya has for sure altered its
foreign-and-defence-policy course: many countries do in the course
even of a long period of rule by a single leader - even Joseph
Stalin's Soviet Union or Kim Jong-il's North Korea, for example.
But at home, and the regime's heart, the changes are cosmetic.
Libya remains controlled by the whimsical leadership around
Gaddafi. Arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and disappearance
still take place; relatives or close colleagues, like Major Jalloud
in the early days, come and go, as do supposedly "modernising"
ministers. The junior members of the family, some perhaps
well-intentioned, others perhaps self-deluded, play intermittent
public roles, and command media and commercial attention abroad;
but since there is no constitutional system, and since all
information is speculative, no one - not even these younger members
themselves - can say what it means.
It can however be assumed that, as in other dictatorial regimes
(not least in the middle east) the real power is held by those who
less visible - above all those who control the intelligence
services. Musa Kusa, the foreign minister who spent fifteen years
as head of Libya's secret service, probably has more influence than
those associates of the regime who promote Libya's image abroad -
even if his name is only rarely in the news.
Moreover, it is clear is that for all the rhetoric about
"revolution" and the "state of the masses" the Libyan leadership
has squandered much of the country's wealth twice over: on foolish
projects at home and costly adventures abroad. Libya, with a per
capita oil output roughly equal to that of Saudi Arabia, boasts few
of the advances - the urban and transport development,
educational and health facilities - that the oil-endowed Gulf
states can claim. Tripoli, the de facto capital, retains the
impressive white buildings and squares of Italian colonial rule;
but its surface charms notwithstanding, it is more the Arab
equivalent of Havana than a Maghrebi version of Dubai or Doha.
Libya has not introduced significant changes to its political
system, and especially not with regard to human rights or
governance. The Jamahiriyah remains in 2009 one of the most
dictatorial as well as opaque of Arab regimes. Its 6 million people
enjoy no significant freedoms: the annual reports of Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch on Libya offer a glimpse of
the real situation, one of continued and systematic abuse of human
rights. Those who oppose the ideology of the Gaddafi revolution
may, under Law 71, be arrested and even executed. There is not
even the flicker of diversity found in such neighbouring
dictatorships as Egypt or Sudan.
The exiled writer Hisham Matar gives a flavour, via a description
of his father's incarceration:
"We were kept in this state of uncertainty for three years until
one morning a letter, written in Father's careful handwriting, and
smuggled from within the notorious political prison of Abu Sleem in
Tripoli, was delivered to our home in the trembling hands of a
young friend of Father's who had carried it across the border. When
he entered our house he went over to the music system and turned up
the volume. He embraced Mother and whispered in her ear. There was
something white in his hand. I thought it was tissue paper. He
pushed it into her palm, but then couldn't let go. They were both
crying.
The single sheet of paper was folded several times. It gave an
uncompromisingly detailed account of what had happened to him since
he had disappeared. Father had been taken from his home in Cairo by
Egyptian secret service officers and delivered to the Libyan secret
service. Izzat Youssef al-Maqrif, another Libyan dissident who was
living then in Cairo, had been taken on the same day. Both men were
bundled into a car. Yellowing newspapers had been papered across
the windows. After a while the road surface became smooth and he
began to hear a humming sound that grew louder as the car picked up
speed. The car stopped and when the passenger door was flung open
Father saw that he was under the giant belly of an aeroplane. Three
hours later he was in Tripoli."
A path of blood
The improvement in Libya's international profile in recent years
reflects the abandonment of the regime's nuclear-weapons programme
and its policy of hunting down Libyan dissidents living abroad
(including their kidnap and murder). But this regime has shown
scant regret, and those who ordered such actions as the shooting
dead of the British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher in central London
in March 1984, the blowing up of passenger airlines, and the
transfer of sophisticated weaponry and material to the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) remain in power. The official response to the
Lockerbie trial and al-Megrahi release reflects an attitude of mind
that rejects real contrition or admission of responsibility. It
still attempts to bully governments it has been in disagreement
with, such as Switzerland.
The prominent guests at the celebrations of 1 September 2009 in
Tripoli included Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and the International
Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Sudanese president. Omar Hassan
al-Bashir. Another honoured invitee was Mohammad Abdi Hasan Hayr,
the Somali fisherman believed to be a leader of the pirates
operating off Africa's longest coastline. The character of Libya's
friends in Europe tells its own tale: among them are Italy's prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi (a frequent visitor) and the country's
former chief political fixer (and mafia collaborator) Giulio
Andreotti, who gave the Libyans advance warning of the American
air-assault of 1986.
For my own part, I do not forget the fate of another indirect
casualty of that event: my fellow student of Yemeni affairs, the
British academic Leigh Douglas. He was kidnapped in Beirut (where
he was teaching) in the aftermath of the American attack, together
with his compatriot and colleague Philip Padfield. Both men were
shot dead by their captors; a third, the United Nations journalist
Alec Collett, was also murdered.
A regional wrecker
The Beirut killings in 1986 are a reminder that the damage Libya's
leadership has wrought over these forty years both goes wider and
is closer to home than the western connections of Lockerbie, the
IRA and (reportedly) the Basque paramilitary group ETA. For
Libya's reputation among other Arab states and peoples is abysmal,
if the state is not actually an object of contempt.
It may be that for reasons of commerce or Realpolitik, western
businessmen and politicians have come to take Libya more seriously
than hitherto (even as the ranks of political fellow-travellers
have migrated to the likes of Venezuela or even Iran); but I have
never met anyone in the Arab world who has ever had any reason to.
No wonder: Libya has over the years of Colonel Gaddafi's rule
interfered in and helped worsen political situations in Egypt,
Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Palestine.
In Lebanon, for example, it was the disappearance (and presumed
murder) of the Lebanese Shi'a leader Musa Sadr during his visit to
Libya in 1978 that opened the way to the rise of the Hizbollah
movement: I once endured a long rant from the then Libyan
ambassador to Tehran, denouncing the Shi'a as in effect accomplices
of western imperialism. Yet Tripoli (perhaps out of resentment that
Iran had displaced Libya as the patron of radicals in the country)
has also long championed chauvinist anti-Iranian and anti-Shi'a
rhetoric.
In Yemen, I can testify to Libya's destructive influence in the
1970s and 1980s: inciting a war between North Yemen and South Yemen
in 1972, then promising large-scale aid to the south's leftwing
regime in the 1980s, only to cut off this aid abruptly when the
Yemenis disagreed with Libya over events in Ethiopia. In Aden, one
of the most visible sights in the early 1980s was the shell of the
unfinished Libyan hospital in Khormaksar - its funding stopped from
one day to the other.
In Palestine too, Libya has been a wrecker. It long fomented
division within the Palestinian nationalist movement, at one time
backing the Abu Nidal faction that sought to assassinate Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO) officials who negotiated with Israel.
Libya has continued to express extreme anti-Israeli views: its
official position is that Israel should be merged into a single
state, Isratina, an innovative way of proposing the state's
elimination. On the eve of the fortieth anniversary celebrations,
Colonel Gaddafi even told a meeting of African Union leaders on
the eve of the anniversary celebrations that Israel was responsible
for many of the conflicts and problems in the continent.
An end to fantasy
Libya is far from the most brutal regime in the world, or even the
region: it has less blood on its hands than (for example) Sudan,
Iraq, and Syria. But al-Jamahiriyah remains a grotesque entity. In
its way it resembles a protection-racket run by a family group and
its associates who wrested control of a state and its people by
force and then ruled for forty years with no attempt to secure
popular legitimation.
The outside world may be compelled by considerations of security,
energy and investment to deal with this state. But there is no
reason to indulge the fantasies that are constantly promoted about
its political and social character, within the country and abroad.
Al-Jamahiriyah is not a "state of the masses": it is a state of
robbers, in formal terms a kleptocracy. The Libyan people have for
far too long been denied the right to choose their own leaders and
political system - and to benefit from their country's wealth via
oil-and-gas deals of the kind the west is now so keen to promote.
The sooner the form of rule they endure is consigned to the past,
the better.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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