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Overview
Alison Pargeter, an author with deep understanding of Libya's history and people, explains what led up to Qaddafi's bloodless coup in 1969 and how he proceeded to translate his highly personalized vision into political, economic, and social policy. She discusses his tight-knit networks, the crises he overcame—including sanctions after the Lockerbie bombing in 1988—as well as his astounding maneuverings in the early 2000s to restore tattered relations with the West. Pargeter provides a thoroughly fascinating analysis of the 2011 revolt and uncovers the full details of Qaddafi's downfall. She concludes by introducing the new power brokers in post-Qaddafi Libya as well as the variety of knotty challenges that now confront them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300139327 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2012 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
LIBYA
THE RISE AND FALL OF QADDAFIBy ALISON PARGETER
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Alison PargeterAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-13932-7
Chapter One
Land of the Conquered
Writing in 1934, Italian colonial civil servant Angelo Piccioli described his first sighting of Tripoli as he approached by steam boat across the Mediterranean:
Today as we came to this white town crowned with palms and girdled with serenity, as we gazed at Tripoli rising from the sea among the light mists of morning, our hearts were filled with a strange joy, confident and thoughtful ... Bright, solemn and silent stood the ancient uncouth city; time here seems to have stopped, and the city keeps intact its Islamic, medieval soul. It looked as though it were suspended in an airy domain of its own, like a block of carved marble between the twin brilliance and immensity of sky and sea.
Anyone making the same approach to Libya's capital city today would be greeted by a rather different sight. Modern-day Tripoli boasts a large and bustling industrial port, a perilously busy motorway that runs along the seafront, and a somewhat unprepossessing strip of reclaimed land that separates the city from the sea. Indeed, the view of the old city, rising up from the water, is marred by these testimonies to the progress of the Libyan revolution of 1969. Moreover, Tripoli has sprawled out far beyond its old city, and even beyond the colonnaded, tree-lined streets of its Italian-built centre. Tripoli's suburbs, some comprising street after street of well-to-do villas and others packed with concrete high-rise government housing projects, now extend so far that they are beginning to merge with other towns along the coast. The city centre also now boasts a hotchpotch of gleaming new office blocks and towering five-star hotels.
Yet beyond this evidence of the modern Libyan state, Tripoli's old city retains some of the characteristics Piccioli describes. Under the intense Mediterranean sun, its white buildings and minarets still rise up in sharp contrast to the piercing blue of the sea and the sky. There is an eerie quietness about the old town, or medina, at certain times of the day, when the burning heat forces its residents inside. Time really does seem to be standing still, particularly in the sand-covered alleyways and unspoilt souqs (enclosed markets) where men still beat copper by hand and where gold is still weighed out on old-fashioned scales.
Yet the medina, with its faded charm, has not escaped all the trappings of the modern world. Young men, with their rap music and smart training shoes, hunch up against the walls, staving off the boredom of having nothing to do. There is also the modern, Italian-style café, serving lattes and cappuccinos on its smart terrace, as well as a handful of touristic restaurants and hotels – reminders of the Qaddafi regime's last few concessions to the Western world. Prior to the 2011 revolution, some quarters of the old city were inhabited almost entirely by African immigrants, unable to afford the rents elsewhere in the capital. It was the sound of West African beats, rather than Arabic pop music, that belted out of barber-shop doorways along the narrowest alleyways and the most run-down parts of the old city. Most of these immigrants, along with those from other parts of the Arab world, fled as soon as the 2011 conflict broke out, leaving Tripoli and its inhabitants to their fate.
Yet Libya is about more than Tripoli. It is a vast land covering 1.7 million square kilometres, most of which is desert. There are no rivers and it rains rarely and sporadically, making much of the land unsuitable for cultivation. Prior to the discovery of oil in the 1950s, pastoralists and nomads in much of the country eked out a living as best they could from the unyielding dry land. Before the country struck 'black gold', it was one of the poorest nations in the world. Because of the harsh landscape, Libya's main population centres are located on the coast, in two main clusters on the west and the east of the country. But these centres are separated by huge expanses of empty desert. There is no railway connecting the cities of the west and the cities of the east, and not even a motorway joins these two main population centres; unless time is no object, the only way to travel between the two is by air.
This lack of connectivity between the two centres reflects one of the defining characteristics that have shaped the country. Libya has always been a land of three distinct parts, each with its own particular identity. There is Tripolitania in the west, which includes Tripoli and other towns such as Al-Zawia, Misarata and Tajoura; Cyrenaica in the east, which comprises the regional capital of Benghazi, as well as smaller towns such as Derna, Al-Baida and Tobruq; and the largely desert area of the Fezzan in the south, whose main town is Sebha.
That these three regions continue to have their own sense of identity is hardly surprising. Libya only came together as a country in the 1950s, at the time of independence from colonial rule. Even that coming together was an accident of history. Libya was a child born of the machinations of the victorious Allied powers, as they readjusted to the new realities of the post-Second World War world. Yet even after the country united under a single flag, it still struggled to overcome regional differences. While these divisions have lessened in recent decades, largely as a result of rapid urbanization and the modernization that accompanied it, they have not disappeared altogether. Libya's history has, then, always been a story of regions.
The east, known for its tightly preserved tribal structures, has always had its face half turned towards Egypt, in part because many eastern Libyan tribes extend across the border into the deserts of its neighbour. Despite Benghazi's being a port, the city – and the east more generally – has remained somehow closed off from the outside world, and its inhabitants have a reputation for being more traditional and socially conservative than their western counterparts. This may be something of a fallacy, as urbanization touched the east as much as it did the west. However, the remnants of tribalism, and the traditions that go with it, are still more deeply ingrained in the east. Tripolitania, meanwhile, has its face turned firmly towards the Mediterranean, and its encounters with the various peoples that have come from there, either as conquerors or as traders, seem to have left a legacy of a more open people. Tripolitanians or Tarabulseen, as they are known in Arabic, are proud of what they consider to be their more worldly take on life; the city is certainly more cosmopolitan than its eastern counterpart, which sometimes feels as though it is a place that time forgot.
The Fezzan, on the other hand, is Libya's overlooked region. It is so sparsely populated and so far from the main cities of the coast that it somehow never generates the same interest as its northern counterparts. Yet Fezzan is the Libya of the desert, of caravans and of the Tuareg and the Toubu – nomadic peoples whose tribes straddle the borders with Mali and Niger, and with Chad, respectively.
Yet in spite of themselves, these three regions came together to form the history of what we know today as Libya, a term first used by the Ancient Greeks to denote all of North Africa west of Egypt. It is, first and foremost, a history of invasion: a story of successive civilizations forcing themselves on this arid, empty land of Berbers – the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa. Invasion has been such a feature of Libya's experience that in one of his memoirs Qaddafi recounts how, when he was growing up, men feared the sea, refusing to settle near it, because of the conquerors it might bring on its waves.
Yet what these conquerors had in common was that they nearly all struggled to impose themselves beyond the coastal areas, failing to tame the tribal hinterlands whose tough inhabitants refused to submit to the will of successive colonial administrations. In many ways, this failure only reinforced the sense of regionalism already created by geographical boundaries. It was also accentuated by the fact that, at many points in Libya's history, one set of colonizers ruled over the west of the country, while another controlled the east.
All of these factors meant that, when Qaddafi came to power in 1969, Libya had still not managed to develop any real sense of unity or nationhood; this left him an almost empty playing field upon which to impose his own unorthodox brand of nationhood.
Early conquerors
Libya is a country that wears its history on its sleeve. Not only can visitors to the country amble along colonnaded, Italian-built streets, but they can also marvel at ancient Greek temples, breathtaking Roman archaeological sites and exquisite Ottoman mosques and houses. Indeed, the country boasts some of the most magnificent archaeological remains anywhere in the Mediterranean. Many of these relics are the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, who, fleeing drought in their native Thera (Santorini), conquered eastern Libya in 630 BC. The Greeks founded Cyrene – from which the name Cyrenaica is derived – a place that became one of the most renowned intellectual and artistic centres of its day.
For all their power, the Greeks were never able to expand down into the deserts of the Fezzan that were controlled by the famed Garamantes – a tribe of either Berber or Tuareg origin. Greek historian Herodotus describes the Garamantes in his famous Histories: 'to the south of this region ... that is teeming with wild animals, are the Garamantes, who shun all human intercourse and contact'. Herodotus also tells of his encounters with other Libyan nomadic tribes and of their curious practices. Many of these tribes used to cauterize the veins on the top of their children's heads with hot grease, which they extracted from sheep's wool. This was done to prevent the children from coming to harm from the 'down flow of phlegm from the head'. If the children went into convulsions during this procedure, they would be cured by having goat's urine sprinkled on them. Such practices led Herodotus to describe the Libyans as 'the healthiest people in the known world'.
The Greeks were followed by the Romans, whose main settlements were at Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Oea – the three towns from which Tripoli takes its name (from the Ancient Greek tri polis, literally 'three cities'). These settlements became thriving Roman centres, which supplied wheat, barley and olive oil to Rome. Although they were unable to conquer the Garamantes in the south, in 74 BC the Romans did extend their empire from Tripolitania into Cyrenaica, uniting the two regions politically for the first time. However, this union was short-lived and the two areas separated again when the Roman Empire split in two, with Tripolitania being run from Rome and Cyrenaica coming under the control of the Byzantine Empire.
The Romans were eventually pushed out of Libya by the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that arrived in ad 429 and that wreaked havoc on the local landscape, until it was usurped by the equally unpopular Byzantines around a hundred years later. However, like the Greeks, the Romans left behind some remarkable archaeological sites that remain astonishingly intact to this very day. Walking around the magnificent amphitheatres, bath houses and mosaics of Leptis Magna and Sabratha, set against the sparkling backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, it is easy to imagine oneself back in the bustle of a prosperous Roman centre. The Roman presence can also be felt in Tripoli, where the imposing Marcus Aurelius Arch still stands proud, and where ancient Roman columns have been built into some of the dwellings in the old medina.
Yet while these wonders of the ancient world enthral the handful of tourists who make it to the country, many Libyans today feel little connection to them. It is as if, by their non-Islamic heritage, these testimonies to Libya's past are not really part of the country's history or soul. They are viewed as part of the European world and something that is alien to the country's identity. A former tourism minister, Ammar Mabrouk Al-Lateef, used to describe the Roman remains as 'Christian tourism', and one piece of graffiti carved into the amphitheatre at the stunning Sabratha site goes so far as to proclaim: 'See what befell the idol-worshippers!'
The Romans failed, then, to leave any really lasting impression on the native population, and it was the Arab forces, which came in two waves in the seventh and the eleventh centuries, that were to completely alter the complexion of what we now call Libya. These forces, the first group of which crossed into Cyrenaica from Arabia in 642, were a hardy lot. Made up mainly of poor, illiterate Bedouins, they made their way westward, meeting with little resistance until they reached Tripolitania. It was here that they came up against the fierce Berber tribes of the mountains. One of the best-known Berber resisters during this period was the queen and prophetess, Dahlia, who is still lauded by the Berbers today for having fought so hard to repel the Arabs. Legend has it that the imposing Dahlia sent her tribe to destroy local towns, cut down trees and burn down woods to ensure that there were no spoils for the Arab armies to loot and no cities for them to take over. However, Dahlia ultimately proved no match for the new conquerors, who took Tripolitania and who even went on to triumph over Gerama, the Garamantes capital in the south, in 663.
Yet it was not only physically that the Arabs succeeded where earlier invaders had failed. These new conquerors brought Islam with them – something that was to have a lasting effect on the whole of North Africa. The indigenous Berbers absorbed this new faith with surprising willingness and speed. That is not to say that there was no resistance to the invaders themselves: although the vast majority of local inhabitants readily converted to Islam, many were still resentful of the Arab newcomers and their bid to subjugate the locals. The Arabs insisted, for example, on still taking jiziya (a tax paid by non-Muslims living in an Islamic state) from those Berbers who had converted to Islam – on the grounds that their new faith was not heartfelt!
In the eleventh century, a second, much larger wave of Arab conquerors arrived and spread across Libya, altering the ethnic complexion of all three regions. These new arrivals, who were from the Bani Salim and Bani Hilal tribes, had originated in Najd in the Arabian Peninsula, but had settled in Egypt until they were forced out following a famine. This was no small-scale affair: thousands of tribesmen, accompanied by their families and flocks, flooded into the sparsely populated Cyrenaica and beyond. The Bani Hilal moved primarily into Tripolitania, while the Bani Salim settled in the east. These tribes, and the Bani Hilal in particular, behaved like most invading forces: they seized land and water resources for themselves and turned many Berbers (as well as Arab tribes from the earlier invasion) into their clients and vassals. They also mixed and intermarried with the Berbers, resulting in the almost total Arabization of what we now call Libya. This was particularly the case in the east, which is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous regions in North Africa today.
It is not clear exactly why these Arab invaders succeeded where others failed. However, the lack of resistance may well have been related to the shared Bedouin culture and lifestyle, and to the fact that both Berber and Arabs practised nomadism as a means of social organization. What is clear, however, is that, despite the stream of foreign occupiers with their different cultures and religions, it was the Arabs who were able to put a truly lasting stamp on the local population. Arab identity remains strongest for Libyans today and in spite of repeated attempts by Colonel Qaddafi at the end of the 1990s to foster a sense of African identity among the Libyan population, Libyans remain resolutely proud of their Arab and Islamic heritage.
The Ottomans
The next group of conquerors who were to have a lasting presence were the Ottomans, who seized the port of Tripoli in 1551, and whose rule was to endure until the early twentieth century. Yet while their presence may have been lengthy, like most of their predecessors the Ottomans were never able to fully subjugate the whole of the territory. Successive Ottoman rulers struggled to bring the recalcitrant tribes of the hinterland, especially those in the east, under their control. This was particularly true during the first two hundred years of Ottoman rule, when Tripoli was governed by a Turkish bey, who answered directly to his masters in Constantinople. During this time, Ottoman control was restricted mostly to the coastal towns, and there were only 'occasional and half-hearted forays into the hinterland to collect taxes'.
Constantinople's attitude towards its territories at this time was to give them ample freedom to conduct their own affairs. This somewhat laissez-faire approach meant that there was no major objection on the sultan's part when, in 1711, an upstart Ottoman military officer, Ali Pasha Qaramanli, seized control of Tripoli and established his own dynasty. Yet for all their efforts, the Qaramanlis were not much better at bringing the unruly tribes under their control. Although they succeeded in extending their rule eastwards, beyond Tripolitania and into Cyrenaica, aside from in the coastal cities, where urban dwellers were forced to pay taxes, they had little real impact on the locals or on the Bedouin tribal structures that still held firm. They also failed, for a long period, to make any real inroads into the Fezzan, where an independent trading state called Awlad Mohamed had been founded by a Sharifan (one who claims descent from the Prophet) who came from Fes in Morocco.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LIBYA by ALISON PARGETER Copyright © 2012 by Alison Pargeter. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Land of the Conquered 10
Chapter 2 Ripe for Revolution 35
Chapter 3 The Rise of the Jamahiriyah 61
Chapter 4 Jamahiriyah in Practice: A Revolutionary Decade 92
Chapter 5 Foreign Adventurism 118
Chapter 6 Jamahiriyah in Crisis 145
Chapter 7 The Chimera of Reform 176
Chapter 8 A New Dawn 213
Conclusion 248
Endnotes 258
Bibliography 277
Index 281