There’s a growing sense that in an unstable world, Libya’s `Brother Leader of the Revolution’ has some attractions, writes Ian Black
Moammar Gadaffi was busy this month, embracing African leaders as they flew in for the lavish celebrations, held each year, of the coup that brought him to power in 1969. Without his customary comic-opera, epaulette-heavy uniform and despite being confined to a wheelchair after breaking his hip, his ageing rock star features seemed calm. Rambling as ever, what he had to say about the latest dramatic twist in the Lockerbie bombing affair, was lucid. He is on top of things.
Starting his 30th year in office, the “Brother Leader of the Libyan Revolution” looks in good shape. Problems he certainly has, but the economy of his Jamahiriya – the Arabic neologism for his unique, often bizarre “state of the masses” – is still based firmly on oil and European companies are still queueing up to extract. And for his (few) friends and (many) enemies alike, he is at least the devil they know.
Gadaffi lives in a tough neighbourhood. To his west the Algerian regime is keeping the lid on a bloody Islamist insurrection. In Tunisia, anxious to forge links with the European Union, President Ben Ali has no qualms about repressing his opponents. Egypt’s Islamist militants have been largely contained. Gadaffi’s relations with Hosni Mubarak, its president, the largest recipient outside Israel of United States aid, are warm.
South of the Maghreb, the Libyan leader is enjoying a honeymoon period with his African neighbours. In the impoverished Sahel region, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali are all in his orbit. Its presidents all paid their respects by demonstratively flying to Tripoli in defiance of the United Nations’ air embargo – in force since 1992 because of Gadaffi’s refusal to hand over the Lockerbie suspects.
Pressure from the Organisation of African Unity, and especially Nelson Mandela, played a vital role in persuading Britain and an even more reluctant US to offer a trial under Scottish law in The Hague.
Regionally, Gadaffi is behaving with more maturity, say Arab observers, “making calculated investments, not taking uncalculated risks”(1).
Not everything in Gadaffi’s arid garden is lovely. Libya’s economic fundamentals are sound though nearly all its export earnings and a third of its gross domestic product depend on oil. UN sanctions have not had a major impact because oil, even when its price has been declining, has generated enough to sustain imports of food, consumer goods and spare parts for the extraction industry.
But growth is sluggish and long-term planning an oxymoron. A study commissioned by Gadaffi from Gar-Yunis University and smuggled out of the country argues that despite an $80-billion development programme between 1970 and 1990, the economy has serious infrastructural defects(2).
While other Mediterranean littoral countries desalinate sea-water, Gadaffi’s prestigious Great Man-Made River Project plans to extract water from beneath the desert, though most will be lost to evaporation. Among young people unemployment is estimated at 30%. Middle- class frustrations focus on the difficulty of travel because of the air embargo. But inevitably it is the poorest in a country of 5,5-million who have been hit the hardest. Hundreds of children are said to have died because they were unable to get medical treatment abroad(3).
Gadaffi’s own whimsical decision-making compounds these difficulties. Sudden orders to transfer government offices or army headquarters to his home area of Sirte have caused chaos; wrangles between ministries have brought paralysis.
“One day they get a certain set of instructions and the next something completely different,” says a well-placed exile. “Gadaffi uses ministers against one another.” The constant formation of new committees is used to attack inefficiency and corruption and defuse opposition.
On the face of it his position seems secure. His three sons have public roles, which indicates the beginnings of the sort of dynastic succession now taking root in Iraq. Tribal loyalties still matter hugely for all Libya’s pan-Arab and socialist rhetoric and there were signs after a coup attempt in the early 1990s that Gadaffi’s ability to balance them was weakening.
Disinformation compounds the difficulties of understanding this impenetrable country. Exiles, complains one former official now living abroad, exaggerate and indulge in wishful thinking. And governments have their agendas too: recent stories, with the whiff of official plants, have reported a secret Libyan deal with South Africa to swap oil for weapons and a meeting with the Real Irish Republican Army before the Omagh bombing. Neither was true.
But the existence of an Islamist opposition is no one’s invention. Half-a-dozen different organisations face an uphill struggle against a leader who has always judiciously appropriated the symbols of Islam – with his “green book” and idiosyncratic “third international theory” positing an Islamic middle path between atheistic communism and materialistic capitalism.
But his most radical enemies still call him al-Taghout, the Muslim equivalent of the anti-Christ. Gadaffi’s recent adoption of sharia punishments such as amputation of hands for theft is designed to bolster his religious credentials.
Western countries used to portray Gadaffi as a terrorist godfather who sent agents to kill his own enemies and supported an eclectic cast of extremists ranging from the Palestinian Abu Nidal, through the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Today his own security forces co-operate with wider Arab anti-terrorism efforts; Islamists have been handed over from Saudi Arabia, especially the worrying variety with anti-Soviet service in Afghanistan behind them.
Haunted by the spectre of Algeria, Gadaffi has cracked down hard. Monitoring of ordinary people is carried out by “purification committees” independent of and often in competition with the police and state security organisations. In March the General People’s Congress approved laws allowing for collective punishment.
“Nasty, but fundamentally stable” is the conclusion of the many governments and companies which want Libya to emerge from the cold. Europeans have been quick to fill the gap left by the US – its 1986 bombing marked a low point in relations with a country which has often seemed an obsession for Washington since Jimmy Carter first imposed unilateral sanctions.
The EU’s defeat of the Iran part of the Iran/Libya Sanctions Act, forcing Bill Clinton to waive penalties for non-US companies dealing with what Congress determined were pariah states, has emboldened many to believe that Libya will eventually be a safe investment. This is vital for companies like the Italian energy group ENI, desperate to push ahead with a $3,8-billion oil pipeline in a joint- venture with Libya’s National Oil Company.
“For many international companies, the post-sanctions period has already arrived, marked by fierce competition among European banks to finance trade transactions,” says one specialist publication(5).
Recent discussion of the sale of Airbus aircraft to replenish the ruined Libyan Arab Airlines fleet is part of this hard- nosed, business-driven story. “It goes without saying,” said one oil executive, “that Colonel Gadaffi is an excellent guarantor of contracts.”
Publicly, Britain and the US invoke the need for justice as they urge Gadaffi to surrender the men accused of blowing up Pan Am 103 in December 1988. But privately he is being told, through Egyptian and African interlocutors, that the arrival of these two in The Hague is the beginning of Libya’s return to the civilised world.
At 56, Gadaffi remains as unpredictable as he was when he took power as a young army officer who worshipped Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. But the enfant terrible of the Maghreb has mellowed since then, and some believe he could now be ready to neutralise one set of enemies in the West, the better to deal with another, closer to home.
Sources: (1)Al-Hayat, September 1, 1998; (2)Libyan Economic Policy: A programme for Reform, AAS, POB 268 Croydon CR2 0EB; (3)George Joffe, African Energy, September 1998; (4)North African Business Monitor, August 1998; (5)Maghreb Quarterly, September 1998