Libya: An End to Isolation?
By Andrew Cockburn
Housam, a guide from the Libyan Ministry of Information, had run only 20 yards (18 meters) from his hotel room to mine, but he was perspiring. "Come quickly," he said, "the Leader is waiting for you in Banghazi. There is a plane ready." We raced downstairs. The government driver, allegedly on standby for just this occasion, had characteristically disappeared. Cursing, Housam led me in a sprint to his own car, and we roared off down the corniche that runs along the Mediterranean seafront of Tripoli, Libya's capital city. We were heading away from the city's main commercial airport.
After a few miles we suddenly peeled off the highway and sped through a gate onto an airfield where a dozen huge Russian-built Ilyushin-76 military transport planes were parked. We climbed a ladder into the vast cargo bay of one of the planes. Waiting inside were Fuad, Muammar Qaddafi's English interpreter, and a youth named Ibrahim toting two large cardboard boxes tied with string. I asked what was in the boxes. "Correspondence for the Leader," replied Fuad, lighting a cigarette. So this was how Muammar Qaddafi gets his mail.
"Do you notice how they're trying to get that light in the cockpit to go out?"
remarked Fuad. "There is a problem with this plane." A nervous-looking pilot appeared at the door moments later and concurred that the plane was not safe. We climbed down, got back in our car, and drove into town. "Kul takhira fi'khira," said Fuad cheerfully, "sometimes it is better to delay," a common Libyan phrase that I was beginning to know well.
This was a voyage of exploration. For years Libya has been a country largely unknown to the outside world. Even the few outsiders who managed to make their way here usually found it impossible to penetrate beneath the surface. Casual contact between ordinary Libyans and foreigners was heavily discouraged as Qaddafi, who came to power
in 1969, gradually imposed his own brand of revolutionary theory on the country. As embassies closed and foreign companies pulled out throughout the 1970s and '80s, there was an ever diminishing number of visitors from the Western world.
Libya's isolation became even more pronounced following the 1992 imposition of United Nations sanctions designed to force Qaddafi to hand over two suspects indicted for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people.
Qaddafi refused for seven years to release the suspects for trial in either the United States or Britain, defying the international community and reinforcing Libya's image as a terrorist state, its people crushed under a dictatorial regime of unbridled repression.
Qaddafi had done much to court this reputation. For years he harbored the infamous terrorist Abu Nidal. He was there for the Irish Republican Army when it needed him, supplying large quantities of arms in the later stages of the Northern Ireland conflict. Libyan agents have murdered people around the world, the victims for the most part "stray dogs"—exiled dissidents on whom Qaddafi had declared war.
When Qaddafi surrendered the Lockerbie suspects in April 1999 for a trial in the Netherlands starting in May 2000, the UN suspended sanctions—although the United States still maintains its own embargo. As the trial began, Qaddafi seemed to feel confident that his years as an international pariah were drawing to an end. He declared that it was "absurd" to postulate that he had ordered the bombing. "The court is sitting to judge them," he told the press, "not whether they are Libyan agents."
In fact, some countries appear ready to forgive crimes where Libyan guilt is far more certain than in the Lockerbie case. In July 1999, for example, Libya agreed to pay compensation to the relatives of the 170 victims of the French airline UTA flight 772, which was destroyed by a bomb over Niger in 1989. A Paris court had found Qaddafi's brother-in-law, Abdullah al-Sanusi, guilty of orchestrating the mass murder.
Now French diplomats and businessmen are among those from around the world who disembark regularly at Tripoli's airport, suddenly bustling after being closed to international flights for the better part of a decade. Foreign businessmen flock to Tripoli as the government makes pleas for foreign investment. All-terrain vehicles filled with European tourists ply the Sahara dunes. Libyans themselves are not only permitted but actually encouraged to embark on private business ventures.
Still, Libya is hardly a country where travel for outsiders is routine, a truth rendered evident by my journey to meet the Leader. Hardly had we returned after the abortive trip to the military airport when Housam reappeared. "There's another plane," he gasped. "Come quick."
This time we drove to the main civilian airport, where we were ushered onto a modern jetliner, part of the Libyan Arab Airlines fleet. Ibrahim reappeared with the boxes containing the Leader's mail. Later I was told that our plane had been diverted from its scheduled afternoon flight to Malta, leaving would-be passengers steaming in the terminal.
We took off, soaring east over green fields dotted with farmhouses along the fertile strip that edges the coast. Far to the south I could see the yellow fringe that marks the beginning of the great sandy waste of the Libyan desert, stretching far into Africa. We were headed for Al Bayda, a sleepy town in the mercifully cool Cyrenaic uplands east of Banghazi.
Late that night I was driven down dark and empty back roads to Qaddafi's temporary residence, a marble-floored villa set in spacious grounds. Just before we pulled up, I noticed an open canvas shelter with a brightly colored checkerboard pattern—a familiar image from pictures of Qaddafi, dressed in extravagant cloaks and turbans, greeting visitors "in his tent." We bypassed the tent, and I was ushered into the mansion to a formal drawing room furnished with white velvet chairs and decorated with framed pictures of Qaddafi's wife and children.
Qaddafi himself finally entered the room, leaning on an aluminum crutch that clicked rhythmically on the marble floor. He had broken his leg some months before, the injury variously ascribed to an assassination attempt, an accident on the football field, a fall in the bathroom, or a fall while trying to climb out the bathroom window—a confusion indicative of the miasma of rumor that surrounds Qaddafi. (A close friend of the Libyan leader insisted to me that the fall in the bathroom was the correct version of the story.)
Clad in a faded sport shirt, khaki slacks, and worn leather slippers, Qaddafi presented a very different picture from the flamboyant figure in extravagant dress long familiar to the outside world. He looked tired. In the past 12 hours he had talked with three African presidents and the Italian foreign minister, worked on plans for a summit conference, and given a stern lecture to the city fathers of Al Bayda regarding unchecked development in the picturesque Green Mountains around the city. "We are a backward country," Qaddafi said matter-of-factly. "People don't understand that we are damaging the land, damaging the environment."
The Leader had also spent a few hours reading a book on mergers and acquisitions in pursuit of his present project to unite Africa. "I work 25 hours a day—but reading is part of the work, and I am a slow reader. Often I have to read things several times to understand." He sighed. The effect was disarming, as were his frequent chuckles and word-play jokes.
The country Qaddafi rules stretches for more than a thousand miles (1,609 kilometers) along the North African coast from Tunisia to Egypt and another thousand deep into the heart of the Sahara. Before Qaddafi achieved power and gave Libya notoriety, this vast land—more than three times the size of France—reposed in obscurity, making only periodic appearances on the world stage.
Long before recorded history the desert interior, where daytime temperatures can exceed 130 degrees, was a sparsely wooded grassland. The people who lived there left images of their daily lives carved and painted on the rocks of the Akakus mountain range in the far southwest before they vanished in the face of the advancing desert some 4,000 years ago.
Scattered oases, all that remained of human habitation, became the way stations for caravans from central Africa as they skirted the great sand seas of Marzuq in the west or Rabyanah in the east, the desolate black highlands of the Jabal as Sawda, and the vast stony plain of Al Hamra before finally reaching the farmlands, settlements, and ports along the Mediterranean. Here in Tripolitania at the western end of the country and Cyrenaica in the east, rainfall and underground reservoirs produced lush landscapes of wheat fields, olive groves, and fruit plantations little different from the landscapes of southern Italy a few hundred miles across the sea.
Before and after the Arabs erupted out of their homeland in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, planting their language, religion, and culture across all of North Africa, the coastal strip was a corridor for invaders passing back and forth between Egypt and the lands to the west. Roman legions marched this way, conquering the settlements of the Phoenician and Greek colonists who first traded along the coasts. Mementos of ancient civilization are everywhere, notably in the cities preserved for centuries in the drifting Saharan sands that buried them long ago. In the east, toward the Egyptian frontier, sand also preserves the lethal legacy of more recent transients—land mines laid by the British Eighth Army and the German Afrika Korps during their epic battles in World War II.
For all this weight of cosmopolitan history, Libya is a young country. Loosely controlled by the Ottoman Empire until early in the 20th century, the peoples of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, as well as Fezzan, which covers most of the southern desert region, had little in common, still less a sense of nationhood, until the Italians made a belated bid for empire and invaded in 1911. Though the invaders had expected an easy conquest, it took them 20 years to stamp out the last resistance. In the occupation of what Mussolini called "Italy's fourth shore," the Italians beautified Tripoli, excavated the Roman cities, and presided over the death of as much as a quarter of the population.
Finally in 1951 Libya became an independent kingdom with an economy based on exports of scrap metal from the wartime battlefields, esparto grass (used for making fine paper), and rent from U.S. and British military bases.
Eight years after independence the average annual income was 25 dollars. But in 1959 American companies began striking oil, and Libya went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to being, potentially at least, one of the richest. I recall a 1964 party thrown on a beach outside Tripoli by an overnight millionaire. The entire expanse of sand, down to the waterline, had been covered with oriental carpets. Then in 1969, irked by pervasive corruption and inspired by the Arab nationalism of his idol, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, 27-year-old army Capt. Muammar Qaddafi, the son of a desert nomad, overthrew the feeble monarchy in a bloodless coup and began his revolution.
Qaddafi gradually eliminated foreign investment, abolished private enterprise, forbade all political parties, renamed the months of the year
View User's Journal
Read it, come on I know you don't want to....
 |
Soko The Sock Puppet
Community Member |
I gotta find something to put here. I know...I'll link to Steph
