Quo Vadis Libya?

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In October 2006 I returned to Libya after 45 years.

In the nineteen sixties, old King Idriss ruled the whole of Libya from Cyrenaica. The international oil industry, for which I worked in the Cyrenaican capital, Benghazi, had just begun spreading prosperity (and corruption) throughout the backward country. Hordes of educated Palestinians kept ministries and businesses going, but Libyan nationals and expatriates normally held the top positions. Educational, literacy and income levels of the native population were low. Only 1% of Libya’s surface is arable.

1969 was the year col. Muammar Gaddafi took power in a coup. The 1972 world energy crisis and the quadrupling of the price of oil were kicked off by his attack on the international oil companies, who vainly tried to stonewall his proposed changes. He also dabbled in Arab unification efforts with Egypt and Syria and militarily invaded Chad, but soon tired of these ventures. Oil production (now 95% of export income) financed Gaddafi’s aid to international terrorist groups and supported his claim to leadership on the African continent; it also financed a controversial 15 billion dollar investment in a “man made river”, which pumps water from an aquifer under the Sahara through a gigantic pipeline to Tripoli.

According to Gaddafi’s visionary “Green Book”, Libya is a socialist  people’s democracy, governed by a pyramid of basic peoples conferences, peoples committees up to the supreme General People’s Conference. (His own position as de facto head of State in this scheme is unclear.) Housing and transport are free, wages are deemed to be an expression of slavery. While some private “income” is justified, private wealth is not. Also, according to the book, mandatory learning only serves to stunt human talents. On the other hand the book says sensible things about family, tribe and the unique role of Islam in Libyan society.

Approaching Benghazi, Cyrenaica’s capital, from the sea, the landmark of the twin-domed Basilica and the enormous expansion of the harbour catch the eye. The harbour is stacked with shiny new oil equipment. Close up however ever the impression quickly changes to one of total abandonment. One walks ashore over badly laid unfinished roads past heaps of garbage. The once outstandingly beautiful basilica and the splendid grand hotel on the seafront next door are both vandalised, ransacked and inhabited by squatters. New futuristic buildings serving no purpose have sprouted everywhere, but are hardly occupied and already falling to pieces in unkempt surroundings. Our solid old office block stands boarded up in the centre of the town. The number of beggars in the street is no less than half a century ago.

We speak with a senior doctor in a hospital. Ordinary Cyrenaicans have been totally kept down, he claims, by government imposed poverty and the necessity to scrape a living. Gaddafi had favored Tripoli, his native part of the country, and punished Cyrenaica (for opposing him?). But now, with 60% of the 6 million population below the age of twenty, with satellite disks sprouting everywhere showing progress in the outside world, he had to allow some material improvements even in Cyrenaica. Billions of dollars of state oil income (Libya has the largest Gross Domestic Product per inhabitant in Africa) had been stolen or corruptly spent on grandiose or military projects. The doctors own salary was only 280 dirham per month (1 dirham=0.8 Euro), which is insufficient for a family to live on. So he lived with his extended family of parents, brothers, sisters, who all pooled resources. An army colonel makes 400 dirham, still below the 500 needed for a small family, even if the housing is given free by the peoples committee. A hospital nurse makes only 100 dirham. No wonder people try to do several jobs (badly) at once. Meanwhile new popular housing stands half finished next to the peeling walls of the old.

Tripoli seems a totally different story. It is wide and welcoming. The harbour and the city have been extended and prettified. It seems well kept. Merchants accept foreign currency, while in Cyrenaica they do not. The Roman city of nearby Leptis Magna is a world tourist attraction. But in Tripoli too, the people expect material if not political change. Islam, fundamentalist or other, seems not a dominant factor. The mosques are not that well attended. A bi-lingual electrical engineer of the Tripoli water authority, making 400 dirham a month and doubling as our tourist guide, told us with envy that he could make 1000 dirhams if he could only work for a foreign oil company in the desert. New concessions are now being negotiated and many like him expect large benefits from these.

So what does the future hold? I sense that Gaddafi’s grip is weakening. Pictures of him are not much in sight and look dated. Above all he must feel that most current developments, from the new oil concessions to the new political accommodation with the West, are irreversibly going against the grain of the Green Book. In December 2003 he even felt obliged to end his favourite program for making weapons of mass destruction. And he must be afraid for his own safety too, because his people do no longer want his speeches, but the kind of materialistic progress for themselves which only a free economy can bring. Empty gestures of the past, such as forbidding the teaching of English in schools for three years, as a response to president Reagan’s bombing of his desert residence, are now unthinkable.

The Arab people of Libya are 100% anti-American Government (and Israel) because of the current wars in Iraq and Palestine, but that could change rapidly if solutions for these traumatic problems can be negotiated, in first instance between the US and the regional powers of the Middle East.

LW

May 2006.