Exit the Colonel (11 page)

After years of war against Chad, the International Court of Justice in 1994 awarded the contested Aouzou strip to Chad. Some experts saw this as a hinge moment when the previously aggressive, expansionist Libyan policy
toward Africa was replaced by a more subtle and effective soft-power campaign, a few years after Gaddafi had effectively shifted his orientation from the Arab countries, which he felt were ungrateful for his various efforts to promote Arab unity. After 1994, investment, economic patronage, and attempted mediation of regional disputes became key levers to project Libyan influence.
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One of Gaddafi's main motivations for these maneuvers was to build international political support within the international community, and by extension, the United Nations in the hopes of lifting the international sanctions on Libya.

Through will, coercion, and the promise of large subsidies, Gaddafi transformed the Organization of African States (OAU) into the African Union (AU), and was a founding member of SEN-SAD, the Community of Sahelo-Saharan States. Gaddafi was installed as chairman of the AU at its inaugural conference held in his hometown of Sirte on September 9, 1999, at a cost of $30 million, for lavish accommodations and improvements to Sirte's infrastructure. In 2006, Libya was admitted to the COMESA, the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa, augmenting its political influence in the Horn of Africa, including a platform for self-serving mediations in Darfur and Somalia.
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Gaddafi used the AU as a channel for various grandiose schemes, including what he envisioned as the AU's ultimate form, the “United States of Africa” (the parallels with the US are obvious). Not all African countries appreciated Gaddafi's largesse and/or meddling and even more strenuously objected to his attempts to co-opt alternative or traditional tribal leaders to anoint himself “King of Kings” of the continent. The date Gaddafi became chair of the AU, 9-9-99, subsequently figured prominently in Gaddafi symbology. The numbers were emblazoned on the tailfins of planes owned by the Gaddafi-financed airline, Afriquiya.

Even so, evidence of Libya's influence in and across Sub-Saharan Africa was clear. The Libya Arab African Investment Company (LAAICO) had offices in twenty-five countries and helped to coordinate investments in a range of commercial activities, from oil to tourism.
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In more recent years, a downstream marketing arm of the National Oil Company OiLibya, established a network of over 1,250 points of sale (filling stations) in 18 African countries, from Djibouti to Senegal.
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Gaddafi money financed a prominent mosque in Kampala, Uganda,
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and an office tower in Dakar, Senegal. Libya signed agreements of economic, military, and cultural cooperation with Gambia, Mali, Eritrea, South Africa, and Ethiopia, to name just a few.
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For all his claims to be the continent's champion in the global arena, Gaddafi's hypocrisy regarding Africa was obvious. In 1997, Gaddafi announced Libya's borders “open” to all Africans who wished to live and work in Libya, knowing full well that the main attraction of Libya for most Sub-Saharan Africans was as a launching point for illegal immigration to Europe. Gaddafi used African migrants as his secret weapon to pressure an immigration-phobic Europe into various concessions. Meanwhile members of the regime handsomely profited, ignoring the waves of Africans who sailed from ports like Zwara, bound for the shores of Lampedusa and southern Italy. Whenever Gaddafi wanted to increase political pressure, he would escalate the number of immigrants.

The experiences of Sudanese, Liberian, Eritrean, Ghanaian, and other African nationals headed for Europe have been documented in a fictional account called, appropriately,
African Titanics
.
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Those seeking passage would typically need to put in a year or more of hard labor to save the average US$1,000 to $2,000 for passage. Thousands died over the years, as overpacked, unseaworthy vessels capsized en route. Farther up the supply chain, the highways linking Niger, Benin, to Sebha, Libya, were at times strewn with the bodies of migrants who perished of thirst or hunger on the early stages of their perilous migrations to the north. Every so often, when Gaddafi was irritated with the crime that proliferated in the refugee camps, he simply decided to empty them out by ordering their inhabitants killed outright or repatriated to their countries of origin. Africans often wound up in jail or under suspicion of committing various crimes. Many were executed without trial, to the weak protests of corrupt regimes that were receiving subventions from Libya to keep them politically engaged on Libya's behalf.

As with most of Gaddafi's grand gestures, the Africa open-door policy generated a sizable domestic backlash from a wide swath of Libyan society. Many Libyan officials felt Gaddafi's Africa policies were making Libya look ridiculous to the Arab world. Workers saw increasing numbers of African squatters as a threat to their livelihoods, sources of violent crime, or, less charitably, a contamination of their way of life. This frustration boiled over most dramatically in the “Zawiya events” of 2000, in which dozens of Sub-Saharan Africans were lynched in that coastal city. According to the Tunisian Libya expert Moncef Ouannes,

While African migrants bore the brunt of anti-Gaddafi sentiment, the message was clearly aimed at the regime, just as the 2006 Benghazi riots were. While Libyan dissident organizations abroad attempted to build awareness of what had happened at Zawiya, as they did with the 1996 Abu Selim prison massacre, in which more than 1,200 political prisoners were gunned down in a couple of hours, these events never made it into the international political consciousness and as such were not recognized as points of deep vulnerability for the regime.

While very few on the outside understood what was happening within Libya at the time, the late 1990s were clearly a period of high social and economic instability. From Gaddafi's perspective, the priorities were to keep the lid on popular discontent, while using the resources he had at his disposal to create pressure groups that might eventually help him break the sanctions—from recipients of Libyan aid and military support, to African immigrants seeking passage to Europe, to Western intelligence agencies. It seems doubtful, given what happened later, that Gaddafi really understood what would happen once the sanctions were removed, but he also clearly saw that the status quo was not working and was dangerous in its own right.

CHAPTER 3

The Price Is Right

WANISS A. OTMAN AND ERLING KARLBERG

 

 

 

F
or decades, Gaddafi alienated his people, baffled neighboring countries, and defied the international community. Each iteration of the Gaddafi program called for a more complex and often more aggressive application of tools of repression and coercion.

Gaddafi certainly had problems. Declining oil revenues in the 1980s and 1990s left him without the usual cash stores with which to placate the masses and cement critical tribal and individual loyalties. Corruption and graft, if not worse in absolute terms, had become firmly institutionalized. Many in Gaddafi's inner circle (and outside it) resented their inability to travel and redeem their ill-gotten gains outside Libya. Young people, faced with poverty and few opportunities, turned to drugs and other asocial behavior. Without the ability to provide for a household, sexual frustration was on the rise, as males (and females) in a highly traditional society were forced to marry later and later—or forgo marriage altogether.

As long as the Libyan people were downtrodden psychologically and without resources, they had limited tools with which they could fight back. The main channels for popular discontent were the relatively well-organized and potentially lethal actions of the Libyan-Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and spontaneous outpourings of popular anger. Demonstrations that so far were emblematic of the depth of disaffection had limited
combustible power. Libya's expatriate opposition was splintered and largely toothless, and the international powers—the US in particular—were occupied with what they perceived to be more important matters.

In a way, the UN sanctions gave Gaddafi a time-out. While internal threats were substantial and getting worse, at least Gaddafi did not have to worry much about subversion from abroad. As the previous chapter indicates, this had not always been the case. He was also not as easily able to involve himself in foreign imbroglios, which had been a huge drain on the Libyan treasury. Most likely, Gaddafi did not see things this way. An actor needs a stage, and Gaddafi had long demonstrated an almost insatiable psychological need to speak to as broad a public as possible. Whatever it took, Gaddafi resolved, he would break the sanctions.

Thus, even before the UN sanctions hit Libya in 1992, Gaddafi began a long, strenuous campaign to be readmitted to the international community. Most of these efforts had limited effect. He waited almost a decade. In the late 1990s, a variety of factors created new realities outside Libya, a perfect storm whereby some of Gaddafi's problems suddenly interested outside powers.

For much of the 1990s, many in the US government wanted to leave Gaddafi exactly where he was, somewhat in the same manner that
Tonight Show
host Jay Leno joked about the 1993 Waco, Texas, cult standoff, suggesting the government solve the problem by building a fence around the sprawling complex and call it a prison. Any talk of trying the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing or negotiating with Gaddafi on any issue threatened to disrupt this comfortable equilibrium. Allan Gerson, one of the lawyers instrumental in passing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gave the Lockerbie families the right to sue the Libyan government for complicity in terrorism abroad, commented,

This state of affairs couldn't last forever. Perhaps one of the first and strangest of the Libyan efforts for a possible solution to the Lockerbie problem involved former US Congressman and former Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart. Libyan agents contacted Hart in February 1992. They requested that he tell the Clinton administration that Libya would consider US demands, and might even be willing to hand over the Lockerbie suspects in exchange for a speedy normalization of relations. Hart followed up by meeting with then Prime Minister Jelloud, who confirmed that pretty much everything was on the table. According to Hart, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward Djerejian nevertheless dismissed these efforts, and the talks went nowhere.
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The Libyans were persistent, however. They made subsequent approaches through a number of would-be Arab mediators and fringe US politicians, including Louis Farrakhan, the controversial founder of the Nation of Islam,
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and former presidential candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson, who met with Gaddafi in Tripoli in 1993. None of these attempts panned out, however. In the end, European policymakers turned out to be far more receptive.

Europe had been a precious lifeline to Libya, even during the period from 1992 through 1999, when UN sanctions were in place. European investments in the Libyan oil sector kept the nation afloat throughout the 1990s.
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Throughout this period, Libyan officials privately held out hopes that the US oil producers would be back soon. Acreage once held by the US oil companies had been held in trust since 1982. The Libyan government would not risk an additional casus belli.
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But even without the United States, European dependence on Libyan oil was becoming profound. Libya accounted for 21.6 percent of hydrocarbon exports to Italy; 10.8 percent to Germany; 7.6 percent to the UK; and 5.5 percent to France.
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In 2004, Libya provided a full 41 percent (another source says 75 percent) of Switzerland's oil and gas imports. As we will see later, that situation left Switzerland particularly exposed to Gaddafi's blackmail.