Exit the Colonel (7 page)

Within a decade of taking power, Gaddafi had identified a fundamental set of behavioral strategies that served to keep him safely in power. A core strategy was to sow confusion—the idea that for every issue there needed to be multiple competing interests, none of which was absolute. This applied to associates, to relationships with other countries, to ministries, and even to his immediate family—whom he trusted no more than any other constituency not to dominate or attempt to harm his interests. A related successful strategy was to impute suspicion to others by selectively bestowing favors or taking away privileges. For example, he might issue offers of amnesty to dissident expatriates. If three returned home, two would be imprisoned or killed, while the third would be given a warm welcome and left to his own devices. The result would draw negative attention to the survivor, who would then be suspected of selling out the others.
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Stagecraft was another useful tool. Gaddafi was a master of props and timing. He made frequent, theatrical use of his traveling tent and the strategic placement of animals. Goats, for example, would occasionally wander in to high-level meetings with his Western interlocutors. This talent for creating perfectly staged red herrings would play a great role in attracting, repelling, and confusing his own people as well as Westerners. While he was not always original in method, his delivery and his sense for the dramatic were almost unparalleled and are essential to understanding how he managed to stay in power for forty-two years.

Gaddafi's capriciousness and brutality were not, to use one of his favorite words, “latent,” nor did they develop slowly and emerge later in his reign. Dr. Fatima Hamrouche, interim minister of health in the Transitional Government, recounted how Gaddafi just after the coup imprisoned her father, one of three senior Libyan judges, for three and a half years. The judge had refused to deliver a stiff penalty on a young soldier who had committed a minor offense, which Gaddafi had taken personally.
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Ahmed Al-Zubeir Al Senussi, who became the figurehead of a pro-Benghazi autonomy movement, was one of the longest-held political prisoners in the world, after being imprisoned by Gaddafi in 1970 following a failed countercoup.
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(The first substantial wave of arrests of those considered to be against the 1969 revolution occurred in 1973.)
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In the early years, however, Gaddafi appeared to be more the earnest, naive revolutionary than the rambling, eccentric autocrat of later years, but he and various key members of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) often appeared to be wildly out of touch. To illustrate the point, when King Khalid bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia paid a courtesy visit to Col. Gaddafi on September 1, 1979, the tenth anniversary of his revolution, Abdelsalam Al Jelloud (Prime Minister until 1977) asked Ghazi abdel Rahman Al Qasibi, a Saudi court adviser, why Sudan's leader, Jafar el Nimeri, was not responding to Libya's diplomatic initiatives. Al Qasibi had to remind his interlocutors that they had tried to overthrow him in a violent coup a short time before. “But we apologized,” said Jelloud, apparently in earnest, “Isn't that sufficient for them?” Al Qasibi came to the conclusion that Jelloud, like Gaddafi, was not playing with a full deck.
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Those who closely observed Gaddafi's behavior insisted that clinical pathologies were at the root of his actions. Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih believes Gaddafi was a sociopath, someone for whom the ends are all-important and others' lives are irrelevant. Combined with his sense of impunity was a countervailing paranoia and fear of death. “There is no normal logic in assessing Gaddafi's behavior,” Fagih says. “Everything is seen through a prism of paranoia.”
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Wayne White, former deputy director of the US State Department's Middle East/South Asia Intelligence Office, described Gaddafi as having “manic-depressive” tendencies: a brash or instantaneous reaction to either insult or perceived opportunity would be followed by a long period of brooding, fear, and/or regret. As White put it, “If Gaddafi had been forced to take a standard desk job, he would have certainly needed a good therapist.”
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As he aged, Gaddafi's thoughts appeared to have an increasingly morbid, fetishlike quality. A Wikileaks cable recounted Gaddafi's strange fascination with the sea and his dislike of flying over the ocean (Gaddafi would schedule his flights in order to minimize any time over large bodies of water).
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Gaddafi seemed to share with Al Qaeda leadership a particular fascination with plane crashes—those he caused, and perhaps one he feared would happen to him.

Gaddafi's attributes—his obsessive need for attention, to have the last word, to assign blame to others, and to be proven correct—are critical to understanding, albeit imperfectly, some of Gaddafi's behaviors. The concept of linkage, which one could define as the necessity to mitigate every accusation or slight with a countervailing claim, threat, or insult, as we will see, was present in almost every dealing with the West. There was certainly no shortage of incidents in which Gaddafi's urge to take the stage trumped reason or morality. Underlying and perhaps accentuating Gaddafi's narcissism were issues of sexual identity, perhaps associated with a fixation on fashion with a feminine touch. As Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “[Gaddafi] can check out Nancy's [the First Lady] closet anytime.”
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Gaddafi seemed to be an unhappy man. In an interview after the revolution, interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril speculated that Gaddafi lived obsessing about the manner and timing of his own death, just like the Sultan of Sadiq Neihoum's fable quoted in the Introduction:
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the parallel is presumably not an accident, given that Neihoum knew Gaddafi quite well.

Gaddafi began his four-decade reign with a five-year period of ruthless experimentation. He purged many of those he had himself recruited to stage the revolution because he feared they were disloyal, precluded the threat of organized rebellion by gerrymandering Libya's administrative units to weaken tribal leadership, and enriched himself and his coterie by appropriating assets of rich traders from the now-defunct Senussi monarchy.
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In the path to absolute power, the scenario was not a new one.

From 1969 to 1974, Gaddafi ostensibly ruled as part of a junta. There had been about seventy Free Officers (a term borrowed from Nasser's own revolution) behind the coup itself, twelve of whom composed the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). In addition to Gaddafi, the eleven others were Abdelsalam Al Jelloud, Omar El Muhayshi, Mohammed Megaryaf, Bechir Hawwadi, Muktar Abdullah al Gerwy, Awad Ali Hamza, Mohammed Nejm, Abdelmonem El Houni, Khouildi El Hamidi, Mustapha El Harroubi, and Abu Bakr Younes. This group comprised a varied group of hardliners, conciliators, and pragmatists. Those who did not fall in line with Gaddafi's wishes did not last long, however. The only names that reappear after the 1980s are the three whom Gaddafi perceived to be most loyal—Abdelmonem El Houni, Abu Bakr Younes, and Abdelsalam Al Jelloud.

Just as he eliminated competition with the RCC, Gaddafi moved to contain or co-opt both religious and tribal authority. His first motions toward Libya's religious leaders, or ulema, were conciliatory. By the late 1970s, however, his attitude changed. He did not hesitate to execute imams who appeared to challenge his authority. He was particularly harsh with respect to the Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical Islamist party founded by Hassan al Banna in 1928, and active followers of the Senussia, pursuing a combination of threats, “re-education” and, failing these, disappearances.
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In order to channel, mold, and project his own version of Islam (and the notion of his rule being somehow divinely sanctioned), Gaddafi created the Islamic Call Society (Jam'iyat ad'Da'wa al-Islamiya), whose ostensible function was to spread Islam throughout Africa, but which was more of an all-around propaganda tool and mechanism for outing domestic religious opponents, whom he referred to as zanadiq, or “heretics.”
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Regionally, Gaddafi focused his efforts on trying to convince the Arab states to support his own vision of Arab unity, along the model pursued by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, beloved throughout the Arab world for euphemistically “socking it to” the West, by nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1957. Egypt, Syria, and the Sudan agreed to the outlines of what would be a series of mix-and-match political associations, called
ittihad al jumhuriyyat al arabiyya
(the Union of Arab Republics), in April 1971. The ultimately unviable association existed in some form from 1972 to 1977.
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In 1971, Tunisia's ruler Habib Bourguiba openly mocked Gaddafi for publicly proposing a political merger between Tunisia and Libya with himself at the head.
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One after another, the Arab leaders came to resent the upstart, thinking his ideas were at best nutty, at worst, dangerous.

Yet for all the purges and political maneuvering, the first five years of Gaddafi's revolution in Libya were a far cry from the brutal, regressive state yet to come. Gaddafi spent more money in the first few years of the revolution on national education and health care than King Idris ever had, building new hospitals and clinics, opening medical schools in Benghazi and Tripoli, and engaging foreign development consultants. Students and doctors trained abroad at government expense.
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Gaddafi mandated education for all male and female children, and committed to provide basic health care for all.
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Within a generation, Libya had virtually eliminated illiteracy, while creating a framework for basic, national, free health care.
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Sheikh Zayed, founder and ruler of the United Arab Emirates, came to Benghazi for an eye operation in the early 1970s—itself a sign of Libya's
progress—and was widely quoted in later years, perhaps apocryphally, and then with irony, given the reversed fortunes of the two cities, as saying, “Someday . . . Dubai will be like this [Benghazi].” While Gaddafi managed within a reasonably short time to educate many of his citizens to a level of basic literacy—and increase life expectancy by 20+ years—this achievement should be measured against what he did
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do, given the vast resources at the regime's disposal and the fact that within twenty years of his assumption of rule, more than 20 percent of the population would be either below international development institutions' measures of poverty, or unemployed, or both.
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In these early years, Gaddafi and the RCC appeared committed to righting the social inequities that had come into relief during the monarchy period.
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Again following Nasser's example, Gaddafi ordered a series of full and partial nationalizations, beginning with the banking and insurance sectors, then moving into the domestic marketing activities of foreign oil companies and the insurance companies.
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In 1971, he created a series of state-run supermarkets, administered by the national supply company (NASCO). Within ten years, most of Libyans' basic food staples came from these Soviet-style cooperatives.

During this period, he laid the groundwork for the social experiments to come. On January 14, 1971, Gaddafi delivered a speech at the coastal town of Zawiya, twenty-eight miles west of Tripoli, outlining a system of popular committees and congresses, channels through which he envisioned mobilizing the people to advance the goals of his revolution.
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Also in 1971, Gaddafi swapped his earlier conception of a popular congress for a single revolutionary party, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), modeled after Nasser's institution of the same name. The main purpose of the ASU was to dismantle tribal influence and discredit and remove the old monarchist elites.
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Gaddafi assigned RCC member Abu Bakr Younes to oversee the militarization of high schools and universities, as well as the formation of female military cadres.
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The ASU clashed with popular apathy and was disbanded in 1976.
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Conflicts with the Libyan ulema (religious scholars) and Muslim Brotherhood grew, in line with the Brotherhood's influence in Egypt (a radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981).

In a landmark speech delivered in the main square of the town of Zwara in April 1973, Gaddafi heralded the coming of a Libyan cultural-popular revolution based on something he called the Third Universal Theory, an
alternative to capitalism and Marxism.
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In the five-point program expressing this theory, particularly jarring (and unremarked) were points two and five, which read, respectively:

Even as Gaddafi experimented with various ideological strands, Libya was in the throes of a major economic boom. Oil money was now flowing into the country at an amazing rate, and those who had invested in building up local businesses were making money hand over fist: “Our sales were increasing exponentially,” said Omar Benhalim, who, then in his early twenties, was managing divisions of his father's import business. “It was amazing, there seemed to be no limit to growth, and yet the writing was on the wall, in Gaddafi's speeches and behavior. We knew things could not continue. It was just a matter of time. Many who had money to spare sent it overseas, in anticipation of an exit.” Benhalim recounts how one day in 1975, just after lunch, he returned to the company showroom to find soldiers standing out front—they remained for a few months, waiting and watching, until the family was told that their services were no longer needed. Within a year Benhalim and many in similar positions had become part of the growing Libyan diaspora.
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