The success of a new Libya — the country held its first general
elections since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in July 2012 and voted in a new
200-member General National Congress — is what drives the focus for most
Middle East experts, noting that in Libya, unlike Tunisia and Egypt,
moderates have been voted into government. This might explain Libya’s
success post-Arab Spring in the short term. The new government, however,
will not only be required to rebuild state institutions and draft a
constitution but contain and disband the scores of powerful and armed
militias threatening to bring factional rivalries and corruption to the
fore in the absence of a coordinated national army and police force. The
killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi last year by an Al Qaeda
linked group is evidence of these rogue militias, some with associations
with Islamist organisations, others operating like mafia groups
threatening security. Then there is also the fact that Libya sits on the
largest oil reserves in Africa worth $120 billion; something that
Gaddafi had effectively used as a bargaining chip with Western
governments, as he worked to rehabilitate himself. Though it has been
projected that Libya’s GDP could rise by 59 per cent in 2012, there is
fear that tribal patronage and regional interests based on decades of
oil-based patronage politics could hold the economy back. Only economic
reforms would ensure the efficient management of oil reserves, say
experts.
Reporting for Channel 4, journalist Lindsey Hilsum made four trips to
Libya in 2011 to report the conflict and follow the stories of many
Libyans — those who supported Colonel Gaddafi right until the end and
those who returned home after decades in exile in the hope that they
would contribute to the changes that the revolution might bring.
In Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution, Hilsum not only draws
on her reportage of the uprising, but also charts Gaddafi’s historical
trajectory, his political projects and socialist, revolutionary appeal
and why his philosophies did not endure beyond the Arab Spring.
Throughout the book, there is discussion about what led Libyans to
dissent against the regime and demand the fall of Gaddafi at all costs;
why families of prisoners incarcerated at Abu Salim prison for decades,
many hundreds dead and buried in unmarked graves, protested until they
got justice; and why educated, exiled professionals returned in the
midst of the uprising to take up arms or assist in other ways critical
to the development of the opposition as a political force. Many Libyans
were angry at the West in the advent of 9/11, accusing the British and
Americans of collaborating with the regime by ‘rendering’ dissident
Libyans who were tortured by Gaddafi’s men. MI6 and the CIA helped Libya
track down their enemies in the West with Mark Allen, the MI6 director,
writing that it is “the least we could do,” notes Hilsum.
Sandstorm is fast-paced, descriptive and held together by interviews
with ordinary people, rebels, government officials, former Abu Salim
prisoners and young activists — all this is evidence of Hilsum’s
experience as a television correspondent. Her analysis of the track
record of Western governments and their relationship with dictators —
something critical to the future of the Arab Spring countries — lends
greater context, reminding how Western governments, especially France,
the UK and the US, which had once rehabilitated Gaddafi, altered their
image of him dramatically when it suited their purpose. His isolation
was also in part because he provided the IRA with semtex used in attacks
in Ireland and in Britain. Also, his government was financially
supportive of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Yet this strange
trajectory from “enemy to friend and back to enemy again had no parallel
in modern history,” according to Hilsum, with the British and the
Americans conveniently forgetting the olive branch that had at times
been extended to a “brutal dictator”. Earlier, former US president Bush
had said that “oldhostilities need not continue forever”.
What changed the Libyan landscape for the West in the post 9/11
period is familiar, as in Egypt during the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but
reminds us that if the West and Gaddafi shared a symbiotic relationship
at the advent of the ‘war on terror’, he too skilfully parlayed his
weapons programme and compensation for the Lockerbie bombings for
international acceptability. So, in essence, even if his political
fortunes swayed with international currents, Gaddafi was a savvy player.
But as the chips fell, Libyans suffered the brunt of this vacillating
liaison, their country without a proper political infrastructure or
identity, an unregulated economy, poverty and poor education and health
care. Gaddafi, the last of his generation of Arab dictators, believed
that he should remain in his position because he never ruled; it was the
people who ruled, and he was simply the guide. From the start, his
charisma and control might have won him friends in high places (John
McCain tweeted about meeting Gaddafi in Libya in 2009, “Late evening
with Col. Gaddafi at his ‘ranch’ in Libya — interesting meeting with an
interesting man”) but he would support any group, country or even
individual who “challenged what he saw as colonialist or imperial
power”. Hilsum meets Mukhtar Nagasa, the son of a diplomat, who had
studied The Green Book (the Gaddafi edicts) at school. He tells her that
Gaddafi and Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser were “like rock stars to
us”. As a work reading somewhere between second-hand socialist ideas
and more original ‘thoughts,’ the Green Book, was so fetishised that
gigantic versions were constructed in concrete across Libya. For
example, it read: “It is… unreasonable for crowds to enter playgrounds
and arenas to watch a player or team without participating themselves” —
if this decree was carried out, it would have killed off Libya’s
sporting life for good.
Gaddafi wasn’t innocent of the allegations against him at home: the
massacre at Abu Salim is an example. In 2001, Hilsum writes, even though
Abu Salim families were given death certificates from Libyan
authorities, they were not informed under what circumstances their
relatives died and their bodies were not returned. Gaddafi’s
brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanussi is held responsible for the murder of
1,270 men at the notorious prison but he could not have been put on
trial and sacked because he was married to Gaddafi’s wife’s sister,
Fatima, explains Razia Sholeh, who spoke fondly of Gaddafi as the
“Guide” for whom both she and her husband worked. Hilsum quotes her:
“‘We are a family country,’ she said. ‘That’s how it works in Libya.’”
According to Razia, if al-Sanussi had been sacked, his tribe would have
rebelled. After Gaddafi’s death, Razia, who is also married into the
extended family, fled for Tunisia. In 2004, Gaddafi allowed Amnesty
International into Libya for the first time and he admitted that
“something had happened at the prison”. In the mid-2000s, his son Saif
al Islam adopted a moderate stance, forming a charity and development
foundation, aware that “human rights were a major problem”.
In Sandstorm, the Brother Leader, as Colonel Gaddafi was also known,
comes across as a man who towards the end of his political career
inhabited a strange world of a corrupt family dictatorship, where his
detractors were tortured and executed in prisons, and abroad and even
publicly. As most dictators, he became so eccentric that “by 2011 he
seemed like a character from an old movie that no one wanted to see
again…his dyed black hair grew longer and wilder, while his face grew
more distorted by Botox, like a sinister Middle Eastern Michael
Jackson.”
That history taught Libyan leaders little to nothing is the focus of
this narrative. Ironically, Libya’s past that had led to the 1969 coup
ousting King Idris — also known to have banned political parties and
enjoyed reliance on the British and Americans — was no different to the
new order patronised by Gaddafi. The outcome of both the monarchy and
Gaddafi’s regime was the same: Libyans suffered “years of neglect”
without a strong state and economy. For both leaders, Western
imperialists played the role of big brother (Gaddafi may have stood his
ground more defiantly) when they felt the need to exert geographical
influence or renew relations to set up gas exploration projects in North
Africa.
The strength of such narrative reporting can be found in the stories
Libyans tell. A former aircraft engineer for Libyan Airlines had two
sons who both fought in 2011. Hilsum meets him at his Misrata home where
he tells her: “I feel ashamed, because my generation was hopeless. No
one thought the young people had this courage and wanted to die for this
country.”
