by Guy Arnold
Over the years 1975–83 Libya’s military forces were increased from 22,000 to 85,000 while Libya spent huge sums on the acquisition of arms. Prior to 1973 arms had come from the West. In 1974, however, Gaddafi had signed a major contract with the USSR to be followed by further agreements in 1977, 1978 and 1980, the agreement of the latter year being worth US$8 billllion. By 1983, of US$28 billion of arms purchases, US$20 billion came from the USSR. On the other hand, the US State Department was doubtful that Libya had the military personnel to handle all these weapons although by this time there were 4,000 foreign advisers in the country, half of them from the USSR. Relations between the US and Libya were cool through 1985, but deteriorated sharply at the end of the year, when the US accused Libya of two bomb attacks at Rome and Vienna airports on 27 December. In January 1986 President Reagan imposed further sanctions on Libya and made support for terrorism the principal reason for his move. A US report of 1986 suggested Gaddafi had secretly given US$400 million to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and sent a team of advisers to Managua. The kernel of the US case against Gaddafi was his supposed support for terrorism around the world, including targets in the United States. In a speech of June 1984 Gaddafi had told a Libyan audience that ‘we are capable of exporting terrorism to the heart of America’. And in another speech on 1 September 1985 (the sixteenth anniversary of his coup) Gaddafi said: ‘We have the right to fight America, and we have the right to export terrorism to them…’9
In March 1986 a US task force on terrorism under the chairmanship of Vice-President George Bush argued that military action could be used as a deterrent against future acts of terrorism. As it was, between 1981 and January 1986 US naval forces had carried out exercises off the Libyan coast on no less than 18 occasions, seven of them including operations inside what Gaddafi had called the ‘line of death’ across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra. On 24 March, from the Sixth Fleet task force of 30 ships, planes from carriers began a total of 375 flights over the Gulf while three ships led by the cruiser Ticonderoga crossed the ‘line of death’ and remained in what were claimed as Libya’s waters for 75 hours. Libyans and Americans each fired a number of missiles and two Libyan ships were sunk. On 5 April the explosion of a terrorist bomb in a West Berlin discotheque, La Belle, frequented by US servicemen provided the excuse Washington had been looking for. The bomb killed a US sergeant and a young Turkish woman and injured 230 people including 50 US service personnel. President Reagan blamed Gaddafi for the bomb: ‘Our evidence is direct, it is precise, it is irrefutable.’ As a consequence, over 14–15 April, US military planes from bases in Britain and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for Libya’s alleged responsibility for terrorist activities in Europe. Libyan casualties were 130, civilian and military, including Gaddafi’s adopted daughter. Gaddafi accused President Reagan of being ‘the world’s number one terrorist’. The repercussions from this raid continued for several years: the standing of Gaddafi was strengthened – he had not been eliminated – while that of the US suffered from accusations of bullying and terrorism as well as ineptness.
Despite his unpopularity, Gaddafi’s defiance of the United States was generally popular in the Third World. He had become to Washington what, a generation earlier, Nasser had been to London, a permanent thorn in the flesh, with the result that Washington was constantly on the lookout for an excuse to punish Gaddafi and if possible topple him from power. In the week following the raid, five US oil companies departed from Libya. By September 1986 at the Non-Aligned Summit in Harare, Gaddafi was sufficiently back to his old form to tell members that most of them were aligned to the West and that the movement was irrelevant.
During the 1980s a number of Libyan nationals in Europe who refused to return home were assassinated by Libyan ‘hit-squads’. Britain, France, West Germany and the US therefore regulated the activities of the Libyan People’s Bureaux in their countries. Britain’s relations with Libya through the 1970s had generally been poor. In an effort to improve these, the British Minister of Health, Kenneth Clarke, visited Libya in February 1983 at a time when there were about 8,000 Libyan students studying in Britain and English was the second language in Libyan schools. However, the Libyans regarded London as a centre for dissident opposition movements and were fearful that opponents of the regime such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya would influence an increasing number of the Libyan students in Britain. In consequence the Libyan regime began to organize its own followers in Britain and told them to eliminate opposition to Gaddafi. In September 1983 the anti-Gaddafi National Front for the Salvation of Libya held its first demonstration in London and the pro-Gaddafi revolutionary committees among students at once organized a counterdemonstration. There followed a steady escalation of violence between the two sides and this came to a head in 1984. In February 1984 representatives of the revolutionary students took over the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square, London, and orthodox Libyan diplomats were sent home. At a press conference on 18 February four revolutionary committee men who had taken over the Bureau ‘accused Britain of harbouring people bent on undermining the Libyan revolution and pledged to eliminate all Gaddafi’s opponents in the country. Though no one in Britain appeared to take them at their word or even to understand what they were driving at, the quartet stated uncompromisingly that, the “sole purpose of the takeover” was to escalate revolutionary activities in Britain.’10
An anti-Gaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square on 17 April 1984 led to a tragedy when a number of shots were fired from the Bureau against the demonstrators and WPC Yvonne Fletcher was killed. The British police besieged the Bureau for 10 days, after which the occupants were allowed to return to Libya under diplomatic immunity.
In the following year Gaddafi attempted to improve relations with Britain while the general British approach to Libya, despite the shooting of WPC Fletcher, was business as usual. In April 1986 Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher supported the US raid on Libya, not least because Gaddafi had supported Argentina’s Gen. Galtieri during the Falklands War and had also provided assistance to the IRA in Northern Ireland. Despite this, Gaddafi was conciliatory towards Britain for the balance of the 1980s, perhaps because of low world demand for oil and the consequent weakness of the Libyan economy. However, this more ameliorative attitude did not last. Libya opposed the Gulf War against Iraq at the beginning of the 1990s and subsequent deteriorating relations with Britain culminated, on 17 June 1991, with a meeting of the General People’s Congress (GPC) when Gaddafi said: ‘To hell with Britain and relations with it until the day of judgement… To hell with Britain and America, as children would say.’11 Any hopes of rapprochment disappeared once the US, Britain and France had been convinced that the Lockerbie bomb of 21 December 1988 that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 with a total loss of 270 lives was a Libyan terrorist act. An article in the London Sunday Telegraph of 16 April 1989 implicated Libya in the bombing. This coloured their relations with Libya through the 1990s.
Gaddafi’s relations with France were equally strained over the decade. The Libyan intervention in Chad caused permanent tension with France until a settlement of the dispute was finally reached at the end of the 1980s. In Tunisia, following the Gafsa incident of February 1980, when guerrillas raided the Tunisian mining town of that name to incite a rebellion and Tunisia blamed Libya, France sent military forces to support the Tunisian government. In reaction, Libyan mobs burned the French embassy in Tripoli and its consulate in Benghazi. This affair brought to the surface Gaddafi’s deep resentment of French neo-colonialist activities. Relations were further set back in 1984 following an agreement by the two countries to withdraw simultaneously from Chad. The French kept their side of the agreement but the Libyans remained in Chad, much to the chagrin of France’s President François Mitterand who was left looking foolish. Yet another cause of Franco-Libyan tension was the destruction of the French flight UTA 772, which
exploded over Niger in 1989 as the result of a bomb, killing 171 people. In 1991 France issued arrest warrants for four Libyans that it claimed were responsible for the bomb outrage.
Libya’s relations with the USSR were more circumspect; the principal tie between the two countries was the purchase of Soviet arms by Libya. This relationship was to change as world demand for oil collapsed so that Libya no longer enjoyed the surpluses that had enabled it to purchase large Soviet arms shipments. In 1983 the USSR proposed a full treaty of friendship between the two countries, for Moscow needed the sale of arms to Libya to continue. However, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988 posed a difficult problem for Gaddafi since he made a point of insisting upon Muslim solidarity. An American appraisal of Libyan-Soviet relations at the beginning of the 1980s made these closer than the reality: ‘Libya is the foremost Soviet arms customer, and in recent years Qadhafi has increasingly provided the Soviet armed forces access to Libyan facilities. Libya serves Soviet aims without a formal relationship, for Soviet arms find their way through Libya to subversive groups and terrorists whose arms serve Soviet interests.’12 During the Libyan confrontation with the US in 1986, the USSR was careful to keep at arm’s length. Moscow had not ratified the treaty of friendship it had proposed in 1983 when Maj. Abdul Salam Jalloud had visited Moscow. By the end of the 1980s the USSR was pressing Libya for the immediate settlement of debts for arms, a sum of approximately US$5 billion. Thus, Libya’s relations with the USSR and the Communist bloc were deteriorating just as the Cold War came to an end.
By the end of the 1980s Libya had more enemies than friends yet Gaddafi had an unique capacity to reverse bad relations, at least to his own satisfaction, and in 1989 he contrived to move Libya out of the isolation into which his policies had forced it. He initiated a process of conciliation towards Libya’s Arab neighbours: he lifted restrictions on foreign travel for Libyans, which proved highly popular; participated in moves to make UMA more effective; concluded a peace accord with Chad; achieved a reconciliation with Egypt; and managed to improve relations with both France and Italy. At home Gaddafi needed to protect his position as undisputed leader in the face of the growth of militant Islamist groups; he did this by breaking up the army and replacing army units with General Defence Committees, which assumed control of the ‘Armed people’. Although this move had a powerful propaganda impact outside Libya it brought the military under the control of People’s Committees and eliminated the possibility of a coup so that all real power rested with Gaddafi. Nonetheless, Islamic opposition to Gaddafi became an important factor in January 1989 when clashes occurred at al-Fatah University in Tripoli between pro-fundamentalist students and the security forces. The disturbances were quelled but further violence erupted on 20 January between members of the Revolutionary Committee and worshippers at a Tripoli mosque, and 4,000 people attending mosque services in the city were arrested. In fact Islamic radicalism had existed underground throughout the 1980s although any political expression of it resulted in severe punishment including public executions. The greatest support for such radicalism was found among young people. Possibly Gaddafi’s biggest breakthrough in 1989 was the rapprochment with Egypt. At the Casablanca Arab League Summit of 24–26 May, which Gaddafi had attended under pressure from Algeria’s President Benjedid, Gaddafi and Egypt’s President Mubarak embraced. Since Libya’s relations with Algeria and Tunisia had also improved Libya agreed to assist funding UMA.
CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX
The Horn: Continuous Warfare
The endless fighting that characterized the Horn of Africa throughout the 1980s – the Eritrean war of secession from Ethiopia, the civil war between North and South in the Sudan and the clan warfare that escalated steadily in Somalia – provided ample justification for those who sought to dismiss Africa as a hopeless geopolitical mess. It was, after all, the decade during which Africa came to be referred to as a ‘basket case’. Only rarely were appropriate questions asked: why such wars, why so long, what were the root causes of the conflicts? In part, the answer lay with political leaders who pinned their reputations to a victory that was unattainable; they only saw, with classic short-sightedness, that any surrender to a different point of view was bound to be interpreted as a surrender of their power. In part, the dilemma went far deeper. Every African country, with the single and in this case ironic exception of Somalia, had agreed with the 1963 OAU ruling that the newly emerging states of the continent should accept their inherited colonial boundaries and this ruling had become a commandment set in stone. Yet in the three conflicts in the Horn, Eritrea would eventually break away from Ethiopia and the northern part of Somalia (the former British Somaliland) would proclaim its independence, although in the case of the Sudan nothing had been resolved by the end of the century.
SUDAN UNDER NIMEIRI
Sudan’s Permanent Constitution was amended in 1980 in order to allow the introduction of regional governments in the northern part of the country and five regions were established. These were the Northern Region, the Eastern Region, the Central Region, Kordofan Region and Darfur Region while a separate administration was set up for Khartoum. Under the Southern Provinces Regional Act 1972, the South had become a self-governing region comprising the three provinces of Bahr El Ghazal, Equatoria and Upper Nile. These had been subdivided in 1976 into three additional provinces – Lakes, Jonglei and Eastern Equatoria. A framework of self-government was created including a parliamentary system. An elected legislature (the Regional Assembly) and an executive – the High Executive Council – were established. Following the Addis Ababa Agreement, which had led to the Southern Province’s Regional Act, the South enjoyed a special status in the Sudan and for a time North-South relations were to run smoothly. However, in June 1983 Nimeiri decreed the creation of three regions in Southern Sudan and a Presidential system of guided democracy was established in them, and the three provinces of Bahr El Ghazal, Equatoria and Upper Nile were transformed into three regions with partly elected and partly appointed legislatures. Executive power in each region was vested in a Governor appointed by the President. The Governor for each region, who was assisted by a deputy and five ministers responsible to him, was alone responsible to the President. The proposal for this division originated in Equatoria with Joseph Lagu whose object was to end Dinka domination of the South. Hostility to the Dinka was a permanent concern of the other weaker ethnic groups in the South and as one non-Dinka member of the Sudan Socialist Union (SSU) told the Regional Assembly, ‘It took the Sudan 50 years to get rid of the British; it took Southerners 17 years to get rid of the Arabs; it will take you (Southerners) 100 years to get rid of the Dinka.’1 Lagu had also insisted that the ‘division of the South into regions would bring leaders from Upper Nile and Bahr El Ghazal nearer to their people, which was bound to improve development in these areas’.
A reflection on tribalism in Africa at this time by Southern members of the Fourth National Assembly highlighted the tensions that dominated Southern politics:
Tribalism is still a very strong force in African politics. It was the main obstacle to the African Liberation Movement, and the tribal chiefs the main reactionary force… Nobody will deny tribalism in the Southern Political Leadership since 1972. The Solidarity Committee notes the monopoly of the Dinka tribe in some public institutions… It is at this point that we stand with Joseph Lagu… The question before every citizen of the South is whether the Dinka domination can only be avoided by re-dividing up the Southern Region… Today in Africa, tribes are not preferably accommodated in autonomous regions as a solution to problems their differences pose. Instead, concern of political leaders in Africa is how to integrate them into modern nations, states and societies within a democratic framework.2
In late 1983, when his popularity was in freefall, Nimeiri tried to pacify his critics and silence the opposition by the manipulation of religion. He Islamized the laws by replacing all the statutes with the principles of Sharia, a move that angered many
people and especially those in the non-Muslim South. Discontent in the South had steadily increased since the end of the 1970s and, after Nimeiri announced his plan to re-divide the southern region, discontent turned into resistance with the formation of the Council for the Unity of Southern Sudan (CUSS). This, in turn, led to the formation of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The SPLM/SPLA was not a secessionist movement but sought progressive change for the Sudan as a whole. To many Southerners Nimeiri’s plan appeared simply a way of weakening them in relation to the central government in Khartoum so that Khartoum would get the greater part of the new revenues from the oil that had been discovered. The US company Chevron was to extract the oil and construct a 1,500-mile pipeline from south-central Sudan to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. In the south it seemed that the oil would bind Washington to the north. As the Vice-President of Standard Oil said: ‘We get the feeling that Washington is determined that Sudan should not be lost.’ However, by this time Nimeiri’s regime was collapsing and he was trying to divert attention from his internal problems by suggesting that Ethiopia intended to invade the Sudan. In an article in Newsweek Hilary Ng’weno, the editor-in-chief of the Nairobi Weekly Review, wrote: