Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  “Qaddafi understands the tribal structure and has the ability to play one person against another, one group against another,” one Libyan official explained. “He’s a strategic genius. He is doing with the reformers and hard-liners what he has done with these tribes, playing the pro-Western element against the anti-Western element.”

  For a foreigner, there’s no better illustration of the push-me-pull-you quality of the new Libya than the process of getting in. An application for a journalist’s visa that I submitted last year went nowhere, although the Libyan representative to the United States assured me steadily for five months that the visa was nearly ready. (When I met with Saif in Montreal, he volunteered to take care of it, with no evident results.) Next, I joined an international party of archaeologists who had been promised entry—but as we were waiting to board a Libyan Arab Airlines flight in Rome, we were abruptly denied access to the plane. One source in the Libyan government told us that the Ministry of Immigration had recently moved and our papers had been mislaid. Another said that the head of the visa section had sabotaged files during the move. A third said that the story about the move had been floated as an alibi; the Leader had decided not to let in any Americans. Indeed, a tour group from the Metropolitan Museum arrived by ship in Tripoli in October and was not allowed to dock; the next month, five other ships met the same fate.

  As a dual national, I applied using my British passport, again as a member of the archaeologists’ delegation, and, as advised, wrote on the form that I was Anglican. Finally, I received a document marked “sixty-day invitation,” though no one knew whether that was sixty days from the date of the letter, sixty days from the date the visa was stamped in my passport, or sixty days from the date I entered the country. I called the Libyan consulate in London every day about my visa. In the morning, there was no answer. In the afternoon, someone answered and said that consular services were available only in the morning. I flew to London, where the consular officer explained that I could enter Libya anytime in the next forty-five days for a stay of up to ninety days. I arrived at Tripoli Airport in mid-November. Through a Libyan travel agency, I had arranged for a car at the airport, and just as I’d joined a nearly motionless line for immigration, a man from the agency came by with my name on a placard and walked me straight through; the immigration officer never even looked to see whether I matched my passport. “Your visa expired—you were supposed to enter within thirty days,” the agency man said. “Fortunately, the guy at immigration is a friend, so it wasn’t a problem.”

  It was an apt introduction to a country where the law is always open to interpretation and personal connections are the principal currency. I was in as a British Christian archaeologist rather than as an American Jewish journalist, but I was in. I promptly went to the International Press Office, where I declared my journalistic purpose, and where the man in charge lectured me for thirty minutes about why Libyan democracy was better than American, the terrible untruths that American journalists had heaped on Libya, and America’s imperialist tendencies. Then he volunteered that the officials I’d wanted to speak to would be too busy for me, and that I shouldn’t have come.

  This was standard procedure. Last April, after months of planning, the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York, sent an august delegation—including David Rockefeller, Peter G. Peterson, Alan Patricof, and Leonard Lauder—to Libya, with appointments to meet both Muammar and Saif Qaddafi. After they arrived, they were told that the Leader was unavailable and that the Principal had made a scheduling error and was on his way to Japan.

  Officials in Libya seldom say no and seldom say yes. Libyans use a popular Arab term: IBM, which stands for Inshallah, bokra, moumken, or “With the will of God, tomorrow, maybe.” All plans are provisional, even at the highest levels of government. You can see the head of the National Oil Company with an hour’s notice; you can also spend weeks preparing for an appointment that never materializes.

  I requested a meeting with the prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, before I went to Libya and every day for three weeks while I was in Tripoli. On my last day, I was in the middle of a meeting when my cell phone rang. “The prime minister will see you,” someone said.

  I said that I hoped he could see me before I had to leave.

  “The prime minister will see you now.”

  I began, “Oh, okay, I’ll get my tape recorder—”

  “He will see you right now,” the voice interrupted. “Where are you?”

  I gave the address.

  “A car will pick you up in three minutes.”

  * * *

  The drive to the prime minister’s office was terrifying, as most Libyan driving is. Tripolitans seem to think that traffic lights are just festive bits of colored glass strewn randomly along the roads, and they rebel against tightly regulated lives by ignoring all driving rules, blithely heading into opposing traffic on the far side of a two-way road, turning abruptly across five lanes of streaming cars. “No shortage of organs for transplant here!” a Libyan acquaintance remarked during one excursion. The driver dropped me at the wrong building. It took two hours of calls and confusion to reach my destination.

  Dr. Shukri, as he is called by those close to him and by those who pretend to be close to him—he has a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts—had a portly grandeur. With a neat mustache and a well-tailored suit, he exuded an effortless cosmopolitanism that seemed more conducive to facilitating Libya’s reentry into the world than to winning over the hard-line elements at home. When I arrived, he was sitting on a gilded sofa in a room furnished with Arabic reimaginings of Louis XVI furniture, before many trays of pastries and glasses of the inevitable mint tea. In the Libyan empire of obliquity, his clarity was refreshing, and his teasing irony seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of Libyan double-talk.

  I mentioned that many of his colleagues saw no need to hasten the pace of reform. This was clearly not his view. “Sometimes you have to be hard on those you love,” he said. “You wake your sleeping child so that he can get to school. Being a little harsh, not seeking too much popularity, is a better way.” He spoke of the need for pro-business measures that would reduce bureaucratic impediments and rampant corruption. “The corruption is tied to shortages, inefficiency, and unemployment,” the prime minister said. “Cutting red tape—there is resistance to it. There is some resistance in good faith and some in bad faith.” Nor was he inclined to defer to the regime’s egalitarian rhetoric: “Those who can excel should get more—having a few rich people can build a whole country.” Qaddafi’s Green Book decrees that people should be “partners, not wage workers,” but it is not easy to make everyone a partner, the prime minister observed. “People don’t want to find jobs. They want the government to find them jobs. It’s not viable.”

  The civil service, which employs about 20 percent of Libyans, is vastly oversubscribed; the National Oil Company, with a staff of forty thousand, has perhaps twice the employees it needs. Though salaries are capped, many people are paid for multiple jobs, and if those jobs are overseen by members of their tribe, failure to show up is never questioned. On the other hand, because food is heavily subsidized, people can get by on little money, enabling them to refuse jobs they consider beneath them. Heavy labor is done by sub-Saharan Africans, and slightly more skilled work by Egyptians.

  “We have a paradoxical economy, in which we have many unemployed Libyans”—the official unemployment rate is almost 30 percent—“and two million foreigners working,” Ghanem said. “This mismatch is catastrophic.” The combination of an imported workforce with high domestic unemployment is typical of oil-rich nations, but the problem is especially urgent in Libya because its population is growing rapidly—it is not unusual to meet people with fourteen children in a single marriage. Roughly half the population is under the age of fifteen.

  The prime minister’s views on Islamic militants were close to those expressed by both the Leader and the Principal: “Radical fundamental
ism is like cancer. It can strike anyplace, anytime, and you can’t predict it, and by the time you discover it, it has usually spread too far to be contained. Is there such fundamentalism here? I honestly don’t think so. But it could be hatching quietly, unseen by us all.” The predominant form of Islam in Libya is Sunni Mālikī, a relatively supple creed that is remote from the fundamentalisms espoused by the jihadis. Some Libyans, though, have pointed out that conditions that seem to have bred terrorism elsewhere—prosperity without employment and a large population of young people with no sense of purpose—currently prevail in the country.

  The prime minister was more circumspect on the prospects for US-Libyan diplomacy. “We would like a relationship, yes, but we do not want to get into bed with an elephant,” he said, laughing, and spreading his hands wide in a gesture of innocence. “It could roll over in the night and crush us.”

  I mentioned public statements he’d made about being unable to bring about reform when he had to work with a cabinet assembled by Qaddafi and asked about the constraints on his authority. Ghanem assumed the air of one confiding a great personal truth: “My ministers are like my brothers”—he wrapped his hands around his knee—“I didn’t choose them.” He paused and added with a smile, “My father chose them.”

  * * *

  At the center of Tripoli lies Green Square. Now mostly a parking lot, it is one of those vast, anonymous spaces that military regimes favor. East of Green Square lie the surviving Italian colonial buildings. To the west is the old city, a warren of tiny streets and shops crowned by the ancient Red Castle, which houses a distinguished archaeological museum. In front is an esplanade beside the sea. The modern city stretches out in all other directions, with some neighborhoods of private villas, and many of Soviet-style housing developments; it reflects both the optimism and the shoddiness of more recent Libyan history.

  I was invited to the opening of a special exhibition on volunteerism, in a tent in Green Square. Addressing a gathering of a hundred or so people, an official said that tribute had to be paid to the greatest volunteer of all: Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who, unlike the American president, does not draw a salary but out of “love and honesty” graciously consents to rule. “There is one God, and Muhammad is his prophet, and Qaddafi is his modern incarnation!” someone in the crowd cried. Such public avowals are of a piece with the billboards you find throughout Libya, showing a beaming Qaddafi, as triumphant and windswept as Clark Gable. Those billboards are the first thing a visitor notices; the second is the ubiquity of litter. Wherever you go—including even the spectacular ruins of the Hellenistic and Roman cities of Cyrene, Sabratha, and Leptis Magna—you see plastic bottles, bags, paper, chicken bones, cans: a film covering the landscape. “It’s how the people of Libya piss on the system,” one Libyan academic told me. “The Leader doesn’t actually care about this country. Why should we keep it beautiful for him?” It is the most arresting of the country’s many paradoxes: Libyans who hate the regime but love Libya cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. You can take this as a tribute, by way of inversion, to the state ideology.

  In the early seventies, the Leader, disappointed by his countrymen’s lack of revolutionary fervor, withdrew to the desert to write the Green Book, in which he advanced his Third Universal Theory as superior to capitalism and Communism. Individuals were to own their homes; other land was to be held in common. In 1977, he issued a Declaration of the Establishment of the People’s Authority, launching the Jamahiriya, or “state of the masses,” and the Libyan system of “direct democracy,” in which the country is “ruled” by the People’s Congresses: what the Green Book calls the “supervision of the government by the people.” The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya—memorably abbreviated as “the Great SPLAJ”—was born. The Green Book proposes that, to avoid internal disputes, every nation should have one religion, but it makes no mention of Islam. Qaddafi claimed that his manifesto enshrined the basic tenets of the Koran (freely equating, for instance, the Koranic notion of almsgiving with his redistributive social-welfare policies), and that it therefore had the status of Sharia. His relation to Islam has two aspects: he draws upon it to buttress his authority, but he is hostile to the Islamists because he will countenance no rivals to that authority.

  The two radical decades that ensued—televised public hangings, burnings of Western books and musical instruments, the sudden prohibition of private enterprise, intense anti-Zionism, official solidarity with terrorist and guerrilla groups—met with sharp international disapprobation. Libya’s rogue status allowed Qaddafi to consolidate power and play protector of his besieged population, a role in which he excels.

  One Libyan in early middle age who had lived in the United States until September 11 and who missed America spoke of what was wrong with Qaddafi’s Libya and then said, “But I wouldn’t be where I am without the revolution. They paid for my education, sent me to America, and gave me a life I wouldn’t have dreamed of without them.”

  In part, that reflects the extreme poverty of prerevolutionary Libya. The Jamahiriya benefited from the dramatic increase in petroleum prices that began in the seventies, and from the more aggressive revenue-sharing deals Libya imposed on foreign oil companies, so that oil earnings in the midseventies were roughly ten times what they had been in the midsixties. Oil money made possible major investments in education and infrastructure. The literacy rate in Libya has risen from about 20 percent, before Qaddafi came to power, to 82 percent. The average life expectancy has risen from forty-four to seventy-four. More than eighty thousand kilometers of roads have been built. Electricity has become nearly universal.

  And Qaddafi has become, for most Libyans, simply a fact of life. Three-quarters of Libya’s citizens have been born since he came to power. During that period, the cult of personality has sparked and dimmed in a way that has a certain congruence with the phases of Soviet leadership: a heady moment of Leninist-style revolution when many people believed in the ideals; a Stalinist period of cruel repression and deliberate violence; a long Khrushchev period of mild thaw; and now a Brezhnev-style period of corruption, chaos, and factionalism. Many of Saif Qaddafi’s admirers hope that he will prove to be the reforming Gorbachev of the story.

  * * *

  That an essentially repressive society can be characterized as being in the midst of reform reflects just how grim things used to be there. In Tripoli, I heard stories about life inside prison from many people whose only offense against the Jamahiriya was to be critical of it. In 2002, a former government official who publicly called for free elections and a free press was jailed; he was released in early 2004—only to be sent back to prison two weeks later for criticizing the regime to foreign reporters. There is no opposition press; an Internet journalist who had published stories critical of the government spent several months in prison last year on trumped-up charges. “Social rehabilitation” facilities—effectively, detention centers—are supposedly for the protection of women who have broken the laws against adultery and fornication, some of whom are in fact rape victims rejected by their families. A woman in these compounds can leave only if a male relative or fiancé takes her into his custody.

  More widely covered is the case of five Bulgarian nurses who were accused in 1999 of deliberately infecting 426 children in a Benghazi hospital with HIV. The nurses were tortured until they confessed, then sentenced to death in May 2004. Among people outside Libya, the accusations seem bizarre and concocted; among most Libyans, it’s taken for granted that the children were deliberately infected and that the Bulgarians are the likeliest culprits. (Whereas Western investigators have blamed the infections on poor sanitation, a Libyan doctor close to the case maintains that only children on the ward where the convicted nurses worked were infected, and that the infections ceased when the Bulgarians left, even though sanitary conditions in all the wards remain far from ideal.) Saif has said that the convictions were unjust, a brave stand given how important it is that he not appear to
be capitulating to Western pressure. “Sure, the Big Guy let Saif say the nurses were innocent—to see how it would play,” a junior government official explained. “And it played badly.” A few months later, Qaddafi reaffirmed the hard line, declaring that the infections were caused by “an organization aiming to destroy Libya.” Negotiations with the Bulgarians are ongoing, however, and Libya’s supreme court has granted the defendants a new trial, which is to begin in May. (NB: They were finally extradited to Bulgaria in 2007, where they were pardoned.)

  Qaddafi is no Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin. He has been brutal and capricious, but he has not killed a large part of his own population. It is illegal to slander the Leader and Law 71 makes a capital offense of any group activity opposed to the revolution, but this rule has been less strictly enforced lately. Libya has signed the UN Convention against Torture, and the minister of justice has said that he will bring Libyan law in line with international human-rights standards. Some of this is window dressing. “They closed the People’s Prisons, where all our political prisoners were,” one Tripolitan lawyer told me. “And what happened? The political prisoners got reassigned to other prisons.” The foreign minister, Abdurrahman Shalgham, told me with pride that four hundred policemen had been arrested for human-rights abuses—then admitted that none has been found guilty.

  Last year, Omar Alkikli, a highly regarded fiction writer who was a political prisoner for ten years in the seventies and early eighties, sued the Libyan government for excluding former prisoners from the Libyan Writers’ League. “I lost, and I knew I would lose,” he said. “But I made my point.” Hasan Agili, a medical student at Tripoli’s Al-Fateh University, told me, “Okay, they’ve fixed maybe four percent of our serious problems, but I guess it’s something.” An official in Benghazi said, “The laws that were made of stone are now made of wood.”