Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Compounding the problem of graft is a shortage of basic operational competence. I went to a session of a leadership training program in Tripoli, organized by Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Monitor Group, two American consulting firms that are advising the Libyan government. The foreign organizers had been determined to include the people they thought had the strongest leadership potential, but some local officials wanted to choose on the basis of connections. The compromise was neither wholly meritocratic nor purely corrupt. To some in the group, capitalism was still a novelty; others were ready for corner offices at Morgan Stanley. They role-played. They made speeches through crackly microphones under gigantic portraits of the Leader. Some described sophisticated financial instruments and drew flow charts; some talked of “leveraged buyouts” and “institutional investors” and “a zero-sum game.” On the other hand, one participant, dressed in a shabby suit and a bright tie, was asked how he would fund a construction project, and he replied vaguely, “Don’t banks do that?” Another was surprised to learn that international backers usually expect interest or profit sharing in return for risking their money. Libyan business, it’s clear, will be led by people of impressive competence and by people of no competence.

  At the end of the conference, the prize for the best presentation went to Abdulmonem M. Sbeta, who runs a private company that provides oil and marine-construction services. He was suave and cultivated, with darting, lively eyes. “We need not leaders but opposers,” he said to me afterward, over an Italian dinner in the Tripoli suburbs. “Everyone here has had a good model of how to lead. But no one has ever seen how to oppose, and the secret to successful business is opposition. People want prosperity more than emancipation, but, in any case, social reform can be achieved only through economic development.”

  But does Qaddafi wish to teach his subjects to oppose him? An expat businessman told me, “Qaddafi is afraid that the emergence of a wealthy class might inspire a so-called Second Revolution.” Wealth is a relative term; by world standards, the wealthy people in the country are the Qaddafis, and if anyone else has truly substantial assets, he’s smart enough not to show it. In the meantime, the Leader’s vagaries have kept Libya’s elites off-balance, sometimes in almost absurd ways. In 2000, Qaddafi lifted a longtime ban on SUVs, and prosperous Libyans went out and imported Hummers and Range Rovers. Three months later, the Leader decided that he had made a mistake, and he outlawed them again, leaving a large number of privileged Libyans owning vehicles that it was illegal to drive. “You can tell if you’ve reached the top,” a young Libyan told me, “if you listen to a lot of conversation about SUVs rusting in the garage.”

  * * *

  “Don’t say opening,” the foreign minister, Abdurrahman Shalgham, said, waving his hands in protest, when I asked him about the new Libya. “Don’t say reintegrate. Libya was never closed to the world; the world was closed to us.” But the cost of Libyan paranoia has been an isolation that feeds this paranoia and keeps Libyans in the fold of the Leader. The idea of a world that wants to engage with Libya is dangerous to Qaddafi’s hegemony. “America as an enemy would cause him trouble,” said Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, the political scientist. “But he doesn’t want America as a friend, either.”

  Relations between Libya and the United States remain shadowed by history. Qaddafi’s most vigorous opponent was President Reagan, who in 1980 closed the Libyan embassy, then suspended oil imports, then shot down two planes over the Gulf of Sidra, where the United States disputed Libya’s sovereignty. Ten days after the Libya-linked bombing of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by American servicemen, in 1986, Reagan bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, dropping ordnance on Qaddafi’s compound in an apparent attempt to assassinate him. Qaddafi claims to have lost an adopted daughter in the raid. “His grip on power was sliding and then there was the bombing and it united the Libyans behind him,” one Libyan official told me.

  The total isolation of Libya began in 1991, when the United States and Britain indicted two Libyans suspected of involvement in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the French indicted four Libyan suspects in the 1989 explosion of the French airliner UTA 772 over the Niger desert. Libya refused to surrender any of the suspects, and the following year, the United Nations approved economic sanctions. Only in 1999 did Libya allow the Lockerbie suspects to be brought to trial, under Scottish law, in The Hague. (A financial settlement was reached that year with French authorities as well.) The Scottish court convicted one of the suspects and acquitted the other. Libya long denied any wrongdoing but eventually accepted that it had to admit to it, as a pragmatic matter, though Libyan officials see it as a forced confession. Qaddafi never accepted personal guilt.

  The Lockerbie question, a closed book to most Americans, was brought up repeatedly while I was in Libya. One official said, “I can’t believe the Libyans at that time could have pulled off something that big. Something that stupid—that is completely believable. But not something that big.” Western investigators continue to argue whether Libya had direct involvement in the event. Initial inquiries suggested that the bombing was the work of the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, a terror group funded by Iran, and both a former Scottish police chief and a former CIA officer later submitted statements claiming that the physical evidence inculpating Libya had been planted. Because of such problems, Robert Black, the QC (Queen’s Counsel—a very high-ranking lawyer) and Edinburgh law professor who helped set up the trial, told the Scotsman this past November that the Lockerbie verdict was “the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for a hundred years” and would “gravely damage” the reputation of the Scottish criminal-justice system. The case is under consideration by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. Because Libya supported foreign terrorist groups, though, the regime could have been implicated even if it was not the main author of the disaster.

  In recent years, US diplomatic relations with Libya have warmed slightly. In 1999, the United States agreed to the suspension of UN sanctions, but not its own, which it renewed in August 2001. Then came 9/11. Qaddafi condemned the attacks, called the Taliban “godless promoters of political Islam,” and pointed out that six years earlier he had issued a warrant for Osama bin Laden’s arrest. In August 2003, the Libyan government pledged to deposit $2.7 billion in the Bank for International Settlements, in Switzerland, to compensate the families of those lost on Pan Am Flight 103. Four months later, after secret negotiations with a British-led team, Libya agreed to renounce its WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program, and American sanctions were eased.

  Qaddafi had made similar overtures to both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton but was spurned—in part, according to Martin Indyk, who was Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, because Libya’s weapons programs were not considered an imminent threat. This contention has been borne out. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, described Libya’s nuclear program as “at an early stage of development”—many of the centrifuges had evidently never been uncrated. But John Wolf, who as George W. Bush’s assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation played a key role in dismantling Libya’s program, maintains that something of real value was secured—more by way of information and evidence than by the removal of a present threat. “The Libyans had the design of a nuclear weapon, sold by the A. Q. Khan network,” he told me, referring to the former head of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program. “Libya’s decision to turn over not only equipment but also the documentation, shipping invoices, plans, et cetera, provided a treasure trove of materials that were instrumental in establishing the credible case that mobilized countries against implicated individuals and companies abroad. We would not have been able to convince many of these countries or the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Association) of the cancer-like nature of the festering A. Q. Khan network without that documentation. The information that enabled us to break up the network was critical.”


  After the 2003 agreement, President Bush said that any nation that gave up WMD would “find an open path to better relations” with the United States and that “Libya has begun the process of rejoining the community of nations.” By late 2004, the United States had revoked the travel ban to Libya, established limited diplomatic relations, and lifted many remaining trade restrictions. What Saif calls “this cocktail of problems and sanctions” had, it seemed, been largely addressed. Certainly the Bush administration was eager to see American companies compete for oil-exploration rights in Libya, and it has facilitated economic engagement. But issues such as the 2003 anti-Saudi plot and the affair of the Bulgarian nurses have stalled the entente, and Libya remains on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Until the country is taken off the list, the United States must vote against IMF and World Bank loans to Tripoli, and substantial sanctions remain in place.

  “It’s almost the same as during the embargo,” the head of the National Oil Company said. Libyan hard-liners point out that US officials have acknowledged that no act of terrorism has been linked to Libya in years, and they complain that while Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and Silvio Berlusconi have all visited Tripoli, the United States has sent no one above the undersecretary level. The United States has no official consulate in Libya; Libyans who want visas apply in Tunisia, and the United States does not grant them freely. Libyan reformers who thought that settling Lockerbie and renouncing WMD would allow the resumption of normal relations talk about “receding goalposts.”

  David Mack, a former high-ranking US diplomat who has served in Libya, told me, “It’s been useful to us to be able to engage in intelligence exchanges with Libya; it’s quite clearly been useful to them.” He pointed out that the United States had agreed to list the dissident Libyan Islamic Fighting Group as a terrorist organization and got it banned from Britain, where some of its members had been based. “Having made all this progress,” Mack said, “if we now just let things drift, inevitably there will be relapses.” So while the Bush administration holds up Libya as a role model for disarmament—“If Libya can do it, Iran can do it, too,” John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has said—some policy analysts think that the administration has done too little to promote that example. Ronald Bruce St John, a Libya scholar at Foreign Policy in Focus, observes that America’s priority has been to control WMD and get support for the war on terror; Libya’s priorities are the rationalization of commercial and diplomatic relations. American goals have been met; Libyan goals have not. In Tripoli, hard-liners seethe that Libya gave away the store, while the reformers feel undermined.

  The reformers’ own diplomatic efforts have had limited success. Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat, of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican, of Indiana, both have visited Libya, where they met with Saif, Shukri Ghanem, and Qaddafi himself, and have taken an optimistic view. “Qaddafi has clearly made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn,” Lantos said to me, “and we are turning around the aircraft carrier that is US policy.” But when Lantos sought a cosponsor for the United States–Libya Relations Act, which was meant to strengthen bilateral relations, nobody was interested. Mack said, “We need to show the world, particularly governments like Iran and North Korea, that there is an alternative paradigm for dealing with the United States, and much to be gained by having a normal relationship with us,” and suggested that American interests would be served by improved relations with an Arab leader who opposes fundamentalism and has substantial oil reserves.

  “Deep down, the Libyans think the US will not be satisfied with anything short of regime change,” one of Saif’s advisers said. “And deep down, the Americans think that if they normalize relations, Qaddafi will blow something up and make them look like fools.”

  * * *

  Everywhere I went in Libya, opposition to US policy was tempered by enthusiasm for individual Americans. Among the older generation of Libyans, the reformers were eager for news of the towns where they had once studied, in Kansas, Texas, Colorado. (Most of the hard-liners I met had never visited the United States.) Because the pariah experience has been a lonely one, many Libyans hoped for improved relations with the outside. I spent a morning with the human-rights lawyer Azza Maghur, a striking woman with cascading hair and a warm laugh who had just returned from a humanitarian conference in Morocco. Her father was an important figure in post-revolutionary Libyan politics, and this has given her leeway; she seemed almost oblivious of the constraints that keep most Libyan women in head scarves and at home. I asked her how she felt about the United States, and she told me that it was hard for her to be pro-American in the wake of the news reports about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. “You cannot imagine how we worshipped the idea of America.” She looked down at the floor, as though she were talking about a relative who had recently died. “We wanted nothing more than to be with you: this rich, fair democracy. But now we ask, ‘Who is giving us this lesson of freedom?’ I mean—if you caught your high priest in bed with a prostitute, would you still count on him to get you in the door of heaven?” Maghur is still hoping to show her young daughter the United States. She said that at least once a week, her daughter asks how things are going between Libya and America, and Maghur says, “It’s going, sweetheart.” And her daughter wonders, “So can we visit Disneyland yet?” And Maghur has to say, “Not yet, sweetheart, not yet.”

  For a culture that is politically and socially underdeveloped, Libya has a surprisingly active intelligentsia, who view their society with tenderness and irony. People I met and liked invited me out repeatedly and introduced me to friends and family. I went to a birthday party at the house of one such Libyan; his wife cooked a feast, and we stayed up half the night with their children, watching movies. The day before I left, friends took me out for late-night tea and gave me full traditional Libyan dress—a long shirt, an embroidered vest, and a little black hat—as a going-away present.

  The social life of Libyans is essentially private. Tripoli is latticed with wide highways; gasoline is subsidized, and because there are no bars or clubs and few cinemas or theaters, the most popular pastime is driving; people cruise around for hours. The privacy of cars enhances their charm, but mostly the Tripoli highways, busy through the night, provide diversion for citizens desperate for entertainment or novelty. When they aren’t driving, most Tripolitans socialize at home rather than in cafés, partly because of the absence of women and alcohol in public places.

  I had my first drink in Libya after a friend called an army colonel and asked, “Do you have any pomegranate seeds?” (It is wise to use euphemisms in police states.) He did, and we drove to the outskirts of a small city, to a large white house with a long veranda, beside a dirt road. In the Libyan way, the house was built of concrete and painted white, but it was beginning to show signs of wear. We sat on a wide, bright-colored banquette under fluorescent lights in an enormous room. The place was decorated with souvenirs from Central Asia, where our host had trained, including many carvings of bears with fishing rods. We listened to a medley of Shirley Bassey hits played on the zither and took turns smoking from a five-foot-tall hookah. The colonel, a beaming, extroverted Libyan of sub-Saharan ancestry, served the local home brew, 80 proof and rough enough to remove not just fingernail polish but quite possibly fingernails as well, on a table covered with a lavishly embroidered cloth and laden with Fanta and Pringles. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a high school pot party. I asked my friend how he would feel if his sons drank, and he laughed, replying, “It’s inevitable.” Then I asked about his daughters, and he grew serious: “If my daughters were drinking, I would be very, very upset—furious, in fact. Because, if people found out that they had been drinking, they would think they might also be sexually active, and their marriage prospects would be shattered.”

  I met a Libyan woman who worked for Alitalia, a job that she loved but that she felt no Libyan husband would tolerate. “I have to choose
between a marriage and a life, and I have chosen a life,” she said. “Most women here choose a marriage. It’s a question of taste.” The restrictions are a matter not of laws—on issues such as gender equality, the laws are more progressive than in most Arab countries—but of social norms.

  Qaddafi accepts such customs, but he frequently describes his own society as “backward” (his favorite term of disapprobation); one Libyan intellectual complained to me, “If you listen to his words, you will agree that he hates the Libyan people.” While Qaddafi represses the democratizing forces from the left, he is far more brutal with the Islamist ones on the right. Indeed, most of the regime’s political victims in the past few decades have been members of Islamist groups that he has banned, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya’s Islamic institutes, almost fifty of them, were shut down in 1988. When clerics protested Qaddafi’s “innovative” interpretations of the Koran and his dismissal of all post-Koranic commentary and custom, Qaddafi declared that Islam permitted its followers to speak directly to Allah, and that clergymen were unnecessary intermediaries. A year later, he likened Islamic militants to “a cancer, the Black Death, and AIDS.” As if to vex Hamas, once a beneficiary of his largesse, he has even argued in recent years that the Palestinians have no exclusive claim to the land of Israel and called for a binational state—he dubbed it Isratine—that would guarantee the safety of both Palestinians and Jews, who, far from being enemies of the Arab people, were their biblical kin. (“There may be some objections to the name,” he allowed, “but they would be unhelpful, harmful, and superficial.”)

  “You ask us, ‘Why do you oppress the opposition in the Middle East?’ ” Qaddafi said in March, speaking via satellite link to a conference at Columbia University, dressed in purple robes and seated in front of a map of Africa. “Because, in the Middle East, the opposition is quite different than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killing. . . . This is a manifestation of social backwardness.” On this point, at least, the hard-liners and the reformers tend to converge. Foreign Minister Shalgham told me, “The fundamentalists represent a threat to your security. They represent a threat to our way of life. They are against the future, against science, the arts, women, and freedom. They would drag us back to the Middle Ages. You fear their acts; we fear the ideology behind those acts. Okay, read the Koran for an hour a day, and that’s enough; if you don’t also study engineering, medicine, business, and mathematics, how can you survive? But people have figured out that the tougher your Islam, the easier to find followers.”