Yet even this was not enough to pacify the nationalists. By this point there was little the government or the king could do to calm the growing nationalist tide. The Six Day War with Israel in 1967 prompted another explosion of nationalist frenzy on Libya's streets. On 5 June, mobs, incited by Egyptian broadcasts, rampaged through the streets of Tripoli, killing terrified local Jews and attacking their property. Angry protesters also attacked British and American property in Tripoli and Benghazi, in the belief that both countries had participated in the war on Israel's side.25 Protesters, demanding the evacuation of Wheelus, also sacked the US information office in Benghazi. The US was so alarmed by the trouble that it evacuated 6,300 American citizens from the country. Oil production was also halted as oil workers joined the Arab embargo.
The popular anger was fuelled as much by frustration at Libya's failure to help its Arab brothers as it was by hatred of the imperialist powers. All the Libyan government had done was to issue a statement stressing Libya's pride in and support for the Arab nation and its determination to fight for the liberation of Palestine. As far as the nationalists were concerned, such limited action was utterly humiliating. By the time a Libyan battalion was actually given permission to go and join the Arab forces that were fighting Israel, it was too late: before the battalion could even reach its destination, the Egyptian army had been routed and the struggle was over. Among those who had joined this battalion was one young Muammar Qaddafi, who later claimed that he had returned to Libya from the escapade determined to mount an attack on the bases of those countries that had helped the enemy.26
By this point it was becoming increasingly apparent that the king was no match for the power of the Arab nationalist ideology, and that he could not contain the growing nationalist fervour. It is true that any Western-backed monarch would have struggled to survive in the face of such potent ideology. Yet Idris's inability to break free from the parochial nature of his own rule made his position all the worse. So did the fact that, as the king got older and frailer, power was increasingly being transferred into the hands of the Al-Shelhi family – the family that had spawned Idris's closest advisors. As Idris had been unable to produce an heir, the nationalist camp feared that the Al-Shelhis were closing in and were trying to ensure the continuation of their privileged position. To many Libyans, the whole system was looking utterly rotten, from the inside out.
That is not to say that Idris's rule was entirely without its achievements. Libya's first and only king oversaw a difficult transition that turned a shattered land of three disparate parts into a functioning unified state that boasted a thriving energy industry. He also invested the country with some sense of national identity, albeit a limited one. It is perhaps for these reasons that some Libyans look upon this short-lived period with a certain fondness. Not that they want a return to the monarchical system. But for all its failings, the monarchy is generally viewed as having been a fairly benign institution. While repression, censorship and corruption did exist under the king, they never reached anything like the astronomical levels they attained under the Qaddafi regime. It is partly for these reasons that the protesters who took to the streets of Benghazi in February 2011 were proud to adopt the Libyan flag of the post-independence era, and why it became one of the enduring symbols of the revolution.
Yet nostalgia aside, Idris's failure to build a modern state, to distribute wealth and power in an equitable fashion, and, most importantly, to understand the demands of a newly empowered generation that wanted to be the master of its own destiny helped to sow the conditions that made revolution all but inevitable. Things were so bad that the country seemed almost to be waiting for someone to take over. Even the king had given up, telling one of his former prime ministers, Mustafa Ben Halim: ‘What is important to me is my relation to Allah. My relation to others is not important … I want to leave. I am incapable.’27 By 1969 Libya was well and truly ripe for change.
Towards a new dawn
Such change was only going to come through the army. While nationalist feeling was strong, it hardly constituted an organized force that could mount a full-scale popular revolution. Moreover, this was the time of the military putsch; the nationalist regimes that had overthrown Western-backed monarchies in the region had, for the most part, come to power via military coups, this being the quickest route to power. As Qaddafi himself was later to recall, ‘The army was the only thing capable of imposing the People's will by force.’28
This reality was not lost on some of Libya's foreign backers. As early as 1967, the Americans were expressing their concerns about possible internal subversion, and specifically urged the Libyans to improve their local security agencies so that they would be able to deal with such an eventuality.29 By the summer of 1969, when the king, accompanied by his wife, Queen Fatima, decided to take a prolonged respite – first in Greece and then in Turkey, ostensibly for health reasons – the air in Tripoli and Benghazi was thick with murmurings of plots and coups.
Such rumours were not unfounded: there were several groups plotting in the wings at the time. Among them was a group of young officers, led by one Muammar Qaddafi. Its plot had been a long time in the making. It had all started a decade earlier, while Qaddafi and his fellow revolutionaries were at secondary school in Sebha in the Fezzan. Intoxicated with nationalist fervour, these schoolboys considered the Libyan monarchy to be the epitome of weakness and reaction and the antithesis of the modern Arab state that they aspired to. In the words of Qaddafi:
Our souls were in revolt against the backwardness enveloping our country and its land, whose best gifts and riches were being lost through plunder, and against the isolation imposed on our people in a vain attempt to hold it back from the path of the Arab people and from its greatest cause.30
It was during this time that Qaddafi determined to launch a revolution of his own – a revolution that his idol, President Nasser, could be proud of. He began to organize this little band of students into something akin to an underground revolutionary movement, dividing them up into cells that Qaddafi himself described as the beginnings of ‘planning and preparation for the revolution’.31 There were no strict recruitment criteria. Rather, Qaddafi sounded out those he thought were Nasser's men, who sympathized with nationalist ideas. However, there were some conditions: the recruits should not drink alcohol and should not ‘run after women’.32
It seems that many of these young men were so taken with the nationalist creed and so keen for action that they were waiting for someone like Qaddafi to come along. Mohamed Belqassim Zwai, who was at a nearby secondary school in Sebha and who stuck by the Leader until the bitter end in 2011, described how, after meeting and speaking to the young Qaddafi, he felt as if he had been born anew and that he had found the right path at last.
The group took to holding secret meetings; as Qaddafi recounted: ‘We used to meet under a palm tree near the Sebha Fortress using a light we had made by our hands. Under this light, I used to give my lessons in secret revolutionary organizations.’33 Right from the start, Qaddafi imposed strict discipline on these recruits, forbidding them all pleasurable distractions, including nightclubs, gambling and other vices. He also demanded total obedience and utmost secrecy. Indeed, this was a serious business. As Qaddafi recalled: ‘We met as a group of friends to plan a long hard path for ourselves. It would, however, lead to a goal we had promised ourselves to achieve.’34
However, their plans were cut short in 1961 when Qaddafi landed himself in hot water after getting involved in a demonstration in the town centre of Sebha against Syria's decision to secede from the United Arab Republic, which it had established with Egypt in 1958. The little band of protesters carried pictures of President Nasser and collected money to send a telegram of support to the Egyptian leader. Qaddafi went further and gave a rousing speech condemning the presence of British and American military bases in Libya. While this speech was to make him a legend in Sebha, it not only got him expelled from school, but also banned from studying
in the province.
Undeterred, Qaddafi packed up his belongings and, after an emotional farewell to his family, travelled the many kilometres to the unfamiliar town of Misarata on the coast. After a struggle over his papers, he managed to enrol himself in a secondary school in the town. As in Sebha, he set about recruiting for the cause among his fellow students, not only in Misarata but in other nearby towns and cities. It was not long before he sparked the nationalist spirit in the local youth and established cells in Tripoli, Janzour, Zliten and Homs, as well as in Misarata itself.
In 1963, as the students came of age, Qaddafi determined that the best course of action for him and his fellow revolutionaries would be to enrol in the army. This way they could begin to lay the groundwork for their military coup. The following year, Qaddafi enrolled at the military academy in Benghazi and urged his colleagues to do the same. Some were less than enthusiastic about signing up to a life in barracks. Abdelsalam Jalloud, who went on to be Qaddafi's right-hand man, was not keen; neither was Omar Al-Meheishi, who also went on to become one of Qaddafi's inner circle. But both men felt they had little choice after Qaddafi insisted and ordered them to present themselves at the military academy with their documents immediately.35
As they became military men, the group reorganized itself. In a direct imitation of Nasser's Egyptian revolution, it renamed itself the Free Unionist Officers Movement and set up a Central Committee (later renamed the Revolutionary Command Council) that held its first meeting on the rugged beach at Tolmetha in Cyrenaica in 1964. It was not easy getting these young cadets, who were posted at various camps around the country, together for meetings. In order to avoid suspicion, the band of revolutionaries used to meet on public holidays and in remote locations, where they ‘slept in the open, met under trees or behind rocks or in Bedouin shacks’.36 Romantic it may have been, but the commitment was not easy, especially given that most of the recruits came from the lower classes: buying a car – something they were all charged with doing, in order to allow them to move around – was a challenge in itself.
The group's members spent the next few years recruiting as far and wide as they could, but mainly within the armed forces, which they believed were their ‘gateway to the revolution’.37 They tried unsuccessfully to pull in some higher-ranking army officers, but focused most of their efforts on the military cadets, who would then graduate to become low-ranking military officers. These officers were organized into sub-committees and were tasked with recruiting their own cells and preparing for the revolution. They also set about amassing live ammunition, stealing it from official sources and hiding it among rocks and trees. It was a risky business. In 1967, the aunt of Abu Bakr Younis Jaber, one of the core group of revolutionaries who went on to be Qaddafi's chief of defence staff, had to fling a stash of ammunition that her nephew had hidden in her house into the sewers to avoid detection when the police came looking for her son.38
By 1969, having recruited enough members, the revolutionaries felt sufficiently prepared to seize the moment. Although there is no way of knowing the exact size of the movement at this time, Qaddafi claimed that it comprised hundreds of officers. This is likely to be something of an exaggeration; but with cells posted at the various military camps across the country, the movement's leaders concluded that they were in a position to be able to control the whole of the army. It was time to set a date.
The day of the coup was fixed for 12 March 1969. But nervous anticipation soon turned to disappointment, when the revolutionaries discovered that the date clashed with a concert due to be given by famed Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum. Not only were a number of key royal and military figures going to attend the performance, but it was also a benefit concert for the Palestinians.39 Interrupting a concert by the Arab world's most revered singer would certainly have been in bad taste and would have done little to endear the young revolutionaries to the people. Moreover, arresting key figures from the regime amidst a crowd of thousands would not have been easy; so ‘for ethical and human reasons, it was decided they would be spared apprehension during the performance night’40 and the plans were shelved.
A new date was set for 24 March. Once again fate intervened: having got wind that something untoward was up, the military authorities spirited King Idris away to Tobruq so that he could be under the protection of the British forces stationed there. They also stepped up security measures in the key centres. Given that the revolutionaries' plan had been drawn up on the assumption that both the king and the crown prince would be in Tripoli, the coup was scuppered. Qaddafi abandoned the plot and ordered the movement to go underground.
The young revolutionaries were shaken by the realization that the establishment had got wind of the plot, and they feared they had an informer in their ranks. This may well have been the case, as the military authorities were never very far behind them. Qaddafi, who was under special monitoring, was repeatedly hauled in for questioning by his superiors, and fear of discovery was always close at hand. Qaddafi recalled one such grilling in 1969:
At such disturbing moments I used to think not of tomorrow, or paradise, or the people. I thought of what I had in my pockets such as papers or leaflets, names, notes I might have written. My fingers moved unconsciously to my pockets.41
Yet time and again, Qaddafi and his fellow Free Unionist Officers escaped detection, sometimes only by a hair's breadth. Indeed, the path to revolution was so full of mishaps and accidents that the whole saga unfolds almost like a farce. There was the time in early 1969, for example, when Qaddafi was driving back to Benghazi in a Volkswagen, after a secret meeting with some of his comrades. They had waited until late at night to travel, in order to avoid detection. However, after losing their way among the sand dunes in the dark, they suffered a puncture, which caused the car to suddenly career out of control and crash. As some locals approached to give them a hand, all that Qaddafi could think about was the handwritten secret leaflet that was in his possession. With beating hearts, the panicked revolutionaries managed to disguise the incriminating leaflet; they wrapped it in cloth and used it as a stopper for an old alcohol bottle that they had filled with distilled water for the car battery. When the rescuers discovered the bottle, the teetotal recruits were more than happy to go along with the assumption that they had been drinking and were little more than young men out for a good time. Though the men were taken to a military camp at Ajdabia for questioning, the authorities failed to get to the bottom of what they had really been doing so late at night. A few months later the revolutionaries feared detection again when they had another car crash. This time Qaddafi was returning to Benghazi with Mustafa Kharroubi, another figure who went on to become part of Qaddafi's inner circle. Kharroubi, who was driving, was so busy reciting verses from the Qu'ran that he failed to notice a large cow that had wandered onto the road near Al-Marj. The vehicle crashed into the beast; though it escaped unscathed, the car was badly damaged.42
It was perhaps this air of complete amateurism that enabled the seemingly shambolic group to escape arrest throughout the long years of preparation. According to Colonel Aziz Shenib, the third in command of the Libyan army at the time, he and other senior officers did not take Qaddafi and his men seriously: ‘We always thought it was rubbish, that Qaddafi and his group would never be able to do anything.’43 However, Qaddafi and his band were to prove them wrong.
After yet another false start, when the coup had to be postponed again because some of the units had not received instructions in time, a new date was finally set. This new date was 1 September 1969 – and this time there was to be no going back. This was partly because the plotters were aware that the authorities were edging ever closer to discovering them, and partly because, after so many failed attempts, some of the young recruits were getting disillusioned and were having second thoughts. Most importantly, however, the date was fixed because a number of the Free Unionist Officers were due to be posted to Britain for a training stint at the beginning of September. The announcement tha
t these officers were about to be sent abroad sparked panic among the revolutionaries. Qaddafi knew that if he did not act, he risked losing his dream forever.
In a mad rush, he and the Revolutionary Command Council set about preparing themselves. Operational plans were drawn up, put in envelopes that were then sealed with red wax, and distributed among cell leaders. Qaddafi and his cohorts spent a frantic couple of days at the very end of August travelling around the country, informing their fellow revolutionaries that the time had finally come. It was a jittery time all round, and fear that their plans would be leaked at the last moment was on everyone's mind.
To make matters worse, some of the Free Unionist Officers had got so accustomed to the coup being postponed that they simply did not believe it when it actually went ahead. This included Omar Al-Meheishi, who refused to believe it when he was told on 31 August that he needed to get back to his unit in Tarhouna (western Libya), to carry out his part in the plot. As Qaddafi recalled:
I asked Kharroubi to go to Al-Meheishi in Al-Barka [Cyrenaica] and he met him. He found that he had no intention of joining his unit in Tarhouna. So Kharroubi gave him 30 dinars to encourage him to travel on the aeroplane. Al-Meheishi took the 30 dinars but decided not to travel and said ‘I want to meet Muammar.’ When it came to my knowledge that that was what he wanted I asked him to come to the Gar Younis camp. He came and I confirmed that we had decided that the revolution would be on that night and that he had to join his battalion in Tarhouna … he was so happy when I personally confirmed to him that the revolution was that night and he congratulated me.44
Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi Page 6