Having dismissed such political systems, Qaddafi goes on to lay out his solution for rule by the people, namely ‘direct democracy’. Building on the ideas in his Zawara speech, Qaddafi asserts that the only way to achieve true democracy is through the establishment of a system of people's congresses and people's committees – something he describes as ‘the final fruit of the people's struggle for democracy’.69 This is a mind-bogglingly complex system; crudely described, at the bottom of the hierarchy are the ‘basic people's congresses’, in which every citizen is supposed to participate. These congresses are tasked with debating and voting on policies of national and local interest, after which their decisions are fed up to a General People's Congress (a kind of parliament), which in turn passes decisions on to a General People's Committee (a kind of cabinet) for implementation. Under this system, in theory at least, every citizen participates in the process of governing, and the general will of the masses is eventually implemented.
The second part of the Green Book, entitled ‘The Solution of the Economic Problem’, adopts an equally egalitarian approach. Qaddafi argues that in his stateless society all citizens should be allowed to share and profit equally from the country's wealth. He rejects the idea that people should be ‘wage workers’, as this only leaves them open to exploitation and means that they are not consuming any of the production they have generated. The book states: ‘Wage-workers are a type of slave, however improved their wages may be.’70 Qaddafi puts this exploitation and the development of the world's unjust economic systems down to the fact that society has strayed from the natural order of things. Indeed he writes as if there is an innate natural law that is inherently just and that has been corrupted by wages, class and ownership.
In order to return to this ‘natural order’, wages should be abolished and people should be freed by becoming ‘partners in production’, taking control of economic enterprises themselves. In this way everyone is able to profit equally. As Qaddafi asserts, ‘For man to be happy, he must be free, and to be free, man must possess his own needs.’ He thus argues that everyone should take an equal share of whatever they produce, and that this share should be commensurate with their needs.
Under this system, the Green Book declares, individuals should not possess economic assets that could be used to exploit others. The renting out of houses, for example, is forbidden: ‘No one has the right to build a house, additional to his own and that of his heirs, for the purpose of renting it, because the house represents another person's need, and building it for the purpose of rent is an attempt to have control over the need of that man and thus “in need freedom is latent”.’71 Similarly it forbids the employment of domestic servants or the hiring of taxis, because these non-productive activities also amount to exploitation.
The third and final part of the Green Book, entitled the ‘Social Basis of the Third Universal Theory’, is a curious mix of eclectic subjects covering sport, music, women and slavery that provides an insight into Qaddafi's conception of the world. Demonstrating that, for all his aspirations to progressiveness, the young leader still clung tightly to traditional values, the Green Book insists that the family is the most important unit in society. It states that if an individual is separated from his family he ‘has no value or social life’ and ‘To the individual man the family is of more importance than the state. Mankind acknowledges the individual man and the individual man acknowledges the family which is his cradle, his origin and his social “umbrella”.’ Qaddafi takes this idea further by explaining that a tribe is a large family, and that the nation is ‘a tribe which has grown through procreation’.
Qaddafi's thoughts on women are rather less traditional: ‘woman and man are equal as human beings. Discrimination between man and woman is a flagrant act of oppression without any justification.’ However, alongside these more progressive statements about equality are more reactionary proclamations about woman's role in society. He asserts, for example: ‘According to a gynaecologist, woman menstruates or suffers feebleness every month, while man, being a male, does not … When a woman does not menstruate she is pregnant. If she is pregnant she becomes, due to pregnancy feeble for about a year.’ He goes on: ‘Afterwards woman breast-feeds the baby she bore … Breast-feeding means that a woman is so inseparable from her baby that her activity is seriously reduced. She becomes directly responsible for another person whom she helps to carry out his biological functions, without which it would die.’ From this Qaddafi concludes: ‘All these innate characteristics form differences because of which man and woman cannot be equal.’
Such obvious contradictions highlight the fact that the Green Book is in essence a naïve and idealistic expression of youthful revolutionary fervour. It was written by a man whose view of the world was uncomplicated by any real experience or knowledge of it, and who, for all his pretensions to internationalism, struggled on the intellectual level at least to move beyond the local. If anything, it is a reflection of his Bedouin roots. For all he thought of himself as progressive, Qaddafi always clung closely to his Bedouin heritage – something that, for him, as for many Arabs, represented purity and honour, and a life free from the materialist trappings of the modern westernized world. The strength of Qaddafi's attachment to this somewhat romanticized image of the Bedouin is nowhere more evident than in one of his own short stories, where he warns:
Flee, flee the city and get away from the smoke … Flee from the lethargy and waste, the poison and boredom and yawning. Flee from the nightmare city … Leave the worm-like existence behind … Depart the city and flee to the village, where you will see the moon for the first time in your lives … Leave the cemetery neighbourhoods for God's wide and wondrous land … In the countryside, look up and see the divine lanterns suspended in the dome of the sky, and not the ceiling of a filthy tomb in the city.72
He goes on:
In complete happiness, go to the village and the countryside, where physical labour has meaning, necessity, usefulness, and is a pleasure besides. There, life is social, and human; families and tribes are close. There is stability and belief. Everyone loves one another, and everyone lives on his own farm, or has livestock, or works in the village's service sector. Deviation is unacceptable, because the people in the village know one another, unlike those in the city … The conscience is healthy.73
In fact, Qaddafi sought to play up his Bedouin heritage throughout his rule, milking it for all it was worth; Bedouin life became totally idealized in the regime's discourse. So much so that state television regularly carried what felt like endless footage of Bedouin women in tents grinding what appeared to be wheat, accompanied by men singing traditional Bedouin songs. The Leader always made a point, too, of hosting meetings in his Bedouin tent, sometimes making foreign dignitaries travel all the way to Sirte, and controversially erecting massive tents whenever he travelled; when Qaddafi arrived, it was as though the circus had come to town!74 So great was Qaddafi's bid to push his Bedouin heritage that it became a stick for his detractors to beat him with: a favourite complaint among the urbane mercantile Tripolitanians was that they were ruled by a handful of ‘ignorant and backward’ Bedouin from the desert.
Yet for all that it may have been unsophisticated, Qaddafi believed that his book contained the ultimate answer to all society's ills. As with his Third Universal Theory, he was in no doubt that the Green Book would change the world; it was the book to end all books and to render every other political system utterly invalid. Following the publication of the first chapter, Qaddafi announced: ‘With the establishment of this unique democratic experiment, all political theories in the world have collapsed.’ In a speech to the final session of the General People's Congress on 18 January 1976, he proclaimed: ‘I am not exaggerating if I say that all philosophy books that have tried to come up with a view on how to solve the problem of democracy before the dawn of 1976 are all now in the rubbish bin.’75 In interviews with the international media, Qaddafi even went so far as to declare that the Green
Book was the new gospel – the gospel of the modern age and the masses.76
It was this ‘new gospel’ and the ill-conceived political system contained in it that was to be Libya's fate for the following three decades and more. Things would never be the same again; Libya had well and truly moved into ‘the dawn of the era of the masses’ and, as far as Qaddafi was concerned, there was no going back.
CHAPTER 4
Jamahiriyah in Practice: A Revolutionary Decade
Having presented his new gospel to the world, the Colonel was ready to put his ideas into practice. On 2 March 1977, in the town of Sebha, where he had staged his first rebellions against the king, Libya's young leader announced the ‘Declaration of the Establishment of the Authority of the People’. This announcement marked the birth of the Jamahiriyah, or ‘State of the Masses’, and formalized the cumbersome political system that Qaddafi had laid out in the first part of his Green Book. This was to be ‘people power’ in action: every Libyan was to participate in governing through the jumble of people's congresses and committees that made up this ‘stateless society’. It was time for the masses to rule themselves.
To reflect this historic transformation, the country's name was changed to the decidedly un-catchy ‘Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah’, and a few months later the flag was changed to what must be the blandest national emblem in history – an expanse of plain, unadorned green. As befitted this momentous occasion, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro was invited to be present at the announcement of the declaration, as a special guest of honour. Qaddafi brimmed with pride as the famed Cuban leader addressed the General People's Congress in Sebha, full of praise for the Libyan revolution. Celebrations in Tripoli, meanwhile, reached a crescendo: crowds filled the streets, chanting their support for the birth of the first ever Jamahiriyah, as military aircraft flew overhead in tight-knit formations and the ships in the port blew their sirens. Direct democracy Qaddafi-style was up and running.
Yet, for all that the declaration was billed as the handing over of power to the people, it was clear who was going to steer the ship. Qaddafi appointed himself head of the Secretariat of the 970-member General People's Congress, a body that was to implement the will of the people, as expressed in the ‘basic people's congresses’.1 From now on, ‘Qaddafism’ was to seep into every part of life, and everything familiar was to be swept away, as the new leader endeavoured to turn his utopian vision into a reality.
The Colonel may have believed that this Jamahiriyah was the answer to all humanity's problems, but most Libyans remained less than convinced by the ‘new dawn’. The masses were, for the most part, utterly bewildered by the changes that were suddenly being foisted upon them in the name of the people's authority. Most were not the slightest bit interested in grand notions of ‘people power’ and, to the Colonel's frustration, there was a widespread popular indifference to his ‘people's democracy’. Attendance at the basic people's congresses that were planted in every locality was pitiful: in Tripoli and Gharyan, for example, more than half the members were routinely absent from meetings; and in some areas of Misarata absenteeism reached 90 per cent.2
Moreover, those who did bother to turn up to the congresses often had no idea what they were supposed to be discussing there. To Qaddafi's displeasure, those who attended often continued to pursue local or regional interests, and had little appetite for his new-fangled political innovations. The congresses were also proving administratively inept; they were often led by careless or absent officials and, even at this early stage, corruption was eating its way through the new revolutionary bodies.3 The purity that the Bedouin from the desert had dreamt of was already being soiled.
To make matters worse, in some quarters popular indifference was hardening into outright resistance. If Qaddafi had hoped that the country's universities would serve as intellectual powerhouses for his new revolutionary theories, he was to be sorely mistaken. Students had begun showing their displeasure at the new regime even before the announcement of the Declaration of the Establishment of the Authority of the People. As early as January 1976, young students began staging demonstrations, demanding freedom of expression and objecting to the authorities' insistence on imposing their own student union leaders. They demanded, too, that the regime amend its newly introduced policy of compulsory conscription, mainly because the timing of what was being proposed interfered with their studies. Such demands were hardly extreme; they were relatively mild in comparison with the kind of student activities taking place in neighbouring countries, where Islamist and militant leftish elements were battling it out on university campuses.
However, Qaddafi's was an ideology of absolutes, and conformity was the name of the game. The Colonel moved quickly to nip the protests in the bud. Following a major demonstration on 7 April 1976 on the campuses of both Tripoli and Benghazi universities, the regime sent in its forces, arresting and detaining hundreds of unsuspecting students. Given that the 1969 coup had been a largely bloodless affair, this sudden heavy-handed approach came as a shock.
Things took an even more sinister turn the following year, when, just a month after the Declaration of the Establishment of the Authority of the People, a number of students who had been involved in the protests were publicly hanged on the campus of Tripoli's Al-Fateh University. Their fellow students were forced to watch the grisly proceedings that were also broadcast repeatedly on state television. On the same day, four Libyans and one Egyptian were hanged in Benghazi's main square after having been convicted of acting for Egyptian intelligence. It was also at this time that twenty-two army officers were executed in their military units for their involvement in Al-Meheishi's 1975 coup attempt. From then on, 7 April was reserved as a special date for public executions.
This baptism of blood was a stark warning: the People's Authority was not going to tolerate dissent. Libyans were learning fast that this uncompromising ‘prophet of the desert’ was not going to allow anything to stand in the way of his vision. As he once declared, ‘It [the revolution] is a moving train. Whoever stands in its way will be crushed.’4 If the Libyans were not willing to come along with him on his revolutionary journey, then he would have to drag them along by force.
Yet Qaddafi knew that force alone would not be enough to quell the popular apathy or the outright resistance to his vision. He also knew that, if he let the revolution rest on its laurels, dissent would worm its way even further into his perfect vision. He feared, too, that his Jamahiriyah would be swallowed up by the state, that his immaculate conception would be sullied by the day-to-day business of running the country.
His answer was to instigate a revolution within the revolution, to create a separate revolutionary authority that could serve as a monitor and guide for the formal political structures that made up the Jamahiriyah. Such an authority could act as a kind of whipping force to keep the country in a state of perpetual revolution and to bend it utterly to his will. On the anniversary of the revolution, at the 1 September celebrations of 1978, the Colonel announced that, henceforth ‘revolutionary authority’ was to be separated from the ‘people's authority’. The following March, he and his fellow former RCC members resigned from the Secretariat of the General People's Congress, leaving it to deal with the everyday business of running the country, while they devoted themselves to the higher cause of furthering the revolution.
Although he still retained the role of commander of the armed forces, from now on Qaddafi was to have no formal position in the state. Instead he insisted on being referred to as ‘Leader of the Revolution’, or, more often, ‘Brother Leader’. Not having an official role in this way appealed to Qaddafi's sense of himself as an intellectual and thinker, busy with the supreme mission of advancing the revolution and way above the mundane role of head of state. As he declared before he resigned from the General People's Congress, ‘I will return to my natural place, which is the revolution, not the authority.’5 Qaddafi clearly saw himself as a Che Guevara figure, a true revolutionary
in its most romantic sense, restlessly pushing the country forwards, ceaselessly moulding it to his revolutionary vision.
Of course, it would be wrong to think that Qaddafi was no longer involved in the affairs of the state. Despite all his protestations, Brother Leader was still in complete control: from foreign policy to the budget to deciding who held what position in the General People's Congress, Qaddafi and his coterie of revolutionaries (who were increasingly coming to include members of his own family and tribe) continued to take all the key decisions.6 Indeed, the creation of this revolutionary authority meant that, from now on, real power was to lie in the informal structures that were centred even more firmly around Qaddafi and his entourage. Within a year of the establishment of his Jamahiriyah, Qaddafi had effectively rendered its formal political institutions impotent, turning them into little more than a façade. Now, unfettered by the constraints of the cumbersome political system he had created, Qaddafi became a behind-the-scenes grand chess master, cannily moving the pieces around his board.
Having created this revolutionary authority, Qaddafi now needed some sort of revolutionary body to people it, in order to mobilize the masses and connect him to the base. Unlike his fellow leaders in the region, Qaddafi had no official political party to back him or to provide any real sense of cohesion or nationhood. He therefore wanted to create a truly populist force that would enable him to rally the masses in support of his vision. He also wanted a force that would be capable of monitoring and controlling the structures that made up the people's authority, and that could bulldoze anything that stood in the revolution's way.
It was to this end that Qaddafi created the ‘Revolutionary Committees Movement’. This paramilitary body was to become one of the most feared institutions of Qaddafi's long rule. Although the movement was formally established in 1979, revolutionary cells were operating as early as 1976. They were established first on university campuses and were primarily an instrument of repression.7 Groups of students, imbued with ardent revolutionary fervour, were brought together in these committees and charged with rooting out and liquidating dissenting students and members of staff. In November 1977, the official media began broadcasting news of the formation of revolutionary committees in different cities across the country, mainly to give the impression that these bodies had sprung up naturally from the midst of the masses.
Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi Page 10