Almost a year later, Qaddafi outlined the duties that the new revolutionary committees were to be tasked with. Unnervingly, the Colonel declared:
The mission of the revolutionary committees is to be everywhere, secret or public … to carry out the duty of urging the masses to revolt in order to seize power and to destroy any organization that stands in the way, including political parties [and] reactionary conventional tools of government such as tribes, families, sects and classes.8
In other words, they were to act like an enormous, omnipresent enforcer, overturning anything that stood in the way of Qaddafi's supreme mission. They soon established their mathabas (meeting places) in every town. These highly distinctive (and exceptionally ugly) constructions, supposed to replicate Bedouin tents, sprang up across the land, planting a sense of foreboding in every local community.
The members of the new revolutionary committees were mostly young men from lowly backgrounds who had benefited from the early education policies of the new regime. They were part of the new generation, eager to seize the opportunity to better themselves and to be part of the new Libya. Not only did membership provide access to jobs and privileges, but, more importantly, it offered power and prestige. Qaddafi imbued the committees with near immortal status: just as he compared the Green Book to the new gospel, he referred to the revolutionary committees as ‘the prophets of the age of the masses’.
These prophets moved quickly to assert their revolutionary authority: the young revolutionaries also marched on all the formal mechanisms of the Jamahiriyah, penetrating the hierarchy of people's congresses and committees from the very top to the bottom. From 1979, for example, they were put in charge of coordinating elections to the basic people's congresses and they could veto candidates they did not approve of. In January 1980, their superiority over these institutions of people's authority was confirmed. The Secretary General of the General People's Congress, Abdel Ati Al-Obeidi, announced: ‘[A]ll People's Congresses, no matter what their level, as well as the Secretariat of the General People's Congress are under the permanent control of the revolution and the revolutionary committees.’9
In this way, the revolutionary committees came to be the highest authority in the land. Yet, demonstrating his political acumen, Qaddafi was careful to tie these revolutionaries very tightly to his own mast. He created an executive body for the movement – the Revolutionary Committees Liaison Office – and filled it with members of his family and his branch of the Qaddadfa tribe. These included key figures, such as his cousins Ahmed Ibrahim, Omar Ishkal and Abdullah Othman, who continued to play a major role in the country's political life throughout the following decades.10 This all-powerful office was headed by one of Qaddafi's relatives and most loyal supporters, Mohamed Majdhoub, who held the post until his death in 2007. In this way, loyalty at the top of the movement was more or less guaranteed. At the same time, Qaddafi took steps to ensure that the base could not become a force in its own right. He shrewdly prevented revolutionary committee groups from contacting each other without going through the Liaison Office. Indeed, there was no structural horizontal relationship between the various revolutionary elements.
Yet the power of the revolutionary committees was not limited to the formal institutions of the Jamahiriyah. As Qaddafi had asserted, these fearsome revolutionaries were to be everywhere; they were to be part of what the Colonel dubbed the Zahf Al-Akhdar (‘Green March’) that would take his revolution to every part of Libya. No institution was to be left untouched, as the revolutionary committees infiltrated universities, professional organizations and even the security apparatus. Revolutionary committee units were set up inside the army, where they enforced petty regulations, such as banning officers from carrying weapons in a personal capacity or prohibiting them from entering barracks after working hours.11 They also infiltrated the police, where they worked to combat speculation and corruption.
The revolutionary committees also moved in on the economy. In a bid to impose Qaddafi's mantra of creating partners not wage workers, in January 1980 groups of young men, bursting with revolutionary fervour, descended upon factories and companies across the land. These ideologues pushed the workers in these places to kick out the owners and managers and to form people's committees that would run the concerns themselves. This was a disastrous policy: the people's committees were completely inexperienced in running businesses, so that the factories and companies quickly fell into decline. Yet for Qaddafi, ideas were more important than state-building.
To spread these ideas, the revolutionary committees also took over the media, turning everything to the service of ‘the people’. They established the Zahf Al-Akhdar and Al-Jamahiriyah newspapers and took over all broadcasting facilities. These outlets regurgitated endless regime propaganda, and the tone was uncompromisingly militant. However, reflecting his personal paranoia, Qaddafi became anxious that some elements in these media outlets might become personalities in their own right. Indeed, there was to be space for one personality only in the Jamahiriyah. When a presenter started to become too well known, the Leader ordered ‘the people’ to take over. The Libyan broadcasting house was suddenly inundated with ordinary Libyans, queuing up to have a turn at reading the news in what were live broadcasts – something that prompted no small degree of amusement among Libyans at large.12 In a similar vein, Qaddafi insisted that officials be referred to by their position, rather than by their name, and that footballers only be known by the numbers on their shirts.
The impact of this media and cultural takeover served to isolate the Libyans from pretty much everything aside from Qaddafi's revolutionary ideas. In an era that pre-dated satellite dishes, Libyans were left largely cut off from the world. Foreign media and publications were banned, and state television, which in the 1980s broadcast for just six hours a day, pumped out little more than the Leader's speeches and conferences on the Green Book. One Libyan woman recalled: ‘We had no idea what was happening in the world. Everything was propaganda, everything revolutionary.’13
This censorship was the start of the overwhelming and suffocating isolation that came to characterize Libya and the bizarre world that Qaddafi created in it. Indeed, the surreal was never far away; on one occasion, for hours on end state television broadcast a photograph of a pair of military boots with the words ‘From a viewer to the broadcasting house’ underneath them.14 Even after state television started having to compete with foreign satellite channels, such as Al-Jazeera, in the late 1990s, the broadcasting got little better. In 2006 Libyans were treated to hours of footage of a seemingly endless dirt road in sub-Saharan Africa, shot from the window of a moving vehicle, because this was the road that Qaddafi was travelling along during one of his many visits to that part of Africa!
As well as revolutionizing the state, the revolutionary committees were given a far more sinister remit. In February 1980, they were tasked with liquidating the opponents of the revolution. To help them complete this gruesome mission, the regime established a new system of ‘revolutionary courts’, in which the revolutionaries were given free rein to try ‘reactionary’ and ‘deviant’ elements. These courts, which were staffed by revolutionary committee members, acted completely outside the country's justice system and, unsurprisingly, committed gross abuses of power; mass trials became commonplace, as did retrials of political prisoners who had been arrested after the cultural revolution of 1973. Many of these prisoners had their sentences increased to life imprisonment; many others who went through these kangaroo courts found themselves sentenced to death.
The revolutionary committees took to the task of rooting out deviant elements with great gusto. This is hardly surprising: each year, every member was charged with uncovering and taking to the revolutionary court five elements who were hindering the revolution. Fear began to fill the air and seep through doorways, as scruffily dressed young men, rigid like their ideology and filled with self-righteous certainty, began arresting and carting off anyone they suspected of anti-revolutio
nary behaviour. One Libyan university professor recalled: ‘People were afraid of expressing their views and thoughts because they were afraid of being accused of treason and treachery.’15 This fostered a climate of crushing fear and intimidation that was not to be broken until the uprisings of 2011.
In such an environment, violence was never far off. Aggressive interrogations by revolutionary committee members were regularly broadcast on state television, with the victims frequently showing signs of torture. The shocking scenes, aimed at instilling fear, remained imprinted on the minds of the masses. One Libyan recalled:
The first person to be interrogated on television was Omar Shalouf. I still remember his face very well. He was wearing a white shirt that had blood spots on it and we could see signs of torture on his face … These kinds of interrogations came on every day after the news bulletin and the broadcaster would announce, ‘and now we will see the confessions of the stray dogs’.16
In one interrogation of Sheikh Al-Bishti, the imam of Tripoli who had dared to question Qaddafi's views on Islam, the terrified preacher had his beard set alight.
These court interrogations and confessions were sometimes carried out as major public events. In 1984, crowds of unsuspecting Libyans, including schoolchildren, were brought to a sports stadium in Benghazi. It soon became clear what kind of spectacle they had been called to witness. A young man, Sadiq Hamed Shwehdi, sat cross-legged on the ground, utterly alone in the middle of the large pitch, his hands tied behind his back.17 At one end of the pitch, seated at a table draped with crudely painted banners sporting revolutionary slogans, were three hardnosed revolutionary committee members. Shwehdi, his face contorted with fear, was certain of his fate. There was only one sentence for ‘dissent’: execution. Even so, the young victim was forced to confess his ‘crimes’ into a microphone, as Houda Ben Amar (who went on to become one of the most powerful women in Qaddafi's inner circle) whipped the crowd up into a frenzy, until it was baying for his blood.
Shwehdi's execution, like so many others that darkened the public squares and stadiums at this time, was broadcast on state television. These public executions seemed to engender a grisly sense of triumphalism among the revolutionary elements, who almost revelled in the violence. Television footage from the era (April 1984) shows one female revolutionary committee member kicking the corpse of a young man who had been hanged; in the same footage, another member sits on the corpse of a victim, repeatedly hitting him in the face.18 In a similar vein, following a failed attack on Qaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli in 1984 by members of the opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), revolutionary committee members were shown chanting over the dead bodies of those who had been killed in the attack. As a warning to others, the corpses were left for days until they rotted.
Qaddafi could clearly be certain of his loyal creation. Yet this was not enough for the Colonel; his was a mission of global proportions and he wanted his new revolutionary forces to make their presence felt abroad. In 1982, he established the International Mathaba to Resist Imperialism, Racism and Reactionary Forces, with the aim of mobilizing the masses the world over. It was headed by the charismatic and much-feared Musa Kusa, who answered directly to Qaddafi (and who went on to become the highest-level defector from the regime in the 2011 uprising). However, this new international revolutionary force was not only a way of spreading the revolution; it was also a means of dealing with those Libyans abroad who were increasingly coming to express their opposition to the Qaddafi regime. Teams of rough and ready revolutionaries moved in and took over the Libyan embassies (now named ‘people's bureaus’) around the world and began rooting out the ‘stray dogs’ who were engaged in anti-regime activities. Eliminating the opposition was far more important to Qaddafi than the niceties of foreign diplomacy.
This extreme approach was a reflection of Qaddafi's increasing paranoia about the opposition outside the country. It is true that opposition elements abroad were creating their own organizations and trying to counter the revolutionary propaganda with propaganda of their own. However, these fragmented groups hardly amounted to a serious challenge, and were more of an irritant than anything else. Yet the Leader could not tolerate such open displays of hostility. Former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky once described the opposition abroad as Qaddafi's ‘weakest spot’, recalling: ‘I have talked to him about it and cannot get a real answer. He is paranoid about this opposition, he cannot think about it logically.’19 The extent of the paranoia is evident in some of the exploits the Colonel engaged in to try to hamper his opponents. In March 1984, an Algerian working for the Libyan regime hijacked a French plane that was on its way from Frankfurt to Paris and tried to redirect it to Tripoli, because Qaddafi believed it had Libyan opposition elements on board.20 In a more sinister incident, on 16 March 1984 a Libyan plane raided a Sudanese radio station, killing five people – all because Qaddafi believed that members of the opposition group, the NFSL, were broadcasting from the building.21
The Libyan opposition abroad were terrified. They had good reason to be. On 11 April 1980, Mohamed Ramadan, a Libyan journalist with the BBC's Arabic Service, who had been publishing open letters to Qaddafi in the Arabic media, was shot at point-blank range in the courtyard of the Regent's Park mosque after Friday prayers. The Libyan authorities refused to accept his body back for burial. Ramadan's death was not a one-off: the same month Libyan lawyer Mahmoud Abu Nafa was shot dead in the offices of a legal firm in Ennismore Gardens in London, a street that at the time also housed the education offices of the Libyan People's Bureau. What followed was a spate of bloody murders. In May 1980, a wealthy Libyan timber merchant was murdered in his hotel bed in Rome. The following month Izzadine Al-Hodeiri, a Libyan living in Bolzano in northern Italy, was shot dead in the railway station in Milan. At the same time, a naturalized Italian of Libyan birth, Salem Fezzani, was shot at in the Rome restaurant he owned. The attacker told the police: ‘I was sent by the people to kill him. He is a traitor and an enemy of the people.’22
One of these bids to silence the opposition landed Libya in very hot water. In 1984, a young British policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, was shot dead as she policed a demonstration of Libyan dissidents outside the People's Bureau in St James's Square in London. The shots, which came from inside the building, were clearly meant for the protesters, but they hit Fletcher instead, prompting the British to break off diplomatic relations with Libya.
The Yvonne Fletcher killing, as well as the other assassinations, demonstrated Qaddafi's complete lack of understanding of the wider world. The Colonel clearly believed that there was nothing wrong with killing those who stood in the way of his revolution – even if that meant doing so in the streets of foreign capitals. The regime revealed its naivety in comments made by Musa Kusa to The Times on 11 June 1980: ‘We killed two in London and there were another two to be killed … I approve of this.’23 Similarly, the British ambassador to Libya at the time recounted how the Libyan reaction to the condemnation by European ambassadors in Tripoli of the killings was incredulity. He was asked by one Libyan official ‘What do you care if these are not your citizens?’24 Indeed, for Qaddafi, this most Machiavellian of leaders, the ends always justified the means, and nothing was going to stand in the way of his revolution. As he once commented, ‘Some people will die and people will forget about them but the result will be that right will triumph, good will triumph, progress will triumph.’25
Turning lives upside down
Qaddafi not only turned Libya's political world upside down, but he also unleashed a whirlwind of revolutionary economic policies that were to jolt the country to its core. In his efforts to create a socialist-inspired economy, he set the revolutionary committees to work, charging them with putting the second part of his Green Book into practice. These changes affected more than just large companies and economic concerns: the long arms of the revolution reached deep into the pockets of almost every Libyan, often to devastating effect. The pe
ople did not know what had hit them, as Qaddafi put his scorched-earth economic policies into effect. In 1977, for example, the government confiscated all land and only allowed individuals to lease back enough to satisfy their own subsistence needs. This measure, which was meant to prevent anyone from making a profit out of farming and which was accompanied by the destruction of all land tenure records, shattered age-old ways of life. The following year, all properties and real estate were confiscated by the state, after which no one was permitted to own more than one dwelling or to rent property.
Even more intrusively, in March 1980, when the regime decided to devalue the Libyan dinar, it called on all Libyans to come forward and declare their assets. People were instructed to exchange any old dinars they had for the new notes at government banks. The policy created untold chaos and panic, as the regime only gave its citizens one week in which to exchange their money. What was worse was that it also limited the amount that could be exchanged to 1,000 dinars; any deposit in excess of that sum was frozen. For a cash-based society, in which people hoarded their savings under the bed, this was devastating. Fearful of losing their hard-earned cash, Libyans rushed to the souqs (markets) and bought up as much gold as they could lay their hands on.
Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi Page 11