It is perhaps for this reason that Qaddafi took such a ‘gung-ho’ attitude to the sanctions in the early 1990s, pompously declaring in September 1993:
The nation should realize and the West must understand that we are not being affected by the blockade, the boycott, the air embargo or anything else. We hope that there won't be any relations at all between us and the West, that none of their goods get here, that we won't buy anything from [them]. What matters is that they spare us their evil and harm, and that the sea is between them and us. Good that we are rid of them as it were.29
Yet, while they may not have bitten immediately on the economic front, the sanctions were enormously damaging to Libya on the psychological level. The Jamahiriyah was now almost completely isolated. Once again, the Colonel's fellow Arabs proved unwilling to come to his defence; worse still, they complied with the ‘Christian crusader’ embargo. This was a crushing blow. Qaddafi's anger was palpable, and almost overnight state newspapers unleashed tirades of vitriolic anti-Arabism. There was little tangible support from elsewhere at this point. For all his dreams of leading a powerful force of oppressed nations, united under the banner of the Jamahiriyah and ready to smash the imperialist powers, Qaddafi had wound up almost completely alone, adrift on a sea of disinterest and disdain.
Internal challenges: tribes and Islam
As the sanctions and the isolation took hold, Qaddafi found himself up against a series of internal challenges, some of which pushed his regime to its limits. The first such test came from within his own ranks, in the form of an attempted coup by a group of disaffected army officers from the influential Werfella tribe. The Werfella, based primarily in Bani Walid in Tripolitania, were always considered one of the tribes most loyal to the Qaddafi regime. They proved ready recruits to Qaddafi's security forces, as well as to the revolutionary committees, and made up one side of the security triangle that comprised the Qaddadfa, the Megraha and the Werfella – the three main tribes that shored up the Jamahiriyah.
However, in 1993, a handful of rather green army officers from the Werfella got themselves embroiled with the exiled opposition group, the NFSL, which was keen to capitalize on Qaddafi's weakness in the face of the newly imposed international sanctions. Having come into contact with some members of the Werfella, and having sensed their unhappiness with the way things were going inside Libya, the NFSL set up a series of meetings in Zurich. At these meetings, which went on long into the night in the rooms of the Ambassador Hotel, the NFSL outlined its ambitious and highly risky plan to the nervous young officers: it wanted them to go back to Libya and to recruit a network of rebels from inside the armed forces, who could eventually stage a coup against Qaddafi.
To the young officers' surprise, there was another, riskier, dimension to the plot. At the first of these Zurich meetings in February 1993, the NFSL also arranged for the Werfella officers to meet an American. One of the officers, Khalil Jedek, described the scene:
The American waited for us in the gardens … the American introduced himself saying that his name was John. Of course he worked for US intelligence … We began to talk. The American was asking about a number of points. He asked about chemical weapons, the rocket development programme, the effect of the embargo on Libya and the Russian experts; were they still in the Jamahiriyah or not?30
Upon their return to Libya, the intrepid Werfella officers set about recruiting from within the trusted circles of their own tribe in Bani Walid. However, the regime was way ahead of the plotters. On the morning of 11 October, the security services, which had been monitoring the men for a while, arrested all the officers involved as they made their way to work, finishing off the conspiracy at a single blow. A week after the arrests, the foreign media carried reports of an armed mutiny at the military base in Bani Walid, as well as of major uprisings elsewhere in the country. The whole affair was portrayed as a serious tribal revolt among parts of the Werfella, prompting speculation that Qaddafi was at risk of losing the support of one of the country's most important tribes. This version of events has remained largely unchallenged, and the Bani Walid uprising has been built into Libya's historical narrative.
However, the reality of the Bani Walid affair was nowhere near as dramatic. Given the difficulty of accessing information from inside the country at the time, the press relied almost exclusively on NFSL sources, which were based outside Libya. It is not clear whether the NFSL intentionally misled the press, whipping the story up into something bigger than it was in the hope of encouraging unrest, or whether it was simply a case of wishful thinking on its part. However, according to a former NFSL member, there was no such rebellion or uprising by the Werfella and no movement of regime forces.31 Rather, the regime had moved quickly to nip in the bud a nascent plot, orchestrated mainly from outside.
Yet the plot was still a serious matter for the Colonel, and the fact that a number of military officers from one of the most loyal tribes had got as far as starting to recruit inside the country, right under the regime's nose, was deeply troubling. Qaddafi believed he had already purged the rogue elements from within his armed forces following the end of the Chad war. What made things far worse and amplified the conspiracy in the Colonel's mind was the American component. Once again, the Americans had succeeded in extending their reach all the way into Libya, and into one of the most loyal of areas at that. The Colonel's worst nightmare was coming ever closer.
The punishment could only be extreme. Qaddafi was going to make examples of these young officers, and they and their families were to pay a terrifying price. The men were hauled off for the regulation interrogation, which was broadcast repeatedly on Libyan television. The petrified young men were forced to confess to their crimes and were portrayed as little more than humiliated stooges of the US who had sold themselves and their country cheaply. They were then convicted of espionage by a military court.
However, Qaddafi could not afford to give the impression that there was a crack in relations between the state and one of its most loyal tribes. Cunningly, therefore, he made the Werfella mete out a punishment of its own: he called on loyal Werfella elements to wreak revenge upon their cousins. In line with tribal norms, in which those who bring dishonour are disowned, the Werfella had to demonstrate that the officers were little more than rogue elements who could be dispensed with as traitors both to the state and to the tribe. Revolutionary committee members from the tribe set about bulldozing the houses and land of the families of those who had erred. Family members of those involved were also forced to go on television and denounce the ‘traitors’ that had been in their midst. In August 1995, revolutionary committee members forced the local population of Bani Walid to attend a meeting where they were made to sign a petition calling for the execution of those who had been involved in the affair.32 In January 1997, the show was finally over: six officers were executed by firing squad, while two civilians who were also accused of involvement in the affair were put to death by hanging.
While Qaddafi came out of the affair with the loyalty of the Werfella intact, the whole episode demonstrated that, for all he had sought to get rid of tribalism, viewing it as the antithesis of what it meant to be modern, it was still a powerful tool that he could draw on in times of trouble. Unlike the revolutionary committees, the tribes were, in his own words, ‘a natural social structure’, and an important element in the country's social fabric. It was dawning on the wily Colonel that harnessing the tribes in a more formalized way could assist him in this difficult period.
That is not to say that the Leader had ignored the tribes until this point. While denouncing tribalism as backward, the Bedouin from the desert had skilfully played the tribal field, pitting different tribes (or elements within tribes) against each other and buying tribal loyalties as he saw fit. He regularly courted tribal sheikhs, handing out money, privileges or positions in return for support. Indeed, the Leader allowed the tribal elites to get involved in the ‘farcical fighting for posts’, while he sat ‘laughing his he
ad off in his tent’.33 In this way the power of each tribe rested only in its relationship to the Leader, and he managed to create a situation in which the tribes were left competing for his favour. Tribal elders regularly visited Qaddafi to pledge their allegiance to him, taking with them gifts of expensive textiles, pedigree horses, camels and land in a bid to seek his approval, as he lorded it over them like a king.34 Moreover, he had shored up his regime with the Qaddadfa, as well as the Megraha and the Werfella, turning the state into a kind of overarching tribe, with him, his family and his tent at its pinnacle. Thus, Qaddafi succeeded in neutralizing the tribes, subordinating them to his revolution.
Yet with the mounting pressures of the 1990s, Qaddafi came to realize that he could use the country's complex tribal tapestry in a more constructive way: the tribes could become another tool of mobilization to shore up his regime. To this end, the Colonel expanded his revolution by setting up yet another institution, the ‘social people's leaderships’, which he described as an ‘engine’ that would propel his revolution ever forward. These social people's leaderships comprised ‘respected natural leaders’ of local communities, namely tribal elders, who were tasked with mobilizing the masses and with resolving local conflicts and problems. From now on, these tribal elders were to be held responsible for everything that happened in their own areas. As he explained to them in 1994, ‘The commune will be responsible for everything: even car number plates will be the responsibility of the commune … Then, if something happens in the commune you will be held responsible, even for price rises.’35
What this meant in practice was that the tribes were turned into another mechanism of social control. As in the Bani Walid affair, they were given the special task of weeding out disloyal elements, and were charged with avenging tribal honour if anyone strayed from the straight and narrow. To get the point across, Qaddafi began visiting tribal notables and impressing upon them the need to defend their honour by uncovering the ‘traitors’ in their midst. He instructed a gathering of tribal elders in Zintan in 1994:
… look for treason, detect it and contain it and disown any of its clans which are involved in treason and say to the Libyan people: we are not traitors, we have washed our hands of such-and-such a clan which has traitors … Every clan should expel the families containing traitors until those very families disown the members who are traitors.36
Thus Qaddafi skilfully clouded the country's most trusted social units with the heavy weight of suspicion. He also brought them directly under the stewardship not only of the regime, but of his own family: in line with his growing preference for surrounding himself with members of his own family and tribe, he appointed his cousin, Sayyid Qaddaf Al-Dam, as the ‘general coordinator’ of this new body. Indeed, as the world around him became more insecure, so Qaddafi retreated into the security of his roots.
However, his skilful manipulation of Libya's tribal system was not to save him from a far more formidable foe, which came in the form of a wave of Islamist activism and which caught him almost completely unawares. The discovery in the mid-1990s of a series of armed Islamist groups, intent on bringing down his regime and replacing it with an Islamist state, was to shake the Colonel to the core. This prophet of the desert was not as invincible as he thought. He found himself up against an ideology that was stronger than his own and that inspired a devotion that would stop at nothing to achieve its objectives. Despite the terrifying array of security measures that the Colonel had put in place to protect his Jamahiriyah, here were young men, brimming over with righteousness and willing to risk their lives to bring down his cherished creation. This was all the more difficult for the Leader to stomach given that he had invested so much in building Islam into his revolution. Why should any Libyan need to follow the ‘reactionary’ forces of political Islam when he had already shown them the way?
This challenge was all the more concerning for the Colonel because the Islamist current was rooted in a wider ideological shift that went far beyond Libya's borders. From the late 1970s, and spurred on in particular by the Iranian revolution of 1979, the entire region had experienced an Islamic awakening that had shaken the foundations of the post-independence regimes. Islamist opposition groups – both moderate and militant – had sprung up across the region, and by the 1980s they had proved successful at tapping into popular grievances. Islam had come to be seen by those seeking change as ‘the solution’ and as the alternative to the ‘corrupted’ elites that had taken power at independence and that had promised so much, but delivered so little. From Egypt to Tunisia, from Algeria to Sudan – in whichever direction the Colonel looked, Islamism had reared its head. While all the neighbouring leaders had struggled against the Islamist tide, it was in Algeria that the effects had proved most devastating. From 1992, when the army cancelled elections that the Islamists looked set to win, the country was plunged into a brutal civil war, with Islamist militants fighting it out against the state. The contagion effect was on everybody's mind. As if that were not enough for Qaddafi to contend with, Sudan had become a veritable hub of Islamist militancy, with the Islamist government there hosting an array of jihadists, including Osama Bin Ladin. Islamism was all round.
Given Islamism's momentum, Libya was not going to remain immune from the tide. The Islamist message, reassuringly rooted in tradition, was always going to hold more sway for the Libyans than Qaddafi's hare-brained ‘new gospel’. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the early 1980s, groups of young men, many of them students, who were ‘searching for something’37 began to gather in each other's houses to share their interest in Islam. While Qaddafi was filling the air with revolutionary slogans, these young men would huddle together to listen to cassettes of sermons or to read pamphlets by radical Islamist scholars, who preached that it was a religious duty to fight against un-Islamic rulers. It was a risky business; anyone caught engaging in such activities would face the severest of penalties. But for many of these young men, frustrated with what they saw around them, this was their way of tapping into the new and exciting ideas that breathed of a new way.
As the 1980s progressed, it was not only these new ideas, but also the jihad in Afghanistan that came to capture the imagination of many of these young idealists. In 1979, Soviet tanks had rolled into Afghanistan, prompting Arabs from far and wide to join the local Afghans in their struggle against the ‘godless’ communist forces. For these young Libyans, living in a land in which everything had been subjugated to the suffocating and emasculating ideology of the Jamahiriyah, the idea of fighting jihad in the name of Islam was both heroic and noble. It was also exciting. The appearance of smuggled cassettes by key fighters and sheikhs in the Afghan struggle only added to this sense of adventure and of a ‘new dawn’.
So it was that a steady stream of young Libyans, fired up by romantic notions of jihad, went to join the ranks of the mujahideen. It was not long before the Libyans had established their own guesthouse in the Abu Sayaf camp at Babi in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. It was here that the more seasoned among them would welcome fresh new arrivals and arrange for them to be transferred to the front lines. Although there are no official statistics of the numbers who went, some of those involved have estimated that there were between 800 and 1,000 Libyans who joined the Afghani jihad during the 1980s.38
Back in Libya, meanwhile, there was a growing sensibility among the population at large to the Islamist message. Signs of increased religiosity were appearing everywhere: the hijab (Islamic veil) – something Qaddafi once described as the ‘act of the devil’, which forced women to ‘sit at home’ – began appearing with greater frequency, especially on university campuses.39 Long beards – another symbol of religiosity – also became more common, despite the fact that growing one brought its own risks. One former militant recounted how his brother, an electricity ministry employee in Benghazi, was hauled off a public bus on his way to work one day by a member of the security services, who promptly set his beard alight.40 There were storie
s of scuffles breaking out on university campuses between Islamist-leaning students and those who were loyal to the revolution; and in 1989, demonstrations that erupted in protest at Libya's cancellation of the World Cup qualifying match between Libya and Algeria took on an Islamist hue. Protesters turned their wrath against the regime, and chants of ‘Allah is great. Qaddafi is the enemy of Allah’ rang through the air.
Such manifestations of Islamist sentiment were deeply concerning to Qaddafi. For all his efforts, the masses were not only proving resistant to his ideology, but they were now actively adopting one of their own. What was more shocking, however, was Qaddafi's realization that he was up against something far more sinister. In 1989, the regime uncovered armed militant Islamist cells in Ajdabia and Misarata.41 Another was discovered in Benghazi after its leader, a fiery imam, Sheikh Mohamed Fahkih, embarked upon a suicidal mission to launch his own jihad against Qaddafi. Given the cell's pitiful lack of training and expertise, the security services were able to finish it off in record time, killing Fahkih in the process. However, the imam's rashness was to have bitter consequences: the discovery ‘made the security services and the government wake up’.42 The regime launched a mass arrest campaign, hunting down hundreds of suspected Islamists and their sympathizers. Indeed, Qaddafi cast the net wide and arrested anyone with the slightest connection to the Islamist movement. The message was clear: Qaddafi was not going to let Libya become another Algeria.
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