Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  The NTC's inability to get the Misaratans to hand the bodies over was an ominous sign of things to come. How could the NTC, secure in its offices in Benghazi, compete for legitimacy with those who had rolled up their sleeves and fought on the front lines? It was the Misaratans – people who had suffered so much when their city was being pulverized by regime forces – who had cut off the head of the snake. They were not going to listen to a group of technocrats and academics – least of all a group whose leadership was linked to the former regime! And they certainly were not going to allow the NTC (which was under pressure from international opinion, outraged at the images of Qaddafi's brutal murder that had been broadcast around the world) to bring the Colonel's killer to justice.

  Moreover, the Misaratans refusal to hand over the corpse suited the popular mood. Libyans began queuing up to catch a glimpse of the reeking corpses, many taking photographs of themselves next to the rotting bodies. While this may have appeared a grisly spectacle to the outside world, to many Libyans it was part of a necessary process. Seeing Qaddafi dead was confirmation that this utterly overpowering character, whose personality had filled every space in the country, and whose eccentric ideas had intruded upon and dominated every aspect of life, was no more than a man after all.

  Being laid out in a meat freezer certainly was not the way the Colonel had envisaged his own end. During his last days, Qaddafi had written a will. It was almost touching:

  Should I be killed, I would like to be buried, according to Muslim rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and relatives … I would like that my family, especially women and children, be treated well after my death … I call on my supporters to continue the resistance, and fight any foreign aggressor against Libya, today, tomorrow and always … Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personal secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour.40

  How far the reality was from this imagined noble ending, which reflected Qaddafi's simple Bedouin roots. Not only was he not buried within twenty-four hours, as is dictated by Muslim tradition, but his body was finally laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the desert. It was the end that many Libyans believed he deserved. As one Libyan who had waited to view his body said: ‘God made the pharaoh as an example to the others … If he had been a good man, we would have buried him. But he chose this destiny for himself.’41 Indeed, Qaddafi had chosen his own fate right from those early years, when he had marked himself out as different, as a man with a vision – a man who was willing to stake his entire being on the country he had come to lead. There was no option for the prophet from the desert but to die fighting in the defence of his Jamahiriyah.

  Qaddafi had once declared ‘my successor will be the people’. He surely did not imagine that this was how the people would finally succeed him. Indeed, perhaps the cruellest irony of all in this very public death was that after years of the Colonel calling on the masses to ‘rise up’ in the service of his revolution, when they eventually did heed his call, they did so in order to destroy him and all that he had created. The sun had finally set on the era of Qaddafism.

  * The regime even wheeled out Saadi Qaddafi in a bid to appeal to people's religious sensibilities. Dressed in a long white jalaba and sporting a beard, Saadi, who was shown surrounded by religious books, explained to Libyans that it was haram (religiously prohibited) to revolt against the state.

  Conclusion

  One year on from the start of the revolution, Libya was still writhing in crisis. Qaddafi may have gone, but things were not panning out quite the way that those who had risked their lives for change had dreamed of. The country was up against a barrage of challenges, and the jubilation that had accompanied the Colonel's demise was fast being replaced by a profound sense of unease at the direction in which this ‘gigantic dust bowl of sand’ was heading. The ‘Pharaoh’ may have been slain, but his death had unleashed a thousand lesser pharaohs, all jostling for power in the new Libya. The revolutionary brigades that had formed during the struggle against the old regime had not disbanded with the fall of Qaddafi, and the chiefs of these brigades, each linked to a city or region, had become the country's new power brokers. Misarata, Zintan and other cities that had been kept down at the hands of Qaddafi's repressive security apparatus had all taken advantage of the enormous power vacuum that had developed in the wake of the conflict to assert themselves. Libya was fast beginning to look like a collection of city states, and the periphery was taking its revenge on the centre.

  There was little that the country's new leaders could do to claw back control. The authorities that had emerged from the conflict were doing their best, but the NTC and its affiliated bodies were struggling to garner any real legitimacy on the ground. They were certainly no match for the powerful brigade leaders, who had cut their teeth on the front lines and who had no intention of submitting – yet alone of handing over their weapons – to this group of ‘pampered’ technocrats, many of whom had links to the former regime. The new authorities were not helped either by the fact that they were so overwhelmed by their efforts to deal with the security situation that they struggled to manage the day-to-day affairs of state. Libyans were getting agitated once again as the promised jobs, improved services and raised living standards failed to materialize.

  Such was the frustration that, by the start of 2012, protests, sit-ins and strikes had become an almost daily occurrence, as Libyans began accusing the new authorities of having sold their revolution down the river. Sometimes events took a more sinister turn: in January 2012, angry protesters stormed the NTC offices in Benghazi, throwing homemade grenades and hurling plastic bottles at the council's head, Mustafa Abdeljalil, who was forced to beat a hasty retreat out of the back door. The following month, the interim prime minister, Abdelraheem Al-Keib, was attacked by knife-wielding crowds. Libya's new leaders were learning the hard way the truth of the old cliché that managing the peace is much harder than winning the war. While neighbouring Tunisia pressed steadily ahead with its transition from dictatorship to democracy, Libya found itself limping along, dragging its past behind it.

  That things should have taken such an extreme turn is unsurprising. Libya was always going to have a tougher time pulling itself through its Arab Spring than was Tunisia. Qaddafi's refusal to step aside when the people rose up meant that Libya had been through what amounted to almost twelve months of wretched civil war. More importantly, perhaps, though the Tunisian regime had been as brutal and repressive as Qaddafi's, it had built a state. President Ben Ali left behind a strong institutional framework and an entire political tradition that the country's new leaders could at least use as a springboard for change. Qaddafi, on the other hand, left nothing in his wake. For all his big ideas, all that the Colonel left was a country utterly shattered by forty years of Qaddafism.

  Indeed, the radical nature of the challenges facing Libya as it moved into the post-Qaddafi era was a bitter reflection of the extreme (often senseless) policies of a man driven by his own vain obsessions. Qaddafi was a leader more preoccupied with self-aggrandizing schemes to project himself beyond the country's borders than with tackling the needs of a nation. State-building always came second. Moreover, in his reckless bid to impose his Jamahiriyah, the Brother Leader razed everything to the ground, destroying the country's institutions, or rendering them impotent. Aside from the energy and security sectors – both essential to the maintenance of his regime – little in Libya functioned in any meaningful way. Virtually every formal body in the state was little more than a façade – an expression of the Leader's vanity – behind which real power was focused almost entirely in the hands of Qaddafi, his coterie of loyal informal advisors, and, as they came of age, his sons.

  Thus Qaddafi's left the country's new leaders with the heavy legacy of hav
ing to build the state almost entirely from scratch. A functioning political system, government, ministries, civil service, police force, even a postal service – all had to be created out of nothing. Even the army, rendered little more than a symbolic body by Qaddafi, had to be set up from the remnants of what was left after the conflict. This was a task of gargantuan proportions.

  Moreover, setting up these institutions was one thing; peopling them was something else. Another of the sad legacies of Qaddafi's four decades at the helm was that this promoter of the masses left a population utterly unprepared for life beyond him. The country was sorely lacking in trained or qualified personnel – not least because, whenever it needed expertise, the regime had simply bought it in from abroad. The thousands of functionaries who filled the country's huge and unwieldy state bodies regarded their employment there almost as a rite of passage. They were the unproductive, low-paid beneficiaries of an enormous distributive state: for many public sector employees, going to work was a chance to have a coffee and a chat with colleagues before heading off to drive a taxi or to engage in some other small-scale private or illegal business activity in the afternoon and evening. Qaddafi's Jamahiriyah was not a place that encouraged dynamism in the formal sector. It was not a place, either, where the middle class could flourish. The professional middle class was not totally absent, but it was small and completely emasculated by the state. Thus, whereas Tunisia's large and solid middle class was able to help drive the country through its transition, Libya had no such pool of skilled personnel to draw on.

  This dearth of qualified personnel has come to pose particular challenges for post-Qaddafi Libya. Given that people want a clean break with the past, even filling posts in the country's interim ruling bodies has proved difficult. Libyans living in exile have had to be brought back to take up senior positions, including at ministerial level. This has generated some resentment among certain parts of the population, which are somewhat disgruntled at the privileges being bestowed upon these ‘newcomers’, who lived in relative ease abroad, while those left at home stuck it out for years under the old regime. Yet the country had little choice. Qaddafi left Libya a land without politicians, and the personalization of politics was so utterly overwhelming that there was no space for anything in the political arena other than the Colonel and his own hallowed image. The only exception was Saif Al-Islam, although even the Leader's son was limited in how far he could project his own ideas. Those figures who had the potential to become personas in their own right – such as Abdelsalam Jalloud or Omar Al-Meheishi – were simply pushed out of the way over the years, so starved of oxygen that they could not make any real contribution of their own. Qaddafi was a ‘Messiah’ who had little time for his disciples. Instead, he relied on technocrats, who tried their best to navigate their way through the endless layers of meaningless bureaucracy he had created.

  Not only was Libya a land with no politicians, but it was also a country with no real political experience. Its experiment with democracy in the early years after independence had hardly been a resounding success, and in any case it was abruptly cut short by the revolution of 1969. Despite the fact that the Qaddafi years, and particularly the early decades, were a whirlwind of political experimentation, Libyans themselves were only ever the guinea pigs. Not only were political parties barred, but there was not even space for Libyans to be active in the realm of civil society. The weight of the Jamahiriyah was such that civil society organizations, trades unions and all independent bodies were strictly off limits.

  While post-conflict Libya has seen the emergence of an array of non-governmental organizations and political parties, the long years of Qaddafism have taken their toll. Among whole swathes of the population there is still a lingering suspicion of the democratic process, of political parties and of liberalism more widely. These are viewed in some quarters as foreign inventions that have little to do with the country's inherent traditions. It is as if the country has been in stasis since the days of the monarchy, suspended in a bubble and isolated from the rest of the world. This is hardly astonishing: Qaddafi's years of half-baked experimentation left a population turned in on itself. As the Colonel dragged the country to hell and back, Libyans got used to keeping their heads below the parapet. In the face of his endless efforts to force them to play a part in his perpetual revolution and to become the masses he believed he was put on the planet to lead, the people took refuge in tradition and social conservatism. Many also took refuge in Islam. Qaddafi may have been able to take everything from them, but at least their pride, their traditions and their innermost faith could not be touched by the grubby and cruel hand of the Jamahiriyah.

  Therefore, while the country's new leaders have been valiantly putting in place the steps to transform what was one of the world's quirkiest states into a modern, functioning democracy, the road ahead is hard and full of obstacles. Indeed, the Colonel put Libya through such an extreme experience that it came out the other side completely ill-equipped to deal with being a modern state.

  Qaddafi also left behind a country steeped in corruption. His was a regime propped up by patronage, where the elite creamed money off the state like there was no tomorrow. Despite the Colonel's repeated complaints about corruption among state officials, who, he claimed, were perverting the course of his revolution, he knew that doing anything serious to tackle the problem would risk undermining his regime. Corruption was a key component of Qaddafi's tool kit, a way to buy loyalty from the very top to the very bottom – from the country's tribal elders to the henchmen who filled his thuggish security apparatus.

  For all that Libyans hoped the Colonel's demise would bring an end to such goings on, old habits die hard. The country's new leaders soon found themselves accused of the very same dubious practices that they had vowed to get rid of. If corruption had been the domain of the elite under Qaddafi, it was fast becoming the province of an ever-widening circle in the new Libya: corruption was being democratized, and it was soiling the purity of the revolution and all it had stood for.

  It is perhaps unfair to pin the blame for the corruption that has already seeped into the new Libya entirely on the Colonel. Corruption seems to be the curse of developing nations – particularly those that are oil rich. (Post-Saddam Iraq has seen an explosion in corruption that makes what went on under the former regime almost pale into insignificance.) However, Qaddafi's willingness not only to buy loyalty over the decades, but also to stand by as the country was turned into what was effectively a kleptocracy, a family business par excellence, left Libya with a heritage of corruption that will prove difficult to shake off.

  Likewise, Qaddafi cannot be saddled with all the blame for the fact that the country has fractured along regional lines. Libya is still a product of its geography and its history. However, the assertion of the local that has characterized the post-Qaddafi era so forcefully is a direct response to the gaping chasm that opened up at the centre. Qaddafi's Jamahiriyah was so overwhelmingly centralized, and his personality so all-encompassing, that when he collapsed, the entire state collapsed with him. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local power brokers – from militia chiefs, to local councils, to tribal heads – all moved in to fill the gap, pursuing their own interests with devastating consequences. To quote W.B. Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’1

  Anarchy was certainly one word for it. The revolutionary brigades, which had come to act like militias, took the law into their own hands. In the absence of a police force or any meaningful state security force, the young fighters who swelled their ranks, and who were part of the enormous pool of disaffected and disenfranchised youth that Qaddafi had left in his wake, began acting with almost total impunity. Locals could only look on in dismay as these militias fought it out among themselves, vying for influence and power.

  Yet the emergence of this localism and regionalism had another, deeper consequence: it played directly into the hands of the country's tribes. W
hile tribes were certainly a feature of Qaddafi's Libya, the Colonel's skill was such that he reduced them to mere social institutions, making them function as mediators and tools of social control. With the demise of the centre, the country's tribes once again began to come to the fore and to seek out a place in the country's new political tapestry. Not that this point should be overplayed: the urbanization of the past half century and more has seen a decline in the importance of the tribe. However, for all that, the post-Qaddafi era has opened up a new space for the tribes to assert themselves politically.

  The post-Qaddafi era has also seen a resurgence of the old antagonisms that traditionally divided east from west. While such divisions were cast aside as the country pulled together to oust Qaddafi, they soon re-emerged as Libya sought to define its new identity. Those in the east began to accuse the NTC of marginalizing them from the country's new power structures. Whether the concerns were real or imagined, some in Benghazi – where there was a strong sense of ownership of the revolution that had started there – believed they were being excluded once again. This got to the stage where there were growing calls in the east for Libya to adopt some sort of federal system. This is hardly unexpected: decades of distrust cannot simply be washed away overnight. Indeed, the Colonel sowed such bitterness in the east that healing these wounds will take generations.

  Yet these are not the only wounds that need to heal. Years of frustration and anger had also been festering against those who had acted as bulwarks of the regime – those tribes and regions that had facilitated the repression, providing willing recruits to the security agencies and revolutionary bodies. With the lid of the regime lifted, some of this rage was unleashed. The country became host to brutal revenge attacks, as militias roamed through the streets of traditionally loyalist areas, such as Bani Walid and Sirte, engaging in the most horrific purges of those they accused of being ‘Qaddafi's men’. The condemned had suddenly turned into executioners and appeared to be relishing their new role. Such actions, which seemed to be aimed at whole clans of tribes or areas, left entire sections of society feeling as though they were being systematically punished for the past. Indeed, Qaddafi had tarred them so heavily with his own brush that many were left feeling as though they had no place in the new Libya.