The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  The Green Book experiment was in bad shape by the 1990s. Low oil prices had curtailed Gaddafi's main source of income, while the heavily nationalized economy, denied international expertise and supplies, was creaking. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its ideology suggested that Gaddafi might best serve his interests by moving into the orbit of the world's now-unopposed superpower, whose stance in the post–9/11 world threatened rogue regimes from Iraq to North Korea. The interception in December 2003 of a Tripoli-bound ship carrying nuclear centrifuge parts put further pressure on Gaddafi, his apparent plans to develop a nuclear programme now out in the open.

  By the late 1990s, back-door diplomatic channels to end Libyan isolation were beginning to bear fruit. As part of the deal that took shape, Gaddafi was required to give up unconventional weapons programmes and settle damages for past crimes. After protracted wrangling, a $2.7 billion compensation package was agreed in 2004 for Lockerbie, and its payment tied to the progressive lifting of economic sanctions. Tripoli also agreed to pay $1 million each to the families of passengers on a French airliner blown up over Niger in 1989.3 The UN and the United States eased sanctions from the early 2000s, and warming diplomatic relations were exemplified by Blair's visit in 2004.

  Libya became a member of the UN Security Council in 2007 and a year later took on its rotating two-year presidency. It was even elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2010, a status that was removed hurriedly in 2011. Gaddafi became president of the African Union in February 2009 and, in the process, persuaded 200 tribal leaders to anoint him as the ‘King of Kings’, much to the unease of many African heads of state.

  Italy, Libya's old colonial foe and its main trading partner, formally renewed ties in August 2008 with a ‘Treaty of Friendship’, and Gaddafi's relationship with Italian President Silvio Berlusconi developed to such an extent, that by 2009 he had even begun to appear next to Gaddafi on giant posters in Tripoli. Relations with Washington were warmer, if tepid. In 2006, the US representative office in Tripoli was upgraded to a full embassy and the Pentagon removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terror. In September 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit brought the highest-level US diplomatic presence in Tripoli for more than half a century.

  In 2007, the newly-elected French premier Nicolas Sarkozy had helped secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to death for allegedly infecting Libyan children with HIV. Shortly afterwards Sarkozy announced that France would cooperate with Libya on nuclear power generation, while Gaddafi's visit to Paris later that year resulted in more deals, including a major order for Airbus and an expression of interest in buying France's Rafale fighter jets – which would ironically unleash the first air strikes against his tanks in March 2011.4

  These deals hinted at the alluring economic rewards of reintegrating Gaddafi. In the mid-2000s Libya was seen as an unopened treasure chest, boasting Africa's largest proven oil reserves but suffering from a lack of investment and expertise that meant it was pumping less crude than it had in 1969. Rising oil prices were generating bumper surpluses for Tripoli, and Libya's disconnected economy was well insulated from the economic crisis buffeting the rest of the world, making it an even more appealing catch for governments and companies in dire financial straits.

  In 2006, a year before the BP deal, three US oil companies had restarted their joint venture with Libya's NOC and other US firms picked up major contracts in Libya. Construction giants from Brazil, Korea, China and India sought to capitalize on a gigantic investment programme that planned to build hundreds of thousands of new houses, as well as overhaul roads, bridges, airports, ports, universities, and sewage, water and electricity networks. The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) was successfully wooed by Wall Street and invested hundreds of millions with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the Carlyle Group.

  The Corinthia Bab Africa – Tripoli's first international five-star hotel – was booked up months in advance, while dilapidated towers in the capital boasted long waiting lists for office space.5 International brands signed deals to manage new hotels, while European retailers like Marks and Spencer, Mango, BHS and Next started to open up in Tripoli's upmarket districts. Property prices went through the roof, in some places doubling in the late 2000s as years of latent demand flooded onto the market.6

  Inbound foreign investment rose from $143 million in 2003 to $4.7 billion in 2008,7 outstripping Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, with new legislation offering tax incentives. Even tourism was picking up. Libya had been off-limits to all but the most determined of travellers until the early 2000s, but visitor numbers rose more than fivefold between 2003 and 2006 as Europeans began to explore the country's world-class Greek, Roman and Saharan attractions, and Tripoli even became a port of call for Mediterranean cruise liners.8 New rules on private business offered customs and tax benefits for investment in tourism and services, and were eagerly taken up by local entrepreneurs keen to profit from this economic spring.

  Libya was no longer the ultra-socialist economy of the 1980s, when private individuals could not own shops, hotels or more than one piece of property. It was now a bizarre combination of laissez-faire rule-bending, in which anything could be done if you knew the right people or paid them enough, and anachronistic nationalist regulations, such as the requirement that all external signs on shops or hotels be in Arabic only. No one appeared to have told that to the new operators of the refurbished Al Mahary hotel in Tripoli, where a prominent Western brand name was abruptly sheathed in a tarpaulin soon after it reopened.

  Politically, too, there was optimism. Libya seemed to set an example for what could be achieved through international diplomacy rather than force, especially with the emergence of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi as a possible reformist successor to his father. Educated in Austria and seemingly more bookish than his militaristic or playboy siblings, Saif completed a PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2007 that would later ignite scandal, but then bolstered his credentials as the reform-minded, Western-friendly face of the Libyan regime.

  At home, Saif led a counter-terrorism initiative that released several hundred members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the Al-Qaeda affiliate formed in the 1990s whose former members would play a leading role in the 2011 revolt. He also fronted a programme of economic liberalization. His Economic Development Board (EDB) paid astronomical fees to US consultancies who advised on Libya's development and introduced senior Libyans to movers and shakers in the West. Saif was also outspoken in calling for political reform. ‘Society needs to have independent media to highlight corruption, cheating and falsification … Libya must have an independent civic society and independent bodies,’ he said in an August 2007 speech which one British newspaper said underlined Libya's ‘transformation from a pariah state into a Western ally’.9

  That was overstating the case, but there was certainly debate behind the scenes about how far change should go. On one side was the old guard, which included Saif's brother Mo'atassim and Prime Minister al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi, and on the other, reformist elements championed by Saif and technocrats like NOC chief Shukri Ghanem and the US-educated Mahmoud Jibril, head of the EDB. The struggle was manifested most publicly in the media sector, when in early 2009 newspapers and TV stations belonging to Saif's media company, Al-Ghad, or ‘Tomorrow’, began to criticize Egypt's quiescent approach to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. One of his channels was quasi-nationalized a couple of months later, and in November 2010, while Saif was out of the country, some sixteen journalists from Al-Ghad were arrested by the internal security forces. Its flagship newspaper, Oea, was subsequently closed before being reopened with new management.

  Was all of this simply manufactured to convince the Libyan public and the wider world that Saif was a genuine reformer? Such a view ignores the real splits about what direction Libya should take. With Gaddafi's woolly ideology now being overtaken by economic liberalization and renewed friendliness with the West, it raised
questions about where Libya might go after he was dead or had retreated from the front lines of power. Those opposing Saif's outlook saw him as a rival to their own long-entrenched interests and were irritated at being openly criticized over issues like the lack of economic reform, corruption and the overly-powerful military.10 As far as Saif harboured any genuine desire to reform Libya's political system, the old guard seemed determined to stop him. It was also extremely difficult to alter power structures that had been in place for decades, based on a system of tribal and family loyalties that favoured some groups and deliberately marginalized others.

  Gaddafi shuffled the same ministers around different portfolios, not allowing any one power base to become too entrenched. Ministerial positions or heads of public companies were essentially ways of bestowing favours, allowing senior figures to milk their positions for financial perks that would filter down to their extended families. People could and did get rich independently of government positions, but the ultimate source of all wealth was the oil revenues, erratically controlled by the ruling family. ‘It's like a tap,’ said one local businessman. ‘Whenever it gets switched on, everyone crowds round to get a drink before it gets switched off again.‘11

  Gaddafi's approach overseas was also shifting. Tripoli still funded rebel groups in Africa and further afield, but its campaign to assassinate exiled political opponents had been abandoned. Human rights abuses were frequent and brutal, there was no rule of law, and many thousands of prisoners still languished in sub-human conditions, but this was not the same regime of door-to-door terror that Hisham Matar described in his bleak novel about 1980s Libya, In the Country of Men. A Human Rights Watch report from 2010 even described a number of ‘breakthroughs’ in Tripoli:

  We first noted a shift in the Libyan winds during a research trip in April when journalists and lawyers spoke openly to us about the restrictions they faced, a startling break from previous visits. The families of [the] 1996 Abu Salim massacre – an event never publicly acknowledged by the government – were demonstrating in the streets, refusing to accept the compensation they were offered to stop demanding justice. Journalists from two newspapers and foreign-based Libyan websites wrote critically about government failings … There was open dissent among the ruling elite, and a public struggle to control the lawless security forces.12

  Libya in the late 2000s was not the same as Libya in the 1980s or 1990s. Even though Gaddafi certainly still could, and often did, exert control over the most mundane details of life in the country, his power had been diluted by Libya's international reintegration, the rise of the internet and satellite television, and the burgeoning private sector. He had hardcore opponents and hardcore supporters, as 2011 would show, but for many Libyans he had become something of an embarrassing irrelevance, an ever-present face that loomed over streets and appeared on television in outlandish robes and sunglasses, but who had little direct involvement in the everyday life of most people. True, the Green Book was still required reading in schools, but few took much notice of it and even fewer bothered to attend the local councils that it proclaimed to be the bedrock of popular rule.

  His regime was not a monolithic, totalitarian structure. Nor was it a hermit kingdom like that of North Korea. It had cracks, splits and disagreements that led to volatility and confusion, and made for little meaningful progress on political reform. But after the initial post-sanctions optimism about Libya, there were more and more signs that although Gaddafi had come in from the cold, he was still only willing to play by his own rules.

  The Failed Reintegration

  In August 2009, some British expatriates in Tripoli decided to leave the country for a long weekend. Others, away on their summer holidays, delayed their return for a few days. No one quite knew how the Libyan regime might react if the Scottish authorities decided not to release Abdulbasset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted for the Lockerbie bombing. A month earlier, a doctor's report had given him less than three months to live, prompting a debate on whether he should be released on compassionate grounds or left in prison. To the palpable relief of British expatriates and companies in Libya, Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, decided that Megrahi could be let go.

  His release was hugely sensitive, and openly opposed by Washington and many British parliamentarians. But what made matters immediately worse was Megrahi's arrival in Tripoli, where he and Saif al-Islam provoked international fury when they were greeted at the airport by a stage-managed group of cheering supporters. Tripoli was not prepared to hide the fact that it saw Megrahi as a wrongly-accused hero, whatever the international sensitivities involved. The issue refused to go away, with leaked cables claiming that British diplomats had written to the Libyan authorities with legal advice on Megrahi's release, or that Libyan ministers had met Kenny MacAskill shortly before the release.

  The brewing row was overtaken by the events of 2011, but it was one of several episodes that highlighted Gaddafi's refusal to abide by international norms and forge relationships that might ultimately have saved his regime in 2011. That defiance was illustrated again just a month after Megrahi's release, when Libya's leader flew to New York to address the United Nations. Despite being one of the world's wealthiest men, its longest-serving head of state, and president of the African Union, Gaddafi could find no one willing to rent him land to pitch his tent.

  But arguably the most damaging affair was a prolonged standoff with Switzerland, triggered in July 2008 when Swiss police arrested and briefly jailed Hannibal Gaddafi, one of the Libyan leader's sons, and his wife, who were accused of beating their domestic staff in a Geneva hotel. Infuriated, the regime withdrew an estimated $7 billion from Swiss banks and boycotted all Swiss companies and citizens.13 To make sure everyone got the point, police toured shops in Tripoli to remove bars of Swiss chocolate and rows of Swiss watches. Swiss companies had their offices closed and Libya stopped shipping oil to Switzerland, which responded by blacklisting and freezing the assets of 186 senior Libyan officials.

  The spat escalated. Tripoli jailed two Swiss nationals whom it had prevented from leaving Libya due to ‘visa irregularities’. Gaddafi even called for jihad against the land of cheese and cuckoo clocks, urging Muslims to ‘go to all airports in the Islamic world and prevent any Swiss plane landing, to all harbours and prevent any Swiss ships docking, inspect all shops and markets to stop any Swiss goods being sold’.14 Then in March 2010 foreign minister Moussa Koussa announced that all nationals of the 26 countries in Europe's Schengen zone were now banned from entering Libya. The travel ban was eventually lifted after mediation by other EU parties, but relations with Switzerland, and with other parts of the EU that had been dragged into what was essentially a bilateral dispute, were permanently soured.

  The whole episode was evidence of how Gaddafi's regime was failing to build real bridges with the international community. Either it did not understand, or did not care about, the norms of international diplomacy, instead insisting on a self-destructive pride that meant foreign diplomats had to approach Libya with the softest of kid gloves. It was the same sort of attitude that prompted Gaddafi, on his first-ever official visit to Rome in 2009, to pin on his uniform a photo of the popular Libyan resistance hero, Omar al-Mukhtar, being arrested by Italian colonial forces in 1931.

  Meanwhile, Libya was turning out to be a great commercial disappointment. Many foreign firms had simply lost patience with the opaque bureaucracy, unpredictable government policies, corruption and unpaid bills. Nor was the all-important energy sector the treasure trove that many had hoped for, refuting the argument that the 2011 intervention was all about oil. Several international firms chose not to extend their exploration licences in 2009 and 2010 after poor results, focusing on other countries with friendlier business environments and less draconian terms. Almost four years after signing its landmark deal in 2007, BP was only just starting its exploratory drilling in early 2011.

  Foreign companies had also been dismayed by what happened to V
erenex, a Canadian wildcatter that struck oil in Libya in 2008 and earned a buyout offer from the state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) the following year. The sale required the approval of Libya's NOC, which dragged its feet for five months before finally deciding to block the sale, upon which CNPC withdrew its offer. The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) later made its own bid for Verenex that was 37 per cent lower than the Chinese offer. Verenex shareholders, effectively having to take whatever they could get, accepted the sale.15

  The episode further eroded commercial trust, suggesting that the Gaddafi regime was not a trustworthy business partner and that Libya was not a reliable place to invest. On the ground, there was disquiet among foreign firms and even rumours that oil explorers were now keeping discoveries secret from the authorities. Tripoli had bullied its way into getting what it wanted, but this was a Pyrrhic victory.

  Tourism was faring even worse than energy. New rules introduced in 2007 required all non-Arab nationals to carry a certified Arabic translation of their passport details, and by 2009 visitor numbers had almost dwindled back to their pre-sanctions levels. When asked in 2010 for the latest figures, a government official said they had been told not to release them because they were so bad.16 Tourist guides started looking for other work, while hotels in peripheral towns like Ghadames, a UNESCO world heritage site, were starting to shut their doors.17 British Airways had cut one of its two daily flights to Heathrow, while another airline, BMI, endured months of delays and red tape to launch its own London-Tripoli route, eventually beginning flights on 21 February 2011. It completed only one return trip before the uprising escalated and the route was deemed too unsafe to operate.18