Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (49 page)

One of my new journalist friends said that “the event” was about to start, so we went over a knoll and into a polygonal structure with exposed rafters, which bore some resemblance to a rec hall at a summer camp. Hanging on the walls were sayings of the Leader’s in huge Arabic and English type (“The United States of Africa Is Africa’s Future” and “One African Identity”), flanked by poster-size photographs of Rosa Parks. It was the fiftieth anniversary of her refusal to move to the back of the bus, and that, we finally understood, was the occasion for the gathering. At the front of the room, on a dais, stood a gigantic Naugahyde armchair with three microphones beside it. A man in medical scrubs came out and swabbed down the chair and the microphones with gauze pads, to protect the Leader from infection.

Some African-Americans were seated in the row in front of us. I introduced myself to one, and he dourly explained that he was Minister Abdul Akbar Muhammad, the international representative of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who had been in Tripoli earlier but had returned abruptly to the United States for health reasons. Qaddafi has long been one of the Nation of Islam’s funders.

Then the speeches began. The speakers stood at a lectern off to the side, keeping the dais free for Qaddafi. The first was a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. “We Libyans cannot accept the prejudice of Americans against Africans,” he began, to applause. “Those who were seven or eight when Rosa Parks was being shoved to the back of the bus are now fifty-seven or fifty-eight and are leaders of the United States. They still carry this mentality. The new generation inherited this, and it is still going on.” He worked himself up into rhetorical paroxysms, as though Jim Crow laws were still in effect. “We must fight the hatred of America for Africa.”

When he stepped down, Abdul Akbar Muhammad took the lectern to speak about American racial injustice, mentioning that, under segregation, blacks and whites had had to use separate hammams, or public steam baths (a detail previously lost on me). “We cannot count on the Zionist-controlled American media to tell our story,” he said. “Zionists in the US won’t show how the leader of the Al-Fateh revolution is in sympathy with us and us with him.”

The Leader never emerged, apparently having decided that, if Farrakhan wasn’t making an appearance, he wouldn’t, either. Still, the event reflected his fixation on establishing Libya as more an African than an Arab country (even though most Libyans are contemptuous of black people, who do the manual labor that Libyans disdain and are blamed for all crime). Qaddafi’s early dream of pan-Arab unity fizzled, and when other Arab nations observed the UN sanctions
against Libya in the nineties, while many African countries did not, he turned southward. By African standards, Libya seems wealthy and functional; Arab nations, even North African neighbors, have little affection for Qaddafi. He has backed groups opposed to the Saudi regime, and Libyan agents were implicated in a 2003 plot to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. (Saif suggested to me that the Libyans were hoping, in his coy phrase, for “regime change” but didn’t necessarily know that their Saudi partners intended physical attacks on the royal family.)

Qaddafi always sleeps in a tent, true to his bedouin roots. When he went to Algeria recently, a local cartoon showed a tent pitched at the Algiers Sheraton. One man is saying, “Let me in, I want to go to the circus!” The other says, “There’s no circus here.” The first rejoins, “But I was told that there’s a clown in that tent!”

For modernizing reformers such as Shukri Ghanem, Libya’s major problems are poor management and isolation, and the solutions are better management and global integration. “The world has changed,” as Ghanem put it, “and, like other socialist states, we recognized that we had limited means and unlimited needs.” The Internet and satellite television—the dishes are so ubiquitous that landing in Tripoli is like descending on a migrant storm of white moths—have brought further pressure for reform by making that larger world visible. “The change has been inevitable since
Oprah
came on our televisions,” a leading Libyan poet said to me ruefully. What Libyans mainly relate to, though, is the standard of living in other oil-rich states, as displayed on Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern channels. Libya seems dusty and poor in comparison, and they wonder why.

Earnings from oil exports account for about 80 percent of the national budget. In the heyday of Libyan oil production, the country produced 3 million barrels a day. That number has dropped to 1.7 million, but the National Oil Company plans to get it back up to 3 million by 2010. Libyan oil is of high quality, low in sulfur, and easily refined. Libya has proven reserves of about 40 billion barrels of oil, the largest in Africa, and may have as much as 100 billion.
Several major oil companies have ranked Libya as the best exploration opportunity in the world. The Libyans have lacked the resources to conduct extensive explorations themselves. In the fifteen years since foreign companies left, Libya’s extractive resources have been seriously mismanaged. “If Dr. No were trying to muck up the Libyan oil economy,” a British adviser to the Libyan government said, “there is nothing he could think of that hasn’t been done.”

Still, oil money continues to make possible Libya’s subsidy programs—the socialism in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya concept. NASCO pays twenty-six dinars for a 110-pound bag of flour and sells it to bakers for two dinars; you can buy a loaf of bread for two cents. Rice, sugar, tea, pasta, and gasoline are also sold for a fraction of their cost. Economic reform will involve scaling back these subsidies (which currently amount to about $600 million a year) without impoverishing or starving people—which is all the more difficult given that wages have been frozen since 1982. Meanwhile, little credit is available in Libya: no Libyan-issued credit cards can be used internationally; no financial institution meets international banking standards.

“The oil absorbs all the mistakes, of which there have been many,” one Libyan official told me. “The oil money means that there is stability, and it makes the country easy to run. It’s this little country with all this oil—it’s like if you decided you wanted to open a 7-Eleven and you had a billion dollars to back it.” The oil is a curse as well as a blessing. The SPLAJ system has produced a population unhampered by a work ethic. Libyans work five mornings a week, and that’s it—assuming that they have jobs. “If they were willing to take jobs in, say, construction, there would be jobs for them,” Zlitni said sternly. “But we’re a rich country, so the youngsters don’t want to work hard.” Economies based on resources such as oil generate few jobs unless they diversify. Many university students I spoke to were convinced that, for all the talk of reform, their talents would remain unexploited. “When I finish my MBA, chances are that I won’t be able to get a job,” one complained to me. “The whole country runs on oil, not on employment. The wealth doesn’t come out of anything you can get by working hard, which I am prepared to do, but what’s the point?”

“If we hadn’t had oil, we would have developed,” the minister of finance, Abdulgader Elkhair, told me. “Frankly, I’d rather we had water.”

For him, and for aspirants to Libya’s emerging private sector, the main outrages are the sclerotic ministerial bureaucracy and its endemic corruption. The nonprofit organization Transparency International gives Libya a Corruption Perceptions Index of 2.5, ranking it lower than Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. The Heritage Foundation’s 2006 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Libya 152nd out of 157 countries evaluated. “You need twenty documents to set up a company,” Elkhair told me, “and even if you bribe all the right people, it will take six months.”

One day, I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic with a Libyan human-rights activist who gestured in despair at the roadwork and said, “They dig it up and close it and dig it up again, for enormous sums of money every time and with no other purpose. This corruption makes me late for my meetings. Necessary things are not done here, and unnecessary things are done over and over.” I met the previous head of the National Cancer Institute, described to me by other doctors as the best oncological surgeon in the country, who had been removed from his job to make way for a friend of the Leader’s. The displaced doctor is now working at a small clinic without essential equipment. The administrator who served under him sells fish at a roadside stand nearby.

“Qaddafi is very happy to have corrupt people working for him,” a Qaddafi insider said to me. “He’d much rather have people who want money than people who want power, and so he looks the other way and no one threatens his total control of the country.” (Tribal loyalties, which intersect with simple cronyism, also play a role here: Qaddafi has filled many high-level military and security posts with members of his bedouin tribe, the Qathathfa, along with members of a large tribe to which the Qathathfa have long been allied, the Warfalla.) A Tripoli lawyer added, “Corruption is a problem, and sometimes a solution.”

I attended the opening of a United Arab Emirates trade fair in Tripoli, which was held in a tent and was full of international goods
presented with a smile. You could get samples of everything from medication to cookware and industrial equipment, and a select crowd of Libyans passed through with shopping bags. Many business cards were exchanged. “Look, this country is so rich you can’t believe it,” Ahmed Swehli, the English-educated businessman, told me, glancing around. “Right now, it’s like we’re the kids of the richest man in the world, and we’re in rags. The corruption, the bloat, is impoverishing.”

Compounding the problem of graft is a shortage of basic operational competence. I went to a session of a leadership training program in Tripoli, organized by Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Monitor Group, two American consulting firms that are advising the Libyan government. The foreign organizers had been determined to include the people they thought had the strongest leadership potential, but some local officials wanted to choose on the basis of connections. The compromise was neither wholly meritocratic nor purely corrupt. To some in the group, capitalism was still a novelty; others were ready for corner offices at Morgan Stanley. They role-played. They made speeches through crackly microphones under gigantic portraits of the Leader. Some described sophisticated financial instruments and drew flow charts; some talked of “leveraged buyouts” and “institutional investors” and “a zero-sum game.” On the other hand, one participant, dressed in a shabby suit and a bright tie, was asked how he would fund a construction project, and he replied vaguely, “Don’t banks do that?” Another was surprised to learn that international backers usually expect interest or profit sharing in return for risking their money. Libyan business, it’s clear, will be led by people of impressive competence and by people of no competence.

At the end of the conference, the prize for the best presentation went to Abdulmonem M. Sbeta, who runs a private company that provides oil and marine-construction services. He was suave and cultivated, with darting, lively eyes. “We need not leaders but opposers,” he said to me afterward, over an Italian dinner in the Tripoli suburbs. “Everyone here has had a good model of how to lead. But no one has ever seen how to oppose, and the secret to successful business is opposition. People want prosperity more than emancipation, but, in any case, social reform can be achieved only through economic development.”

But does Qaddafi wish to teach his subjects to oppose him? An expat businessman told me, “Qaddafi is afraid that the emergence of a wealthy class might inspire a so-called Second Revolution.” Wealth is a relative term; by world standards, the wealthy people in the country are the Qaddafis, and if anyone else has truly substantial assets, he’s smart enough not to show it. In the meantime, the Leader’s vagaries have kept Libya’s elites off-balance, sometimes in almost absurd ways. In 2000, Qaddafi lifted a longtime ban on SUVs, and prosperous Libyans went out and imported Hummers and Range Rovers. Three months later, the Leader decided that he had made a mistake, and he outlawed them again, leaving a large number of privileged Libyans owning vehicles that it was illegal to drive. “You can tell if you’ve reached the top,” a young Libyan told me, “if you listen to a lot of conversation about SUVs rusting in the garage.”

“Don’t say
opening
,” the foreign minister, Abdurrahman Shalgham, said, waving his hands in protest, when I asked him about the new Libya. “Don’t say
reintegrate
. Libya was never closed to the world; the world was closed to us.” But the cost of Libyan paranoia has been an isolation that feeds this paranoia and keeps Libyans in the fold of the Leader. The idea of a world that wants to engage with Libya is dangerous to Qaddafi’s hegemony. “America as an enemy would cause him trouble,” said Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, the political scientist. “But he doesn’t want America as a friend, either.”

Relations between Libya and the United States remain shadowed by history. Qaddafi’s most vigorous opponent was President Reagan, who in 1980 closed the Libyan embassy, then suspended oil imports, then shot down two planes over the Gulf of Sidra, where the United States disputed Libya’s sovereignty. Ten days after the Libya-linked bombing of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by American servicemen, in 1986, Reagan bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, dropping ordnance on Qaddafi’s compound in an apparent attempt to assassinate him. Qaddafi claims to have lost an adopted daughter in the raid. “His grip on power was sliding and then there was the bombing and it united the Libyans behind him,” one Libyan official told me.

The total isolation of Libya began in 1991, when the United States and Britain indicted two Libyans suspected of involvement in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the French indicted four Libyan suspects in the 1989 explosion of the French airliner UTA 772 over the Niger desert. Libya refused to surrender any of the suspects, and the following year, the United Nations approved economic sanctions. Only in 1999 did Libya allow the Lockerbie suspects to be brought to trial, under Scottish law, in The Hague. (A financial settlement was reached that year with French authorities as well.) The Scottish court convicted one of the suspects and acquitted the other. Libya long denied any wrongdoing but eventually accepted that it had to admit to it, as a pragmatic matter, though Libyan officials see it as a forced confession. Qaddafi never accepted personal guilt.