The New Middle East (53 page)

Finally capturing and killing Mukhtar didn’t actually do the Italians any good, because his bravery and stoicism at the gallows became legendary, turning him into a martyr and a hero. He became so much a part of the Libyans’ sense of themselves that Colonel Gaddafi reportedly bankrolled a 1981 Hollywood blockbuster called
Lion of the Desert
, starring Anthony Quinn as Omar Mukhtar and Oliver Reed as the ‘evil’ sixth governor of Libya, General Rodolfo Graziani. The film was immediately banned in Italy and only shown publicly in 2009 during an official visit by Muammar Gaddafi, during which he was photographed with what looked like a roughly crafted handmade badge of Omar Mukhtar pinned to his chest, opposite his medals, as he shook hands with the then Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The movie was played incessantly on Libyan TV under Gaddafi and it continued to be played in the areas that broke away from him. The only time I went into coffee shops during the war and found the TV was not showing the news it was showing
Lion of the Desert
.

If one world war gave Libya to Italy, the next took it away. After a long series of battles that would make then obscure cities like Tobruk household names in the UK and leave British war graves dotted along the coastline, the European allies ousted the Italians from the country in 1942. It then remained under the administration of the British and the French until the United Nations General Assembly voted in 1949 that within three years it should become an independent sovereign nation. According to Benjamin Higgins, the economist appointed by the UN in 1951 to work out a plan to develop the new nation: ‘The establishment of the United Kingdom of Libya . . . [was] one of the boldest and most significant experiments ever undertaken by the United Nations Organization, or by the League of Nations that preceded it.’
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It is fair to say that Professor Higgins was not overly hopeful. ‘Libya is a gigantic “dustbowl”,’ he concluded in a report for UNESCO.
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It is a damning indictment of Italian rule that he adds: ‘Few countries in the world are less advanced economically, have a higher proportion of illiteracy, or have been longer under foreign domination than Libya.’ ‘The economy,’ he said, ‘offers discouragingly little with which to work.’

The man who was chosen to lead the newly created institution of a Libyan monarchy was the Amir of Cyrenaica, Sayyid Idris al-Senussi. The new King Idris, who was the grandson of the Grand Senussi, declared his country’s independence on 24 December 1951. It was he that Gaddafi would depose. King Idris was the first Libyan ruler to inherit its oil wealth, and like the man who ousted him he didn’t use it to build much of a state. One of his first acts as king just two months after declaring the nation’s birth was to strangle its still nascent democracy. He cancelled the first and, until Gaddafi was overthrown, only multiparty elections the country had ever had.
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For good measure he banned political parties too.

The new kingdom had two capitals, one in Tripoli and one in Benghazi. King Idris spent most of his time in the east. Not surprisingly he was unable to build a sense of nationalism around the institution of the monarchy. What he did preside over was a widespread theft of the nation’s wealth. There is an argument among historians about how heavily involved King Idris was in the corruption that swirled through his court once the oil money flowed in. There is much less debate over its scale. It was endemic. After the death in a car crash of a senior member of the family running the royal household, there was panic among the expat oil executives. One American oilman recalled that the accident ‘created real uncertainty about who to bribe’.
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Gaddafi arrived on the international stage on 1 September 1969 at the head of a bloodless coup mounted against King Idris by a group of young army officers. Gaddafi certainly looked the part then. He was handsome: square-jawed with a wide smile revealing lots of shiny white teeth. He was the epitome of the dashing young officer, so much so that the British painter Francis Bacon declared that if he had the chance to sleep with anyone in the world, ‘I’d like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi.’
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Colonel Gaddafi wanted to get into bed with the rest of the Arab world, and following Nasser’s death, a year after Gaddafi came to power, he tried many times over several years to refashion Arab nationalism in his own image through abortive attempts at mergers or federations with, variously, Egypt, Syria, Sudan and Tunisia. But despite his best efforts he and his country were never really treated as equals by the leading countries in the Arab world. Geography is often a defining factor in the power plays in the Middle East. The closer the country is to the religious and political fault lines that fracture their way through the region, the more influence that nation often has. Libya is physically, and so always has been politically, on the margins. Gaddafi may have considered himself a natural replacement for his hero Nasser, but nobody else in the Arab world did. He became so frustrated by their lack of respect that he turned inward to realise his ambitions and developed a cult of personality at home like no other in the Arab world.

At first Gaddafi and his ‘Free Officers Movement’ were largely welcomed by the Libyan people. For the first few years there wasn’t very much that was radical about their domestic agenda. The old guard left over from the monarchy was slowly replaced, but they weren’t all put up against a wall and shot. The country’s new governing body, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), of which Gaddafi was the chairman, all came from middle-class or poor backgrounds. None of them had had any experience running a bureaucracy. They tinkered around creating a more open environment for business, and significantly they began to invest the country’s oil wealth in education and health, areas long neglected by all the country’s previous rulers. But when it came to relations with the outside world they were more ambitious. One of the RCC’s first acts was to serve notice on the foreign soldiers still on Libyan soil. King Idris had agreed to allow Britain and the US to establish military bases in return for substantial rent during the Cold War era. Unlike the king, Gaddafi did not want their money, their friendship or their people anywhere near him. He threw them all out. And as he tore up the old agreements with the Western powers he began to rewrite the rule book for their oil men.

Because Libya came late to the oil game it learned from the mistakes made by other producers in the region. Its 1955 Petroleum Law gave most of the concessions to small independents rather than the majors. ‘I did not want Libya to begin as Iraq or as Saudi Arabia or as Kuwait,’ explained the then Libyan oil minister. ‘I didn’t want my country to be in the hands of one oil company.’
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That decision would prove to be incredibly influential in the coming years. Apart from an historical perspective, Libya’s oil managers also had two other key things going for them. Their oil was on the Mediterranean coast, so it didn’t need long pipelines or to travel through the Suez Canal on its way to the market. It was also of a very high quality and there was lots of it. By bullying the smaller companies who often had most of their eggs in the Libyan basket the country undercut the bigger players. During the monarchy, oil was exploited only for its economic benefits. Gaddafi identified its political value.

To force the oil companies in Libya to push up their prices and thus increase Libya’s revenue, the Colonel threatened in 1970 to stop production, declaring: ‘People who have lived without oil for 5,000 years can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights.’
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Daniel Yergin in his masterful history of the oil industry,
The Prize
, described how the negotiations were led on the Libyan side by the deputy prime minister, Abdel Salaam Ahmed Jalloud, who ‘charged into a room full of oil executives with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder’. During another meeting he ‘unbuckled his belt and set down his .45 revolver’ on the table directly in front of his Western counterpart.
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Colonel Gaddafi may have been crazy but he was not a fool. He had all sorts of crackpot ideas and wrecked almost every institution of state, but he was smart enough to leave this one alone. The oil industry he inherited was brilliantly structured to maximise the country’s control over its greatest asset. Under Gaddafi the way Libya played the international market would revolutionise the whole oil industry and put more and more power into the hands of the Middle Eastern producers.

Back then the Suez Canal was still closed, as an aftermath of the 1967 war, and the European capitals were getting 30 per cent of their oil from the Colonel’s wells.
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Gaddafi’s hand was further strengthened because the appetite for oil in the West by the start of the Seventies was huge. When Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 the West could absorb the blow and then engineer a coup to depose him. But oil consumption in the West had quadrupled by 1970. Tripoli used its position in the market to change the relationship between the industry and the oil-producing nations for ever. The oil companies were ‘whipsawed by Libya’, wrote Walter J. Levy, a leading petroleum specialist.
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‘The oil industry as we had known it would not exist much longer,’ reflected another American oilman. George Williamson of Occidental turned to a colleague as he prepared to put his signature to an agreement and said: ‘Everybody who drives a tractor, truck or car in the Western world will be affected by this.’
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He was right. There was a rush of demand for renegotiating deals from the other members of OPEC, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. By the time the Arab–Israeli war of 1973 was under way, the oil producers, thanks to Gaddafi, had their new weapon to wield against the West and reshape the political order.

Oil can be a financial blessing for a nation but too much of it can be a curse. While nobody likes to pay taxes, they do create an element of accountability between the people and their rulers. But look across the oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and it is clear that where money just gushes from the ground, leaders are likely to conclude they can spend it as they like. Gaddafi used his oil money to sate his desire to be taken seriously. He began diverting his windfall from the October 1973 oil ‘supply shock’ into sustaining and developing the political experiment he had unveiled to his supporters earlier that year. It was, Gaddafi would opine modestly later, ‘the way to direct democracy based on the magnificent and practical system: the Third Universal Theory’ about which ‘no two reasonable adults can possibly disagree’.
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In April 1973 he had declared his own ‘cultural revolution’, using ‘popular’ committees in schools, universities and the workplace to ‘govern’ locally. These groups became the regime’s eyes and ears on the ground, and until his rule was ended they helped root out and suppress democrats, Islamists or anyone else who didn’t like the way the country was being run. Like China’s Chairman Mao, Gaddafi would, over the next few years, collect his pearls of wisdom to guide the nation in a little book, though the Colonel’s was green, not red. The colour green would soon be everywhere.

If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind before he published the contents of the Green Book that Gaddafi was unorthodox in his approach to politics, they were in no doubt afterwards. It was all there in black and white: everything from menstruation to monetary policy. It was full of his homespun logic couched in convoluted, confusing prose which posed as the language of academia but which was often just very odd.

‘Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth,’ Gaddafi informed the world. ‘Women are female and men are male. According to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month.’ ‘Like men,’ we learn, women also ‘live and die’.
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Under the heading ‘Parliaments’, Gaddafi states that parliament ‘is a misrepresentation of the people’. Much of his book was self-indulgent drivel – ‘Freedom of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally to express his or her insanity.’
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But each piece of airy rhetoric changed people’s lives. Gaddafi declared that people must be ‘Masters in their own homes’.
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The consequence of this was that anyone living in a rented property suddenly became the property’s owner, causing a flurry of rows after the revolution when people tried to reclaim their houses. Paying someone a wage was ‘virtually the same as enslaving a human being’.
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Almost overnight Gaddafi wiped out private enterprise, the lifeblood of modern economies. It was economic suicide, but Gaddafi didn’t need an economy, he had oil.

The Colonel’s brave new world finally took form on 2 March 1977, when his General People’s Congress adopted the ‘Declaration of the Establishment of the People’s Authority’. This was the moment from which Gaddafi would forever state that he stopped ruling the nation and had handed authority to the people. He would always contend that from this day he was no longer running Libya, the members of the GPC were. He castigated world leaders during the civil war who called for him to step down because, he said, he had nothing to step down from.