Qaddafi’s Libya Has Never Existed

Two Truths and a Lie: Libya Edition

Have you ever played the game “Two Truths and a Lie?” It’s quite simple. One player presents the other with three statements, two of them true, and one a lie, with the objective being to uncover the lie. For example:

1) “Libya nearly bought a large chunk of the Bank of Ireland, but pulled out at the last second because they didn’t feel comfortable with Ireland’s finances”

2) “For around a decade all shops in Libya were banned, with all consumer goods sold through state supermarkets known as ‘Popular Markets’.”

3) “Qaddafi had a song composed named African Flower in the White House which he dedicated to former American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

The third one is false. The song was actually called Black Flower in the White House.[1] [2] [3]

All kidding aside, it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction in the information-rich world of today. The process becomes even more difficult when you consider subjects that themselves are contentious whether due to bizarreness, complexity, competing narratives, or plain obscurity of information. Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya ticks all of these boxes. It has been, and continues to be, a land of “two truths and a lie.” But it shouldn’t be, nor should anywhere be. If we, as information-rich residents of the twenty-first century, allow conspiracy theories, misinformation, and plain ridicule to dominate our discussions about Libya, then the only lessons we can draw from the complete chaos that descended upon Libya with the fall of Qaddafi in 2011 will be products of conspiracy, misinformation, and ridicule. Furthermore, why is it that Qaddafi, along with other leaders deemed anti-Western, seem to be stranger and more shrouded in mystery than their counterparts?

So, what actually happened in Libya, before, during, and after the fall of Qaddafi?

In separating fact from fiction, it is important to understand pre-Qaddafi Libya. Where is Qaddafi coming from and why did he choose to rule Libya in the way that he did? To better comprehend Libya, it’s important to look at two things: the Italian occupation of Libya and the Libyan monarchy. In the 1910s Libya was three distinct Ottoman provinces, Fezzan, Cyrenaica, and Tripolitania. Italy, recently unified and ready to start building a colonial empire, tried to invade these three provinces. The native Libyans fought back the Italians for a time with Ottoman support, but eventually, the Ottomans made a secret deal with the Italians, essentially telling them “go for it.” Thus, the basis of Libya’s status as a single state is a direct response to colonialism.

Italy variously came and went into Libya from 1911-1922, but with the coming of Benito Mussolini Italy’s strategy became far more expansive and aggressive. From 1923 until practically the end of World War II, Italian Fascism ruled in Libya. The Italians took most of the available agricultural land for their own settlers, dispossessing Libyans of their own country. Those who opposed were brutally killed or sent to concentration camps, as were those who were suspected of opposition. The Fascists used the gallows so regularly that Italians made and exchanged postcards of hanged Libyans. In a country with a population of less than 1 million, there were 12,000 hangings of Libyans in Cyrenaica in 1930 alone. When one reviews the image that Libyans would have of Europe, and the Global North more generally in the coming decades, this is crucial to consider.

Italy withdrew from the region with the fall of fascism, and the British and American governments installed a monarchy headed by the head of a tribe and religious order in Cyrenaica, King Idris al-Sanussi.

The monarchy was remarkable in just how badly planned and managed it was. Until the discovery of oil, it relied exclusively on foreign aid. The monarchy was also initially founded on a federal system in which the capital city switched every two years from Tripoli to Benghazi (which have some 1000 kilometers of desert between them, creating massive logistical issues). King Idris practiced a policy of “benign neglect,” i.e., not doing anything. He had taken the throne out of patriotic duty and would regularly threaten resignation whenever he ran into obstacles.  A policy of benign neglect doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the people, nor does it inspire any sort of political enthusiasm within the system. Libyans remained politically excluded and remarkably poor. This situation unified Libya into one country yet fostered a lack of interest and mistrust of the government among Libyans, creating a long history of Libyan distrust of the government, as well as Libyan political apathy.

Enter Muammar Qaddafi.

The twenty-seven-year-old Captain Qaddafi seized control with a bloodless coup in 1969. He led a group of young officers who arrested all the major players of the monarchy while the king was in Turkey receiving medical treatment. Interestingly, it seems that nobody much cared. The royal guard didn’t interfere, the senior figures in the army didn’t care, and there are no records of major demonstrations of resistance or support. [4]

The next forty-two years could very well be The Iliad for the myths that they spawned. The myths tend to fall into three categories: he’s either an exceptionally cruel and depraved human being, a saviour or tragic hero, or completely and utterly insane. None of these is true. Qaddafi was a human being and the authoritarian leader of a country, not a storybook villain or a satire in real life. So what exactly is true?

Qaddafi: Depraved Beyond Belief

Western media has tended to present Qaddafi as truly and deeply evil. One of his very few English language biographies describes him, almost immediately after introducing him, as “inherently cruel.”[5] The BBC has described his rule as “42 years of pain and deprivation.”[6] Ronald Regan even had a nickname for him: the “mad dog of the Middle East.”[7]

Some of the allegations are that Qaddafi was a terrorist, sex-maniac, rapist, human rights abuser, murderer, and all-around demon spawn. They are partially true. Qaddafi financed causes he believed were anti-imperialist in nature which were often conducted via terrorism. For instance, he financed Palestinian terrorism and provided Libya as a safe haven free of extradition. He also financed and provided weapons to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). [8]  The commonality is that the actions of these groups are now better understood as groups responding to the perceived occupation of their homes. Qaddafi tended to support similar causes, even condemning 9/11 before normalizing relations with the United States.[9] Qaddafi’s causes weren’t based on random, anti-Western fervour, but, as would be expected of a world leader, a coherent set of beliefs.

The stories of sex mania and rape can be traced back to two threads: the first is speculation about his “Amazonian Guard,” a group of all-female bodyguards who were with him at all times and attracted significant media attention. The second is a book named Gaddafi’s Harem by French journalist Annick Cojean. The former is speculation, and the latter asserts that Qaddafi regularly used sex as a weapon, abducting teenagers and forcing them to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and smoke cigarettes.

A number of things cause me to doubt Gaddafi’s Harem as a reputable source. The most pressing is the lack of corroboration, either by other writings or word of mouth. Before Western media ever scratched the surface of Saddam Hussein’s sons’ sexual atrocities, the coffeeshop whispers had covered the Middle East many times over: “avoid Saddam’s sons,” they said. Furthermore, the actual availability of alcohol and cocaine in Libya is a factor in the reputability of these stories; Qaddafi banned alcohol when he first came to power in 1969 and international travel and import into Libya was very difficult after the UN embargo on Libya in the 1980s. Of course, with the amount of money available to Qaddafi at the time, it is unlikely that this would pose much of an obstacle[10]. However, given his hardline anti-drugs and alcohol stance, combined with his apparent ignorance about drugs — he claimed, for example, that protestors during the 2011 Arab Spring consumed hallucinogenic drugs in their Nescafe[11] — I find it unlikely that those would be his particular vices. That being said, I cannot conclusively corroborate or disprove this, which means that if true, Qaddafi was as bad as many other Arab leaders or high-ranking officials, and possibly Prince Andrew[12]. Basically, as terrible as he may have been, he was not exceptionally terrible.

Lastly is the question of human rights abuses. This is categorically true, but sadly not out of the norm for the region or the era. The Libyan government imprisoned or assassinated many Libyan nationals, usually for political reasons. They did so not only within Libya, but to Libyan citizens living abroad who were deemed to be a threat. The outpouring of popular frustration in Libya during the Arab Spring was not manufactured, stoked, or aimless. However, the question is not actually whether Qaddafi assassinated, unfairly imprisoned, or simply “disappeared” Libyan citizens, because so did the Egyptians, Americans, Soviets, Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, Ugandans, Israelis, East Germans, and probably any other government you would care to name. The question is whether Qaddafi was eviller and more depraved than others. The answer is: probably not.

Qaddafi: Our Nationalist Saviour or Tragic Hero

The other, usually non-Libyan Arab, view is that Qaddafi was a nationalistic, anti-imperialist hero whose country was maligned and whose reputation was dragged through the mud. The myths usually relate to Libya’s remarkably high standard of living, Qaddafi’s personal virtues, the presence of a cure for cancer in Libya, Qaddafi’s oddities being the result of shrapnel from a landmine being lodged in his brain shortly after taking power, and many others. Most of these are not worth the virtual ink used to display them, but interestingly the high standard of living in Libya at the time is no myth.

In Libya under Qaddafi, especially prior to the twenty-first century when more free-market initiatives were adopted, utilities, education, and healthcare were totally free. There was also a specific provision in Libya’s law that each person should own their home, and the government thus gave every Libyan a home. This was through a combination of housing initiatives, and a law in 1976 that stipulated that whatever house you were currently living in was yours, and whatever houses were not occupied belonged to the government. The government also later provided a subsidy to newly married couples to buy them their first home. Furthermore, there was supposedly not too much of a wealth-gap between private citizens. Qaddafi leveled private wealth when he changed the currency in 1980, making it so that every citizen had to exchange all of their money for a specific number of new Libyan dinars. The government also provided interest-free loans. Finally, anyone who wanted to become a farmer was granted a farmhouse, a lump sum to get the farm going, and cattle free of charge in an effort to make Libya self-sufficient in food.[13]

Was this exceptional? Yes. Was this functional or, for that matter, everything the government could have done with its massive resources? No. Literacy and academic qualification rose dramatically (literacy went from 10% to roughly 87%)[14]. Most people could eat. Everyone had their own home. In short, it was not a terrible place to live, but it had major limitations and significant breaches of both personal freedom and the ability to participate in the state economy.[15]

Qaddafi completely decimated the private sector in the country and stopped it from developing a middle class or a large educated professional base when he banned private law practices and all other private professional occupations in 1980. In Qaddafi’s Libya you could be in the military or the government, which employed basically everyone and was therefore replete with completely empty and useless jobs. So, was Qaddafi a hero? No, probably not, unless the thing you fear before all else is unemployment.

Qaddafi: Master of the Bizarre

This is where the majority of coverage, ridicule, and conspiracy theories lie. That Qaddafi painted the desert green in order to stimulate, or simulate, the effects of irrigation; that he once said “without the gift of electricity we would all be watching television in the dark;” that his favourite film was The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and that he dedicated a television station to play it 24/7; that he was a beanie baby afficionado who traded on eBay under the name “gandalf69;” and many, many others[16]. These are untrue, if hilarious. Though it is actually true that he was a hypochondriac, that he travelled with a Bedouin tent,[17] and that he conducted a 40-minute interview with the BBC during which he passed gas the entire time without acknowledging or hiding it[18]. He was certainly unusual, but the difference between eccentricity and being the world-leader equivalent of a clown is important. By only reporting on what demonizes or delegitimizes Qaddafi, Western media has created a facsimile of him that bears little resemblance to reality and that could thereby serve to justify whatever action Western governments took to remove him from power, including the 1963 US and the 2011 NATO bombings of Libya.

Qaddafi did bizarre things, but often for a reason. He wore white gloves to an Arab League meeting to symbolize his refusal to touch the bloodstained hands of the other Arab leaders in the room. On his first visit to Italy in 2009, he wore a suit that had pinned upon it photos of Italian fascists hanging a Libyan national hero. He attempted to irrigate the desert in order to make Libya self-sufficient in food and built a massive underground river to do so[19]. He also allegedly received Botox injections, supposedly to maintain his youth and beauty. Qaddafi was eccentric, he was odd, he was weird, but he was probably not insane.

So Why Did Libya Implode?   

The neat story of Qaddafi’s Libya imploding after his death either due to his having demolished the country, or due to the country being left without his stewardship, is just that: a neat little story that bears as much similarity to reality as artificial banana flavouring.

Qaddafi’s Libya was a “Jamahirryeh”, a type of political system so strange and novel that it cannot be categorised by any term other than that neologism of Qaddafi’s invention. Basically, everyone voted on everything. Each settlement had a number of committees, which reported to higher committees, which reported to a higher committee, which made a decision. In the beginning, there were some one thousand representatives for a state of around 2 million people. To put that in perspective, the United States as of this writing has 535 elected representatives within both the House and the Senate for an estimated population of around 330 million; were they following the Libyan method they would have 165,000 representatives, or a bit more than 300 times their current body.

Aside from the bloated government, there were some fundamental issues with this system. There were limits to the competency of the average citizen to make and judge the merits of these decisions, so Qaddafi provided technocrats to the committees to offer advice. Even with that, nobody agreed with anybody else. There were simply too many variables and ideas. Lastly, Qaddafi removed "sensitive" topics from the hands of these committees, namely foreign relations, the economy, the military, and anything related to oil. Thus, the committees felt useless, because they were, and the average Libyan was discouraged from joining as a result.

This deepened the sense of political apathy in Libya, and as a result, nothing ever got done, except by corruption. Qaddafi also amassed enormous personal wealth and utilized this Jamahirryeh to his advantage. Because the government was technically in the hands of the people, the people could not express opposition, because what exactly would they be opposing? Themselves? It also gave Qaddafi an earpiece into the frustrations of the people, which he exploited for popularity.[20] He didn’t, however, institute a system of governance that could work without somebody to make the final decision. Thus, upon Qaddafi’s death, there was no unified political system which Libyans could use or reform. As political groups had been outlawed early in Qaddafi’s reign, there was a complete absence of political organization to mobilize support for policies. Like-minded insurgents had to learn how to form into a group or party, actually form a group or party, and then attempt to put their system into practice for the rest of the very large and mostly impassable country in the absence of any organized political communication.

It appears that the oddities of Qaddafi have lowered the standard for what is acceptable and responsible journalism when it comes to Libya. Focusing only on strangeness or negatives gives Libya, and the Middle East by extension, an undeserved reputation, so that any lessons we could learn from these novel systems, ways of utilizing wealth, and social programs are delegitimized by this coverage. The myth that Qaddafi would annually broadcast a televised lunch showing him eating an entire squid, followed by a cup of Turkish coffee for each year he’d been in office on the anniversary of his coup, is not merely a joke, but takes on a seriousness that is not accorded to Arab heads of state.