Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

At the center of Tripoli lies Green Square. Now mostly a parking lot, it is one of those vast, anonymous spaces that military regimes favor. East of Green Square lie the surviving Italian colonial buildings. To the west is the old city, a warren of tiny streets and shops crowned by the ancient Red Castle, which houses a distinguished archaeological museum. In front is an esplanade beside the sea. The modern city stretches out in all other directions, with some neighborhoods of private villas, and many of Soviet-style housing developments; it reflects both the optimism and the shoddiness of more recent Libyan history.

I was invited to the opening of a special exhibition on volunteerism, in a tent in Green Square. Addressing a gathering of a hundred or so people, an official said that tribute had to be paid to the greatest volunteer of all: Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who, unlike the American president, does not draw a salary but out of “love and honesty” graciously consents to rule. “There is one God, and Muhammad is his prophet, and Qaddafi is his modern incarnation!” someone in the crowd cried. Such public avowals are of a piece with the billboards you find throughout Libya, showing a beaming Qaddafi, as triumphant and windswept as Clark Gable. Those billboards are the first thing a visitor notices; the second is the ubiquity of litter. Wherever you go—including even the spectacular ruins of the Hellenistic and Roman cities of Cyrene, Sabratha, and Leptis Magna—you see plastic bottles, bags, paper, chicken bones, cans: a film covering the landscape. “It’s how the people of Libya piss on the system,” one Libyan academic told me. “The Leader doesn’t actually care about this country. Why should we keep it beautiful for him?” It is the most arresting of the country’s many paradoxes: Libyans who hate the regime but love Libya cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. You can take this as a tribute, by way of inversion, to the state ideology.

In the early seventies, the Leader, disappointed by his countrymen’s lack of revolutionary fervor, withdrew to the desert to write the Green Book, in which he advanced his Third Universal Theory as superior to capitalism and Communism. Individuals were to own their homes; other land was to be held in common. In 1977, he issued a Declaration of the Establishment of the People’s Authority, launching the Jamahiriya, or “state of the masses,” and the Libyan system of “direct democracy,” in which the country is “ruled” by the People’s Congresses: what the Green Book calls the “supervision of the government by the people.” The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya—memorably abbreviated as “the Great SPLAJ”—was born. The Green Book proposes that, to avoid internal disputes, every nation should have one religion, but it makes no mention of Islam. Qaddafi claimed that his manifesto enshrined the basic tenets of the Koran (freely equating, for instance, the Koranic notion of almsgiving with his redistributive social-welfare policies), and that it therefore had the status of Sharia. His relation to Islam has two aspects: he draws upon it to buttress his authority, but he is hostile to the Islamists because he will countenance no rivals to that authority.

The two radical decades that ensued—televised public hangings, burnings of Western books and musical instruments, the sudden prohibition of private enterprise, intense anti-Zionism, official solidarity with terrorist and guerrilla groups—met with sharp international disapprobation. Libya’s rogue status allowed Qaddafi to consolidate power and play protector of his besieged population, a role in which he excels.

One Libyan in early middle age who had lived in the United States until September 11 and who missed America spoke of what was wrong with Qaddafi’s Libya and then said, “But I wouldn’t be where I am without the revolution. They paid for my education, sent me to America, and gave me a life I wouldn’t have dreamed of without them.”

In part, that reflects the extreme poverty of prerevolutionary Libya. The Jamahiriya benefited from the dramatic increase in petroleum prices that began in the seventies, and from the more aggressive revenue-sharing deals Libya imposed on foreign oil companies, so that oil earnings in the midseventies were roughly ten times what they had been in the midsixties. Oil money made possible major investments in education and infrastructure. The literacy rate in Libya has risen from about 20 percent, before Qaddafi came to power, to 82 percent. The average life expectancy has risen from forty-four to seventy-four. More than eighty thousand kilometers of roads have been built. Electricity has become nearly universal.