Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.