Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Qaddafi accepts such customs, but he frequently describes his own society as “backward” (his favorite term of disapprobation); one Libyan intellectual complained to me, “If you listen to his words, you will agree that he hates the Libyan people.” While Qaddafi represses the democratizing forces from the left, he is far more brutal with the Islamist ones on the right. Indeed, most of the regime’s political victims in the past few decades have been members of Islamist groups that he has banned, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya’s Islamic institutes, almost fifty of them, were shut down in 1988. When clerics protested Qaddafi’s “innovative” interpretations of the Koran and his dismissal of all post-Koranic commentary and custom, Qaddafi declared that Islam permitted its followers to speak directly to Allah, and that clergymen were unnecessary intermediaries. A year later, he likened Islamic militants to “a cancer, the Black Death, and AIDS.” As if to vex Hamas, once a beneficiary of his largesse, he has even argued in recent years that the Palestinians have no exclusive claim to the land of Israel and called for a binational state—he dubbed it Isratine—that would guarantee the safety of both Palestinians and Jews, who, far from being enemies of the Arab people, were their biblical kin. (“There may be some objections to the name,” he allowed, “but they would be unhelpful, harmful, and superficial.”)

“You ask us, ‘Why do you oppress the opposition in the Middle East?’ ” Qaddafi said in March, speaking via satellite link to a conference at Columbia University, dressed in purple robes and seated in front of a map of Africa. “Because, in the Middle East, the opposition is quite different than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killing. . . . This is a manifestation of social backwardness.” On this point, at least, the hard-liners and the reformers tend to converge. Foreign Minister Shalgham told me, “The fundamentalists represent a threat to your security. They represent a threat to our way of life. They are against the future, against science, the arts, women, and freedom. They would drag us back to the Middle Ages. You fear their acts; we fear the ideology behind those acts. Okay, read the Koran for an hour a day, and that’s enough; if you don’t also study engineering, medicine, business, and mathematics, how can you survive? But people have figured out that the tougher your Islam, the easier to find followers.”

The fear of radical Islam helps explain why authorities cracked down so forcefully when, in February, protests erupted in Benghazi over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the decision of an Italian cabinet minister to wear a T-shirt featuring those images. Eleven people were killed by the police, and violence spread to at least two other cities in the eastern part of the country, where Qaddafi’s hold on power has always been relatively weak. Saif gave local voice to international opinion, saying, “The protest was a mistake, and the police intervention against the demonstrators was an even bigger mistake.” His father, too, repudiated the “backwardness” of the police response, but mainly wanted to insist that the riots hadn’t arisen from Islamic fervor, much less from discontent with his regime. Rather, they were spurred by anger at the history of Italian colonialism. (More than a quarter of a million Libyans—perhaps a third of the population—are estimated to have perished as a result of the Italian occupation, many in concentration camps.) “Unfortunately, there could be more Benghazis,” or even “attacks in Italy,” if Rome didn’t offer reparations, Qaddafi warned, saying that he would be mollified if Italy were to build a highway across Libya, for some 3 billion euros. The Italian foreign minister, Gianfranco Fini, said that this was “a not too veiled threat,” adding, “We have already said that we want to put the colonial past definitely behind us in our relations with Libya. We maintain this position in a clear and transparent way. We expect a similarly coherent position from the Libyan leader.”

When I read this statement to a Libyan acquaintance, he burst out laughing and said, “Good luck, Mr. Fini!” Expatriate opposition leaders have claimed that Qaddafi staged the riots to extract concessions from Europe, but that they escalated out of control. In Libya, the issue was widely seen to be economic—a disgruntled population of unemployed youth needed an outlet for their anger.