Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The most immediate sequel to the riots was the dismissal of Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem. (He was given a post at the National Oil Company.) I had already heard rumors in Tripoli that Ghanem was going to lose his job in a cabinet reshuffle; the openness that seemed so refreshing when we met had not pleased the Leader. “He made three basic mistakes,” one Qaddafi adviser said to me. “First, he associated reform with his own name and complained publicly about the Leadership. In Libya, if you want to accomplish things, you make yourself invisible, you sublimate your ego. Second, he thought that a strong position with the West would guarantee his hold on power and didn’t understand that the West counts for very little here. Third, he failed to win over the Libyan people; he never seemed to be concerned about their suffering. . . . In the street, there is relief that he is gone—though there is no affection for the alternative.” Ghanem’s successor was the taciturn hard-liner Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi. “For the Leadership, it will be easier to make economic adjustments now that the reform will come clearly and directly from the Leadership and not be seen as admissions that the Leader was wrong, as concessions to some kind of competition.”

The change of prime ministers was a reassertion of Qaddafi’s power: more tumbling of the rats. Several ministries—including oil and energy—were shaken up, with people removed from jobs they had held for decades. The US State Department’s decision, in late March 2006, to keep Libya on its terrorism list both reflects the problem and contributes to it and has outraged Libyans in and out of power.

Because Ghanem’s strong suit was supposed to be his ease with Western powers, his failure to get Libya removed from the US terrorism list helped ensure his replacement by a hard-liner. Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi has been described to me as financially corrupt but wily, calculating, and extremely industrious. He is “a technocrat out of the Revolutionary Committees who works hard to glorify the Leader’s policies,” a Libyan American academic said. “Will reform slow? Well, Shukri Ghanem talked a good line about reform but accomplished so little that there’s not much backsliding to do. Mahmoudi realizes that economic reform has to move forward and will do that for the Leader. He has absolutely no interest in political or social reform, and he will leave it to the Leader to have a relationship with the West.” It has been suggested that, with the appointment of a hard-liner, some of the infighting will subside.

“Ahmed Ibrahim’s power will wane, too,” one of Saif’s advisers told me hopefully, referring to the deputy speaker of the General People’s Congress. Saif will be his own man: “He’s old enough to carry that off.”

“We call the world close to the Leader ‘the Circle of Fire,’” one Libyan intellectual said. “Get close and it warms you up; get too close and you go down in flames. The Circle of Fire includes both reformers and hard-liners; Qaddafi likes the chaos that creates.” The man spoke with irony, almost disdain, yet he was not above warming himself at the fire. The class of educated Libyans—which includes poets, archaeologists, professors, ministers, doctors, businessmen, and civil servants—is tiny. Given the way that tribalism intersects with class alliances and political identities, social relationships exist in Libya among people who in a larger society would probably be kept apart by mutual opposition. Political enmity is often crosshatched with social amity. In Tripoli, I had dinner at the home of the poet and physician Dr. Ashur Etwebi, who spoke passionately of the injustices of the Qaddafi regime in both its absolutism and its new capitalism. “He has to go,” Etwebi said. “This colonel has eaten the best years of my life, poisoned my soul and my existence, murdered the people I loved. I hate him more than I love my wife. He and his government and everyone who has anything to do with him must go. Enough is enough. We have no souls left. Do not let yourself be fooled by this talk of reform. What kind of reform is it when this man is still sitting in Tripoli? I cannot say it to you enough times. He must go. He must go. He must go.” A few minutes later, when I mentioned a high-ranking member of the regime whom I hoped to interview, Etwebi said, “Ah, he was here for dinner earlier this week.” He added with a shrug, “I don’t agree with him, but I like him.”