TRIPOLI, Libya, 14 December 2003 — At first, the changes were easy to ignore. Military roadblocks on the long, sun-scalded highways out of town melted away. Pious men were allowed to grow beards again. Libyans were permitted to carry a second passport after years as pariah travelers. Things like that; little things, one after the next.
Improbably, Muammar Qaddafi stopped cursing America and the West, and the mercurial Libyan leader took to the national airwaves to hail a “new era.” Libyan officials began reminding anybody who cared to listen that this sandy Mediterranean nation issued one of the first arrest warrants for Osama Bin Laden.
Then, this spring, Qaddafi brought in a sharp-tongued, American-educated oil specialist and handed him unlikely instructions: Reform a system engineered by Qaddafi himself. Under that newcomer, Prime Minister Shukri Mohammed Ghanim, Libya is undergoing a massive privatization of its socialist economy.
“It’s trying to become more democratic — quote, unquote,” a European diplomat here said. “It will be easier for the West to stomach.”
Beneath its virgin beaches and its crumbling troves of Roman ruins, Libya is still a shadowy place. After more than three decades of capricious rule by the man known as “The Revolution Leader,” or simply “The Leader,” Libya is still a mystery to many people. Allegations of arrests, disappearances and killings continue to darken the regime, along with suspicions that Libya is trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, long-standing UN sanctions were lifted this fall, and a hopeful Libya is now waking from collective slumber. Libyans are telling themselves, as one government official says quietly over a cup of coffee: “We can be a normal country, even with Qaddafi.”
In a tumbledown neighborhood by the beach, the boy leans against a metal doorframe. His jeans are bleached and tight; his undershirt old and frayed.
This clutch of low houses is one of Tripoli’s black markets, and they say you can get just about anything here for a price. The streets are blown by garbage: margarine tubs, Pepsi cans, tattered plastic bags.
The men tinker beneath open hoods and lift their eyes to inspect passing cars, waiting to be summoned. The doors on the houses creak open and close fast, cracks of light split the edges of drawn curtains.
On paper, Libyans are entitled to a job, free school, free medicine and a house. But it hasn’t worked out that way. “We tried to take care of everybody, but we ended up standing on long queues in the black market,” Ghanim says.
One of Qaddafi’s pet slogans is, “Partners, not wage workers” — but many Libyans can’t even claim the latter distinction. Unemployment is estimated between 10 percent and 30 percent, but it’s hard to measure.
In the heat of afternoon, listless men line the cornice down by the water to stare off over the Mediterranean. Their clothes flap like rags in the wind. The country’s poor are wandering the streets. “If you come to my house for two hours,” a local oil company employee said, “you will answer the door to 12, 14 beggars.”
The government waited until twilight on a September day to herd journalists and dignitaries into the burned orange salon of a fading seaside hotel. A man stepped up to a podium and rattled off the news in a few clipped sentences: The Libyan charity headed by Qaddafi’s son had struck an agreement with the families of the victims killed when a French airliner exploded in 1989. A bomb brought down the passenger plane, killing 170 people. Terms would be announced soon, he said.
Only a few hours passed before the United Nations voted to lift international sanctions. Cautiously optimistic over the promise of Libyan cash, France dropped its threat to veto, and opted instead to abstain.
There may be a hitch: As the weeks drag past, Libya appears to be balking. Last week, French President Jacques Chirac publicly warned Libya that it will remain isolated unless it fulfills “commitments made at the highest level of the Libyan state.”
This fall, Libya for the first time accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and promised to pay up to $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the 270 victims. Libya seemed newly eager to compromise, and talk in Tripoli attributed the change to the invasion of Baghdad.
“The Iraqi lesson was so bitter,” said one of the Western diplomats who climbed the old staircase to hear the government’s brief announcement. “And so clear.”
This is local wisdom: If there was a single moment when Libya’s slow drift toward practicality — or even cynicism — hardened into a solid trend, it was the day the United States invaded Iraq. “We learned how vulnerable a country like Libya can be,” government analyst Youssef Sawani said. “Everything had to be thought afresh.”
Nobody is bracing for a US invasion; the shadow of Iraq is subtler than that. Many Libyans have simply become convinced that cooperation with the United States is the only way to protect their country. After all, the economy is sour and Qaddafi, the man who invents Libya as he goes along, is now in his early 60s.
“The United States has the means and the power, and they will not hesitate to use them,” says Ghanim, the prime minister. The US “can change the rules in the middle of the game, so what can we do?”
The war did not inspire the negotiations with the families of terror victims — Libya was already deep into talks, pressed by poverty and isolation to buy back the world’s good graces. The US attack only hardened official resolve to “buy peace,” as Ghanim puts it.
And if you ask Qaddafi, it’s cash well spent. “God curse money. What is money for?” Qaddafi told his people this fall. “We have our dignity and we are not interested in money. We have reached a new era with the West.”
It is morning in Tripoli, and the city slurps up great puddles of sun like a new sponge. Ghanim sits behind his desk in an office soaked with light. Under the watchful eye of a journalist’s stern government minder he speaks earnestly, but his gaze keeps drifting. Across the room, Al-Jazeera is blasting video of Israeli tanks crushing Palestinian homes.
The prime minister can’t keep his eyes off the television. They slip away in the middle of a treatise on currency equalization, and in the midst of a metaphor comparing Libya to the former Soviet Union.
“This is the basic problem,” he finally bursts out.
“America is looking at the Arab world through Israeli eyes. Look at this building — they’re demolishing it. Why?
“Israel,” he says, “is distorting our picture and image to the Americans.”
Ghanim knows that all the financial renovations he can dream up won’t be enough — the regime’s underlying struggle is to reconcile with the Americans, to overcome a tumultuous and often ugly history. Clear of UN sanctions, Libya has only the American trade and travel restrictions to wriggle out of — but that’s no mean task.
It wasn’t always this way — it was Americans who first struck oil in Libya back in the 1950s, and American companies drove the burgeoning oil industry here throughout its early days. Even during its ugliest moments, even when the United States bombed Libya and reportedly killed one of Qaddafi’s adopted children, Libya never lost hope of luring America back to its oilfields.
American oil concessions remain intact nearly two decades after an executive order from President Reagan banned US companies from doing business here.
Drawn to collect their lost profits, representatives for American oil companies still flit in and out of Tripoli. Libyan leaders say US officials have quietly pledged to do their best to persuade Congress to lift sanctions. If true, that’s a sharp contrast to what they say in public.
US officials upbraid Libya for human rights abuses, for tampering in Africa and for allegedly pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The sanctions won’t budge, they say — not without serious change.
When Libyans say “The Leader,” you can hear the capital letters. In a gesture of empire fit for an ancient ruler, he sliced his nation with a vast waterworks project, the Great Man-Made River. Another time, he renamed the months on a whim. February is “flowers.” April is “bird.” There is “Nasser,” and “Hannibal.” September, the month in which he seized power, is “fatah,” or “conquest.”
Qaddafi was originally a zealous proponent of pan-Arab unity, which he later abandoned to cast his lot with Africa. He imposed Islamic law, only to recoil in later years. He has flirted with the West before, only to lose his temper and storm back into isolation. Qaddafi watchers say his latest fancy is reform and economic reinvention. It remains to be seen whether it will last.