Libyas Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge

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Geographically based committees were formed at the governorate, municipal, and zone lowest levels. Seats on the people's committees at the zone level were filled by direct popular election; members so elected could then be selected for service at higher levels. By mid estimates of the number of people's committees ranged above 2, In the scope of their administrative and regulatory tasks and the method of their members' selection, the people's committees purportedly embodied the concept of direct democracy that Gaddafi propounded in the first volume of The Green Book , which appeared in The same concept lay behind proposals to create a new political structure composed of "people's congresses.

On July 21, , there were first gun battles between troops on the border, followed by land and air strikes. Relations between the Libyan and the Egyptian government had been deteriorating ever since the end of Yom Kippur War from October , due to Libyan opposition to President Anwar Sadat 's peace policy as well as the breakdown of unification talks between the two governments. There is some proof that the Egyptian government was considering a war against Libya as early as On February 28, , during Henry Kissinger 's visit to Egypt, President Sadat told him about such intentions and requested that pressure be put on the Israeli government not to launch an attack on Egypt in the event of its forces being occupied in war with Libya.

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During relations were ebbing, as the Egyptian government claimed to have discovered a Libyan plot to overthrow the government in Cairo. They were captured by Egyptian authorities in an operation that ended without any casualties. In retaliation for accusations by the Egyptian government of Libyan complicity in the hijacking, the Libyan government ordered the closure of the Egyptian Consulate in Benghazi. In the official political philosophy of Gaddafi's state, the "Jamahiriya" system was unique to the country, although it was presented as the materialization of the Third International Theory , proposed by Gaddafi to be applied to the entire Third World.

The GPC also created the General Secretariat of the GPC, comprising the remaining members of the defunct Revolutionary Command Council, with Gaddafi as general secretary, and also appointed the General People's Committee, which replaced the Council of Ministers, its members now called secretaries rather than ministers. The Libyan government claimed that the Jamahiriya was a direct democracy without any political parties , governed by its populace through local popular councils and communes named Basic People's Congresses. Official rhetoric disdained the idea of a nation state , tribal bonds remaining primary, even within the ranks of the Armed Forces of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

The term does not occur in this sense in Muammar Gaddafi 's Green Book of Thus, it is similar to the term People's Republic. The changes in Libyan leadership since culminated in March , when the General People's Congress declared that the "vesting of power in the masses" and the "separation of the state from the revolution" were complete.

The government was divided into two parts, the "Jamahiriya sector" and the "revolutionary sector". Gaddafi relinquished his position as general secretary of the General People's Congress, as which he was succeeded by Abdul Ati al-Obeidi , who had been prime minister since They oversaw the "revolutionary committees", which were nominally grass-roots organizations that helped keep the people engaged. As a result, although Gaddafi held no formal government office after , he retained control of the government and the country. All legislative and executive authority was vested in the GPC.

This body, however, delegated most of its important authority to its general secretary and General Secretariat and to the General People's Committee. Gaddafi, as general secretary of the GPC, remained the primary decision maker, just as he had been when chairman of the RCC. In turn, all adults had the right and duty to participate in the deliberation of their local Basic People's Congress BPC , whose decisions were passed up to the GPC for consideration and implementation as national policy. The BPCs were in theory the repository of ultimate political authority and decision making, embodying what Gaddafi termed direct "people's power".

The declaration and its accompanying resolutions amounted to a fundamental revision of the constitutional proclamation, especially with respect to the structure and organization of the government at both national and subnational levels.

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Continuing to revamp Libya's political and administrative structure, Gaddafi introduced yet another element into the body politic. Beginning in , "revolutionary committees" were organized and assigned the task of "absolute revolutionary supervision of people's power"; that is, they were to guide the people's committees, "raise the general level of political consciousness and devotion to revolutionary ideals".

In reality, the revolutionary committees were used to survey the population and repress any political opposition to Gaddafi's autocratic rule.

Filled with politically astute zealots, the ubiquitous revolutionary committees in assumed control of BPC elections. Although they were not official government organs, the revolutionary committees became another mainstay of the domestic political scene. As with the people's committees and other administrative innovations since the revolution, the revolutionary committees fit the pattern of imposing a new element on the existing subnational system of government rather than eliminating or consolidating already existing structures.

By the late s, the result was an unnecessarily complex system of overlapping jurisdictions in which cooperation and coordination among different elements were compromised by ill-defined authority and responsibility. The ambiguity may have helped serve Gaddafi's aim to remain the prime mover behind Libyan governance, while minimizing his visibility at a time when internal opposition to political repression was rising.

The RCC was formally dissolved and the government was again reorganized into people's committees. A new General People's Committee cabinet was selected, each of its "secretaries" becoming head of a specialized people's committee; the exceptions were the "secretariats" of petroleum, foreign affairs, and heavy industry, where there were no people's committees. A proposal was also made to establish a "people's army" by substituting a national militia, being formed in the late s, for the national army.

Although the idea surfaced again in early , it did not appear to be close to implementation. Gaddafi also wanted to combat the strict social restrictions that had been imposed on women by the previous regime, establishing the Revolutionary Women's Formation to encourage reform. In , a law was introduced affirming equality of the sexes and insisting on wage parity.

In , a law was passed criminalizing the marriage of any females under the age of sixteen and ensuring that a woman's consent was a necessary prerequisite for a marriage. Remaking of the economy was parallel with the attempt to remold political and social institutions. Until the late s, Libya's economy was mixed , with a large role for private enterprise except in the fields of oil production and distribution, banking, and insurance. But according to volume two of Gaddafi's Green Book, which appeared in , private retail trade, rent, and wages were forms of exploitation that should be abolished.

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Instead, workers' self-management committees and profit participation partnerships were to function in public and private enterprises. A property law was passed that forbade ownership of more than one private dwelling, and Libyan workers took control of a large number of companies, turning them into state-run enterprises. Retail and wholesale trading operations were replaced by state-owned "people's supermarkets", where Libyans in theory could purchase whatever they needed at low prices.

By the state had also restricted access to individual bank accounts to draw upon privately held funds for government projects. The measures created resentment and opposition among the newly dispossessed. The latter joined those already alienated, some of whom had begun to leave the country. By , perhaps 50, to , Libyans had gone abroad; because many of the emigrants were among the enterprising and better educated Libyans, they represented a significant loss of managerial and technical expertise.

The government also built a trans-Sahara water pipeline from major aquifers to both a network of reservoirs and the towns of Tripoli, Sirte and Benghazi in — It is pumping large resources of water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System to both urban populations and new irrigation projects around the country. Libya continued to be plagued with a shortage of skilled labor, which had to be imported along with a broad range of consumer goods, both paid for with petroleum income.

The country consistently ranked as the African nation with the highest HDI, standing at 0. According to Lisa Anderson, president of the American University in Cairo and an expert on Libya, said that under Gaddafi more women attended university and had "dramatically" more employment opportunities. As early as , Gaddafi waged a campaign against Chad.

This dispute eventually led to the Libyan invasion of Chad. The conflict ended in a ceasefire in After a judgement of the International Court of Justice on 13 February , Libya withdrew troops from Chad the same year and the dispute was settled.

In , Gaddafi dispatched his military across the border to Egypt, but Egyptian forces fought back in the Libyan—Egyptian War. In , Gaddafi created the Islamic Legion as a tool to unify and Arabize the region. The priority of the Legion was first Chad, and then Sudan. This Islamic Legion was mostly composed of immigrants from poorer Sahelian countries, [42] but also, according to a source, thousands of Pakistanis who had been recruited in with the false promise of civilian jobs once in Libya.

History of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi - Wikipedia

A French journalist, speaking of the Legion's forces in Chad, observed that they were "foreigners, Arabs or Africans, mercenaries in spite of themselves, wretches who had come to Libya hoping for a civilian job, but found themselves signed up more or less by force to go and fight in an unknown desert. At the beginning of the Libyan offensive in Chad, it maintained a force of 2, in Darfur. The nearly continuous cross-border raids that resulted greatly contributed to a separate ethnic conflict within Darfur that killed about 9, people between and Janjaweed , a group accused by the US of carrying out a genocide in Darfur in the s , emerged in and some of its leaders are former legionnaires.

In , Gaddafi tried to buy a nuclear bomb from the People's Republic of China. He then tried to get a bomb from Pakistan, but Pakistan severed its ties before it succeeded in building a bomb. Thailand reported its citizens had helped build storage facilities for nerve gas. When Libya was under pressure from international disputes, on 19 August , a naval dogfight occurred over the Gulf of Sirte in the Mediterranean Sea. US F Tomcat jets fired anti-aircraft missiles against a formation of Libyan fighter jets in this dogfight and shot down two Libyan Su Fitter attack aircraft.

This naval action was a result of claiming the territory and losses from the previous incident. A similar action occurred on 23 March ; while patrolling the Gulf, US naval forces attacked a sizable naval force and various SAM sites defending Libyan territory. US fighter jets and fighter-bombers destroyed SAM launching facilities and sank various naval vessels, killing 35 seamen. This was a reprisal for terrorist hijackings between June and December Gaddafi's plan was intercepted by several national intelligence agencies and more detailed information was retrieved four years later from Stasi archives.

The Libyan agents who had carried out the operation, from the Libyan embassy in East Germany , were prosecuted by the reunited Germany in the s. Air defenses, three army bases, and two airfields in Tripoli and Benghazi were bombed. The surgical strikes failed to kill Gaddafi but he lost a few dozen military officers. Gaddafi spread propaganda how it had killed his "adopted daughter" and how victims had been all "civilians".

Despite the variations of the stories, the campaign was successful, and a large proportion of the Western press reported the government's stories as facts. Following the bombing of Libya, Gaddafi intensified his support for anti-American government organizations. Stones gang, in their emergence as an indigenous anti-American armed revolutionary movement. He began financing the IRA again in , to retaliate against the British for harboring American fighter planes.

Gaddafi announced that he had won a spectacular military victory over the US and the country was officially renamed the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah". Criticism of Gaddafi by ordinary Libyan citizens became more bold, such as defacing of Gaddafi posters. Gaddafi was a close supporter of Ugandan President Idi Amin. Gaddafi sent thousands of troops to fight against Tanzania on behalf of Idi Amin. About Libyan soldiers lost their lives attempting to defend the collapsing presidency of Amin.

Amin was eventually exiled from Uganda to Libya before settling in Saudi Arabia. Gaddafi was a strong opponent of apartheid in South Africa and forged a friendship with Nelson Mandela. President Bill Clinton and others to cut ties with Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a strong supporter of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Gaddafi trained and supported Liberian warlord-president Charles Taylor , who was indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the conflict in Sierra Leone. According to Douglas Farah , "The amputation of the arms and legs of men, women, and children as part of a scorched-earth campaign was designed to take over the region's rich diamond fields and was backed by Gaddafi, who routinely reviewed their progress and supplied weapons".

Gaddafi's strong military support and finances gained him allies across the continent. He had himself crowned with the title " King of Kings of Africa " in , in the presence of over African traditional rulers and kings, although his views on African political and military unification received a lukewarm response from their governments.

In , , and the months prior to the civil war, Gaddafi announced plans for a unified African gold dinar currency, to challenge the dominance of the US Dollar and Euro currencies. The African dinar would have been measured directly in terms of gold. In Gaddafi warned that if France opposes Libyan military occupation of Chad, he will use all weapons in the war against France including the "revolutionary weapon". He also promised financial support for attacks.

Reportedly, Gaddafi was a major financier of the " Black September Movement" which perpetrated the Munich massacre at the Summer Olympics. We have sent them to the Irish revolutionaries so that the British will pay the price for their past deeds". In the Philippines, Libya backed the Moro Islamic Liberation Front , which continues to carry out acts of violence in an effort to establish a separatist Islamic state in the southern Philippines.

Gaddafi also became a strong supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization , which support ultimately harmed Libya's relations with Egypt, when in Egypt pursued a peace agreement with Israel. Libya became the first country outside the Soviet bloc to receive the supersonic MiG combat fighters, but Soviet-Libyan relations remained relatively distant. Gaddafi also sought to increase Libyan influence, especially in states with an Islamic population, by calling for the creation of a Saharan Islamic state and supporting anti-government forces in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the s and the s, this support was sometimes so freely given that even the most unsympathetic groups could obtain Libyan support; often the groups represented ideologies far removed from Gaddafi's own. Gaddafi's approach often tended to confuse international opinion. Gaddafi applauded the murder and remarked that it was a "punishment". Gaddafi reportedly spent hundreds of millions of the government's money on training and arming Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In April , Libyan refugees in London protested against execution of two dissidents. Communications intercepted by MI5 show that Tripoli ordered its diplomats to direct violence against the demonstrators.

Libyan diplomats shot at 11 people and killed British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher. The incident led to the breaking off of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Libya for over a decade. After December Rome and Vienna airport attacks , which killed 19 and wounded around , Gaddafi indicated that he would continue to support the Red Army Faction , the Red Brigades , and the Irish Republican Army as long as European countries support anti-Gaddafi Libyans. In , Libyan state television announced that Libya was training suicide squads to attack American and European interests.

On 5 April , Libyan agents were alleged with bombing the "La Belle" nightclub in West Berlin , killing three people and injuring people who were spending evening there. Gaddafi's plan was intercepted by Western intelligence.

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More-detailed information was retrieved years later when Stasi archives were investigated by the reunited Germany. Libyan agents who had carried out the operation from the Libyan embassy in East Germany were prosecuted by reunited Germany in the s. In May , Australia broke off relations with Libya because of its role in fueling violence in Oceania. In Australia, there were several cases of attempted radicalisation of Australian Aborigines, with individuals receiving paramilitary training in Libya.

In the s, the Libyan government purchased advertisements in Arabic-language newspapers in Australia asking for Australian Arabs to join the military units of his worldwide struggle against imperialism. In part, because of this, Australia banned recruitment of foreign mercenaries in Australia. Gaddafi developed a relationship with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia , becoming acquainted with its leaders in meetings of revolutionary groups regularly hosted in Libya.

Some publications were financed by Gaddafi. UN Security Council resolutions UNSCRs passed in and obliged Libya to fulfill requirements related to the Pan Am bombing before sanctions could be lifted, leading to Libya's political and economic isolation for most of the s.

The UN sanctions cut airline connections with the outer world, reduced diplomatic representation and prohibited the sale of military equipment. Oil-related sanctions were assessed by some as equally significant for their exceptions: Under the sanctions Libya's refining capacity eroded. Libya's role on the international stage grew less provocative after UN sanctions were imposed. In , Libya fulfilled one of the UNSCR requirements by surrendering two Libyans suspected in connection with the bombing for trial before a Scottish court in the Netherlands.

One of these suspects, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was found guilty; the other was acquitted. UN sanctions against Libya were subsequently suspended. In , Gaddafi paid a ransom reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars to Abu Sayyaf , a Filipino Islamist militancy, to release a number of kidnapped tourists. He presented it as an act of goodwill to Western countries; nevertheless the money helped the group to expand its operation.

In December , Libya announced that it had agreed to reveal and end its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and to renounce terrorism, and Gaddafi made significant strides in normalizing relations with western nations. He received various Western European leaders as well as many working-level and commercial delegations, and made his first trip to Western Europe in 15 years when he traveled to Brussels in April Libya responded in good faith to legal cases brought against it in U.

In late , Libya was elected by the General Assembly to a nonpermanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for the — term. In , the General People's Congress approved the introduction of "purification laws" to be put into effect, punishing theft by the amputation of limbs, and fornication and adultery by flogging. Throughout his long rule, Gaddafi had to defend his position against opposition and coup attempts, emerging both from the military and from the general population.

He reacted to these threats on one hand by maintaining a careful balance of power between the forces in the country, and by brutal repression on the other. Gaddafi successfully balanced the various tribes of Libya one against the other by distributing his favours. To forestall a military coup, he deliberately weakened the Libyan Armed Forces by regularly rotating officers, relying instead on loyal elite troops such as his Revolutionary Guard Corps , the special-forces Khamis Brigade and his personal Amazonian Guard , even though emphasis on political loyalty tended, over the long run, to weaken the professionalism of his personal forces.

This trend made the country vulnerable to dissension at a time of crisis, as happened during early The term "Green Terror" is used to describe campaigns of violence and intimidation against opponents of Gaddafi, particularly in reference to wave of oppression during Libya's cultural revolution , or to the wave of highly publicized hangings of regime opponents that began with the Execution of Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy.

Dissent was illegal under Law 75 of The surveillance took place in government, in factories, and in the education sector. Following an abortive attempt to replace English foreign language education with Russian, [98] in recent years English has been taught in Libyan schools from a primary level, and students have access to English-language media. He kept us ignorant and blindfolded". During the late s, some exiled Libyans [ who? In early , Gaddafi warned opposition leaders to return home immediately or face "liquidation.

It is the Libyan people's responsibility to liquidate such scums who are distorting Libya's image abroad. Gaddafi employed his network of diplomats and recruits to assassinate dozens of his critics around the world. Amnesty International listed at least twenty-five assassinations between and Gaddafi's agents were active in the U. After Libyan diplomats shot at 15 anti-Gaddafi protesters from inside the Libyan embassy's first floor and killed a British policewoman , the U. In , a Libyan agent attempted to assassinate dissident Faisal Zagallai , a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The bullets left Zagallai partially blinded. Gaddafi asserted in June that killings could be carried out even when the dissidents were on pilgrimage in the holy city of Mecca. In August , one Libyan plot was thwarted in Mecca. There is indication that between the years of and , Libya's Gaddafi-era intelligence service had a partnership with western spy organizations including MI6 and the CIA , who voluntarily provided information on Libyan dissidents in the United States and Canada in exchange for using Libya as a base for extraordinary renditions.

This was done despite Libya's history of murdering dissidents abroad, and with full knowledge of Libya's brutal mistreatment of detainees. In the s, Gaddafi's rule was threatened by militant Islamism. In October , there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Gaddafi by elements of the Libyan army. In response, Gaddafi used repressive measures, using his personal Revolutionary Guard Corps to crush riots and Islamist activism during the s.

Nevertheless, Cyrenaica between and was politically unstable, due to the tribal allegiances of the local troops. The novelist Idris Al-Mesmari was arrested hours after giving an interview with Al Jazeera about the police reaction to protests in Benghazi on 15 February. Inspiration for the unrest is attributed to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt , connecting it with the wider Arab Spring. Gaddafi's son, Khamis , controlled the well-armed Khamis Brigade and alleged to possess large number of mercenaries.

The government in Tripoli had lost control of half of Libya by the end of February, [] [] but as of mid-September Gaddafi remained in control of several parts of Fezzan. On 21 September, the forces of NTC captured Sabha, the largest city of Fezzan, reducing the control of Gaddafi to limited and isolated areas. Many nations condemned Gaddafi's government over its use of force against civilians. Several other nations allied with Gaddafi called the uprising and intervention a "plot" by Western powers to loot Libya's resources.

The UN resolution authorised air-strikes against Libyan ground troops and warships that appeared to threaten civilians. Vice Admiral William E. More than "Tomahawk" cruise missiles were fired in an initial assault by U. The last government holdouts in Sirte finally fell to anti-Gaddafi fighters on 20 October , and, following the controversial death of Muammar Gaddafi , Libya was officially declared "liberated" on 23 October , ending 42 years of Gaddafi's leadership in Libya.

Political scientist Riadh Sidaoui suggested in October that Gaddafi "has created a great void for his exercise of power: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

History of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi

Part of a series on the. Libya and weapons of mass destruction. The Wages of Oil. A History of Modern Libya. Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East. The Horn of Africa since the s. The Power of Creative Reasoning. The Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings. Turkey as a Mediator. Violent Conflict and Peacebuilding. The Peace Process between Turkey and the Kurds.

The Journey to Tahrir. The Consequences of Chaos. The Independence of South Sudan.

Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Strategic Change. International Institutions of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia in a Multipolar World. Turkish Foreign Policy in the New Millennium. The United Arab Emirates. Carthage Must Be Destroyed. The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi. The Afghan War in Meeting the Challenges of Transition. The Tragedy of the Korosko. Arthur Conan Sir Doyle. Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan.

The Manpower Problem in Kuwait. Italian soldier in North Africa — Gulf Politics and Economics in a Changing World. Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew. Afghanistan After the Drawdown.

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Political and Humanitarian Responses to Syrian Displacement. Political Survival in Pakistan. Pacification in Algeria, Reintegrating Iran with the West. From the Congo to Iraq. Harry Potter and International Relations. Iran's Political, Demographic, and Economic Vulnerabilities. The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building. Europe's Role in Nation-Building. From Insurgency to Stability.

Imported Oil and U. Choices for America in a Turbulent World. Air Power as a Coercive Instrument. Meaning and International Relations.

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