Libya

By: Marian Aguiar

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Libya

In 1997 President Nelson Mandela of South Africa visited the North African nation of Libya and praised its leader, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, for his support of the Antiapartheid Movement in South Africa. The international community was startled by this meeting of two prominent African leaders: Mandela the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, Qaddafi widely despised as an enemy of the West and a supporter of Arab terrorism. But Mandela’s visit showed the West how Libya appears to other Africans—as a country that is as much African as it is Islamic. Often considered part of the Arab world, Libya is one of Africa’s largest and wealthiest nations, and for centuries it has cultivated relationships with sub-Saharan Africa. Since coming to power in 1969, Qaddafi has aided a variety of African national movements and governments ranging from Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda to Thomas Sankara’s populist socialist state in Burkina Faso. In 1997, Qaddafi launched a plan for an economic treaty with at least nine African nations. Although many in the West view Libya’s influence in Africa with concern, some poorer African nations have welcomed aid from the oil-rich country.

Three Regions

Libya

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Since ancient times, trade routes and political federations have linked parts of Libya to Egypt; to the Maghreb, the Islamic region of western North Africa; and to sub-Saharan Africa. Libya’s identity as a unified territory dates from the modern colonial era, when Italy claimed it. Before that time, Libya consisted of three distinct regions: Tripolitania, the cosmopolitan Mediterranean center of trade; Cyrenaica, historically linked to Egypt and home of the powerful Islamic Sanusi sect; and Fezzan, the interior, ruled by tribes and linked by desert trade routes to sub-Saharan Africa.

Ancient Tripolitania was a Roman province, a fertile region that exported olive oil and traded gold for slaves brought across the Sahara. The Roman presence in Tripolitania, as in most of North Africa, was mainly on the coast; inland, the Berber inhabitants governed themselves. A desert that could be crossed only by camel divided Tripolitania from Cyrenaica to the east, but both trade and the rise of Christian culture linked Tripolitania to Roman holdings on the coast to the west, such as Tunis. When the Roman Empire split into western and eastern halves in 395, Tripolitania’s links to the West grew stronger.

Then, in the seventh century, Arab armies moved through North Africa, bringing the new religion of Islam and dreams of conquest. Arab leaders took Tripolitania in 650, and from there they expanded westward into the land they called Ifriqiya. Libya and Tunisia were ruled together, first by the Aghlabid emirs and then by the Fatimid dynasty. Reviving ancient Roman irrigation systems, the Aghlabids developed the region’s agriculture. Yet their main source of income continued to be trade. Wool, leather, salt, and slaves from the interior passed through the Mediterranean port.

Despite the conversion of most Berbers to Islam, Berber identity and language remained largely distinct from the urban Arab elite until the eleventh century, when a large population called the Hilalians migrated from Egypt through Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Most historians trace the creation of an Arabic-speaking Berber pastoral culture in the interior to this period of migration. Meanwhile, along the coast, expanding Mediterranean trade brought new struggles for control of strategic ports. In 1060, for example, Normans from southern Italy took several ports near Tripoli. Over time, Tripolitania developed a thriving trade with Europe.

The region of Cyrenaica takes its name from the ancient city of Cyrene. Legend says that Greeks from the island of Thera founded the city of Cyrene in 631 B.C.E.. The city became an intellectual and cultural center, home to schools of philosophy and medicine, enriched by the fertile countryside’s production of grain and wine. At various times Cyrenaica fell under Egyptian, Persian, and Roman rule. It also attracted immigrants, becoming home to a large population of Jews, many of whom had fled Palestine. In 115 C.E.., a Jewish revolt leveled the city.

After the division of the Roman Empire, Christian Cyrenaica came under the influence of the Egyptian Coptic church, creating lasting links between Cyrenaica and its eastern neighbor, Egypt. Three centuries later, however, Cyrenaica became the first of Libya’s three regions to come under Arab rule. Islam created new religious ties between the region and the western Maghreb. Still, however, Cyrenaica maintained political and economic connections with Egypt. Later the region fell under the formal control of a series of Egyptian dynasties, although Bedouin chieftains maintained real political and economic control; they taxed pilgrims and caravans that passed through Cyrenaica on the way to Egypt.

In the arid interior region of Fezzan, oasis settlements grew up along the trade routes that linked western Sudan to the Mediterranean. Some oasis communities irrigated farmland with stone-lined water channels. Others profited from the trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, ivory, and slaves. Unlike its neighbors, Fezzan did not fall under direct Roman rule, but its chieftains did enter military and economic alliances with the Romans. Islam reached Fezzan in the seventh century, almost twenty years after arriving in Cyrenaica.

Ottoman Period

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Christian and Muslim powers competed for control of the Mediterranean maritime trade. North African ports became increasingly important as bases for Corsairs, state-sponsored military ships that taxed and sometimes pillaged passing merchant vessels. In 1510, Spain captured Tripoli and established a naval base there under the protection of the Knights of St. John of Malta.

The same year that Spain took Tripoli, Khayr ad-Din, a leader of the Islamic Ottoman dynasty based in Turkey, seized the port of Algiers. He and his successor, known as the Barbarossa Brothers, extended their holdings eastward along the coast until they captured Tripoli in 1551. Seeking to profit from the commerce through Fezzan, the Ottomans sent armies to exact a yearly tribute. But Ottoman power remained concentrated mostly in coastal enclaves, particularly Tripoli. The rest of the area that is now Libya was controlled by Islamic religious states and Berber confederacies.

Tripoli was home to a number of janissaries, special military troops who accompanied the Turkish conquerors. Their power rose as the region broke free of direct Ottoman rule. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tripoli had grown rich from corsair raids, and its population of 30,000 included janissaries, cologhli (people of mixed Turkish and Arab descent), Jews, Muslims driven out of southern Spain, slaves from West Africa, and European Christians who had been captured by the corsairs.

A Mosque in Tripoli.  Some ninety-eight percent of the population of Libya adheres to the Muslim faith. Photo, c. 1900.

(Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

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para/>Eighteenth-century Tripoli had a series of military leaders, some more independent than others from the Ottomans. One of the more autonomous rulers, Yusuf ibn Ali Karamanli, took stronger control over Fezzan. By helping French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte invade Egypt in 1799, Karamanli also alienated Great Britain, Bonaparte’s chief foe, which was already angy about corsair activity. In the dawn of the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States bombarded Tripoli to end the practice of forcing foreign ships to pay for safe passage. Deprived of its main source of income, Tripoli’s economy was thrown into crisis, and Karamanli borrowed heavily from French and British merchants. But the people of Tripoli rebelled against stringent taxation, and when Tripoli failed to repay its foreign debts, the French and British blockaded the port. Civil war broke out, and in 1835 the Ottoman Empire stepped in to regain direct control.

The new Ottoman state looked south, exploiting the three ancient trade routes between Tripoli and West Africa—one to what is now northern Nigeria, one to Air and Kano in Hausaland, and one to Tombouctou, Mali. Along these routes traders carried guns and European textiles to the interior, returning with luxury goods such as ostrich feathers, gold, goatskins, and ivory. Until 1860, when slavery was effectively banned in the region, many slaves also traveled north along these routes.

In nineteenth-century Cyrenaica, where wandering mystics known as Marabouts possessed significant political and spiritual authority, a Sufi Islamic sect founded by Muhammad bin Ali al-Sanusi (1787–1859) reorganized long-distance commerce. Originally founded to promote a purified form of Islam, the Sanusi order built a series of lodges in Cyrenaica that operated as caravan watering-holes in addition to serving as monasteries, schools, and social and commercial centers for local people. Under Sanusi’s son Muhammad al-Mahdi, the order’s influence spread southward. For trade caravans traveling between the coast and sub-Saharan market towns, the Sanusi lodges offered security and provisions. More important, they created a unified identity and social structure—a forerunner of the modern nation. It would be the Sanusi sect, not the Ottoman Empire, that would forge a unified resistance to the Europeans who next invaded and claimed the region.

Italian Colonization

In the late nineteenth century, European imperialism in North Africa shifted from economic domination to outright conquest. Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia fell under French control. Not to be left out, Italy—with a long history of trade and commercial interests in Tripoli—staked a claim to Tripolitania and its environs. Great Britain supported Italy’s claim because an Italian Libya would be a buffer between French holdings in the Maghreb and British-ruled Egypt. In 1911, Italy engineered a crisis to justify invading Libya. It accused the Ottomans of giving weapons to Libya’s Arab Bedouins and then, claiming a need to protect Italian business interests, it declared war.

Italy’s claim to Libya, however, was really decided by conflicts in other parts of the world. In 1912, the Ottomans gave up Libya as part of a peace treaty to end a war in Eastern Europe. The Ottomans were allowed to remain Libya’s religious authorities, a circumstance that maintained Libya’s strong ties with the Islamic world and fueled an anti-Italian resistance. At first the Italian presence was mainly coastal. Resistance was strongest in the interior, where the Bedouins of Fezzan, who had never fully accepted Ottoman control, vigorously opposed the new foreign, Christian overlords.

Sanusi followers soon formed an organized resistance in Cyrenaica. In 1914, they launched a military campaign that continued after they allied themselves with Turkey and Germany during World War I. After the war, the Sanusis forced Italy to give in to some of their demands in Cyrenaica. Italian troops and colonists met comparatively little organized resistance in Tripolitania, although some nationalists there joined the Sanusis’ resistance efforts. In 1922, after considerable debate over a Sanusi-dominated anticolonial struggle, Idris I, formal ruler of Cyrenaica, became emir of all Libya. Threats of persecution, however, forced him to flee to Egypt shortly afterward.

In 1923, Italy under leader Benito Mussolini resumed war against the Sanusi. Italian forces brought Tripolitania and Fezzan under control but met strong resistance in Cyrenaica. Using soldiers from their East African colony of Eritrea, the Italians waged a brutal guerrilla war in the desert, cutting off supply lines, filling wells, killing livestock, confining Bedouins in concentration camps, and constructing a barrier along the Egyptian border. Italy finally established control over Cyrenaica in 1931, when Sanusi rebel leader Umar al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged. Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were then joined in a single colony called Libya, leaving Fezzan as a military territory.

With its claim to Libya established, Italy began building roads and railways and expanding ports. To relieve unemployment and overcrowding at home, Italy sent 20,000 settlers to Libya in 1938. Within two years, settlers made up 12 percent of the colony’s population. While the newcomers benefited from the modernizing projects, native Libyans saw much of their best grazing and farming land confiscated and turned into settler-owned olive groves.

When World War II began, Libyan nationalists hoped that the defeat of Mussolini would bring the liberation of Libya. In Egypt, Idris committed troops, including many veterans of the Italo-Sanusi war, to fight on the side of the British. As leader of the Sanusi, he drew support from traditionally rebellious Cyrenaica and, to a lesser extent, from Tripolitania.

Several major World War II battles were fought in the Libyan desert. In January 1943, the British took Tripoli; by the following month they had seized all of Libya. While the British occupied Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the French, another Allied power, held Fezzan. As the Allied powers debated the future of Italy’s African colonies, Idris returned to Cyrenaica and, with British support, established an independent emirate there. A United Nations resolution called for Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan to be united into an autonomous nation by January 1952; it also created a national assembly to write a constitution. Idris was declared king of the United Kingdom of Libya, a federal monarchy with a legislature made up of representatives of the three provinces, including elected senators and senators nominated by the king. General elections were held on February 19 1952, and Libya became the first North African nation to achieve statehood.

Independence

Omar Mukhtar.  Omar Mukhtar (center) led the resistance movement against the Italian occupation of Libya from 1912 to 1932, at which time the seventy-year-old was captured and hanged by the Italians.

(Wikimedia Commons)

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After independence, relations between the regions were strained. Idris had never truly established his authority through the country. Cyrenaica supported him and the Sanusi order, but Fezzan looked to tribal leadership, and in Tripolitania the National Congress Party tried to establish a republican government. Not surprisingly, the king viewed republicanism unfavorably and quickly outlawed the Congress Party as well as all other political parties. But republican sentiment was not limited to Tripolitania. In Cyrenaica in the 1940s, an organization of young nationalists called the Umar al-Mukhtar Club called for a republican government based on a vision of Libya as part of the larger Arab community. The real threat to the Libyan monarchy would come not from the nationalists of Tripoli but from this pan-Arab movement.

The new nation was poverty-stricken and seemingly without major natural resources. One of its biggest sources of income was selling scrap metal from World War II wrecks. In exchange for economic aid, Libya allowed other nations—including the United States—to establish military bases within its territory. But the country’s pros-pects changed dramatically in 1959, when large reserves of high-quality petroleum were discovered in Cyrenaica. As soon as a new pipeline to the Mediterranean was completed, oil and money began to flow. But most Libyans saw little of the new wealth. Within a few years popular resentment of the privileged elites, together with growing pro-Arab sentiment, exploded into widespread civil unrest. In 1967, when Israel and the Arab states of the Middle East went to war, workers and students rioted in Tripoli and Banghazi. Violence was directed toward Jews and the West, both seen as enemies of an Arab state. Finally, popular sentiment turned against the king.

Qaddafi and Revolution

On September 1 1969, a group of young military officers, influenced by the political philosophy of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized power while the king was out of the country for medical treatment. Calling themselves the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) of the Free Officers Movement, they proclaimed the country to be under a new government, the Libyan Arab Republic. Shortly after their bloodless coup, the RCC brought more than 200 top government officials, including the king, to trial for treason, some in absentia. Disbanding the Sanusi order and reorganizing administrative states to break up tribal affiliations, the RCC began to dismantle all remnants of the old Libya.

Within a year, a twenty-seven-year-old colonel named Muammar al-Qaddafi had risen to the top of the RCC. Ascetic yet charismatic, Qaddafi sought to unite Islamic principles with economic and political reforms based in Socialism. He cultivated relations with the Soviet Union, distanced himself from the West, and even forced the U.S. military to withdraw from its Libyan base.

An enthusiastic supporter of Arab unity, Qaddafi proposed political unions with Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Chad, Morocco, and Algeria. The most extensive discussions took place with Egypt and Syria. Hoping to combine Egypt’s labor supply with Libya’s oil industry, from 1972 to 1978 Qaddafi and Anwar al-Sadat discussed the merger of states. Ultimately, due to strong popular opposition and Qaddafi’s anger over the 1978 Egypt-Israeli peace agreement, the plan was abandoned. Two years later Libya embarked on a union with Syria, agreeing to pay a billion-dollar debt to the Soviet Union for weapons, but that arrangement fell through because of diplomatic concerns over two hijackings. Libya was also one of the most militant founding members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

During the same period, Qaddafi launched the “popular revolution,” a massive internal restructuring of national and local government that was intended to fight bureaucratic inefficiency and the lack of public interest and participation in government. Qaddafi created “people’s committees” that, in principle, were supposed to take over and run the government. By 1973 there were more than 2,000 such committees, filled by popular election in selected geographic areas as well as in universities, businesses, government administrations, and the broadcast media. “Revolutionary committees” were instituted to oversee the spread and growth of revolutionary ideals, as described in Qaddafi’s The Green Book, published in 1976.

Volume two of The Green Book appeared in 1978. In it Qaddafi, by then “Leader of the Revolution” and controller of the military, attacked democracy, private trade, and private property. A second phase of restructuring brought state enterprises and retail business under workers’ management; it also limited Libyans to one private dwelling. Securing economic control of Libya’s resources, Qaddafi nationalized the oil industry, shifting it from private to state ownership. The government ultimately gained control of about 70 percent of the industry. It also nationalized banks.

Libyans greeted these reforms with considerable resistance. The middle class opposed Qaddafi’s economic changes. Many professionals and technicians left the country. A number of Islamic leaders disapproved of what they viewed as Qaddafi’s use of religion for his own purposes; they also resented the nationalization of Islamic properties. Qaddafi’s international reputation declined after a number of prominent Libyans who had fled the country were assassinated; it fell still further after he granted shelter in Libya to several accused terrorists. In 1980, the army, from which Qaddafi had originally emerged as a leader, attempted to overthrow him but failed.

Qaddafi also made many enemies though his foreign policy. Claiming rights from before the colonial period, Libya occupied a mineral-rich strip territory on the border with Chad and used it as a base to aid rebels in Chad’s civil war. Qaddafi also backed Idi Amin, notorious dictator of Uganda, to the bitter end, supplying Amin with weapons and troops and giving him asylum when he fled Uganda in 1979. Tension rose steadily between Libya and the United States, which shot down two Libyan aircraft in 1981. Five years later, amid accusations of Libyan support for terrorism, the United States attacked Libya and banned trade with it. In 1992, after Qaddafi refused to turn over individuals who were suspected of having caused Pan Am 103, a U.S. airliner, to explode over Scotland in 1988, the United Nations banned arms sales to Libya.

When the United States ended its commercial relationship with Libya, European companies filled the void. Despite economic sanctions against Libya, the country’s standard of living, including housing, education, social services, and health care, was among Africa’s highest during 1980s and 1990s. Qaddafi sponsored large state enterprises such as railways and the “Great Man-Made River” project, a $30-billion effort to transport subterranean water from the the southern desert to the heavily populated Mediterranean coast. In the late 1990s, Qaddafi began experimenting with more open and liberal economic and social policies, although he also arrested 1,500 businessmen on charges of corruption. Despite a number of failed coup attempts and considerable international animosity, he remained firmly in place as leader of Libya.

In 2003, after the United States went to war against the Arab nation of Iraq on the grounds that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction and aiding terrorism, Qaddafi surprised the international community by volunteering to end Libya’s programs to develop nuclear missiles and other weapons of mass destruction. The move was generally seen as a positive step toward bringing weapons programs under control. In 2004 the United States lifted most of its sanctions on Libya and began to establish diplomatic relations. In March 2008 Qaddafi announced intentions to dismantle many government administrative structures and disburse oil revenue directly to the Libyan people. Elected chairman of the 53-nation African Union in February 2009, Qaddafi showed once again that Africans see Libya in a different light than Western nations do.

See also Islam in Africa.

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