In view of the lack of internal resistance, it appeared that the chief danger to the new government lay in the possibility of a reaction inspired by the absent King Idris or his designated heir, Hasan ar Rida , who had been taken into custody at the time of the coup along with other senior civil and military officials of the royal government.
Within days of the coup, however, Hasan publicly renounced all rights to the throne, stated his support for the new government, and called on the people to accept it without violence. Idris, in an exchange of messages with the RCC through Egypt's President Nasser , dissociated himself from reported attempts to secure British intervention and disclaimed any intention of coming back to Libya. In return, he was assured by the RCC of the safety of his family still in the country.
At his own request and with Nasser's approval, Idris took up residence once again in Egypt, where he had spent his first exile and where he remained until his death in On 7 September , the RCC announced that it had appointed a cabinet to conduct the government of the new republic. An American-educated technician, Mahmud Sulayman al-Maghribi , who had been imprisoned since for his political activities, was designated prime minister. He presided over the eight-member Council of Ministers, of whom six, like Maghrabi, were civilians and two — Adam Said Hawwaz and Musa Ahmad — were military officers.
Neither of the officers was a member of the RCC. The Council of Ministers was instructed to "implement the state's general policy as drawn up by the RCC", leaving no doubt where ultimate authority rested. Analysts were quick to point out the striking similarities between the Libyan military coup of and that in Egypt under Nasser in , and it became clear that the Egyptian experience and the charismatic figure of Nasser had formed the model for the Free Officers Movement. As the RCC in the last months of moved vigorously to institute domestic reforms, it proclaimed neutrality in the confrontation between the superpowers and opposition to all forms of colonialism and "imperialism".
It also made clear Libya's dedication to Arab unity and to the support of the Palestinian cause against Israel. The RCC reaffirmed the country's identity as part of the "Arab nation" and its state religion as Islam. It abolished parliamentary institutions, all legislative functions being assumed by the RCC, and continued the prohibition against political parties, in effect since The new government categorically rejected communism — in large part because it was atheist — and officially espoused an Arab interpretation of socialism that integrated Islamic principles with social, economic, and political reform.
Libya had shifted, virtually overnight, from the camp of conservative Arab traditionalist states to that of the radical nationalist states. Following the formation of the Libyan Arab Republic , Gaddafi and his associates insisted that their government would not rest on individual leadership, but rather on collegial decision making. The first major cabinet change occurred soon after the first challenge to the government.
In December , Adam Said Hawwaz, the minister of defense, and Musa Ahmad, the minister of interior, were arrested and accused of planning a coup. In the new cabinet formed after the crisis, Gaddafi, retaining his post as chairman of the RCC, also became prime minister and defense minister. Major Abdel Salam Jallud , generally regarded as second only to Gaddafi in the RCC, became deputy prime minister and minister of interior.
From the start, RCC spokesmen had indicated a serious intent to bring the "defunct regime" to account. In and more than former government officials—including seven prime ministers and numerous cabinet ministers—as well as former King Idris and members of the royal family, were brought to trial on charges of treason and corruption in the Libyan People's Court. Many, who like Idris lived in exile, were tried in absentia.
Although a large percentage of those charged were acquitted, sentences of up to fifteen years in prison and heavy fines were imposed on others. Five death sentences, all but one of them in absentia , were pronounced, among them, one against Idris. Fatima , the former queen, and Hasan ar Rida were sentenced to five and three years in prison, respectively.
Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition
Meanwhile, Gaddafi and the RCC had disbanded the Sanusi order and officially downgraded its historical role in achieving Libya's independence. He also attacked regional and tribal differences as obstructions in the path of social advancement and Arab unity, dismissing traditional leaders and drawing administrative boundaries across tribal groupings. It acted as a "vehicle of national expression", purporting to "raise the political consciousness of Libyans" and to "aid the RCC in formulating public policy through debate in open forums". The press, already subject to censorship, was officially conscripted in as an agent of the revolution.
Italians and what remained of the Jewish community were expelled from the country and their property confiscated in October In , Libya joined the Federation of Arab Republics with Egypt and Syria but the intended union of pan-Arabic states never had the intended success, and was effectively dormant after As months passed, Gaddafi, caught up in his apocalyptic visions of revolutionary pan-Arabism and Islam locked in mortal struggle with what he termed the encircling, demonic forces of reaction, imperialism, and Zionism, increasingly devoted attention to international rather than internal affairs.
As a result, routine administrative tasks fell to Major Jallud, who in became prime minister in place of Gaddafi.
Two years later Jallud assumed Gaddafi's remaining administrative and protocol duties to allow Gaddafi to devote his time to revolutionary theorizing. Gaddafi remained commander in chief of the armed forces and effective head of state. The foreign press speculated about an eclipse of his authority and personality within the RCC, but Gaddafi soon dispelled such theories by his measures to restructure Libyan society. After the September coup, U. The last of the American contingent turned the facility over to the Libyans on 11 June , a date thereafter celebrated in Libya as a national holiday.
As relations with the U. Libya's army—sharply increased from the 6,man prerevolutionary force that had been trained and equipped by the British—was armed with Soviet-built armor and missiles. The economic base for Libya's revolution has been its oil revenues. However, Libya's petroleum reserves were small compared with those of other major Arab petroleum-producing states. As a consequence, Libya was more ready to ration output in order to conserve its natural wealth and less responsive to moderating its price-rise demands than the other countries.
Petroleum was seen both as a means of financing the economic and social development of a woefully underdeveloped country and as a political weapon to brandish in the Arab struggle against Israel. The increase in production that followed the revolution was accompanied by Libyan demands for higher petroleum prices, a greater share of revenues, and more control over the development of the country's petroleum industry.
British Petroleum rejected as inadequate a Libyan offer of compensation, and the British treasury banned Libya from participation in the sterling area. In , the Libyan government announced the nationalization of a controlling interest in all other petroleum companies operating in the country. This step gave Libya control of about 60 percent of its domestic oil production by early , a figure that subsequently rose to 70 percent. Total nationalization was out of the question, given the need for foreign expertise and funds in oil exploration, production, and distribution.
Insisting on the continued use of petroleum as leverage against Israel and its supporters in the West, Libya strongly urged the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries OPEC to take action in , and Libyan militancy was partially responsible for OPEC measures to raise oil prices, impose embargoes, and gain control of production. While the other Arab nations lifted their oil embargoes on 18 March , [17] the Gaddafi regime refused to do so.
Production continued to fall, bottoming out at an eleven-year low in at a time when the government was preparing to invest large amounts of petroleum revenues in other sectors of the economy. Thereafter, output stabilized at about two million barrels per day. Production and hence income declined yet again in the early s because of the high price of Libyan crude and because recession in the industrialized world reduced demand for oil from all sources.
Agriculture was slated to receive the largest share of aid in an effort to make Libya self-sufficient in food and to help keep the rural population on the land. Industry, of which there was little before the revolution, also received a significant amount of funding in the first development plan as well as in the second, launched in The "remaking of Libyan society" contained in Gaddafi's ideological visions began to be put into practice formally in , with a so-called cultural or popular revolution.
This revolution was designed to create bureaucratic efficiency, public interest and participation in the subnational governmental system, and national political coordination.
In an attempt to instill revolutionary fervor into his compatriots and to involve large numbers of them in political affairs, Gaddafi urged them to challenge traditional authority and to take over and run government organs themselves. The instrument for doing this was the people's committee. Within a few months, such committees were found all across Libya.
They were functionally and geographically based, and eventually became responsible for local and regional administration. People's committees were established in such widely divergent organizations as universities, private business firms, government bureaucracies, and the broadcast media. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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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. 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.
Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition : The Nation-Building Challenge - Details - Trove
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. The Independence of South Sudan. Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Strategic Change. International Institutions of the Middle East.
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DTIC ADA569558: Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge
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