Exit the Colonel (2 page)

For a time, Gaddafi, like the Sultan in Neihoum's story, believed this deal had saved him from his mounting problems—the metaphorical black dog. Yet it was precisely at this critical juncture that Gaddafi lost control of his own destiny, the West lost a few degrees of its moral compass in the Middle East, and the United States and key European countries (the UK and France, in particular) unwittingly set the stage for their own intervention in Libya in 2011. What has been lost in the coverage of Gaddafi's fall from power is this crucial pivot. For even though the Arab
Spring was the trigger of Gaddafi's exit, it was more like the blow of a falling branch from a tree on a house that had only barely survived battering by a violent hurricane.

 

I ARRIVED IN LIBYA at the cusp of Gaddafi's international makeover, in late summer 2004, as commercial/economic officer at the US Liaison Office (USLO) in Tripoli, a position that appeared on a State Department volunteer list just before I was to take up a position as a Vice Consult in Kuwait. The assignment involved reporting to the State Department and various other interested agencies on all aspects of the Libyan economy and reform process, while facilitating US business interests in the country. I did ask myself if I was comfortable contributing, however indirectly, to a process of reconciliation with a regime tagged with responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing (I had been a college student at the time and knew people who knew some of the victims, many of whom were Syracuse University students returning home for Christmas from study abroad programs). What I learned in pre-departure briefings about the terms of the re-engagement did not settle my mind in this regard, but I reasoned this was a tremendous opportunity for the West (and me personally) to learn more about what was happening on the ground in Libya, how Gaddafi's system did or did not work. Further, tending to seek out the unusual—I had spent most of 1997 and 1998 in Yemen, writing a dissertation on port competition in the Red Sea. There were few places in the region—other than Libya—that could be said to be as exotic. Years before, one hot summer day in 1990, just weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I had approached the Libyan-Tunisian border, wondering when it might be possible to visit the “Great Jamahiriya” (Gaddafi's made-up word for “State of the Masses”).

A few weeks after being cleared for the post, I left for Tripoli, wading through a series of airport security (TSA) agents and airline staff in the US and UK who—despite my visa and diplomatic passport—refused to believe an American was authorized to travel to Libya. I thought it somewhat funny that I was suspect at the borders of my own country but was allowed to move about reasonably freely (even if I was followed) once I was in Tripoli. For whatever reason, I encountered few of the impediments to movement faced by many of my colleagues.

The Libya that I found in summer 2004 bore the markings of a totalitarian state. Phones were tapped and rooms were bugged, foreigners were usually followed. Revolutionary propaganda was ubiquitous. There
were few hints of life outside Libya—no advertisements, few foreign products, no signs in any language other than Arabic. Because of the difficult access and lack of standard amenities, many diplomats and businessmen (there were few women) who were posted to Libya for a year or more left with little more than a sense that the country was kooky and yet on the road to reform, as per the somewhat forced proclamations by government officials that “things are different now.”

There were advantages to being the person within the US mission charged with talking about the economy and facilitating trade, particularly at a time when the Europeans were already old hat, having returned to the country almost four years earlier, in 1999, when UN sanctions were first lifted. In 2004, I became something of a lightning rod for Libyans who had political agendas of various kinds, and could use commercial issues as a cover to speak with a US diplomat. Further, unlike those above me with weightier responsibilities, I had freedom to travel all over the country, to the southern and eastern deserts; Benghazi and the Green Mountains; the western mountains, Jebel Nafusa—places where American diplomats had not been for more than twenty years. I often stood in for the chargé at protocol events when he was unable or deemed inappropriate to attend. Thus, I found myself hurtling uneasily through the Libyan skies in poorly maintained aircraft with a herd of other diplomats, to Sirte to listen to the Leader's interminable speeches. I witnessed various desert tributes to the Leader, including one massive sound and light show on the edge of the Sahara, was taken to see the cornerstone of the Great Man-Made River, and attended various lower-level diplomatic and cultural events inside and outside the capital.

In a short period of time, I saw the same elements of absurdity that journalists and businesspeople had reported over the years. But I also heard muffled stories and hints of generations of anguish and deeper, systematic human rights abuses—stories that did not really start to surface, and were certainly not mentioned in any official correspondences, until several years later. As the 2011 revolution progressed, many of these stories, a few of which are described in this book, began to resurface with a vengeance. More sustained interaction gave hints of deeper trauma, of lost lives and opportunities. For me, Hisham Mattar's 2007 novel
In the Country of Men
gave voice to an unquantifiable darkness that lurked behind the otherwise benign-looking façade of the new Libya, many Libyans' remarkable and genuine sense of humor, and Gaddafi's vaudevillian distractions.

One thing that struck me most during my two-year assignment was how many times people from different levels of Libyan society, from cab drivers to ex-monarchy ministers and businesspeople, would take me aside and insist that the “US government should know” what they were dealing with in Gaddafi, even as they hoped that the apparent rapprochement would make their lives easier. Now, they would say, is the time for the Americans to push Gaddafi to the wall and exact concessions—or forever hold our peace.

 

THE US LIAISON OFFICE, the precursor to the US Embassy in Tripoli, was located in a self-styled, five-star hotel. Most of us, including chargé Greg Berry, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Tsou, Public Affairs Officer Anne O'Leary, and several temporary administrative and reporting officers (TDY), would put in twelve- to fifteen-hour days in cramped quarters, with few outlets for rest and recreation other than an outdoor pool. In addition to swimming daily laps, with the encouragement of my Libyan commercial assistant, Basem Tulti, I undertook to translate a few Libyan short stories into English. Most were simultaneously depressing and mildly subversive. Noticing that the vast majority of stories contained neither the names of people nor places, we decided to try to find as many stories as possible that contained Libyan geographical references, then visit those places. In retrospect, a good fraction of the 100 diplomatic cables I wrote over the first year were somehow linked, if indirectly, to conversations about or contacts made in the course of researching these stories or attempting to visit the places mentioned. I learned of the stunning Benghazi riots of 2006, as they were going on, from a contact who had helped me track down Sadiq Neihoum's stories. I understood something about the repression of Libya's Berbers after being invited by Berber staff members to visit their homes in Jebel Nafusa, en route to visit the site of Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Fagih's Al Jarad—the story of one town's fight against a swarm of rapacious locusts. Many landmarks of the 2011 revolution—from southern oases to the back streets of Benghazi, I would recognize immediately from these literary forays.

 

WHEN MY LIBYA TOUR CAME TO AN END in late summer 2006, Libya and the West were in full-blown makeover mode. Out of the sanctions' vise grip, Gaddafi was well on his way to making up for lost time. The Fourth of July party at the chargé's residence was an unusually ebullient occasion, crammed with hundreds of Libyan businessmen, Libyan and foreign
diplomats, and artists. It was a testament to the cultural and personal inroads the mission had made with the Libyan people and many of the key administrators. At the same time, on a political/administrative level, a thaw had set in: the narratives each side had set up to justify the reunion were already starting to wear thin, and for all the fanfare, what would happen next in Libya was really anyone's guess.

In 2007, I left the State Department and eventually wound up with then Senator Barack Obama's foreign policy advisory group. One of my assignments was to predict what aspects of the US-Libya rapprochement might come up in the presidential debates with Senator John McCain. While Libya never made it into the debate, the country would soon figure prominently in the political history of both politicians.

In 2008, I joined a Dubai-based multinational company, where I was asked to advise on Gaddafi family squabbles and the prospects for lasting change in Libya. While aspects of the reform process had ramped up since 2006, the Libyans I knew well, who were participating in commercial projects, both large and small, predicted impending turbulence. Dubai, meanwhile, had become a center for both pro- and anti-Gaddafi voices—friends and associates of individual Gaddafi members; traders seeking to expand their business regionally; representatives of the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), the principal sovereign wealth fund; political dissidents; and ex-monarchy ministers, all of whom were engaged in their own war of words—many months before the 2011 revolution.

In December 2010, while traveling from Dubai to Dakar, Senegal, I flew over the Libyan desert, and appreciated for the first time its true vastness and emptiness. The first object I saw upon landing in Senegal was a Soviet-era Antonov cargo plane with Libyan markings—typically a marker of a weapons delivery, or a State visit by the Leader himself. As I waited in the terminal for my return flight to Dubai three days later, I noticed a Libyan Afriqiyah A340 parked a discrete distance away from the main reception hall. A Senegalese honor guard—barely noticeable—stood on the tarmac, starting up and standing down in line with gestures from a soldier atop the mobile stairwell. The occupant—whom I assumed at the time was either Gaddafi's diplomatic son Saif Al Islam, or the militaristic son Mu'tassim—dallied inside. A figure hurried uncharacteristically down the stairs to a waiting car, dispensing with protocol. After the Libyan revolution, I read that this had been Gaddafi himself, in Senegal for the World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN), which was to start a few days later. Something
about this scene struck me as odd, and I wondered later whether Gaddafi had other, pressing matters on his mind, just days before street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in Tunisia, the act that launched the Arab Spring. Rumors had been rife in Dubai the weeks before that Gaddafi was preparing a major policy announcement, and that whatever it was, it was not likely to be well received by those with interests in the New Libya.

Once the uprising began on February 15, I became instantly transfixed with events on the ground. After the liberation of Benghazi in March, I looked for ways to get back into the country, even if briefly, to experience the atmosphere of a revolution that, while long deemed a distinct if not imminent possibility, was nonetheless astounding. I was working at the time on a project to establish a network of primary care clinics in port cities in East and West Africa, and I shared an interest with a Libyan colleague in investigating the possibility of applying a similar model to revolutionary Libya—but with a focus on the treatment of trauma—in regions where, despite Libya's riches, the standards of medical care were abysmal. I wanted to know more about how the uprising had spread in Benghazi, and what had happened since I had left. I wanted to look deeper into where the United States and the rest of the West had gone wrong, and right in Libya. After all, I had been sent to Libya ostensibly to help push forward what was at the time the beginning of an interesting transition, if not a warm relationship, one which might have positive effects on the way the United States dealt with other seemingly intractable regional disputes.

 

UNTIL THE 2011 REVOLUTION, not much had been written about Libya. One obvious reason was the difficulty—particularly for Americans—in gaining access. Journalists would typically have to travel on foreign passports to visit Libya, and were strictly “minded” during their stay. Only a handful of academics—Dirk Vandewalle, Moncef Djaziri, Moncef Ouannes, Hanspeter Mattes, and Ronald Bruce St. John stand out—had devoted more than a fraction of their career to writing about Libya, usually as part of research on oil states and with little expectation that their interest in Libyan politics would become pressingly relevant.

In writing this book, I have tried to fill in the gaps between the academic studies of a dysfunctional state and the more recent journalistic accounts; between the high-level political and economic situations and the local
culture; between the pre-2011 history of Libya and the Arab Spring. I draw heavily on my own experiences in pre- and post-revolutionary Libya, as well as a large number of Arabic and French sources.

My perspective is somewhat rare, in the sense that the people who covered the revolution as journalists and diplomats were for the most part different from those who were there before. I benefited from particularly good access to those members of the regime who defected, who were in the know but not known, and wanted to share their insight on the events in which they had taken part. I also had access to many senior sitting and former US and EU officials, many of whom were eager to tell their part of the backstory, even if on condition of anonymity. Many others involved in policy making in current and previous US and UK administrations were unwilling to comment.

In some cases, interviews I hoped to conduct with Gaddafi-era or revolutionary figures were made unnecessary by extensive interviews published in still-obscure local newspapers, before these individuals assumed roles of even greater importance. There was a period in the early days of the revolution during which many of the protagonists were far more open, ebullient, and willing to talk in detail about their experiences.