Exit the Colonel (32 page)

Bernard-Henri Lévy later wrote that his and colleagues' attempts on March 2 to verify claims that an “Islamic Emirate” had been created in
Derna by Abdel Hakim Al Hasadi (another Libyan veteran of the US detention center at Guantanamo) turned up nothing obviously incriminating: Al Hasadi was apparently “at the front” fighting. Lévy says, “We did not see there anything resembling either an emirate or a burka.” (Hasadi supposedly mandated the wearing of the burka by all Dernawi women.)
⁴²

On the one hand, the radicalization of young people in the East was felt to be a natural reaction to harsh conditions of chronic unemployment and regime harassment. However, most Libyans in heavily populated areas appeared to believe that the primary motivator for Dernawi youth fighting in Iraq was not sympathy with jihadist ideologies, per se, but that they saw it as an opportunity to fight Gaddafi by proxy, gaining skills in the process that could be useful in the struggle back home. Further, groups like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and associated smaller groups had strong ties to the local commercial elite—also long repressed by Gaddafi—all of which contributed to the formation of a kind of popular sympathy with “the rebellion,” just as Omar Al Mokhtar had during the counter-Italian insurgency in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Missing from most of these Western reconnaissance missions is reference to Derna's modern history, specifically its role, above all the cities in the east, in producing more of Libya's intelligentsia and political elite than any other city or region in Libya. This fact was itself the subject of much more speculation and was presumably linked both to its culture of resistance to Gaddafi and to what happened subsequently. Mohammed Al Mufti, author of several informal books on Libyan culture, asked many of the older generation in Derna why Dernawis had established such a culture of education and valued learning. Older residents attributed this emphasis to a mixture of factors, the root of which was that it was a farming community—
fellahin
—and as families had more children, they confronted the problem of how to divide land. To ensure that the children were able to support themselves, the families pushed them (including girls) to attend school and to pursue their studies abroad. Mufti credits Dernawi's “intellectualism” to one of the Italians' few positive acts in Eastern Libya, the establishment of a local school.
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As we have seen, the prevailing impression of Libya in Western policy circles in the few years (if not the few months) before the revolution was one of a success. Despite the fact that the pace of economic reform was slower
than wished for, Gaddafi had basically served his purpose and could be left on autopilot. The US and UK governments still referred to reconciliation with Libya occasionally as a model counterproliferation and counterterror initiative, but with far less verve. The US and UK intelligence communities appeared to be getting what they felt was some useful information out of the arrangement (exactly what has not been disclosed, even if information on some of the methods has been exposed), and huge commercial opportunities were lurking within reach.

As time went by, however, Gaddafi seemed to be going more and more off the rails—again. Indeed, it is hard to think of anyone Gaddafi had spent much time and energy courting while sanctions were in place that he had not personally embarrassed or insulted. In the same way, he was compelled to try to prove his righteousness by exploiting “unfinished business” like the remaining Lockerbie payments, the Bulgarian nurses case, and various unconsummated commercial deals to extort return reparations from the West. There appeared to be no way that Gaddafi's mind could let him “forgive” an exogenous event like the Wikileaks scandal and let its trove of personal slights go unpunished, just as he was not able to prevent himself from pulling together a team to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah, during the very time when he was trying to strike a deal with the West.

Thus, rather than spending his golden years enjoying the fruits of a tremendously successful rehabilitation campaign, Gaddafi chose, again, to try to resurrect his “honor” at the expense of his personal and Libya's national interests, unsettling the foreign oil companies, and embarrassing his closest allies. At the same time, he was deepening relationships with the West's strongest competitors, especially Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries) and universally loathed foreign rulers, like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who had spent the previous few years chasing out many of that country's foreign investors.

Gradually, those individuals who had assisted with Libya's transformation—those who were still alive or in office—came to realize that they might have a problem on their hands. The State Department further drew down embassy staff while trying to figure out the next move. No one, at least outside government and intelligence circles, seemed to know what to make of Mismari's defection and rumors of Saif 's apparent decision to remove himself from Libyan politics. Some felt the best course of action was simply to wait out the storm; a new ambassador might smooth things over. Or maybe not.

The fact remains that both Gaddafi and the West shared responsibility for this state of affairs, which had direct roots in the 2003 WMD deal and subsequent rapprochement. As we have seen, the conditions for Gaddafi's rehabilitation were framed largely in terms of compensation for past acts of terror (the Lockerbie bombing), “declarations” (abandonment of WMD), and “willingness to cooperate” on high-level issues, like counterterrorism.

Still, very little attention was paid to more systemic problems of human rights and trying to control Gaddafi's natural, disruptive tendencies. So, while the West was able to crow that it had succeeded in “flipping” Libya from the dark side, it was not long before Gaddafi started to complain that he had been swindled by the West, which was not living up to its various implicit promises of proper respect for a major world leader with continental influence (i.e., Gaddafi). With nothing to anchor them to an objective reality, the narratives spun by the West and Libya about the reasons for the rapprochement and their respective obligations allowed both sides to revert to traditional adversarial positions, with increased righteousness.

Gaddafi had another, problem, however. Just as he had been constrained by key associates and tribal leaders in responding to the Western demands for Libya to turn over Megrahi and Fhima for trial, he was constrained to some degree by the needs and wishes of those people within his circle who had been the pillar of his repressive apparatus for more than three decades. These people had done his dirty work, had been compensated for it, and would have a very hard time finding a role within any new, more open, more respectable Libya.

So Gaddafi found himself between a reform process and narrative he knew was necessary to maintain on some level in order to continue to buy time—before he had another plan. Those who had fought his previous battles for him were increasingly unhappy and were becoming recalcitrant, if not an outright danger. The overriding anxiety and paralysis Mahmoud Jibril had seen in Gaddafi months earlier may have made it impossible for him to do anything other than what he had always done—try to play all sides against the middle. Yet the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. The West, unwittingly, may have simply added too many balls to Gaddafi's already immensely complicated juggling game—such that it was only a matter of time before he would lose his grip.

LISA ANDERSON
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CHAPTER 9

Benghazi: The First Five Days

HANNAH ARENDT, ON REVOLUTION
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T
he Libyan uprising, was undoubtedly a youth-led popular revolt, initially centered on (and sustained by) a series of rather amazing, and still somewhat unexplained, actions that took place in Benghazi and environs from mid-February through end of March 2011 and beyond, against a regime that had long considered the East the equivalent of a province under revolt. Interviews with numerous Benghazi residents in summer 2011 revealed pride in “spontaneous public action,” but also acknowledged that the roots of rage went back a long time; the regime's reaction to protests in January and February were simply the final straw in a series of deep insults and organized deprivation. While this is all very true, the role of individual leaders, and the actions of a core group of individuals—some courageous citizens pushed to acts of incredible heroism, others who had held high office under Gaddafi but whose loyalties remained to the East, academics who took part in Saif 's reform process as aides or trainees, or their local interlocutors—played a critical, and thus far underestimated, role in steering the people and articulating their cause.

The ultimate trigger for the movements subsequently known as the Arab Spring is widely acknowledged to have been the self-immolation on December 17, 2010, of Mohammed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old fruit
vendor in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 265 kilometers south of Tunis, following humiliation at the hands of a female police officer the previous day. The question of how a lone act, however intense and gruesome, could have mobilized a nation to overthrow the leaders of a seasoned police state is a good one. One would have expected, in a state with one of the most controlled medias in the world, that news would take time to spread, that there would be confusion regarding what had happened, and why. Much credit is due to the Qatari TV channel Al Jazeera, which was for days literally the only global network to cover the unrest (and in so doing, to goad popular action); the Western press did not catch on to the fact that these events could have significant consequences until a day or two before Tunisian strongman Zinedine Ben Ali was forced to abdicate, on January 14, 2011. Ben Ali and his cronies had ruled Tunisia since he ousted Habib Bourguiba in a bloodless coup in 1987—not without similarities to Gaddafi's rise to power. From Tunisia, the Revolution initially skipped over Libya and landed in Egypt.

The Egyptians called Tunisia's revolution a “Tunisami,” which inspired activist and a much more technologically savvy youth to use social media such as Facebook to call for a Day of Rage (
yowm al Ghadab
) for January 25, a week after Ben Ali fled Tunisia. Eighty thousand Internet-users registered online and took to streets to demand reform and express alienation and not-so-veiled resentment at Hosni Mubarak's increasing indications or preparations for his son Gamal to succeed him. It would be the largest act of civil disobedience in Mubarak's thirty-three-year rule. Egypt's Day of Rage encompassed mass protests in Cairo, Alexandria, and several other cities.

As in Tunisia, and Libya subsequently, protestors at first had rather vague demands, including, in Egypt's case, an end to repressive emergency laws, the sacking of the interior minister, and an increase in the minimum wage. Protestors took control of Tahrir Square, while Mubarak's regime, shocked by the scale of the demonstrations, sought to confront the waves of protest with shows of force and censor coverage of what was going on. Egypt's interior minister Habib al Adly banned all protests, clamped down on social networking sites, blocked cellphone coverage in Cairo, and had more than a thousand arrested.
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While the riots were still under way in Tunisia, and just gearing up in Egypt (i.e., before the Egyptian “January 25th Revolution”) the Libyan towns of Derna, Benghazi, and Bani Walid, saw primarily economic-driven protests from January 13 to 16. In several cases, demonstrators took over
abandoned construction sites, which they proclaimed symbolic of the Libyan reformists' failed promises to improve living conditions.
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These actions coincided with another set of Wikileaks revelations on the decadent lifestyles of the Gaddafi children (“Qadhafi Children Scandals Spilling Over into Politics” and “A Glimpse into Libyan Leader Qadhafi's Eccentricities,” filed in September 2009 and February 2010). These reportedly led Gaddafi to cancel all soccer games in the country, fearing that the soccer clubs and fans themselves would become a vector for protests, as they had in Egypt.
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