Andrew Solomon: "How Qaddafi Lost Libya"

The escalating violence of the Qaddafi regime's response to the uprising in Libya is bringing increasing calls for international action.

"Libya is North Africa’s most prosperous country, given its tremendous oil wealth and small population. Yet most Libyans live in deplorable conditions. The state provides little by way of civil society and does not take care of even the most basic government obligations."

"The government has been exercising control over communications, shutting off both Internet and phone services. One of my contacts in Libya managed to call last night just before all lines were cut. He said, 'It’s awful, much worse than you think. Please get out the word to support us.'”

-- Andrew Solomon, in a New Yorker blogpost
yesterday, "How Qaddafi Lost Libya"

by Ken

And one of what Andrew Solomon describes as "several strategic errors" made by the Qaddafi regime since Solomon wrote about Qaddafi and Libya for The New Yorker in 2006 (Letter from Libya: "Circle of Fire," May 8, 2006), "has been the lack of attention to the poverty of the population."

Back in 2006, Solomon writes, "the question was whether a much-advertised reform process was really underway."

The ostensible champion of reform was Qaddafi’s son Seif-al-Islam. Seif usually talks a good game, but he does so with minimal regard for the truth. I was amazed, at a meeting with Seif and some senior American diplomats, in 2008, to hear him describe as imminent the exact same plans he’d so described to me in 2005, without the slightest embarrassment that nothing he had promised then had even inched forward.

And it seems that nothing more has been accomplished in this department since. Solomon describes the Libyan leader's "retreat" from his son's announced plans for reform as one of "several strategic errors" made by the regime since his article was published.

It was in Qaddafi’s interests to sustain the fierce battle between hardliners and moderates, to present his moderate spokesman to the West (hence the meeting between Seif and diplomats), and to keep his hardliner face visible to his own people. Within the government, each side had moments of believing itself in favor, but the best guarantee of Qaddafi’s continued hegemony was to keep them constantly embattled. When this became unsustainable, however, in 2008, he quashed the reformers, and Seif was generally seen as having fallen from grace. Even though most Libyans had been cynical about the reform process—which was predicated on economic reform rather than on the introduction of real democracy—it had kept hope on the horizon, had allowed them to indulge the idea that Qaddafi was really interested in what was best for the population rather than for himself and his family. To give hardliners more power, as Qaddafi did in 2008, was catastrophic.

Where most observers were puzzled that the public face the regime first offered on Libyan TV during the current crisis was that of Seif Qaddafi, Solomon sees the choice as "very telling."

Qaddafi would not have chosen him as spokesman if he didn’t recognize the hunger for reform, and if he didn’t know that quashing Seif’s ambitions had fed the fire now consuming Tripoli. Monday morning, Qaddafi announced that Seif would be forming a committee to investigate what is happening. But Seif’s too-little-too-late performance -- which Al Jazeera described as “desperate,” and which some commentators have said was aimed at his friends in the West rather than at the Libyan people -- has almost certainly not helped his cause.

Of the regime's callous disgregard for the living conditions of most Libyans, Solomon writes:

There are police to control people who stray from supporting the Leader, but there is little else. As a housing crisis has escalated in the past few years, the regime has made no effort to provide adequate public accommodation. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. It would have been easy for Qaddafi to raise the standard of living for the population as a whole either by creating a sustainable non-oil economy or simply by distributing some portion of oil revenues, but he chose to do neither.

As a third mistake he cites inattention to "the needs of the young."

When a third of the population is under fifteen and a further large proportion is under twenty-five, the young become central to coherent governance. Qaddafi has stuck with his old cronies, and has not taken on board the nature of the widespread discontent. The most obvious problem here, as in much of the Middle East, is vast youth unemployment, for the amelioration of which there are no programs at all. Qaddafi has never made any attempt to reach out to disgruntled youth, and they feel that their voices are not heard and carry no weight.

Solomon doesn't claim to be able to predict how the current situation will play out -- "whether the regime can withstand the revolution that is underway."

The response to protests has been swift and brutal, since Qaddafi had seen how ineffective more moderate responses were in Egypt and Tunisia. It is not clear, however, that brutality will work; it appears to be making more and more Libyans incensed. A Libyan diplomat said today, “The more Qaddafi kills people, the more people go into the streets.” Qaddafi’s power has for a long time relied on the docility of ordinary Libyans. As he ignored the youth of his country, though, he seems to have ignored the possibility that he is ruling a less passive population. The new generation is ready to push out the old. Libya’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations said today that if Qaddafi does not willingly step down “the Libyan people will get rid of him.” Two members of the Libyan Air Force have defected to Malta rather than attack protesters in Benghazi. Others may well follow, and a loss of loyalty within the army would be the end of Qaddafi’s reign.

This would indeed represent an important change from the attitude of the Libyan people during the earlier decades of Qaddafi's rule.

The regime has always wanted credit for its beneficent decrees, without accepting blame for its failure even to try to turn them into results. Libyans are aware that this represents a higher degree of hypocrisy than is common in most of the rest of the world. For a long time, they did not much love Qaddafi, but they did not hate him, either; he was in many ways irrelevant to their lives, which chugged along according to a tribal logic that had been in place long before the regime came to power. Libyans are leery of democracy; they like a strong ruler who can keep tribal rivalries from erupting. But they do not particularly like their current strong ruler.

It's not surprising to Solomon that the uprising began and has remained most incendiary in eastern Libya.

The area around Benghazi has always been the one least under Qaddafi’s thumb, and most of his problems have originated there. Qaddafi’s tribe is a desert one, and the verdant east resents his authority.

Part of Qaddafi's strategy in keeping the restive east under control has been "deflecting the anger of one enemy against another."

But it was not possible to suppress permanently the fact of his unpopularity in Benghazi; people there have always felt freer to express disapprobation of the regime than people in the western parts of the country, and they have long waited for a moment when they could act on those expressions.

Whenever the post-Qaddafi era comes, it's difficult to guess what form it will take. It's certainly possible, Solomon suggests, that the country could split apart into "several smaller countries," since "modern Libya is an artificial construct, a remnant of colonialism," and "the glue holding it together is failing." The warnings of chaos are real, he says. "The choice between chaos and oppression is always a tricky one, but this population is tired of oppression and corruption, and chaos may look more attractive to them."

However, the opposition in Libya is far less organized than in any of the other countries facing regime change. There aren't "any real opposition leaders," or "any internal opposition as we generally define it." And Libya, with all its geographical vastness, has a smaller population even than Tunisia (6 million to 10).

All the educated and competent people in Libya know one another, and most of them have worked in one way or another with the Qaddafi regime. If Qaddafi goes, there are not enough trained bureaucrats or statesmen to construct a new Libyan government that is not an extension of the old one, and this fact alone could propel Libya back into some form of tribalism. That failing, his stooges are likely to end up playing a significant part in running the show.

One thing Libya clearly has in common with the other Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa is that it's hard to imagine good outcomes -- and by "good outcomes" I mean the people seeking to overthrow the regimes that have oppressed and exploited them.

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