The 2011 Libyan Uprisings and the Struggle for the Post-Qadhafi Future

J. Pack, J. Pack

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137308092
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2011 Libyan Uprisings is a thematic investigation of how pre-existing social, regional, tribal, and religious fissures influenced the trajectory of the 2011 Libyan Uprisings and an analysis of what this means for the post-Qadhafi future.

1

CIVIL ACTIVISM AND THE ROOTS OF THE 2011 UPRISINGS

George Joffé

One of the most surprising aspects of the recent uprisings in Libya was the apparently spontaneous emergence of organized political activity inside a state where, for four decades, formal political action outside the repressive confines of Muammar Qadhafi’s Jamahiriyya (massocracy) system had simply not existed. In fact, the imposition of the Jamahiriyya so fragmented Libyan society that even informal structures, such as Libya’s complex tribal system or institutions linked to Islam, no longer appeared to provide a basis for political coherence. At the same time, however, in the wake of the crisis between Libya and the West, which began in the late 1980s, the innate contradictions within the Libyan state—given the repression inherent in the Jamahiriyya’s illusion of “direct democracy”—together with issues of succession and reconciliation with the outside world, began to generate opportunities for precursors to social movements to emerge. These were to seize their moment in early 2011 and provide the momentum needed to destroy the Qadhafi regime. This chapter seeks to uncover the ways in which this occurred after first setting the scene by discussing the political system that Muammar Qadhafi put in place after the “Great September Revolution” in 1969.

THE JAMAHIRIYYA

Superficially, modern Libya under the Jamahiriyya system would appear to have been an idiosyncratic authoritarian state, ruled by a charismatic, mercurial, and unpredictable leader, Muammar Qadhafi, who brought the contemporary state into being through a military coup on 1 September 1969. The Great September Revolution ushered in a state initially based on Nasserist Arab Nationalism which, within five years, reformulated itself as a Jamahiriyya, in which sovereignty was said to reside in the Libyan people who exercised full authority over the “stateless state” through direct popular democracy. This new Libyan state was “stateless” in the sense that its sources of legitimacy and authority were both dispersed throughout society by the principles of direct democratic action by the population over all aspects of administrative and political behavior and incarnated in the person of its leader, despite the fact that he occupied no formal function within it. This meant that impartial institutions—accountable to a legitimate sovereign authority, itself constitutionally accountable—did not exist but were simply figments of a personalized and unaccountable political imagination.¹ Its economic functioning was predicated on the modernization of Libyan society as a result of its increasing integration into and exposure to the global economy as the new state became an oil producer. This was a process that had begun under the Sanussi Monarchy that had preceded the Qadhafi regime but which, because its own power base had depended on the tribal society of rural Cyrenaica, had been incapable of retaining the support of the new social strata that had emerged from the modernization of Libya’s expanding urban society, particularly in Tripolitania.

A crucial element in the modernization process, alongside the proliferation of new institutions, such as trade unions and other civil society organizations, had been the dramatic growth in education. This progress depended on teachers brought in from Egypt and led to the popularization of the ideology of Arab Nationalism,² which in turn provided an alternative to the narrowly based religious tribalism of the monarchy.

The revolution that occurred in 1969 thus initially enjoyed massive popular support. Buoyed up by oil revenues, it enabled the new regime to experiment with its political initiatives in the first few years. Thus, as the single-party system associated with Arab Nationalism failed to retain popular support, it was gradually replaced, between 1973 and 1979, by a “popular committee” system of direct populist control. However, by 1975, as oil revenues unexpectedly declined as oil prices weakened, political opposition to the new regime began to emerge, culminating in an unsuccessful coup from within the regime seeking to end Qadhafi’s ideologically driven foreign and domestic policies. Two years later, 22 of the officers involved were executed, thus rupturing the integrity of the Union of Free Officers, which had carried through the 1969 revolution, and setting the regime at odds with the Libyan armed forces. Over the next five years, the regime became gradually more intolerant and increasingly personalized around the figure of Colonel Qadhafi and his small clique, the rijal al-khayma (Men of the Tent) drawn from the remnants of the Revolutionary Command Council which had presided over Libya’s brief experiment with Nasserist Arab Nationalism after 1969 and the Union of Free Officers who had helped him mastermind the original coup which had brought him to power.

At the same time, the economy was also subjected to revolutionary measures of allegedly populist control through the popular committee system, designed to eliminate the private sector, which caused an outflow of Libya’s commercial elite.³ By 1984, the process was essentially complete, and Libya had become gleichgeschaltet⁴ in that the allegedly populist control of political and economic life masked a profoundly intolerant, autocratic, and proto-fascist corporate system which exercised its hegemony over the economy as well. Although, on the surface, there continued to be a plethora of civil society organizations in operation, now they were all brought under rigid central control, as freedom of expression, too, was effectively suppressed, not only as a crime but also as a heresy, in the supposedly perfect system of direct popular democracy that Colonel Qadhafi had now espoused. The baleful consequences of this on the daily life of Libyans are excellently captured by Hisham Matar in his novel In the Country of Men.

This new system of direct popular democracy was supposed to be articulated through the Basic People’s Congresses (BPCs) through which the views of the population on local, national, and international policy matters were to be expressed and through which it, in theory, controlled the “popular committees” responsible for translating policy into action in the political, economic, and social spheres. Their views, incidentally, were in practice expressed through mandated delegates from the BPCs at regional congresses and then in the General People’s Congress (GPC) which acted as Libya’s parliament. It, in turn, elected the members of the General Popular Committee, Libya’s equivalent of a ministerial cabinet, which in theory formulated policy in accordance with the principles passed on to it by the GPC. This policy was then transmitted through the bureaucracy to the popular committees created by and accountable to the BPCs, thus completing the bottom-up, top-down pattern of the circulation of power that was thoroughly unique to Libya. This pattern was also, in practice, extremely time-consuming, and since in reality it ran counter to the personalized centralism of the Jamahiriyya system, it soon lost the initial support that it had enjoyed. By the start of the new century, fewer than 10 percent of the population actually exercised their supposed democratic authority over the Libyan body politic.⁵

The ideological and intellectual foundations of this novel political construct were expressed in The Green Book⁶—Colonel Qadhafi’s political testament and vehicle for his Third Universal Theory, which he proclaimed was an alternative vision to both Communism and Capitalism.⁷ Rejecting the monopoly of both capital and labor as explicatory drivers, Colonel Qadhafi argued instead that human society and the polities emerging from it were driven by nationalism and religion. His vision of nationalism was not territorially based but rather ethnic, cultural, and implicitly religious. Indeed, the Libyan leader viewed the essence of religion as strict monotheism, of which Islam was the ultimate and purest expression.⁸ As important, he believed, was the innate unicity inside the Islamic corpus. He viewed the split between Sunni and Shi’i Islam as a kind of “false consciousness.” As had been the case under the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa, he argued, the two traditions were really mirror images of each other, and he called for Libya to be the center of a second dawla Fatimiyya (Fatimid State) as a focus of the historical integrated Arab homeland that formed the core of his political vision, despite—or perhaps because of—his endorsement of a united Africa at the end of the twentieth century.⁹

The Colonel’s concept of a new universal theory first emerged in June 1973, just two months after the “people’s authority,” the guiding principle behind the direct popular democracy that characterized the Jamahiriyya, was proclaimed. As Ronald Bruce St John has pointed out, it marked “the end of the ideological beginning” of postrevolutionary Libya.¹⁰ Such ideas formed the basis of the formal Libyan political experience and the practice of the Libyan stateless state. Since, in the Colonel’s eyes, it represented, in essence, the ideal solution to the problem of representation, dissent from such an ideal, even in the form of oppositional political movements or currents, would be a kind of heresy that inherently called for the elimination of such dissenters.¹¹

In reality, of course, the Libyan state did not operate in accordance with its proclaimed ideal as defined so far in this chapter. In practice, after 1973, Colonel Qadhafi, although he had no formal role within the state, controlled all aspects of Libyan policy, delegating its execution to trusted colleagues.¹² This intense personalization of the policy process meant that it was inevitably arbitrary in nature and practice, for the Colonel relied on a small circle of advisers, the rijal al-khayma, which had administered the new revolutionary state in the first five years of its existence after the Sanussi Monarchy had been overthrown. Other agents were drawn from the Colonel’s own immediate and, on occasion, extended family. The formal administrative structure of the Libyan state thus merely served as a vehicle for executing the policies that emerged from this informal central core—effectively a court around the “Guide of the Revolution.”

Needless to say, the Libyan people themselves soon tired of the institutional paraphernalia of the “stateless state” through which they were supposed to practice direct popular democracy. It has been estimated that less than 10 percent of them ever bothered to participate in the BPCs. Mabroka Al-Werfalli established that, in Benghazi, participation in the congresses fell from a high of 70 percent in 1989, having been between 60 and 70 percent in preceding years, to a low of 10 percent in 1997.¹³ The Qadhafi regime had realized early on that the BPC system might produce results it did not want, so it created a new institution in 1979 designed to galvanize both the original revolution and the political system to which it had given birth: the Revolutionary Committees Movement (harakat al-lijnat al-thawra).¹⁴ This movement, unlike the Libyan state and its institutions, came directly under the control of Colonel Qadhafi and his close collaborators and remained so until the end of the Qadhafi regime.¹⁵ In addition to its role as a mechanism for threatening the population through repression and its use of arbitrary “people’s tribunals,” it also served as an institution for galvanizing the political system. Its militants, as a result, were inserted into the formal political system as agitators, both to activate the system and to ensure that its outcomes corresponded with the intentions of the leadership.¹⁶

The most important feature of this new initiative was the nature of its militant cadres. Ostensibly they re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The Center and the Periphery
• Chapter 1   Civil Activism and the Roots of the 2011 Uprisings
• Chapter 2   Dynamics of Continuity and Change
• Chapter 3   The Post-Qadhafi Economy
• Chapter 4   The Role of Outside Actors
• Chapter 5   The Rise of Tribal Politics
• Chapter 6   The South
• Chapter 7   Islamists
• Afterword   Libya: A Journey from Extraordinary to Ordinary
• Index