Follow The Leader
Former 'mad dog' Muammar Qadhafi is taking Libya in a surprising new direction
Few Libyans believe--or want to admit--that their government was complicit in the terror over Lockerbie or elsewhere. Ghanem told the BBC this year that he couldn't serve as prime minister if he really thought Libya had downed Pan Am 103. His government was later pressured to repudiate his remarks, though his views are routine here. "In general, people think we are not guilty," explains Mohamed Lutfi Farhat, a former planning minister who is the president of Al-Fateh University in Tripoli. "I myself cannot believe it." Ghanem, says a western diplomat, has argued privately that with sanctions costing Libya perhaps $8 billion annually, the $2.7 billion Lockerbie settlement was a good deal if it bought peace. "This is their approach," says the diplomat. "They don't even admit there are car accidents in Libya. They are not repenters." But actions matter more than motives, says a senior State Department official. "So what? We're not going to be blown up by a Libyan bomb. Qadhafi's heart I could care less about," he says.
Libya under Qadhafi has been a country unusually preoccupied with ideology. He fancies himself a philosopher with a grand political vision. In his Green Book, Qadhafi lays out a "Third Universal Theory" --an odd stew of socialism, Arab nationalism, and populism--that envisions a stateless world run by liberated masses. Now that he has turned away from liberation struggles, you can almost hear the ideological gears grinding out reinterpretations. Miloud Mehadbi, director of foreign relations at Tripoli's World Center for the Studies and Researches of the Green Book, concedes that Libyans have "a feeling of failure in some areas." But the failures, he quickly adds, stem from "good ideas applied badly." Qadhafi, says Abdulgader Elkhair, the minister of economy and trade, never ordered the near eradication of private enterprise, which was the case until the late 1990s. Instead, officials mistook the Green Book 's teachings for "tools and not goals." The state-owned firms, he says, "are not efficiently run. . . . We cannot continue with these losses, with this drain." Now, the policy chatter in Tripoli sounds like the standard World Bank/IMF playbook: tax cuts, tax holidays, exemptions from customs duties, privatization, a stock market, and incentives for foreign trade, investment, and technology transfer. In Greenspeak, privatization is the "enlargement of people's ownership," a reform in "people's capitalism."
By any name, the implication is that Qadhafi did just fine but was badly served. In fact, Libya's staggering economy seems to be the central reason for Qadhafi's shift. With unemployment around 25 percent (higher for the burgeoning youth population), a decaying infrastructure, rubble-strewn neighborhoods, and oil production sliced in half since the Americans left, Libya is hurting. Its oil and gas riches combined with a sparse population of 5.8 million should make this desert nation comparatively rich. Aside from certain neighborhoods in Tripoli and Benghazi, it does not feel that way. A western diplomat warns of growing tensions: "There is steam in the kettle."
Opening up ... to a point
Tripoli has many of the trappings of a freewheeling society. Satellite television dishes sprout from roofs and balconies. Friends has been popular. Mobile phones are common, and Libyans have cheap access to the Internet. At the Dakar Internet Cafe, where the rock band Nirvana is blasting from speakers, 20- and 30-somethings occupy most of the 36 computer terminals. They pay one dinar, about 75 cents, an hour to surf the Web.
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