Exit the Colonel (26 page)

The WMD-terror deal was perhaps the weakest link in terms of enforcing anything, as cooperation effectively turned the US and Western intelligence agencies into collaborators with Gaddafi in the repression of his own people. In this context, any possible good that could have been done, in terms of sustainable reform, was all but stillborn. As Saif Al Islam discovered—again, in the absence of a clear reading of his intentions—in this atmosphere and without his father's precommitments to the West, he would be practically toothless. Further, lack of precommitment enabled those who wished to see Saif 's efforts buried—Mu'tassim, and Ahmed Ibrahim, to name two—to fight back. Yet for all of Gaddafi's masterful manipulations and talk of a new Libya, the irony was that there were serious fissures in the asphalt with which Gaddafi's Libya had been repaved.

CHAPTER 7

Cracks Apparent

T
hat a certain buckling of the Libyan social fabric took place within the first years of the rapprochement is no accident, for one of the promises Gaddafi made to his Western interlocutors was the appearance of progress, which meant loosening the reins in key areas of interest—economic reform, press freedoms, human rights, and so on—just enough to suggest good faith, but not irreversible empowerment of the people. Further, while the reform narrative sold well outside Libya, large constituencies simply did not believe anything that came from the regime and were furthermore suffering from both the cumulative effects of Gaddafi's repression and some particularly deep wounds. As far as those in eastern Libya, for example, were concerned, there would be no redemption for Gaddafi, or his clan. For those who participated in Gaddafi's crackdowns as implementers, enforcers, or direct beneficiaries, the new openness posed serious uncertainties and threats. What does a professional thug do once the mafia don has decided to turn state's evidence? In 2005–2006, the magnitude of the challenge was perhaps just starting to become clear to Gaddafi. How could he accommodate his victims and his collaborators after years of mistreatment and mutual dependence, respectively? While Gaddafi tried, largely through the offices of Saif Al Islam, to reach out, for many it was just too late.

One of Gaddafi's most unforgivable acts, and most galvanizing event in the history of the Libyan resistance to Gaddafi was the Abu Selim massacre, which took place in an eponymous prison in Tripoli on June 29, 1996, in which more than 1,250 prisoners were killed in about two hours. Many of the Abu Selim victims had been imprisoned since 1989, or 1995, when more mass arrests took place, and were predominantly from the eastern population centers of Benghazi, Al Beida, and Derna. The killing of so many individuals was destined to galvanize public opinion in a region in which everyone knows everyone else.

The proximate spark of the killings was a protest against poor living conditions. The disturbance turned into a near revolt in which the prisoners allegedly took two guards hostage (one died of unknown causes). Guards shot at the prisoners, killing six of them and injuring many more. Gaddafi's Head of internal security, Abdullah Senussi, arrived on the night of June 28 to hear prisoners' demands, which included an end to torture, better medical care, family visits, and more time in open-air quarters.
¹
Human Rights Watch interviewed several former prisoners and one guard, all of whom claimed to have been in the prison at the time of the massacre, Senussi assented, and 120 sick prisoners were taken away that night (they were never seen again, and presumed shot).
²
The following morning, men with machine guns systematically exterminated most of the inmates, in an operation that took two hours and five minutes and left few witnesses.
³

Rumors concerning what had happened took some time to percolate through the region. Families continued to apply for visits and to deliver care packages for years after, ignorant of the fate of their loved ones. Sometime in 2002, the regime decided that its interests would be better served by releasing information piecemeal, in the process trying to buy out families with blood money. This was the same strategy Gaddafi had used in other major cases that involved large groups of family claimants, whether Lockerbie or the Bulgarian nurses case (the nurses, the doctor, and the victims and their families). In 2002, one Abu Selim family received a death certificate; others were sent in batches over the following years. Thus began a process whereby the families, certainly those based in eastern Libya, began to form networks both to support one another and to coordinate protests. By 2007, Abu Selim families in Benghazi were holding protests each Saturday. In particular, Fathi Terbil, a Benghazi-based lawyer whose three
relatives had been killed in the massacre, emerged as a prominent advocate for the families.

Survivors' accounts of life in Abu Selim appeared in force after the 2011 uprising. One described the prison after the 1996 massacre: “The area of Bu Sleem [sic] prison was surrounded by high walls, ringed with armed wire. Garbage surrounding it on all sides, and from within poured the stench of corpses.”
⁴
Along with second-hand stories of the massacre itself, there were accounts of multiple-year detentions in solitary confinement and medical neglect. Mohammed Al Mujarib, a former inmate, said that once he had arrived at Abu Selim, “life as I knew it ended.”
⁵

In the two years after Libya's reopening, between 2004 and 2006, Internet usage in Libya grew from practically nothing to about 20 percent penetration. Informal estimates in 2006 suggested there were about twenty thousand to forty thousand Internet users in Tripoli, of a population of two million. While, again, reliable statistics are unavailable, Internet usage was clearly growing at a very fast clip, facilitated by increasing points of access—Internet cafés—direct satellite access, and interest in social networking sites, Facebook first among them. In these early days of the Internet in Libya, Libyan government censorship was still somewhat primitive, and illicit satellite hookups allowed those with influence to bypass censors entirely.

Around 2004, Libyan exiles began to set up opposition sites, which IT-savvy Libyans were able to access without much difficulty. As the postrevolutionary magazine
Al Libii
(
The Libyan
) reported in spring 2011, “since sanctions were lifted in 2004, a handful of UK-based websites set up by Libyans who fled their country in the 1970s are playing a much greater role in fostering awareness of domestic politics in Libya.” Some of the sites offered the “straight dope” on political and economic developments in Libya; others were directed at rallying opposition to the regime.
Libya Al-Yowm
(
Libya Today
) was one of the former.
Akhbar Libya
, by the Libya Human and Political Development Forum (LHPDF), mixed opinion with targeted information campaigns, some of which aimed to expose specific Libyan officials for corruption. One such campaign succeeded in ousting the head of Al Fateh University in Tripoli, after it published evidence of her “illicit practices.”
⁶
Opposition political parties, such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), maintained websites that facilitated
contact with members who were sympathizers within Libya. Also notably, a few scant blogs appeared from within Libya; one in English—libyans .
blogspot.com
—whose members posted from Tripoli. When using exile sites or other forms of Internet posting, either within or outside Libya, many Libyans wrote using pseudonyms.

Meanwhile, violent uprisings continued to ignite. On February 17 and 18, 2006, crowds of angry youth in Benghazi launched a two-night rampage. The events began as a government-organized protest against the wearing of a T-shirt by Italian reforms minister Roberto Calderoli that depicted the Danish cartoons published the previous September, which many Muslims had found offensive to Islam.
⁷
Eleven people were killed in the events and scores wounded; the Italian consulate was gutted, but more significantly, the protestors quickly turned against obvious manifestations of regime control, including the offices of the Social Security Fund, which owned most of the real estate in eastern Libya. Violent protests moved to Sebha in the south the following day.

The 2006 riots were far from isolated. When juxtaposed against the 1993 coup attempt, the soccer wars of the late 1990s, and the 2000 lynchings-cum-riot in Zawiya, we can discern a growing pressure-cooker atmosphere in which popular discontent increasingly manifested itself in large-scale acts of public disobedience.

Though the regime continued to fight violence with violence, it attempted to use some of the tools from its reformist arsenal as well. From 2009 to 2010 the regime released several groups of high-profile “Islamist” prisoners (there were 946 in all, largely emptying out the Abu Selim prison, which, the regime announced, would be closed). The release was spearheaded by—who else?—Saif Al Islam, assisted by Sheikh Ali Sallabi, a Libyan Muslim cleric whom Gaddafi had also imprisoned in Abu Selim and who was an associate of Yusuf Qaradawi,
⁸
as part of a dialogue and reconciliation initiative.
⁹
In March 2010, the regime released 214 prisoners. Thirty-four among them were from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), including three of its senior members: Abdelhakim Belhaj, de facto leader of the group and one of the American “rendees,” who would become a notable figure in the forthcoming rebellion; Khaled Charif, head of military operations; and Sami Al Saadi, an ideologue. Many of these released prisoners assumed leadership or fighting roles in the 2012 uprising.

Saif Al Islam announced additional prisoner releases on September 1, 2010, including that of an ex-Guantanamo detainee, Abu Sofiyan Bin
Qummu, another person rendered by the Americans for interrogation in 2007. These releases were typically preceded by debates organized within Libyan prisons between representatives of the regime and young Islamic militants, including veterans of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia conflicts, who the regime felt were inclined to jihadist or neo-jihadist thinking.
¹⁰
In April 2009, Colonel Kama El Dib described to representatives of Human Rights Watch a series of training programs he ran at the General People's Committee for Public Security in 2004. He claimed that up to sixty thousand Libyan officers had been trained in this context in “human rights concepts, nondiscrimination, security and legitimacy, the torture convention, how the policy should deal with citizens, and the Great Green Charter on Human Rights.” Human Rights Watch said that while it could not evaluate the impact of these measures, it felt it was important to be as encouraging as possible.
¹¹
Even so, not much had changed.

For all the steps forward, there were (or appeared to be) steps backward. In March 2006, Shukri Ghanem was sacked as prime minister and replaced by a known opponent of the reform process of which Ghanem had been a prominent symbol, Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi. Ghanem was made the head of the National Oil Company, replacing Mohammed Al Badri, another technocrat with a strong reputation for competence. Given Ghanem's expertise in oil and experience as former senior OPEC administrator, the shuffle gave outsiders the feeling that higher-level reforms might be in danger, but that the focus on attracting foreign oil investment might continue at an even greater clip.

Two thousand seven was the year Saif appeared to have been anointed, if not by any formal paternal dispensation, then in the absence of strong objection by the Leader, as Libya's primary reform icon. In a speech on August 20 (CK) entitled “Libya—Truth for All,” Saif announced his plan to draft a new Libyan constitution, and launched two new newspapers
Oea
and
Quryna
, and, a TV station called Al Wasat (The Middle), and a radio station. This public address would become an annual event, sponsored by the Libyan Youth Association, and the venue for all significant announcements related to Saif 's reform platform, which he styled “Libya Al Ghad (Libya Tomorrow).”

Linked to the question of a constitution and the rights of minority groups in Libya was the contentious issue of Libya's Berbers. In 2007, the regime, through Saif, for the first time reached out to the Berber communities, whose demands for linguistic and cultural recognition Gaddafi had long ignored. (Berbers and mixed Berber-Arabs are variously estimated at 5 percent to 20 percent of the population, and are heavily concentrated in communities like Yefren and Gharyan, in western Jebel Nafusa. The Yefren rebellion was ultimately critical to the formation of a western front against Gaddafi in the post-February 2011 hostilities.)

As part of the “rapprochement within a rapprochement” in 2007, Gaddafi hosted a session of the international Imazighen (Berber) Congress to discuss “education and social integration of Berber communities” in Libya, and subsequently allowed limited expression of Berber culture in country, notably via a website called
Tawalt
(
Word
), which rapidly became a hub for information on Libyan Berber language and heritage, as well as related discussion groups.
¹²
Members of the Berber community hoped that these new overtures, including visits to Berber communities by both Saif and Prime Minister Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi, might lead to an explicit mention of “protected cultural rights” within Saif 's proposed new constitution. This would be in stark contrast to Gaddafi's statements in the
1969 Constitutional Declaration
and
1977 Declaration of the Establishment of the Authority of the People
, which insisted on the “absolute” Arab and Arabic character of Libya.
¹³
Yet Berber hopes were swiftly dashed. In December 2008, the regime (and, allegedly, members of Saif 's Libya Al Ghad) organized at least one sizable and menacing anti-Berber protest in Yefren.
Tawalt
was off line by February.