Exit the Colonel (9 page)

Life imitated art, and relations swiftly deteriorated. In 1977, the Pentagon put Libya on a list of potential US enemies. Two years later, the embassy chancery in Tripoli was attacked and burned by an angry Libyan mob.
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American Chargé William Eagleton departed shortly thereafter. In May 1980, President Reagan pulled all remaining US officials from Libya and called for US oil companies to repatriate their employees.
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Diplomatic ties were officially severed in 1981. The following year, Reagan banned imports of Libyan oil to the US and blocked all exports from the US except for food and medicine. This included, notably, eight Lockheed C130 transports and two Boeing 727-400s purchased by Libya in the early 1970s.

Yet in spite of all the recriminations and theatrics, the US and Libya were tied to each other by common economic interests that neither was willing to forgo. For the Libyans, American technology and expertise (particularly in the oil sector) were virtually irreplaceable. The US found Libyan high-quality, sweet crude an attractive alternative to politically risky, lower-quality oil from the Persian Gulf. US imports from Libya rose from $216 million in 1973 to $2.2 billion in 1976. In 1977, the US was Libya's largest trade partner, running a $3.5 billion trade deficit with the Libyans. In short, according to Ronald Bruce St. John,

Within fifteen years of Gaddafi's coup, Libya had morphed into a full-blown totalitarian state. The experimental period of incremental social improvement had come to an end, and now Gaddafi's monopoly over power was
secured more through fear than patronage. Some Libyans who lived through this period described it as the point at which Gaddafi had given up on his people and declared war on them.

The fabric of Libyan society was beginning to strain under Gaddafi's repression and paranoia. Rifts were widening between those who were members of the Revolutionary Committees and those who weren't. Gaddafi's influence was becoming increasingly pervasive, reaching into homes and families, as the committees recruited ordinary people to spy on their relatives. Anecdotally, by the mid-1980s, an estimated 10 percent of the population had been incorporated through the Revolutionary Committees into a web of informants that frequently spied and reported on family members and each other.

Cracking down on his own people was not enough. Libyans abroad became targets as well. In 1980, Gaddafi launched the infamous “stray dogs campaign,” designed to neutralize and make an example of dissident expatriates. This move was analogous to, and perhaps inspired by, the efforts of Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini to hunt down former senior officials in the Shah's service. Gaddafi's agents shot influential Libyan dissident Abdel Jalil Aref in a Roman café. Muhammed Mustafa Ramadan, an announcer with the Voice of London, was gunned down after leaving a mosque after Friday prayers. Others were assassinated in Athens, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Gaddafi's aim was to prove that he could get to the opposition members, wherever they were.
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Yet this wave of state-supported terror was instrumental in the formation of what became one of the longest-lived opposition movements, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, created by Mohammed Megaryaf in October 1981.

At home, Gaddafi set about systematically destroying each and every possible competing source and symbol of power, whether secular or religious. In 1980, he ordered the leveling of the mosque of Sidi H'mouda, which he said was a base for the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaddafi likewise ordered destroyed a statue of Septimius Severus that stood at a corner of Green Square. This priceless antiquity had previously been pilfered from the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna. Now it fell victim to Gaddafi's desire to eradicate the competing influence of a long-dead empire. To make room for new objects, he ordered obliterated multiple structures of cultural and religious heritage in Tripoli.
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Gaddafi closed down all theaters and music houses in 1984, declaring the Cinema Qureena/Teatro Municipale in Maidan Al Shajara (Tree Square) “incompatible with the ideology
of the Cultural Revolution and the revolutionary spirit.” The structure had retained a strong association with Italian influence since Mussolini had inaugurated it in the early 1930s. Once shuttered, the building soon was destroyed by arsonists.
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Gaddafi's obsession with extirpating any possible conflicting source of authority or observation was reflected in the state of Libyan arts: writer Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih has remarked that Libya under Gaddafi was one of the few dictatorial regimes to maintain a government unit specifically dedicated to repressing innovation and artistic creation in all forms. Gaddafi thought these activities encouraged “star power” that might detract from his monopoly on public adulation or create alternative social networks.
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The atmosphere that resulted from such crackdowns was vividly evoked in Libyan novelist Hisham Mattar's
In the Country of Men
. Mattar described systematic tortures and disappearances, gruesome scenes in which suspected traitors were hung in public squares and on university campuses. Libyan poet Khaled Mattawa, in a similar vein, likened Libya during this period to “a helpless teenage girl forced into marriage hoping her groom would be kind.”
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Gaddafi's domestic policies reversed much of the social good from the previous decade. In a critical blow to Libyan education, in 1980 education minister Ahmed Ibrahim outlawed teaching in English or any language other than Arabic.
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This act was later cited as a principal factor in the creation of a lost generation of Libyans unable to communicate with the outside world.
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Ali Omar Eumes, a Libyan artist based in London, recalled that the breaking point was in 1981: “I know many individuals then, some who could have been international movers and shakers in art, literature and culture if they had the right opportunities.”
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In the end, unremitting brutality proved to be inadequate to the task of ruling Libya. Faced with low oil revenues, resulting from falling prices of international crude, on which his patronage structure depended, and a restive population, Gaddafi intuited that he would have to add new, more conciliatory tools to his dictatorial arsenal. He reached out to various opposition figures in 1987 and, for the first time, freed many political prisoners in March 1988. He employed this “half-hearted” reconciliation tactic repeatedly in coming years.

In June 1988, the regime went so far as to announce another supreme red herring, something Gaddafi called the Green Charter of Human Rights, though its main purpose appeared to be to denounce the use of Islam
for partisan or political ends, jabbing once again at the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1987, he initiated a limited consumer
infitah
, or economic opening, the first of a series of periodic measures designed to placate the masses with creature comforts: small-scale joint stock companies called
tasharukiyyat
, which facilitated the import of foreign foodstuffs, appliances, and so on. A large fraction of the goods were defective or adulterated, as Libya had no effective means of monitoring or testing the imports.

As the end of Gaddafi's brutal years drew near, Libya's course would be reshaped by an act of international terror, much more than by any of his domestic pivots.

Gaddafi's gravest single offense against American interests was the December 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Two hundred seventy people were killed aboard the plane, and eleven on the ground. This one event would, directly or indirectly, tie into almost every significant movement in the West's relationship with Libya for the next two decades. Arguably, it also constituted the beginning of the end for Gaddafi himself.

The Lockerbie bombing was not the last of its kind. Less than a year later, Libyan agents detonated a bomb aboard a French UTA DC-10 over Niger's Ténéré desert, killing 170. Though no less barbaric, this act of terror received far less attention than Lockerbie. The French had less international political clout and appeared far less willing to pick a fight with Gaddafi, lest they be put at a disadvantage in the inevitable (and already ongoing) scramble for Libyan resources.

Descriptions of the Lockerbie (and UTA) investigations elicit more questions than answers. Sonia Popovich, then vice president of the organization Victims of Lockerbie, said in a 1999 interview, “The more I have learned of this case, the less I do understand of it.”
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Gaddafi never admitted personal responsibility for any aspect of the bombing, though at times he came close. In an interview with Milton Viorst in early 1999, he remarked, “Whether we were responsible for bringing down the French plane [UTA 772] will be decided by a French court. We don't say anything about it. The same is true of Lockerbie. I can't answer as to whether Libya was responsible. Let's let the court decide.”
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During the weeks and months following the destruction of Pan Am 103, Libya was not thought to be responsible. Suspicion instead fell, as it would for the UTA bombing, on Syria and Iran. Iran had the most pressing motive. Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini had only recently vowed to “retaliate to the maximum” after American cruiser
U.S.S. Vincennes
mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger plane near Bandar Abbas, killing two hundred ninety pilgrims. Likewise, the West German police had recently broken up a cell plotting the destruction of a US airliner departing from Europe. Investigators tied this cell to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP–GC), which was known to have deep ties to Syria and Iran.

Not until 1990 did Libya emerge as a serious suspect, largely due to the testimony of a Maltese shop owner who had identified Libyan agent Abdelbasset al Megrahi from a set of photos as the man to whom he sold clothing later found at the crash site. This break in the case was bolstered by the discovery, also at the crash site, of a piece of a detonator that investigators were able to tie to bomb-making materials seized in West Africa from Libyan agents.

Even so, not all were swayed by the evidence of Libya's involvement. Pierre Péan, an investigative journalist, argued in his 2001 book on the UTA bombing,
Manipulations Africaines
(
African Manipulations
), that Libya was “framed” (albeit perhaps with Libya's tacit consent and even participation) by the West to avoid inflaming the real suspects, Iran and Syria. Syria at the time was a key member of the anti-Iraq coalition formed by George H. W. Bush, and vital to Israeli-Palestinian talks. Convincingly tying Gaddafi to the Lockerbie bombing would avoid disrupting those shaky alliances, while also serving the US goal of further isolating the Libyan regime. The US State Department took grave offense at various suggestions that it had “steered” the Lockerbie investigation toward Libya.

Gaddafi certainly had plausible motive for both crimes. The Pan Am bombing could have been revenge for President Ronald Reagan's attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986; the UTA bombing, retribution against the French for foiling Libyan ambitions in neighboring Chad.
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Nevertheless, explanations remained elusive. Just as the firm Libyan imprint on UTA circumstantially seemed to bolster the case for Libya's culpability for Lockerbie, the continuing whiff of Syrian-extremist-Palestinian involvement in UTA continued to implicate them with respect to Lockerbie. In interviews after the 2011 revolution, former Libyan
Foreign Minister Abdelrahman Shalgam alleged Palestinian extremist collusion in Lockerbie.

These complexities aside, two years after the Lockerbie bombing, Libya had become the prime suspect. In November 1991, the US and Scotland indicted two Libyan agents, Abdelbasset al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhima, for the crime. In 1992, the UN passed Resolutions 731 and 748, which together instructed Libya to comply with a series of requests for information concerning Fhima and Megrahi, support investigations into the Lockerbie and UTA bombings, take responsibility for its actions with respect to the two events, remit the two suspects and cease support for international terrorist organizations. When Gaddafi failed to comply, the UN levied comprehensive sanctions against Libya in 1992.

Gaddafi's adventurous and enormously provocative foreign policies had the effect of drawing condemnation and opprobrium from the outside and increasing a sense of crisis and despair internally, as Libyans feared for their economic future and, frequently, their lives. For many of Gaddafi's advisers, the perquisites of access to the Leader had long ceased to be sufficient compensation for the hardships that accompanied association with a pariah state. All manner of Libyans were at a loss to see how the country could continue on this path without some disaster ensuing, whether in the form of sustained deprivation or war.

As would happen so frequently in modern Libyan history, senior members of Gaddafi's inner circle grasped the severity of Libya's position some time before Gaddafi himself did. Presumably those who had a hand in the planning of Lockerbie and UTA understood that the target countries would see the attacks as declarations of war. This was a dangerous course of action, especially at a time when Libya's resources and domestic support were declining.
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Something had to be done. The policies of the 1980s were yielding paltry returns. It was time for drastic measures. If there was one person within the Libyan establishment who could speak with any degree of parity with Gaddafi, it was his former RCC partner, ex-Prime Minister Abdelsalam Al Jelloud. Sometime between 1990 and 1992, Jelloud apparently decided to nudge Gaddafi to do something about the spiral into which he saw Libya falling.
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If the dedication to his autobiography, published in 1994, is any indication, former Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa Ben Halim seemed to
think that Jelloud might have been right, or that the sanctions would have had a quicker effect than they did in reality: