There was a more sinister side to Libyan politics
though it only affected us indirectly
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
The first of September 1969 saw a young army communications officer and a band of like minded officers take over the reins of power in a relatively bloodless coup. This had a marked effect on the lives of all Libyans from that date on. All strata’s of society were affected, though in different ways. Colonel Ghaddafi became the countries leader, taking the place of the deposed king. He formed a Revolutionary Council Committee, (R.C.C.), composed mainly of his coup compatriots and proceeded to govern the country.
Prior or to the coup the country was a constitutional monarchy with strong connections to the West. It was an open economy with easy access, it was a good tourist destination because there is plenty to see and experience in scenery and more especially antiquities. After the coup all this changed. Libya became difficult to enter, tourism was discouraged, alcohol was forbidden, and travel to Europe and the rest of the world became almost impossible.
A certain amount of experimentation went on to try and organise the internal politics, none were very successful due to various things, not the least being the strong tribal affiliations in different parts of the country. Eventually the R.C.C. became the top tier of a series of committees called the Arab Socialist Union, the A.S.U.
The idea was that decisions or suggestions came from the bottom (the people) and went upwards to the top. This gave the impression that the people were making the decisions on the running of the country. Actually the people were totally isolated from the top two or three tiers.
This was more or less the situation when we arrived. Though things were to change again during our time there.
There was still some internal unrest in the form of strikes and demonstrations and perhaps to combat this the A.R.U. set up a "Cultural Revolution". An idea of what this meant can be seen in the following five point programme given in a speech from Ghaddafi in 1973
1. All existing laws must be repealed and re-placed by revolutionary enactments designed to produce the necessary revolutionary change
2. The weeding out of all weak minds from society by taking appropriate measures towards perverts and deviationists.
3. The staging of an administrative revolution in order to eliminate all forms of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy.
4. The setting up of popular committees whereby the people might begin to seize power. This was meant to ensure freedom for the people with regard to bureaucrats and opportunists.
5. The staging of a Cultural Revolution to eliminate all poisonous imported ideas, and fuse together the people's genuine moral and material potentialities.
Although the other items are bad enough, it was items 3 and 4 that had a marked effect on how the general day-to-day business of the country took place.
Initially the student’s movements set up these popular committees. The first was in the law faculty at Benghazi University but very soon popular committees had proliferated throughout schools and colleges. These committees vetted the political correctness of the staff and the courses; they even revised curricula and censored politically dubious textbooks.
Other popular committees soon formed, local government suffered, large firms and businesses likewise. A good story, which may be an urban myth but could well be true, went the rounds of the expatriates. One of the large car importing firms popular committee, fired or demoted the senior staff and took over the running of the business. Things went well as stock was rapidly sold off, but no one had the ability to arrange new supplies. A new popular committee was hastily organised senior staff reinstated and the day was saved.
Not every case was a disaster, in some organisations no popular committees formed and they just carried on, in other cases, including those of the airport sections, where I worked, the popular committees showed some sense, and limited their actions to more immediate work related situations. More or less a union. Even so, if someone ran foul of a committee, no matter what his position, that could be the end of his job.
It was not till I understood some of this, that I then understood a few of the puzzling things that happened from day to day. People I would be working with happily organising things would suddenly disappear and someone else would take his place. Maybe in a week or months time the reverse would happen. All very confusing but you got used to it.
I think it was something along these lines that caused the downfall of the German chap I lived next door to I mentioned earlier. I suspect a popular committee took over the Libyan side of the contract and caused so many problems that the whole enterprise collapsed.
I must say that some good things that happened at work were probably due to a popular committee decision. One was the supply of a new air-conditioned Porta-Cabin, complete with offices, for my use. The other was the provision of a brand new car for my work use. Both of these items came out of the blue as it were, I had not asked for them but they certainly made life easier.
So this was the political situation when we first arrived in Benghazi. Colonel Ghaddafi at the top, the RCC under him and a series of committees descending to the popular committees at the bottom.
What I have written above is a broad outline of a very complex Governmental organisation. I have not mentioned the effect of the secret police whom everyone, expatriates and Libyans alike blamed for just about everything that happened. Probably with some justification. The fact that Civil laws were inextricably intertwined with Islamic law affected everyones daily lives. Bureaucracy was taken to the ultimate degree, there was not all that much work for the general population so the civil Service provided jobs more or less for any one who wanted one.
There was no real poverty and as far as we could tell very little crime. The average citizen had it pretty good. For instance loans were easy to come by, and as the Islamic religion forbids usury the only interest charged was a minimal 1% or so to cover costs.
So beneficial was the loan system for home ownership that it led to an odd situation. On the way to work I sometimes went through a new housing development. Many of the newly built houses were of two or three storeys, and many of these had the top storey unfinished. It was evident that people were living in the bottom storeys and had been for some time. I asked about this and the explanation was simple. When someone took out a loan to build a house, the contract stated that he did not have to repay the loan till the house was completed. There were houses in Benghazi that had been unfinished for years and probably never would be finished.
There was a more sinister side to Libyan politics though it only affected us indirectly. We hadn’t been there long when an explosion rocked the harbour and took out a few windows of the Omar Khayam hotel. (One of which was Edwin de Courcys) What the reason for the blast was no one knew, but was tied in with some student unrest at the time. The upshot of all this was six students were tried and executed, and as a warning to the general public their bodies were strung up in the courtyard of what was once the Catholic cathedral. They were there for a couple of days and provided such a shock for a newly arrived American woman that she was on the first available flight home.
Toward the end of our stay new edicts from the revolutionary council began to affect the more wealthy Libyans, some of whom we knew. In a bid to stop wealth accumulating in individual hands and more importantly to stop it being sent off shore, purges were enacted. People disappeared, some of whom we knew, (Pete Corners landlord was one) trials were held, and in fact were televised. There is no doubt that in the name of peoples power some tragic events took place.
A year into our stay and Libya is getting more and more offside with Syria and Egypt, Syria doesn’t affect us much, but Egypt was a different matter. Gamel Abdel Nasser while he was president of Egypt had been Ghaddafi’s hero. Nasser had overthrown Egypt’s ruler King Farouk and soon after had taken the reins of power. Nasser had fought Israel, Nasser had nationalized the Suez canel, and built the Aswan dam. Nasser wanted to unite all the Arab states.
All of this was great stuff for the young Colonel, and when he assumed power in 1969 he wasted no time in throwing in his lot with Egypt. Consequently tens of thousands of Egyptian workers came to Libya and over the years took over many relatively important positions. School teachers, university lecturers, pharmacists, doctors, company executives, shopkeepers, and last but not least, airport technicians.
Anwar Sadat took over the presidency of Egypt and right from the start relations deteriorated between the two countries. Sadat made a peace of sorts with Israel which really upset Ghaddifi and this brought on the 1977 confrontation.
I was completely out of the loop of course and didn’t have a clue as to what was happening, nor for that matter did any of the Libyans I worked with except possibly Abdulrahim.
The first inkling I had that something was happening was Abdulrahim telling me that for the time being there were to be no visits to Gamel Abdel Nasser or Kufra airports. He didn’t say why and I didn’t push it. Next there came a directive that the Egyptian technicians were not allowed to work unsupervised on any equipment, this was closely followed by an order confining the Egyptians to the control tower.
It was a bit odd in that they could go home at the end of the day and come to work next day, but while at work they had to stay in the base of the tower.
I talked to them a few times but they were as much in the dark as we were, but I know that they were very worried as to what was going to happen to them.
Then the blow fell, all the techs were to return to Egypt, they were given a few days to pack up and go. Although this was a blow to me as they were a valuable part of the maintenance system, it was a much greater blow to them as many had been in Libya for years and had there families with them. Now they faced an uncertain future back in Egypt.
It was very sudden, one day we had a fairly good technical staff and the next we had only me and a small group of largely untrained Libyans. The expulsion of the Egyptians was only the forerunner of what was to come, I imagine the Egyptian technicians were singled out because of the sensitive nature of their work. If it came to a firefight with Egypt an unfriendly airport technician could do a lot of subtle damage to airport equipment.
Then came the final order, all people of Egyptian nationality in Libya were to return to Egypt. They were not given much time, and this caused the most tremendous overloads on all transport systems.
There were three ways for these thousands of people to get to Egypt, by sea, by land, and by air. Going by sea was probably the best option as there was a good chance a family could stay together and take their goods with them. I heard however that there were few passenger boats plying between the two countries. These were soon booked up.
Those electing to travel by road, had to take their worldly goods with them, few of the Egyptians had cars so it meant hiring a taxi for the job. A taxi from Tripoli to Egypt meant a journey of 1500 kilometers, but hundreds maybe thousands of people chose this method. Perhaps it was their only option.
I know that if you drove on the Tripoli road, which passed through Benghazi, you would see these taxis, grossly overloaded labouring there way toward the Egyptian border. When I say overloaded, I mean overloaded, they were crammed with people and they invariably had roof racks which were stacked high with whatever goods the owners thought necessary to take with them back to Egypt.
I heard that the border was a shambles, the taxi could not go into Egypt so dropped off their passengers and goods and returned to wherever they started from. The evicted people had to then make their way to wherever they were going to in Egypt. The whole thing must have been a nightmare.
Going by air was not much better, there were no direct flights to Egypt from Libya, anyone traveling had to make a connection at one of the major airports in the Mediterranean region, such as Rome or Athens or Malta.
At Benghazi no extra flights were put on and for a while the airport terminal became very busy whenever an International flight departed. People arrived for their flight bringing with them huge amounts of goods that they hoped to take with them. These were mostly consumer type goods, TV’s, radios, household appliances. Unfortunately for their owners there was no room in the aircrafts cargo hold for this amount of freight. Most of it had to be left behind.
I can imagine the agony this must have caused, having to leave behind everything you had worked for over many years. I was told that the stuff would be forwarded on when space became available. From my own experiences I thought this unlikely, and my doubts were borne out by later events.
Over the weeks the goods that were left behind were stacked out in the open on the tarmac area. I used to see this stack just about daily as I went about airport business. At the time of year there was no rain and the stack remained relatively undamaged. But as the weeks went by and the odd shower started to appear things began to change, the stack started to crumble.
Card board cartons became soft, their contents spilled out. The stack, which had started out as a reasonably neat pile, began to spread out. A TV had burst from its carton on the top of the pile, rolled down and lay on the tarmac face down. Radios, clothes, began to appear till eventually the stack began to look like what it had become, a pile of rubbish. Then one morning it was all gone, scooped up with a front end loader and taken to the municipal rubbish dump. A sad end to the aspirations of many people who had come to Libya hoping for a better life.
The reason for this upheaval was the falling out between Ghaddafi and Sadat now reached a new low. Sadats intelligence people believed Ghaddafi was installing sophisticated Russian surveillance equipment at some of his military airports. Sadat sent an emissary to Russia to try and get this stopped but to no avail. Sadat then took the unprecedented measure of attacking a fellow Arab nation. The attack took the form of several air raids on the suspect installations, I don’t know the results of these raids, but its probably what caused the expulsion of the Egyptian nationals.
We expatriates knew that something was going on of course but not exactly what. The English hour was been taken off the Benghazi radio. The only news we had was the BBC, and they didn’t really know what was happening. The Western world seemed somewhat bewildered by the spat between Libya and Egypt, but diplomacy must have prevailed somehow or the two protagonists must have come to their senses as a full war between two Arab states would not help their cause at all.
I left a darts match late one evening and found the city in darkness, power failure again I thought. I started home and switched my headlights on. I hadn’t gone far when a car flashed his lights, then another, then one nearly rammed me. Light dawned if you’ll pardon the expression, Not only were street and building lights out, so were vehicle lights, this was a blackout. I drove home without lights, slowly, because the Libyan drivers seemed to be out in force, enjoying the experience of being able to drive in the dark without the assistance of headlights.
Blackouts occurred fairly regularly for a while, and gave rise to a host of rumours. Another excerpt from one of Jan’s letters home.We had another blackout on Tuesday night, they turned out the all the street lights, made the cars drive without any lights at all, and shut up all the shops. Rather hair raising. Rumour has come up with various reasons, ranging from:
An exercise to see how quickly people would react to such orders.
They were bringing the wounded into hospitals and no one is allowed to see a wounded soldier here!!!
Ghaddafi was on his way through here to Tobruk. Or
They were moving some new secret missile/weapons through Benghazi.
Any or all of them could be true or none. No one will ever know.
A little side issue to all this involved me though to a minor degree. About this time I was working on trying to improve the HF communications and had an occasion to call a remote station and get a signal report. Usually I would call Tripoli or Malta, but for some reason I decided to call Cairo instead, after all it was part of the HF network wasn’t it?
I called, they didn’t reply, I called again, silence from Cairo. So I called Malta and got my report.
Then the phone went, it was a message to me, from the army commander wanting to know why I was calling Cairo, didn’t I know it was strictly forbidden? and so on. Next a signal arrived from Tripoli telling me in no uncertain terms not to contact Cairo for any reason. I got the message. I also realised that all our transmissions were being monitored by the military.
Next page. Chapter 17 Time to come home