Like the famous Syrian "player," Libya's master of the "Jamahiriya" sowed the seeds of collapse during his phase of claimed greatness. Today Libya is geographically and institutionally divided. Its promised elections were never held, the UN-sponsored agreement among its parties has to be put to test, and its oil wealth has been sapped by the contest between its two authorities. Moreoever, the forces of the east attacked Tripoli in 2019, and a year later a government of national unity was formed, only for a parallel government soon to emerge.
The unity of the country that was punished with the 1969 coup of Muammar Gaddafi, then a Nasserist officer, could not be taken for granted. On top of the immeasurable violence the Italians inflicted on the Libyans, Libya was administered as three units: Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and Fezzan in the south. In 1934 it was nominally unified as "Italian Libya."
This does not mean the Italians "partitioned" the country, for its unity in the Ottoman era was fragile and superficial, and its administrative arrangements varied from region to region. Tripolitania, closely tied to Tunisia and Malta, developed into a Mediterranean trading city; closely tied to Egypt and the stronghold of the Sanusiyya Cyrenaica, grew as an agrarian region; Fezzan, which borders Algeria, Niger, and Chad, was left to networks of desert tribes and their caravans. At the end of the Second World War, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were in British hands, and the French took over Fezzan.
From the moment the country was independent as unified kingdom under Idris al-Sanusi in 1951, the weight of its fragmentation has been pressing down on the countnry’s chest.
Between independence and 1963, it had two capitals, Tripoli and Benghazi in Cyrenaica. In 1963, with the abolition of the federal system and the reinforcement of centralization- and to avoid "Tripoli's dominance-" Bayda, also in Cyrenaica, was chosen as the seat of government. The matter was settled in Tripoli's favor only after the 1969 coup. This deepened Cyrenaican resentments- traditionally Sanusi sympathizers, they accused Gaddafi’s regime of concentrating power and wealth in Tripoli more than the previous regime had been accused of concentrating them in Cyrenaica.
Sanusi was genuinely keen on forging national loyalty that would bridge the gap, but he took contradictory and somewhat experimental approaches to doing so. At first, he recognized the differences constitutionally, and each province enjoyed a measure of local legislation. In 1963, however, he favored centralization over the federal formula, and the discovery of oil in 1959 drove him to centralize the management of its resources and its development policy.
Oil revenues were actually used to build infrastructure, hospitals, schools, universities, and state services; enormous leaps were also made in education. The social transformation that oil secured, however, was not accompanied by the development of institutions or a political society. "Political" actors were thus confined to local and tribal leaders, and the parliament that had been established at independence was never paired with a competitive party system.
In the climate of Nasserism, Libya was subjected to campaigns of accusation for having concluded military agreements with Britain and the United States in 1953 and 1954, when it depended on Western aid and its oil had not yet been discovered. That campaign was taken up by youthful cohorts and officers, Gaddafi among them, who removed a regime that had neither foreclosed possible avenues of reform nor shut the door firmly in their face. The new power remained exclusively in the hands of Gaddafi, who behaved as a demigod and considered parties a form of dictatorship, even as he expanded the "People's Committees" in 1973 as a formula for direct rule, before moving to the "Great Jamahiriya" in 1977.
Society was sterilized- rendered a barren plain with nothing but the leader, his drivel, his peacockery, and his cosmetic surgeries. Repression was the regime's law: killing, torture, disappearance, and detention. The Abu Salim prison massacre of 1996, in which 1,200 prisoners were killed, was one of the peaks of its coercive conduct. On top of an economy that recorded the highest levels of dependence on oil rent, Gaddafi squandered much of the revenue on backing armed militias and "national liberation movements."
In the 1970s and 1980s he waged a foolish war with Chad and aggravated tensions with the United States and the European states. In 1986 Libya, accused of sponsoring terrorism, was struck by American air raids, before becoming subject, after the Lockerbie crisis of 1988, to sanctions that lasted seven years.
In 2003, however, a settlement of the Lockerbie crime was imposed on Gaddafi, under which $2.7 billion was paid in compensation to the victims. Late that year he abandoned the weapons of mass destruction program he had sponsored, fearing a fate like Saddam's. While his relations with the Western states thawed, his relations with his own people steadily aggravated. In early 2011, revolution did indeed break out in Benghazi, morphing into a popular revolution laced with civil war. With NATO's intervention, Gaddafi, after 42 years of absolute rule, was killed late that year.
What was built was a highly centralized regime that saw in the slightest sign of difference a threat to unity, even as the east-west and desert-coast sensitivities swelled, if out of sight. The desert south in particular, home to Tuareg, Tebu, and other ethnic groups, never ceased complaining of marginalization by the north.
The regime, for its part, was known for demolishing institutions far more than for building them, and it rested on networks of loyalty secured by bribery with oil revenues, especially among the Qadhadhfa, the Magarha, and the Warfalla tribes. This explains how its fall came hand in hand with the rise of armed local networks, the division of the state, and the emergence of the two rival authorities, amid a flood of militias and foreign interventions in a bleak Libyan landscape.
