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Africa's Ceausescu
After losing control of two-thirds of his country to anti-government protesters and suffering condemnation worldwide for bloody human rights abuses, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is still refusing to go quietly into the night. As Libya descended into violence and chaos, in a rambling 73-minute television broadcast a defiant Gaddafi called himself a “Bedouin warrior’ and said he would stay and “fight until the last drop of my blood” and die as “a martyr.”
The broadcast was made from a damaged building in Tripoli, Libya’s
capital, which American forces under President Ronald Reagan had bombed
in 1986 as a reprisal for Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks. The
“Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” as Gaddafi is called in
Libyan publications, had deliberately left the building in a state of
disrepair as a monument to “American perfidy.”
“Muammar Gaddafi is not a president and not the kind of person,
against whom one can conduct demonstrations,” the Libyan leader told his
countrymen, who had already proven him wrong by successfully taking to
the streets against him. Anti-government protesters had seized
eastern Libya, including the cities of Benghazi and Tobruk, where they
flew the banned flag of Libya’s pre-Gaddafi royal regime. About half
of Libya’s 1,000 mile Mediterranean coast is now in anti-government hands. Gaddafi has since promised
the demonstrators the death penalty.
Libya is the third North African country this year, in which the
people have risen in popular revolt against unbearable economic
conditions and long-standing oppression. Successful in
Tunisia and Egypt, whose leaders were pushed from power with little
bloodshed, Gaddafi is proving a harder nut to crack. Like the Romanian
dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, who also refused to step down when communist
regimes fell like dominoes in Eastern Europe in 1989, his African
counterpart is putting up a bloody resistance.
More than 300 people are reported to have died in the fighting so far
that has seen tanks and warplanes used against the
demonstrators. Tripoli’s violence-scarred streets are described as
resembling a war zone. Gaddafi is also employing mercenaries from Chad and Sudan who are reported to
have fired indiscriminately on protesters.
As Gaddafi digs in his heels, the civil strife will definitely
deepen, since the reason behind his determination to use force to remain
in power is fear. For him and his clan, the Libyan leader, who came
into power 42 years ago at age 27 in his own revolution that deposed
80-year old King Idris, knows defeating the revolt is an all or nothing
proposition. Most Westerners are unfamiliar with the concept of
tribalism, which strongly defines Libya, the Arab world’s most tribal
society east of Saudi Arabia. They are probably even more unfamiliar
with the tribal code of revenge for perceived wrongs. And Gaddafi has
given some Libyan tribes, as well as individual Libyans, enough cause in
his four decades in power to hold deadly grudges against him, the
consequences of which would also spill over on to his clan.
In the French newspaper, Le Figaro, analyst Olivier Pliez
cites the recent defection of the large and powerful al-Warfulla tribe
as an example of this tribal code of revenge in action. One of the
tribe’s leaders, Akram al-Warfulla, announced on national television the
withdrawal of his tribe’s support for the regime. Unreported in many
Western media outlets is the fact that the al-Warfulla tribe, as Pliez
relates, had been involved in a military coup d’etat against Gaddafi in
1993, in which a hundred of its members were killed. Afterwards, the
tribe was “repressed and marginalised”, and now sees in the current
disturbances the opportunity “to settle accounts.”
According to Pliez, the successful uprising by protesters in the
Libyan city of Baida was also driven by an old grudge. Baida is the seat
of the Sanussi order, from which Libya’s former royal family hails (the
same royal family that Gaddafi overthrew 42 years ago). But the desire
for revenge, or at least justice, also extends to other Libyans. In
1996, more than 1,000 people were murdered by security forces in a
Libyan prison. Their relatives were among the first demonstrators to
take to the streets in Benghazi in the current uprising, demanding to
know the truth about this massacre.
“The revolt is opening old wounds,” Pliez summed up in Le Figaro.
Since Gaddafi always took care, as Le Figaro reports, to
respect Libya’s tribal map, maintaining a balance in tribal
representation when he handed out government posts, it would be
interesting to discover what tribes those Libyan diplomats and fighter
pilots (the ones who landed their planes on Malta) are from who defected
from the regime as well as those who have stayed loyal. For the most
part, the defectors claim their decision to quit was one based on
conscience. The Libyan ambassador to the United States, a diplomat for
forty years, is one such Gaddafi appointee now bothered by his
conscience. In resigning on Tuesday, he called Gaddafi’s rule a
“dictatorship regime”, making one wonder what kind of government he
thought he had been working for all these years.
Even the fatwa issued on Tuesday by the leading Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi for Libyan soldiers to kill
Gadaffi can be viewed in a revenge context. During his 42 years in
power, Gaddafi had imprisoned and executed Islamist extremists,
threatening his rule, including Brotherhood members. Al-Qaradawi’s
ordering his killing can be seen as exacting revenge for their deaths.
Gaddafi’s tribe, the al-Gaddadfa tribe, is small in number and
located in the north-center of the country in the oil-producing region.
It is one of Libya’s 20 tribes and numerous clans. To make up for its
small numbers, a Reuters story reports Gaddafi crushed other
tribes with violence “or fear of it”, while granting others economic
benefits. He also forged alliances with tribes around Tripoli, which
would account for that area’s continued loyalty during the current
crisis and a reason why eastern Libya around Benghazi, one of the
country’s most economically deprived areas, revolted.
But while the media have paid little attention to the important role
tribal loyalties have played in the revolt, they have noticed its
adverse effects on the world economy. Libya is no minor player among oil
producers. Its oil fields pump out 1.8 million barrels of oil a day,
making it the largest oil exporter in Africa and among the top 20 in the
world. Stock markets have reported losses as oil prices have risen to over
$100 a barrel for the first time since 2008. Oil companies are now
evacuating their employees and Libya’s oil ports are shutting down as civil war threatens,
all of which means the economic fallout will only get worse.
But it is not a lack of oil exports that will break Gaddafi in the
end and free his country from his Ceausescu-like grip, but rather the
crumbling away of the tribal alliances that he has built up during his
rule, upon which he is now staking his own, and his clan’s, survival.
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