In Libya, Delusion Makes a Last Stand

FURY Despite the repressive regime, protesters in Benghazi, Libya, set a book with an image of Col. Muammar (Scott Nelson for the New York Times)

June 18, 2011
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times

TRIPOLI, Libya — The chess match last week between Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and a visitor from the remote steppe of southern Russia who had traveled to Tripoli to promote chess in Libyan schools was a case of the oddest of couples, at the oddest of times. With NATO bombs and missiles pounding the Libyan capital and Colonel Qaddafi venting on Libya’s airwaves only days before that he would choose “death before surrender, it captured something quintessential about the Libyan leader and the oddball qualities he has displayed in decades of repressive one-man rule.

With his days in power now surely numbered — by popular revolt, by the NATO attacks and by escalating defections from his elite — Colonel Qaddafi seems fated to end up as little more than a footnote among our age’s dictators. Libya is a country of only 6.5 million people, oil-rich but still in many ways dirt-poor. If it has punched above its weight in the 40 years of Qaddafi rule, it is largely because of his pattern, discarded only in recent years, of promoting terrorism abroad. The pattern included his early embrace of Carlos the Jackal, the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal and the I.R.A., as well as the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Still, to see Colonel Qaddafi in his oversize sunglasses laboring clumsily over a chessboard with Kirsan N. Ilyinov, president of the World Chess Federation and a fervent believer in cosmic aliens, and then beaming as he was offered a diplomatic draw, was to be reminded of other moments of illusionist denial by autocratic rulers at moments of the most desperate chaos beyond their palace gates: Nero, fiddling in Rome; Stalin, reportedly locked in seclusion in the days after Hitler’s tanks invaded; Mao Zedong carousing with concubines as Red Guard zealots convulsed China with their puritanical brand of Maoist egalitarianism.

To sojourn in Tripoli is to travel deep into a world of illusionism and deceit. This is a world where much of the evidence available to an outsider suggests that Colonel Qaddafi, the “Brother Leader” and “Revolutionary Guide,” has led his followers into a narrowing cul-de-sac; where few if any with access to the colonel, by their own accounts, seem ready even to whisper that the game may be up; a world where a battalion of official spokesmen, inured to a lifetime of wrenching reality into the shapes commanded by propaganda, seem intent on turning truth on its head — a world, in short, where a leader beset by a murderous civil war thinks it normal to spend his Sunday afternoon playing chess.

For all that, the Qaddafi dictatorship is unusual for its lack of rigor and efficiency. In Libya, at least in the two-thirds of the country not yet lost to the rebels, a dictatorship that has all the standard instruments of suppression and fear seems in some measure to have lost the power to command the fealty of its citizens. This seems true not just in areas controlled by the rebels, and not alone in the areas of Tripoli like Tajura, Souk al-Juma and Feshloom that were fountainheads of the uprising’s early weeks and where an active underground survived the sustained use of live fire against protesters in February and early March. Now it seems broadly true among the population at large.

Over several weeks in Tripoli, it has been commonplace to encounter, at random, Libyans ready to speak openly of their contempt for Colonel Qaddafi, and enthusiastically about NATO’s ability to bomb targets associated with the most sensitive strongholds of the government. To be sure, there were others, in many places, who offered a ritual defense of him, and a loathing of the rebels. But the much more common response — in bookshops and cafes, in hospitals and hotels, and in the mosques and souks that crowd the winding alleyways of the old Ottoman heart of Tripoli down by the city’s ancient port — was to hail the day when the Libyan leader would be consigned to what Trotsky called the dustbin of history.

There was, for example, an educated, English-speaking young man, Muhammad (not his real name, for his own protection), who met this reporter as he sauntered along an alleyway in the Medina, not far from the hole-in-the-wall store where he sells vegetables while hoping for a better job. Smoking a cigarette, he reacted dismissively as a pickup truck packed with pro-Qaddafi demonstrators drove past on one of the few drivable passageways through the district, shouting the Libyan leader’s name, waving placards bearing his image and hoisting automatic rifles in the air. “They pay them 10 dinars a day to do that,” he said. “It means nothing.” Asked what outcome he would favor, he smiled. “Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream, a dream for Libya,” he said. “Victory is coming. With Qaddafi gone, everything will be O.K.”

On other days, in the atrium of an old Ottoman building, among caged songbirds, men pulling on shisha pipes and playing fast-paced games of baccarat spoke almost casually of their eagerness for change. Over cups of Turkish coffee and glasses of fresh-pressed lemonade, they voiced their anger for Colonel Qaddafi, and their bitterness over the fortune in oil money they said he had squandered while leaving many Libyans virtually destitute. They even spoke of their discomfort at having their country identified with a leader renowned for his earlier links to terrorism. “Before him, we were a proud people,” one man who has traveled to America said. “Now, when you show a Libyan passport at a foreign airport, people look at you with an air of concern. And all this because he bombed foreign airplanes, and killed many people overseas. He’s a destructive character.”

What was surprising in these encounters was that the Qaddafi government has shown from the start its readiness to deal violently with its opponents. Bookshelves of human rights reports, and testimonies from survivors, tell a story of Colonel Qaddafi as a man who might well have studied the grimmest practices of other dictators who built an elaborate machinery of fear to suppress dissent. For decades, Libya has had its ubiquitous secret police, its archipelago of Abu Ghraib-like prisons, and a chilling narrative of “disappearances,” extrajudicial murders and summary executions, often after torture. The victims number in the thousands.

The practices were eased, or at least more carefully obscured, after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Colonel Qaddafi apparently decided that the writing was on the wall. With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein sounding a tocsin in his ears, he set out to mend fences with the West. Libya abandoned its secret programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons and accepted international supervision of their dismantling; Colonel Qaddafi earmarked up to $2.7 billion in compensation to families of the 270 victims of Lockerbie; de-nationalization and foreign investment became watchwords; and Libya’s vast oil reserves were reopened to a competitive scramble by Western oil companies.

But just how insubstantial these measures were, in terms of fundamental change in the regime’s rule, became evident from the moment that Libyans rose up in mid-February, triggering the civil war that continues now. A new report prepared by an international panel of legal experts for the United Nations Human Rights Council, obtained in draft form by The New York Times, chronicles in painful detail abuses committed by both sides in the civil war.

But for all that it condemns the rebels, the report deals far more harshly with the government, chronicling a pattern of “shoot to kill” attacks that left scores of corpses among protesters, secret police dragnets in which hundreds of people were detained or “disappeared,” and the mournful legacy of posters pasted by families on public buildings, courthouses and hospitals seeking any information on the fate of loved ones — posters that, in Tripoli, have been routinely removed or defaced by the government. The document cites a televised speech in late February in which Colonel Qaddafi described the protesters as “rats” who needed to be executed, and an address by Seif al-Islam, his son, vowing to “fight to the last man and woman and bullet.”

In the face of this brutality, what is puzzling is the persistence of open dissent on the streets of Tripoli. One theory is that the government’s agencies of repression have been forced to accept with smoldering frustration what they would previously have smothered, because they are strained to the limit by the revolt and by defections that have caused hundreds of thousands of Libyans to flee the country.

Another is that a government that set out in the past decade to cloak the old dictatorship with a new and more appealing facade has been hoist with its own petard, with Libyans in large numbers deciding for themselves that they will no longer accept the old repression, and that they no longer need even to pretend to swallow the half-baked political theories in Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book, which sets out a “third way” approach to governance that does away with any pretense of Western-style democracy in favor of “popular rule” through grass-roots committees that turned out to be a formula for one-man rule.

If so, it is a far cry from the grim landscape of George Orwell’s “1984,” where the totalitarian state has so deeply repressed the human instinct for liberty that it has made impossible any wresting back of power. In Libya, as elsewhere in the dictatorships of the Arab world, just the opposite seems to have been proved true. But if so, it is a message that has yet to register with the officials who speak for the government, who brief foreign reporters every day with a through-the-looking-glass view of reality that has government forces on the brink of final victory over a few weak pockets of rebel resistance, NATO as terminally discredited and hated by Libyans for its targeting and killing of civilians, and Colonel Qaddafi as a leader beloved of the overwhelming majority of Libyans.

It is a gospel that finds perhaps its most passionate disciple in Moussa Ibrahim, the government’s chief spokesman, a British-educated, English-fluent loyalist who has ties to Colonel Qaddafi through their common membership in the small Qaddafa tribe. At his regular news conferences for foreign reporters, he routinely describes the colonel as Libya’s only hope of resolving the conflict, and of guiding it to the electoral democracy that he is said to have accepted now as the only way forward. “People are rallying behind the leader,” Mr. Ibrahim said at a news conference last week. In the new world of threat in which Libyan loyalists like Mr. Ibrahim live, it seems, there is still only one essential reality, the dictatorship of Colonel Qaddafi, and all other facts must be bent, at whatever cost to credibility, to keeping him in place.