giulio petrocco
this page: Libyan rebel fighter sets up and aims a missile before shooting it towards Qadhafi loyalists trenched in the town of Bir Ghanam, Libya, on Aug 1, 2011.
facing page: Rebel fighter exchanging gunfire with Qadhafi loyalists during the battle for Bir Ghanam, on Aug 6, 2011.
4 Initially, despite the RCC’s backing for Nasser’s trinity of freedom, socialism, and unity, it pursued policies largely identical to that of the monarchy that preceded it. In 1970, following the Egyptian model, political parties were banned, leading to a loss of support within the country. Shortly afterwards Qadhafi made his most famous speech, on 15 July 1973, and announced that the old bureaucracy was to be replaced by popular committees. This heralded the beginning of the triumph of the bedouin hinterlands over the cities. This movement, from the tent to the city, is the great theme of Qadhafi’s fiction which, while formulaic, is revealing. Time and again in his short stories, the central question emerges: how is the bedouin to exist in the modern world? Is he to be crushed like an ant, his soul worn down at the factory, to be stepped on along the long city boulevards? Or is there another way: could the bedouin become the model for the city? The Jamahiriyya (state of the masses), was declared in 1977, and took its inspiration from Qadhafi’s Green Book , published in 1975. It announced that representation is fraud. Political parties pretend to represent the people, but are only concerned with their own interests. Classes are no better. Qadhafi was explicitly anti-statist, writing that ‘the state is an artificial economic and political system…with which mankind has no relationship’. In Libya’s direct democracy, Qadhafi held, everyone will join popular committees, which will then chose people’s committees to run public utilities; quite how these latter committees were to prevent the problem of representation was never answered. Nonetheless, Qadhafi achieved something remarkable – he harnessed the great Libyan tradition of hinterland resistance to colonialism, and articulated this distrust of the state in a populist
language understood by the people: he made the distrust of the state the basis of his state project. On the surface, it may seem like Qadhafi’s political system is but another variant of the sort of direct democracy which begins with Rousseau – there is the same distrust of representation, and the same endorsement of direct participation as the only real means to ensure a legitimate government. The Green Book even echoes Rousseau in its suspicion of theatre, which may distract man from his direct participation in public life. What Qadhafi uses to criticise the theatre however, is not a model of the citizen, but an appeal to the life of the bedouin. 5 Many of the nations that sit on the edge of the desert have placed the bedouin at the center of their national mythology, even as they busily modernise and forget the bedouins’ rigourous egalitarianism and concern with socio-economic rights: witness Doha’s comical, surreally monumental coffee pot, a strange symbol of bedouin hospitality for a land of underpaid migrant workers in which the bedouins themselves are pushed to the margins of the city.
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