giulio petrocco
Qadhafi’s Libya was different. The very qualities the Green Book eulogises as those that should be the basis of the nation are centred in Qadhafi’s understanding of what it is to be bedouin. The Libyan nation, he held, is merely a ‘big tribe’. Analogously, Qadhafi’s inner circle were known as the Rijal Al-Kheima , the men of the tent. Qadhafi pursued policies of bedouinisation and attacked urban values. He did not want to destroy the cities, but to transform them into places governed by the sort of affinal feeling and egalitarianism he saw among the bedouins; a people who would not be distracted by the delights of the city, but could commit themselves to the serious business of building a nation. At least, that is how it was supposed to work out. 6 Some in the RCC resisted, claiming that some degree of technocracy was necessary to manage the state. Following a failed coup against him in 1975, Qadhafi tightened his grip on power, and paranoia set in. The Libyan state became one that denied its own existence. In theory, everything was in the hands of the people’s committees. In reality, everything became increasingly informal – decisions about oil, foreign policy and defence were taken out of the hands of the committees and instead made by the very technocrats Qadhafi had wanted to remove from power, except this time the technocrats were invisible and firmly under his control. The whole process is summed up by the bizarre spectacle of Qadhafi’s tent, in which he famously met visiting heads of state. To the end of his life, Qadhafi claimed he wasn’t the head of state. In a sense, he was right. There was no state – just a seemingly
empty place that he inhabited: the whole structure of political egalitarianism was made possible by oil revenues that flowed to a state that was informal and gained its efficacy through the fact that it denied its own existence. When you entered Qadhafi’s tent, you entered the hollow image on which he had constructed his private state: a formal egalitarianism that allowed an enormous private hierarchy, based on friends and family, with Qadhafi sitting on the top of it. 7 As the Libyan regime fell, and images poured in of endless swimming pools, caged tigers and the various fantasies of the Qadhafi clan, it was easy to be cynical about the people’s committees, and the history of the Jamahiriyya . I traced other continuities, as the revolution continued. If the rebels at Bir Ghanam you see in the photos around this text were fighting against Qadhafi, they were also fighting with the same spirit, and the same hostility to exterior power, that Qadhafi harnessed to build his state. All over Libya, regional bodies, peoples’ committees and growing self-governance emerged. Today, the question of the Libyan state is again an open question, and it is not too outlandish to think that, over the body of Qadhafi, something of his ideology will continue. It may not be the moment for the people of Sierra Leone to stop watching Libya just yet. –
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