Looking through the eyes of one Libyan, Anthony Ham examines how Gaddafi’s dynamic shifts in government policy have transformed the basics of life in this proud North African nation.
Few countries in the world have been so defined by their leader and so radically transformed in a generation as Libya. Under Colonel Mu’ammar Gaddafi, who came to power in 1969, Libya became a pariah state and its people disappeared from view behind a wall of sanctions and the all-pervasive personality of their leader. Then the colonel renounced terrorism and, in December 2003, announced that Libya would give up its illicit weapons programmes. Suddenly Libya was open to the world and the story of ordinary Libyans began to emerge.
On my first visit there in early 2001, Libya’s process of opening up to the world was still a work-in-progress. Middle-aged men, slumped in the armchairs of hotel lobbies at 3am, looked for all the world like undercover agents, and it was not unusual to return to your hotel and find that a government delegation had taken over your room without notice.
It was during that visit that I met Hakim, a guide, later a friend, who would accompany me to every far-flung corner of the country. Hakim was born one month after Colonel Gaddafi came to power and has known no other leader. A Berber from Zuara on Libya’s northwestern coast, he speaks Tamazigh, Arabic and English and is at home in many worlds: Hakim has the latest mobile phone, 300 satellite TV channels at home and DVD players in his car’s sunshades, yet his idea of entertainment is to picnic with his family or to sip mint tea with friends on chaste evenings amid clouds of lightly-scented tobacco.
We would travel together again in 2005 and 2006. By then Libya had become a different country: measurably more prosperous, no longer suspicious of the world and infectiously optimistic about its future. Over many conversations, mostly around desert campfires deep in the Sahara, Hakim recounted what it was like to live in Gaddafi’s Libya of old.
“Back when I was a child,” Hakim told me one night on the desert plateau of Hamada al Hamra, “we had nothing. There were only government shops. When you heard that there was meat or milk, you would go to the shop and find 100 people waiting there and you had to fight them to get anything. If you heard that some dresses had arrived, the same thing, except that you couldn’t ask for large, or small. You would fight your way to the front and then find that all they gave you was a dress for a child, even if you had no children.”
Hakim paused to stare into the fire.
“It was the same when I got older. One time I went to Turkey and brought back bananas as a gift, but I could only give them to my closest friends and family because they were such a luxury. Some of them had never seen a banana before. Can you imagine?”
I couldn’t, and still can’t.
“From the 1980s, life was very difficult. The country was closed. We were enemies with Tunisia, with Egypt, with Sudan. We were at war with Chad. From Europe we were closed. Nothing, no goods, no tourists could come in and we could not leave. Libya was a prison.”
On another occasion, when Hakim and I found ourselves momentarily stranded, our wheels spinning uselessly in the sand of the Ubari Sand Sea, our axle almost sheared off, the ingenuity and improvisation of Hakim and our driver, Najib, soon saw us on our way.
“You have to understand that during the sanctions we had no spare parts. If we wanted to fix a car, we learned to do it ourselves with whatever we had. If we needed to build a house, we called everyone in the family together and we built it. We didn’t ask anyone for help and everything we built we could look at and say, ‘we did this’.”
I once asked Hakim whether, during the long years of Libya’s isolation and hardship, he ever thought of leaving.
“To study, yes. But this is my home. We are Libyan and we have our way of life. Yes, we all want a comfortable life. We want our country to be clean, to be developed, to have everything to make life comfortable... But I still want to dress like a Libyan. And I still desire to eat like a Libyan, on the floor and from the communal plate. In Libya, if a friend arrives and he hasn’t eaten, you will cook something for him. We like to say that if you have a good heart, one spoon can feed 100 people. If we leave our country, if we change too much, we lose this, we lose our roots.”
Then he flashed me a smile.
“Now, Libya is again a part of the world. We, ordinary Libyans, haven’t changed, but now the world is coming to Libya and we are happy. Yes, we are happy.”
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