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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Libya
Index
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Libya was widely suspected of
financing international terrorist activities and political
subversion around the world. Recruits from various national
liberation movements reportedly received training in Libya, and
Libyan financing of Palestinian activities against Israel was
openly acknowledged. There were also allegations of Libyan
assistance to such diverse groups as Lebanese leftists, the Irish
Republican Army, Muslim rebels in the Philippines, and left-wing
extremists in Europe and Japan. Some observers thought support was
more verbal than material. However, in 1981 the GPC declared Libyan
support of national liberation movements a matter of principle, an
act that lent credence to charges of support for terrorism.
Support for international terrorism was a major issue in
Libya's relations with the United States and Western Europe. The
United States, in particular, viewed Libya's diplomatic and
material support for what Tripoli called "liberation movements" as
aid and comfort to international terrorists. In general, after the
early 1970s relations between the two countries went from bad to
worse, even while the United States continued to import Libyan
crude.
Qadhafi opposed United States diplomatic initiatives and
military presence in the Middle East. As a protest against
Washington's policies in Iran, the United States embassy in Tripoli
was stormed and burned in December 1979. In the late 1970s,
Washington blocked delivery to Libya of equipment judged of
potential military value and in May 1981 ordered Libyan diplomatic
personnel to leave the United States to prevent assassination of
anti-Qadhafi Libyan dissidents. The most serious incident occurred
in August 1981 when United States jets shot down two Libyan jet
fighters during naval maneuvers in the Gulf of Sidra
(see Relations with the United States and Western Europe
, ch. 4). That same month,
Libya signed an economic and political agreement with Ethiopia and
South Yemen, the so-called Tripartite Agreement, aimed at
countering Western, and primarily American, interests in the
Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. After a series of joint
consultations, however, the pact became largely a dead letter.
Libya's income from oil came from sales to Western Europe as
well as to the United States, and to ensure a steady supply of oil
most European nations tried to remain on reasonable terms with
their Libyan supplier. Some protests arose over the wave of
political assassinations of Libyan exiles in Europe in 1980, but
only Britain with its independent supply of oil took a strong stand
on the issue. Qadhafi's call that same year for compensation from
Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and Italy
for destruction of Libyan property in World War II brought no
response, even when the Libyan leader threatened to seize property
if adequate compensation were not negotiated.
By the early 1980s, Libya was a country embroiled in
controversy. Libyan ventures in Chad and elsewhere in North Africa
and the Middle East had earned a good deal of opprobrium for
Qadhafi, who often pursued his goal of Arab and Islamic unity and
extended Libyan influence at what seemed any price. Indeed,
suspicion if not hostility were the usual response to Qadhafi's
initiatives in the Arab and Western world.
Domestically, the government had attempted to ensure a more
equitable distribution of wealth, a step that pleased many but by
no means all of its citizens. A new political system with new
institutions was also in place with the aim of involving as many
citizens as possible in governing themselves. But overlapping
jurisdictions and responsibilities had led to confusion, and there
were questions as to the viability of the committee system of
government. A sizable number of Libyans seemed uninterested in
political participation, while others had gone into opposition,
active or passive, at home and abroad. The country's oil revenues
had been channeled into agricultural and industrial projects that
the regime hoped would provide employment and lessen dependence
upon imports and foreign labor. Even in these areas, the results
were less promising than had been expected, and falling oil prices
diminished the financial resources that could be devoted to
continued economic and foreign policy initiatives.
The decline in oil revenues and consequent economic slowdown,
the continued reliance upon non-Libyan expertise, and the generally
unfavorable state of foreign relations and persistent dissidence in
the military and society at large posed grave problems for the
Qadhafi regime in the early 1980s.
* * *
Two of the best English-language sources on Libya are John
Wright's Libya, which covers Libyan history prior to the
1969 revolution, and his Libya: A Modern History, devoted to
the course of the revolution during the 1970s. Jamil M. Abu-Nasr's
detailed A History of the Maghrib views Libya in the larger
context of regional history but carries the narrative only up to
1951. The various works of the archaeologist Richard G. Goodchild
are of primary importance for the study of Libya in antiquity.
Kathleen Freeman utilizes both fable and fact in her delightful and
informative historical essay on Cyrene in Greek City-States.
For a treatment of the late medieval period, see Robert
Brunschvig's La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides. Much
material of value for an understanding of the early Ottoman period
in North Africa is found in Fernand Braudel's classic The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II. Seton Dearden's A Nest of Corsairs is the welldocumented but fast-moving story of the Karamanli dynasty. Few
works on modern Libya compare in scholarly significance to Edward
Evans-Pritchard's monograph The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Claudio
G. Segrè's Fourth Shore studies the colonial period from an
Italian vantage point and submits findings that call for a
reassessment of the demographic colonization of Libya. Several of
the essays in E. G. H. Joffe and K. S. McLachlan, Social and
Economic Development of Libya, cover important aspects of Libya
in the present century. Lisa Anderson examines the mistrust of the
modern bureaucratic state that is so peculiarly Libyan and that
characterizes Qadhafi's political philosophy in The State and
Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980. Richard
B. Parker's North Africa offers an incisive overview of
contemporary Libya that emphasizes Qadhafi's role in determining
state policies. (For further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of 1987
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