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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Libya
Index
Bureaucratic inefficiency and lack of public participation
continued to plague the subnational governmental system. Not only
did the ASU organization appear too complex to foster public
involvement by the politically unsophisticated masses, but there
was the additional problem of poor coordination between the ASU and
subnational administrators. In large part to correct these
problems, Qadhafi proclaimed the Cultural Revolution on April 15,
1973. The institutional linchpin of the Cultural Revolution was the
people's committee, which also was the primary component of the
third stage in the development of subnational administration.
Similar in structure to the ASU, people's committees were both
functionally and geographically based. Functionally based people's
committees were established in universities, schools, private
business firms (including foreign-owned oil companies), farms,
public utilities, banks, government organs, the broadcast media,
and at harbor and airport facilities. Geographically based people's
committees were formed at the governorate, municipal, and zone
levels (municipalities being composed of several zones). Direct
popular elections filled the seats on the people's committees at
the zone level. The zone-level committees selected representatives
who collectively formed the Municipal People's Committee; municipal
people's committees in turn selected representatives to form the
governorate people's committees. Any citizen of at least nineteen
years of age was permitted to vote and to run for committee
membership, but there were no standardized rules governing the
formation of the people's committees, at least at the beginning.
This resulted in considerable confusion, particularly when multiple
people's committees formed in the same place began denouncing each
other. In such instances, new RCC-sanctioned elections had to be
called. The deadline for the formation of people's committees was
August 1973. Estimates of the number of committees in existence by
that time vary from approximately 1,000 to more than 2,000.
According to Qadhafi, people's committees were to be the
primary instrument of the revolution. They were to decide what and
who conformed to the principles of the revolution, a task that
included the purging of government officials (up to the rank of
undersecretary) and private executives and managers. Thousands of
functionaries were dismissed, demoted, or transferred. In rare
cases, executives and other functionaries were promoted. Such
actions severely disrupted the orderly operation of countless
government offices and private enterprises, so much so that by the
fall of 1973 the press and the RCC were publicly criticizing the
zeal with which committees substituted unqualified replacements for
experienced persons. At no time did the RCC lose control of the
situation, however; on occasion it reversed people's committee
actions, dismissed individual committee members, and even dissolved
whole committees, sanctioning new elections in the process. In a
positive sense, the people's committees provided the masses with
still more opportunities to participate in the governmental system,
and the purges resulted in the replacement of critics (both real
and imagined) of the Qadhafi regime by militants who felt more
closely linked to the RCC and the revolution.
The people's committees originally were seen as an experiment,
but by October 1973 a new law had formalized their existence and
set their term of membership at three years. More significantly,
the law transferred the authority and functions of municipal and
governorate councils to the people's committees at the same levels.
The chairmen of the governorate people's committees became the
governors; the chairmen of the municipal people's committees became
mayors.
During 1974 doubts increased regarding the operation of the
people's committees. The Libyan press warned of the danger inherent
in the creation of a new bureaucratic class. In early September, an
RCC spokesman publicly accused the committee system of degenerating
into anarchy and rashness and of deviating from the path of true
democracy. New elections for all levels of people's committees were
held from September 14 to October 3; some of the existing
committees were reelected.
At the 1974 National Congress, Qadhafi stated that the
complexity of administrative machinery limited mass interest in
political participation, and he called for the removal of obstacles
between the people and the government. He believed that policy
planning should be centralized but that execution should be
decentralized. The congress responded by recommending the abolition
of governorates. It also stressed the primacy of the people's
committees in administrative affairs and the ASU's supervisory
authority over the committees.
In February 1975, the RCC issued a law that abolished the
governorates and their service directorates; twelve years later,
however many sources continued to refer to the governorates as
though they still existed. A separate Ministry of Municipalities
reemerged from the Ministry of Interior. Direction of the services
previously administered by the governorate directorates--education,
health, housing, social services, labor, agricultural services,
communications, financial services, and economy--was transferred to
nine newly created control bureaus. Each control bureau was located
in the appropriate ministry, and the ministry became responsible
for delivery of the service to the country as a whole. Another RCC
law, issued on April 7, formally established the municipality as
the sole administrative and geographical subdivision within Libya.
It further stipulated that each municipality would be subdivided
into quarters, each quarter to have its own people's committee. The
municipal people's committee would comprise representatives from
the quarters' committees.
Data as of 1987
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