LIVING IT UP IN TRIPOLI
Charles Glass explains
why the Libyans have never had it so good
Tripoli THE MALTESE shipping clerk, handing me a ticket for the Tripoli ferry, asked, `Well, do you think they will lift the sanc- tions?'
Daring to predict the outcome of the United Nations review on 15 August of the economic sanctions against Libya, I answered, `No.'
`That's good for us,' he said, relieved.
The UN boycott of the trade with Libya in aircraft parts and military supplies has proved, like all embargoes and customs regulations, an opportunity to make money. The Greeks and Maltese are pro- viding ships and port facilities to compen- sate for the closure of Tripoli's international airport. The Tunisians, for their part, increased the number of flights from their airport at Djerba just over the Libyan border. All along the road from Tripoli to Djerba, Tunisian peasants wave banknotes to make a profit exchanging one artificially overvalued currency for another.
The sanctions, a bonanza for Greek shippers and Tunisian airports, are for the Libyans at worst an inconvenience. Most of them do not travel overseas anyway. Travel delays affect the foreign oil workers whose trips home to Britain and back to Libya take an extra day. The fact that UN resolutions 731 and 738 prevent Libya from purchasing hardware for airplanes and the armed forces is not even a nui- sance. If anything it must be counted a benefit. The Libyan armed forces have for years wasted a fortune on weapons with which they were unable to resist the advance of French paratroopers in Chad in 1983 and to defend themselves from American air attacks in 1986. Sanctions save money not only on the army but through the reduction, required by the UN, in the number of Libyan diplomats abroad. Most countries' exchequers would welcome sanctions of the kind imposed on Libya. One can almost hear someone from the Treasury telling the defence chiefs, `We'd like you to buy that Trident, but the UN won't let us,' or briefing Douglas Hurd, 'Of course, it would be nice to send young Arbuthnot as second secretary, commercial, to Buganda, but the UN says we must keep the numbers down, and we really can't break international law as we did with those arms sales to Iraq, which, of course, we didn't.'
Libyans are, if anything, living better than during my last visit here in 1986. Libya then was labouring under the bur- den of the economic and philosophy tomes in the possession of their leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who changes the constitution of the state at will, based on whatever book he happens to have read or whatever inspiration (often divine) has struck him. Then, it was all Proudhon, property is theft, no shops, no profits, etc. As a consequence, there was nothing to eat,' drink or wear in sight. Tripolitanians survived on black-market chickens, food from relations in the countryside and the haphazard supplies in government ware- houses. Gaddafi, whose studies appear to have moved on a bit from Proudhon, per- haps to Milton Friedman, decided to become a capitalist a few years ago. Now, shopkeepers are free to open for business, and the shelves are filled with local and imported fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, blue jeans and Pepsi Cola. He has recently offered more capitalism, asking tourists to visit Leptis Magna and inviting foreign companies to invest in Libya's inefficient infrastructure. The telephones barely work, and large areas of Tripoli have no piped water. The colonel has spent far more on grandiose and unnecessary con- struction ventures, from which South `It's Quick Buck Palace.' Korean companies make vast fortunes while paying Bangladeshi workers next to nothing, than in maintaining the bare essentials. With oil sales of 1.5 million bar- rels a day, he is free to play with his econo- my as he likes without destroying it completely.
Ordinarily, American journalists like myself travel to Libya only when we believe the United States is about to bomb the country. I had not visited since 1986, when the Reagan administration zapped air defences in Sirte and sank patrol boats off- shore that March, and bombed houses in Tripoli and Benghazi, killing about a hun- dred people, in April. As in the past, any American aerial bombardment, whether in Mogadishu or Baghdad, is assured a pretty good American press and television turn- out. That is, unless Washington neglects to inform the media of its intentions. The Clinton administration, new at the game, failed to tell anyone in advance of its last Baghdad attack and, as a result, publicly lamented the absence of CNN cameras to record the event. Oh, well, next time.
With no bombers roaring overhead, Tripoli is a fairly boring place. The Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, has not given any speeches since my arrival from Malta, and — no doubt because I am the only foreign journalist in town — he has not bothered to stage any spontaneous popular demon- strations in the streets. The inactivity has left me free to wander, to talk to people and to sip espresso in various cafés. Green Square, delineated by an old Turkish fortress and arcaded Italian colonial build- ings facing the seafront, has lost some of its revolutionary charm. Cars park where peo- ple once chanted the leader's slogans, and the old posters of the colonel in assorted costumes and his meaningless aphorisms (Partners and Not Wage Workers') are peeling in the relentless Mediterranean sun. Tripoli is not entirely unpleasant, although alcohol remains illegal and Colonel Gaddafi has announced that the whipping of women convicted of adultery should be displayed on television. It is a freer life than in, say, Saudi Arabia, where women must cover themselves, are not per- mitted to drive cars and are stoned to death for adultery. There are no restric- tions on satellite dishes, and many people watch television from other Arab countries and the West, which helps in a country where the press is not worth reading, no foreign newspapers are permitted and national television is one long paean to the leader.
A few people complain about sanctions. They say that vaccines with a short life need to be flown in from abroad and that some emergency medical cases must be flown out for operations, and they maintain people are dying as a result. (The World Health Organisation or the Red Cross could remedy this with special flights with- out violating UN restrictions.) They blame the lack of airplane spare parts for the crash on 2 December last year, the fourth anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, of a domestic flight in which 157 passengers died. Several hundred people have died in car crashes on the now congested road to Tunisia.
The remainder of my time was spent in fruitless negotiations for an American tele- vision interview with Colonel Gaddafi. The colonel's people insisted the interview be broadcast live, and the American network held to its position that the interview be recorded on videotape, translated and edited before transmission. The Libyans feared the interview might not be broad- cast at all or that the editing would distort the leader's message. The network pre- ferred not to inflict on its viewers monotonous translations of English ques- tions and Arabic answers and the inevitable digressions one expects from as free ranging a mind as the colonel's.
My discussions, between two cultures that barely understand each other, were as pointless as the negotiations between the United States and the colonel over the fate of the two Libyans suspected in the PanAm 103-Lockerbie case. The colonel, in common with most Libyans to whom I spoke, sees the American insistence on a trial in the United States or Britain as a violation of Libyan sovereignty and an exercise in imperial weight-throwing. The United States believes its courts are free and unbiased, and it feels it owes a trial to the families of the 259 people who died when the airliner crashed over Scotland in 1988. It may also be flexing imperial mus- cles, because it has not followed up leads pointing to, among others, Syria, its ally in the 1991 war against Iraq. Since last March, when the United States and Britain persuaded the UN to enact resolutions to compel Libya to hand over the suspects, the UN has had as much luck with the colonel as I have. I'm giving up. I suspect the UN will eventually do the same.
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