Other regimes emboldened by Kadafi’s tactics

Moammar Kadafi has ruled this country for four decades using tools also at the disposal of other Arab leaders. He shrouded his dirty deeds in nationalist ideology. He tactically doled out the country’s oil money. He kept tabs on his enemies here and abroad.

But in the end, it was Kadafi’s willingness to use brute force and the tools of his police state that has helped him so far avoid the fate of neighboring autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt who were swallowed up by popular revolutions.

Regimes in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria appear to have taken note, confronting their uprisings with a hard wall of state-sponsored violence.

Photos: A journey from Libya back to Egypt

On Friday, government agents fired on a peaceful protest in Yemen, security forces in Syria reportedly killed several demonstrators, and Bahrain’s ruling monarchy tore down a 300-foot sculpture at Pearl Square, where protesters had been routed in a deadly confrontation just two days earlier.

Just as activists in Bahrain gleaned lessons from protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and as Egyptians adopted the slogans of revolutionaries in Tunisia, so too have Arab autocrats been learning from one another’s missteps and successes.

Libya’s so far successful use of force, including the deployment of heavy artillery and warplanes against opposition-held areas, has offered a chilling lesson.

“They are willing to kill, even with their words,” said one Libyan scholar, an opposition activist in the Tripoli, describing her country’s leadership.

The relatively unrestrained use of force in Libya transformed a popular uprising against Kadafi’s rigid rule into a civil war, one from which he may still emerge victorious despite the United Nations decision to impose a no-fly zone over his country. Even some of Kadafi’s fiercest opponents concede that his strategy has demoralized some of those arrayed against him.

“When you use extreme force, you instill hopelessness and helplessness in the people,” said Essam Gheriani, an opposition spokesman in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

The popular movements facing off against Middle East autocracies are not all battling the same kinds of regimes. And they must galvanize vastly different societies.

Libya and Yemen, for example, remain connected to their tribal roots, while Egypt and Tunisia are modern urbanizing societies. Large constituencies in Jordan and Morocco appear to support their monarchies, even as they protest the governments that those rulers oversee. Algeria is more of a military dictatorship, while ruling families in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula states run the show.

Libya, like the regime in Iran, dresses the authoritarian aspects of its state in the cloak of left-leaning populism and oil-financed largesse.

“Libya has been a regime that didn’t really brook opposition,” said Lisa Anderson, a Libya expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who is president of the American University in Cairo. “Libyans are facing a much more take-no-prisoners regime than the Egyptians or the Tunisians. The Libyan regime has never had any qualms about killing people.”

But authoritarian rulers throughout the Arab world appear to be concluding that using state violence, rejecting political compromise and maintaining tight control are a better route to survival than agreeing to the kind of fundamental political reform pressed by the Obama administration.

This week Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, all close allies of Washington, appeared to ignore U.S. entreaties for reform and instead addressed demonstrators’ demands with truncheons and gunfire. The Bahraini government’s destruction of the Pearl Square monument that had become a symbol of that nation’s protest was a totalitarian gesture that Kadafi might applaud.

Both the violence in the Arabian Peninsula and the crisis in Libya show those long worried about political stagnation in the region may have to do more than sit on the sidelines as calls for political change rattle the Middle East and North Africa.

“As these movements are going forward, if there’s something useful for outsiders to do, they have to do it,” said Robert Hunter, a former U.S. diplomat now working for Rand Corp.

Kadafi’s staying power may also offer other lessons, for both Arab autocrats looking to maintain their grip and those seeking change in the Middle East. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Libya is endowed with oil money, and just like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kadafi has used his petroleum wealth to buy off constituencies and quell discontent.

As the crisis enveloped his nation, Kadafi quickly handed each Libyan family $400, a half-a-billion-dollar giveaway that might have bought him some populist goodwill. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, which raised wages for state employees 15% last month, committed Friday to even more wage increases and cash gifts in a bid to undermine a small but growing protest movement. Oil money also allowed Libya to fully mobilize the country’s security forces and ratchet up a propaganda machine spewing out questionable truths like never before.

“The hand of the government is so powerful and it’s so hard to move,” said Idris Tayed Lamin, a Libyan writer, poet and former diplomat in Benghazi, in explaining why street protests have petered out in the capital. “He wants to win and he’ll use anything. He has no limits and no moral limitations.”

Many agree that Kadafi’s deft manipulation of tribal leaders with bribes, threats and appeals to national unity may have bought time and neutralized some of his potential enemies, strategies being successfully used by rulers in Yemen and Jordan.

“We know that 85% of the population is against the Kadafis,” said Mohammad, a 22-year-old opposition activist in Tripoli. “The Libyan population is made of tribes, and when the leader threatens the sheik, they all fall into line.”

Once the uprising started, Kadafi also flooded the capital with security forces, a step many say has prevented protesters from taking to the streets. His loyalists have wiped the city clean of antigovernment graffiti and quickly fixed up damaged portraits of Kadafi. Security agents have established a massive stranglehold in and around the capital; checkpoints, sometimes positioned one after another, are overseen by swaggering young militiamen armed with AK-47 assault rifles.

“Tripoli is a huge prison, and you cannot get out,” said a retired petroleum engineer and resident of the capital. “Now they are even arresting people off the street.”

But there are also key differences between Libya and other Arab dictatorships, which may make it harder for them to adopt Kadafi’s strategy.

Kadafi and his deputies spent 40 years obliterating the country’s middle class. He instituted harsh socialistic policies, including expropriating second properties, and drove out the country’s once-significant Italian population.

By contrast, other countries spent the last few decades struggling to build up their middle classes.

Unlike Tunis, Cairo, Manama or Damascus, Tripoli was long kept isolated from the rest of the world. And the Libyan capital has not been a welcome home for people such as Wael Ghonim, the Google executive whose tech savvy helped organize the Egyptian uprising.

“Libya has not had, for the last 100 years, what one would call an urban middle class,” Anderson said. “Kadafi deliberately undermined the professional classes. He didn’t want them to think of themselves as professionals. His constant revolution was anti-bureaucratic and anti-professional.”

Bahrain and Yemen have strong histories of lively opposition politics. In Tunisia, with its powerful unions and small opposition parties, and Egypt, with its robust civil society and history of activism, many players were already in place to take to the streets.

By contrast, Kadafi’s Libya, like Saudi Arabia, is a political desert. In Libya, political parties are illegal and elections are considered anti-democratic. Libyans are urged to express their interests and grievances through state-organized “committees” that serve as instruments of surveillance and repression.

“There is no opposition here,” Kadafi told the French newspaper Le Figaro last week. “All protests are organized here. The masses support me.”

During his four decades of rule, Kadafi has also shaped the nation’s armed forces into his vision, cloaking a Stalinist state in tribal gowns, Islamic lingo and populist rhetoric. According to Libyan officials, there is no professional army in Libya. Instead, there are “popular” armed forces consisting of various murky branches of varying degrees of organization and professionalism.

Most Arab countries, though, have professional armed forces with some degree of political and ideological independence. But Kadafi’s obsessive control over all aspects of Libyan life, including the military, also offers a warning for Arab rulers. His harsh rule may have made the type of armed, no-holds-barred conflict roiling the country inevitable.

“I don’t think the opposition had any alternative to armed struggle,” said Anderson, who last visited Libya in 2007. “Both the regime and the rebels knew from the outset that they had no incentive to surrender, that it would be a fight to the finish.”

daragahi@latimes.com