Kadafi, Beset at Home and Abroad, Turns to Charm

Chunks of twisted ceiling panels litter the entrance hall in what was once Libya’s grandest villa. Paintings tilt crazily above overturned sofas. Upstairs, a child’s bloodstained mattress is encased in a glass shroud.

This is at once Moammar Kadafi’s former residence and a shrine to Libya’s enduring rage--a site where young Libyan soldiers and foreign dignitaries are shuttled through by the busload to ensure that they will not forget the night of April 14, 1986, when American bombs rained down on Tripoli and Benghazi four hours before dawn.

In the months that followed the raid--which, according to Kadafi, killed his adopted daughter and injured his son--the contentious, obsessive, vision-struck Libyan leader, who had plowed like a solitary tank across the world stage for a decade and a half, was left shellshocked.

Economic sanctions by the United States and severe travel restrictions by Western Europe were bottling up the Libyan economy. A difficult war in neighboring Chad was eating up a reported $1 billion a year and spurring growing unease at home. Borders on two sides were shut from years of feuding with Arab neighbors. Opposition abroad was mounting, and even loyal Libyans at home were growing increasingly restless over boarded-up shop windows and long lines for staples such as meat and bread. The longtime proponent of Arab unity, for once, found himself almost utterly alone.

“I think in ’86 he must have realized that if he continued on in this way, he was bound for disaster,” said one Western diplomat posted in Tripoli. “Quite simply, he realized he couldn’t go on like this.”

Now, concluding a week of celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of his revolution, Kadafi is riding an unparalleled charm offensive that has restabilized his regime and forged Libya’s best relationships abroad since his growing support of international terrorism first rendered the North African nation an international renegade.

$300-Million Extravaganza

In a $300-million extravaganza this month hosting 17 heads of state from much of the Arab world and black Africa, mid-level delegations from dozens of other countries and more than 700 foreign journalists, Kadafi has worked hard to show off both the successes of his tenure and his new-found amiability--while still pledging to export his odd brand of Islamic socialism around the globe.

In interviews last week, diplomats and business people say there are signs that Kadafi has moved to distance himself from radical Palestinian terrorist groups and the Irish Republican Army, reportedly refusing an audience recently with two Damascus-based Palestinian guerrilla leaders and signaling up to 70 terrorist organizations and national liberation movements around the world that Libyan financial aid may no longer be so readily forthcoming.

Western officials, used to the mercurial leader’s swings of will and whim, say the new overtures are a practical move, aimed at winning back U.S. technology for Libya’s aging oil fields and potential markets for Libyan agricultural exports, should they materialize as hoped.

Has a Practical Side

But Kadafi the impatient revolutionary has always had a practical side. In 20 years, his pariah regime has transformed Libya from a land of devastating poverty to a country with the second-highest per capita income in Africa, a nearly 90% literacy rate--and, for a desert-bound nation of just 4.3 million people, an astonishing presence in the global consciousness.

“Perhaps some people may think that such a revolution that may change the way of living all over the world could not come from such a small nation as the Libyan people,” Ibrahim abu Kzam, deputy secretary general of Libya’s People’s Congress, said late last month. “The most important and significant changes in history were done by people who were not expected to be important people.”

When Kadafi and his military colleagues seized power in a coup on Sept. 1, 1969, while King Idris was away in Turkey seeking medical treatment, Libya was already riding the upward crest of the oil wave, but only a very few of the rich were realizing the profits.

Whatever Kadafi has or has not done in the years since, analysts agree that his revolution has succeeded in redistributing the country’s wealth to a significant degree, ensuring that most Libyans--unlike many of their Arab neighbors--own their own homes and cars and have access to decent medical care, schools and telephones.

Before the revolution, all of Libya contained only 300,000 units of livable housing for the country’s 365,000 families, and much of the countryside was peppered with tin shacks. Government leaders say the last hut was burned down in a celebration in 1976, and while some substandard houses remain in rural Libya, Tripoli has been rebuilt with modern high-rise apartments and hotels, most of which are owned by their tenants, either outright or on government-subsidized loans.

Asphalt roads now stretch into the remotest regions of the southern desert. Sand airstrips have been replaced with three international airports at Tripoli, Baninah and Sabha.

Jana, the official news agency, said the regime has increased total hospital beds from 7,589 to 19,661, established fundamental education for nearly every child born after the revolution and reclaimed 267 million acres of land to agricultural use.

‘Was Nothing Before’

“Libya was nothing before Kadafi,” said 26-year-old Mohammed Salem Rheibi, a mechanical engineer who has a 1988 Mazda and lives with his family in a six-bedroom, three-story house in Tripoli.

The satisfaction is not universal, however. Despite Kadafi’s show last year of demolishing prisons and freeing political prisoners, outside opposition groups estimate there are still 200 dissidents behind bars--victims of Kadafi’s hated but now much less powerful Revolutionary Guards--and no immediate prospects for their release.

Moreover, Libya is only now beginning to come out of a devastating economic downturn occasioned by Kadafi’s enormous war expenditures, a decline in oil revenues and the regime’s long discouragement of private enterprise.

In the Green Book that serves as the political Koran of the Libyan regime--full of Kadafi’s pronouncements on Islam, popular socialism, life and Arab unity that are intended to provide a road map for attainment of a true Libyan jamahiriya, or “state of the masses,” Kadafi had proclaimed that profit making was one of the ills of capitalism that must be wiped out.

Businessmen Arrested

All over Libya, shops closed. Business people suspected of hoarding profits were arrested. Lines began forming at grocery stores for even basic supplies.

Then, last year, in one of the first moves of his “green perestroika ,” Kadafi declared that profit making wasn’t necessarily evil if it was intended to benefit the revolution. Thus was launched a major privatization program in the retail and small-service sector that has led to new shops, restaurants, vegetable stands, shoe stores and clothing outlets all over the capital.

In the old souk , or marketplace, behind Tripoli’s Revolution Square, storefronts and market stalls that a year ago were closed and shuttered are open again, repainted in the mint green that is the color of Kadafi’s revolution.

Bedouins Wander Streets

Strolling up the hot, rank, dusty alleyways are blank-faced Bedouins, the lines in their faces caked with desert silt, women in white scarfs impatiently pushing children ahead and teeming dozens of young men making their way aimlessly from stall to stall, pausing to stare at silver lame shoes and blow dryers.

Since Kadafi declared that Libyans should not have to perform menial labor, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians--depending on Libya’s mercurial international relations at any one time--have been imported to wait on tables, clean hotel rooms and drive cabs. Foreign labor also performs most of the skilled duties required at factories and in the oil fields, Western diplomats say, because Libya remains drastically short of skilled labor despite all the new universities.

Spending a week in Libya, a country that is governed by an estimated 700 revolutionary “people’s committees” that are intended to embody real democracy at work, one has the sense that it is a nation run by committee.

Last week, a foreign diplomats’ tour of a major new public works site was abruptly canceled “for the moment”--apparently because no one could agree on how or when it should be conducted.

Throughout Tripoli last week, during what would normally be working hours, dozens of young men could be seen in hotel lobbies, restaurants and cafes clustered around television sets, silently staring at rerun after rerun of the week’s revolutionary parades and speeches.

‘Libyans Do Not Work’

“The Libyans do not work,” explained one Western diplomat. “It’s a society that’s based on sitting in front of your shop and looking into the air. Their officials drink tea and sign papers, but they have no engineers, no scientists, no technicians.”

That is true, said another diplomat who has been based in Tripoli for several years, because many Libyans have never had to work, and they are both the beneficiaries and the victims of that state of affairs.

“The Libyans are the most apathetic people that I have ever met. They take the same approach to political events as we do to meteorological phenomena,” he said. “Even when they come to the point where the government says, ‘Close your shop,’ they don’t say, ‘That is enough.’ They say, ‘Well, maybe I can find a way to sell my goods elsewhere.’

“The problem is, their lives have changed too fast. In 1956, they were among the poorest countries in Africa, and that means in the world. Now, they have a nominal per capita income higher than most countries of Europe . . . and all this without them really having to do anything.”

It was the vast pools of petroleum beneath the Libyan desert that made all the difference. At their peak in the early ‘80s, Libyan oil wells were bringing in $20 billion a year. Then, with the worldwide drop in oil prices and the U.S. embargo, revenues slipped to a low in 1986 of $4.7 billion. This year, they are expected to ease back up to $6 billion.

It is clear that Kadafi’s new conciliatory mood may indeed be pragmatic. Western economic analysts say Libya badly needs new American equipment and technology in its oil fields, and it also needs to build economic solidarity with its Maghreb neighbors in North Africa if it hopes to develop new industries that will outlive the oil bonanza in the decades to come.

Next year, Libya expects to complete the first phase of a massive engineering project dubbed “The Great Man-Made River” that Libyans hope could be one key to developing a new, exportable agricultural industry.

Mammoth Water Project

Reversing the route of traditional water projects, the Great Man-Made River will import water from desert aquifers to the coast--via a $25-billion, 2,000-kilometer network of enormous concrete pipes carrying 5.68 million cubic meters of water a day.

Libya is putting the finishing touches on a $6-billion steel complex at Misurata, which will be one of the largest industrial sites in the region and one of the four or five largest steel mills in the world, with an ultimate annual capacity of 1.32 million tons of liquid steel, one analyst said.

Support Galvanized

If the American government hoped that the 1986 bombing raid would destabilize Kadafi’s regime, it hoped wrong. If anything, the image of Kadafi’s shattered home, preserved within the walls of a military compound in Tripoli, has helped to galvanize support for the man Libyans call simply “The Leader” and his tireless fury at the West.

Perhaps more significantly, many of Libya’s most influential citizens have become comfortable even with the discomforts of a nation run by a white-robed desert visionary.

“Some young people here are frustrated,” said one successful businessman. “They see American movies and Egyptian movies, and they say, ‘Why are there no discos here? Why can’t I drink?’ You know, I studied in London when I was young--it was 1968, the time of hippies and miniskirts--and I had seen all that on TV in Libya, and I said, ‘I want that.’ Then, when I got there, I had money only to go to the movies once a week. My girlfriend and I would say, ‘Oh, if we could go to the movies Tuesday night, and Wednesday night, and Thursday night.’ But we could not.

“Now,” he said, “I have a three-bedroom house, a wife. I have money to go to the movies--but here there are no movies. You see? It all passes. It is just the face of our lives.”