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(LIDO) Arab Spring, Libyan Winter - Vijay Prashad | PDF | Egypt | Gamal Abdel Nasser - Item Preview |
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Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Books to Borrow Open Library. In came the French and the United States, with promises of glory. A deal followed with the Saudis, who then sent in their own forces to cut down the Bahraini revolution, and NATO began its assault, ushering in a Libyan Winter that cast its shadow over the Arab Spring.
This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the recent history of the Qaddafi regime, the social forces who opposed him, and the role of the United Nations, NATO, and the rest of the world's superpowers in the bloody civil war that ensued.
He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History, and professor and director of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
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(LIDO) Arab Spring, Libyan Winter - Vijay Prashad | PDF | Egypt | Gamal Abdel Nasser.Arab Spring, Libyan Winter by Vijay Prashad - Ebook | Scribd
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Arab spring, Libyan winter Item Preview. Such an outcome would strengthen what Washington and Riyadh see as the revisionist bloc, led b y Iran.
As it happened, US intervention was not needed. The Shah's replacement, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerics, disdained the Americans for their support o f the Savak regime, and had no love for the G u lf Arabs either. Nevertheless, their general tenor was that they wanted to consolidate their "Islamic Revolution in One Country.
Angered by the hostage crisis, Carter nudged Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman, to open an all-out w ar against his Iranian neighbors. That war, the Iran-Iraq war, bled the two countries from to with one and a half million dead and untold amounts o f the treasury wasted.
I am referring to the shaykhs in the G ulf region whose governments have supported unbelief against Islam. A series o f hasty summit meetings across cemented the alliance, with a Defense Pact agreed upon in November. In deference to Iran's strength at that time, the G C C did not move to a formal mutual defense pact. But the real power will not come from any maddening war against Iran the Iraqis already showed that this was going to be bloody and senseless affair.
The G C C very quickly set up the capacity to exchange intelligence and to mutually train each other using the best riot control equipment on the market. The GCC's conundrum was made more complex when the Bush administration hastened to war against Afghanistan in and Iraq in What the Bush adventures did was deliver a gift to Iran, removing in two blows Iran's enemies on its two main borders the Taliban to the east and Saddam Hussein to the west.
In both cases, the new regime had a soft spot for Iran—in Afghanistan, apart from the old Iranian friend Ismail Khan o f Herat there are a number o f Afghans in government now who took refuge in Iran during the Civil W ar in the s and the Taliban rule thereafter; in Iraq, the governing Islamic Dawa Party and its ally the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council have long-standing ties with the Iranian government, as does the more radical Sadr Movement. Their scramble to bring the GCC's military arm to life once more has to be seen in the context o f the revival o f Iranian influence.
As the temperature continued to rise in Bahrain in , the Saudis itched to act. The demonstrators refused to leave the Pearl Square Roundabout, in whose center was a three hundred foot sculpture o f six arches holding a pearl. Each arch represented a dhow, the sail o f a ship, and each o f these represented one o f the six members o f the GCC.
It was erected in to commemorate the first G C C summit held in the emirate, and an image o f it came onto the half dinar coin o f the realm. It was an ironic moment. A clear way forward appeared to the Saudi court when events in Libya and Syria took a turn for the worse. In Bahrain's Pearl Square, the protestors chanted d 'dmiyya, silm iyya, peaceful, peaceful. To enter with military force against this cry would look very poorly on the G ulf Arab emirates.
But the evolution o f the conflict in Libya and Syria sent a chill through the Arab Spring. N o longer the resolute protestors o f Tunisia and Egypt, now the guns had come out, and even if the conflict was asymmetrical, no longer could the opposition claim to be peaceful. The heavy hand o f State repression that followed in Libya and Syria opened the door for the Gulf Arab emirates.
N ow it was a question o f handling the opportunity. Places where a political culture had been incubated b y brave activists and b y workers' movements, such as Tunisia and Egypt, had the fastest dynamic forward. Tahrir Square is rarely quiet. The contradictions o f governance shall slow down some o f the momentum, but not b y much. Elsewhere, the calculations o f the powerful tried to derail the emergence o f the Arab Spring.
The early victims were Bahrain and Yemen. They could not be permitted to have their breakthrough. Legitimacy for the Gulf regimes would have been questioned, and this was not permissible as far as the US and its European allies were concerned. Pretensions o f liberty have to be set aside when it comes to Riyadh and Doha.
The Libyan revolt was not conjured up by magicians who rule the Atlantic states, and nor can it be reduced to their machinations. Part 2. Whenever night falls, the echoes o f a phonograph record bring you back.
You traitor. The worst o f all is to have betrayed. Elliot Cola. One such cable, from , noted, "President Ben Ali's extended family is often cited as the nexus o f Tunisian corruption. He lost legitimacy. There was nothing left.
Across the border, in Tripoli, Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi once more opted for the erratic. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet. This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in; do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner. It can suck anything. And you read what he writes and you believe it.
This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims o f Face- book and Kleenex and YouTube? Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our m oods?
It would come from older movements, with deeper roots and grievances. In early February , the IM F said o f Libya that it has followed its "ambitious reform agenda" and the Fund encouraged Libyas "strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role o f the private sector.
The pain o f the IM F-led policies pushed the needle o f distress beyond the bearable. Combined with the lack o f democracy and the harshness of the security state, it is no wonder that the contagion spread as rapidly as it did. Libya, however, did not suffer the sharp rise in grain prices, nor the overarching distress afforded b y the global credit crunch that began in There were no bread riots in late , nor was the protest in February linked directly to economic matters.
Rumors o f a demonstration on February 17, hastened the hand o f the Qaddafi regime. N ot only was this demonstration against the tide o f Islamophobia sweeping through Europe, but it was also against the old colonial power, Italy, whose minister seemed to relish being hateful. That the police opened fire to defend the consulate o f the old colonial power sent a chill through Benghazi, where there were deep roots o f anger against the Qaddafi regime. The police broke up the crowd, and the Qaddafi regime sent the interior minister Abdullah Senussi and Sa'adi Qaddafi to take charge o f the city.
His charms were lost on the city. It was a failed mission. Enthused protestors gathered at the Maydan al-Shajara, where they fought o ff the police attempt to break up their resolve.
News o f the Benghazi revolt spread to other towns, and in Al Bayda' and Az Zintan the protestors burned down the traffic police headquarters and the police station respectively. The revolt, in earnest, tried to match the state repression with its own violence. There was no other way to go. Qaddafi s Libya would not tolerate a Gandhi. It had to be fought with force o f arms. Those arrests provided the best advertisement for the protests.
Rumors spread that Qaddafi s regime, like Mubarak s before him, released thirty prisoners, armed them, and sent them to shoot at the protestors. The numbers were not huge, but they are o f course considerable ten here, thirteen there.
Undaunted, the next day, the protestors in Al Bayda' captured a military base. In Derna, the rebels burnt down a police station, where prisoners died in their cells. Protestors rushed in, and took the barracks.
B y February 21, the city was in the hands o f the rebels. The hasty speed o f the fall of Benghazi showed the brittleness of the regime. Those that remained with Qaddafi, such as the troops in the Elfedeel Bu Omar compound, were besieged and, as news reports put it, "butchered b y angry mobs.
M ore condemnation would come soon. Events on the ground did not suggest that things were so bleak for the rebels. The rest o f Libya will be liberated b y the people and Qaddafi s security forces will be eliminated b y the people o f Libya. In no time, Qaddafi's military prowess was degraded. On August 22, the rebel forces took Tripoli. Qaddafi disappeared. On October 20, Qaddafi was killed in Sirte, his hometown. The future o f Libya remained an open question.
W ould the Libyan rebels set aside the many sectarian religious and tribal affiliations that bedeviled them, and combine to properly fight o ff the Qaddafi regime? This meant that with the fall o f Tripoli, the rebel command remained diffuse. There was a government, but no state with the authority to enforce its laws on the population. Each city Mis- rata, Zintan, Dernah has its own military authority, with little coordination amongst them and very little respect for the central government.
The rebels from below, who spent the most blood in the conflict, are not the immediate beneficiaries o f the revolution, but they are not quiet. They retain their guns. They have their imaginations for a new Libya. What comes is to be seen. But how did we get here? It is not even the beginning o f the end. But it is, perhaps, the end o f the beginning. But with King Idris on the throne, Libya enjoyed a constrained freedom.
In , when Libya was formed, Idris took up the mantel, but essentially retired to his honey-colored palace in wondrous Tobruk. Tripoli was a backwater for him. He preferred Cyrenaica. Idris' flag for the new Libya borrowed from Cyrenaica's emblems with the star and the crescent , not Tripolitania s totems a palm tree, a star and three half moons.
The troops stationed at these bases kept to themselves. Others, when they do leave, make asses o f themselves. Ben Halim had come to the Americans with a dow ry in hand: he had signed a treaty with President Habib Bourguiba o f Tunisia, and they were eager to forge an alliance that might include Algeria in a pro-Western bloc if only the French could be persuaded to leave their neighbor alone. Such fealty to the old and new colonial powers unsettled the Libyan people.
It won Qaddafi a great deal o f popular respect. It wanted for basic social development. W hen Qaddafi came to power, the main export was scrap metal. Libya's deserts were a dumping ground for the detritus from Operation Compass, the allied attack on the Italian and German positions between December and February That part o f the war is celebrated in the R ock Hudson film, Tobruk , where Hudson, playing a Canadian soldier points out, "A dead martyr is just another corpse.
I remember being driven along the Mediterranean road as a child, looking in wonder at the half tracks and tanks littering the roadside. It was these ruins that provided the main export for Libya. Libya's second main export was esparto grass or halfa needle grass used to make high quality paper. Idris' regime ignored the economic question. B y , Standard Oil began to export Libyas oil.
This was to soon become the major export o f the country. B y the time Idris was deposed, the country exported three million barrels o f oil per day. Scandalously, the government received the lowest rent per barrel in the world.
The routine corruption o f Idris' circle and their obsequiousness to their imperial friends are two o f the reasons why there was barely any opposition to Qaddafi s coup. The Libyan people were with him in They would have been with his revolution in if it had delivered on its promise. That was perhaps part o f the problem: the social goods were delivered. The Human Development Index H D I is a measure that looks at education, life expectancy, literacy and the general standard of living.
It was the measure that most disturbed sections o f Libyan society. That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care. Tripoli until then had been the most expensive city in the Middle East. M any large properties were taken over and let to the people at low rents.
The vast sprawling shanty town just outside Tripoli was torn down and replaced b y new workers' housing projects. Libya has often been described as a large desert with two towns on either end, as bookends for the sand: Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east. But in the middle and into the south lay vast desert stretches where the Bedouin and the peasantry worked the land in miraculous ways to grow crops and to raise livestock.
Aware o f the hardships in the countryside, Qaddafi s regime allowed farmers to settle on confiscated Italian and Sanusi land, and the government provided them with low interest loans to buy farm equipment and inputs. Redistribution o f land on the Jefara plain west o f Tripoli was the rural cognate. It was a straightforward redistribution o f wealth conducted as a currency exchange.
Qaddafi was never keen on the full agenda o f socialism. Instead, Qaddafi turned over the fruits o f social wealth to the people at the same time as his regime centralized the mechanism for the redistribution o f those fruits. The gargantuan state was not capable o f being efficient, and this led to serious problems o f incentive in the population and to alienation from its mechanisms.
Rather than address these administrative problems, Qaddafi relied upon the oil revenue to pacify the population. It was the oil that prolonged his revolution and allowed his central state to appear benevolent even as it monopolized de- cision-making in the country. The democratic set-up, which he called the Jamahiriya State o f the Masses , exceeded what King Idris allowed.
The Revolution Committee Movement was not a real development. This abeyance o f authority "I am not the leader" was dangerous because it weakened the established systems, which turned to Qaddafi for his almost regal assent or views.
When the audience laughed with him, he smiled and laughed along, saying, "In theory, in theory. In his Green Book, Qaddafi offered an alternative to the Jamahiriya idea o f democracy. The war in Chad wore down the military, and it ate into the exchequer. The return to eastern Libya o f the Afghan Arabs jihadit b y the late s and the Algerian Civil W ar in brewed the stew o f extremist political Islam in the towns o f Dernah and Benghazi. The tribal leadership caviled at the regime, as it floundered.
It is fitting that the leaders o f the two wings are sons o f Qaddafi—it tells us a great deal about the involution o f his regime. Geography o f Identity. Qaddafis new regime purportedly attempted to overthrow the supremacy o f the tribes. These tribes are vast kinship groups, spread over considerable territory. A million or so o f the Warfallah do not march in evolutionary lockstep. They are a "refuge, given the total absence o f Libyan political institutions.
The ultimate tribe o f the regime, the army, w ould be at hand to make it so. About a third o f the country's population gave their allegiance to the order. It was powerful. Qaddafi saw it as the fifth column, and was not disposed to being generous. The Sa'adi confederation o f the East was left out o f the spoils o f the new dispensation. By the s, Benghazi looked a little worn compared to Tripoli. The returns o f the oil rent and the social wage pledged b y the new revolutionary regime offered only parsimonious help to the impoverished East.
The Tripolitanians wanted a unitary system, and the Cyre- naicans wanted a federal system. It wanted to preserve these through political autonomy from Tripoli, now ruled b y the men o f the small towns such as Qaddafi s own Sirte.
It was a sore issue. Even as Qaddafi s prejudices offered parsimonious help to the impoverished East, his state- building policies ensured the creation o f a Libyan national sensibility.
It was the state bureaucracy and the military that finished the process, cementing the basis for Libyan personhood, now formulated around a culture polished b y the authoritarian populist state. From the Kabyles o f northern Algeria to the Riffians o f northern M orocco and to the Tuareg o f the Sahara, the Amazigh peoples or the Imazighen have struggled against the national liberation states, with little success.
A year later, Qaddafi went to Jadu, in the Nafusa mountains, to meet with Amazigh leaders. It was a normal tendency o f modern nationalism to deny the fractures within a nation-state, and to pretend that minority rights and cultural expression are the first gesture toward secession. The denial o f those rights, history shows us, are more likely to spur secession than the recognition o f them in the first place.
They refused to do so. It is in such instances that it becomes clear how Qaddafi lost the loyalty o f the natural leaders. These declarations also demonstrate that Libya's tribes are not homogenous entities, but rather are composed o f diverse members with varying social and economic backgrounds.
The Green Flag. His new constitution was founded on Islamic principles article 2 , and his new state attempted to do with Islam what it had done with the economy and with politics: nationalize Islam. Political Islam's representatives began to dig deep roots, mainly in eastern Libya. It built up networks outside the mosques whose ulema had been largely nationalized.
There Dr. The attack failed, and two thousand or so people were captured as a result o f its failure. Further attacks came from Inqat and the Islamic Liberation Front. M ore repression followed, including the hanging o f two students at the al-Fateh University in and the execution o f nine members o f Jihad on Libyan State Television on February 17, In , fears o f unrest led the regime to cancel a soccer match between Libya and Algeria.
It was safer to conduct their jihad in far o f f Afghanistan than in Libya, where the regime remained powerful and dangerous. W ith the Afghan war winding down b y the end o f the s, the Afghan Arabs returned home. The Algerian Civil War cost almost two million lives and the destruction o f the social wealth o f the country. After , they would go to join the insurgency in Iraq.
The East had sent a disproportionate number o f its young to fight in Iraq. A US embassy official snuck away from his Tripoli minder in and reported that the young men who went to Iraq did so because they could not effectively protest against Qaddafi. Iraq stood in for Libya. The official went to Der nah. Other factors include a dearth o f social outlets for young people, local pride in Derna's history as a locus o f fierce opposition to occupation, economic disenfranchisement among the town's young men.
For them, resistance against coalition forces in Iraq is an important act o f 'jihad' and a last act o f defiance against the Qadhafi regime. The regime killed 1, prisoners. Qaddafi s henchman and brother-in-law , Abdullah Senussi, who would be sent to Benghazi in February , was the interior minister then as well.
During George H. He's been making some crazy statements. Bush responded, "I think he is just grandstanding. He was trying to turn the ideological tide to his favor, complaining that in the context o f the US bombing in Iraq that "Islam became the target o f the West. He was the "shield o f Islam," as one Libyan put it at that time. Frayed Uniforms. Debates over old colonial treaties and historical claims rested on a region believed to be home to large uranium deposits.
Proxies for powers far from Tripoli and N'Djamena, the two countries went into a bloody conflict that lasted for ten years. The French intervened twice, and with superior air power beat back Qaddafi and his allies.
This was the Toyota W ar o f , and it resembled in many particulars the use o f such trucks in Libya itself in The Libyan army was routed, and it lost the Aouzou Strip, and if the Organization o f African States had not intervened, it might have been threatened within Libya itself.
It was a preview o f B y some accounts, the Libyan armed forces lost a third o f its infantry and considerable amounts o f armor. Morale was at a very low level. It was never to recover its verve. The defeat in the Toyota War reduced their confidence. The U N sanctions, Dirk Vandewalle argues, led to "mounting discontent and increasing privation in Libya, reflected in unpaid salaries, decreased subsidies, cuts in army perks and a shortage o f basic goods.
Canny enough to recognize the problems in the military, Qaddafi recalled his best units to the western part o f the country. The elite corps, including the 32nd Reinforced later Khamis Brigade, was brought to defend Tripoli. It was already a sign o f weakness. The Libyan army was the regime's own Trojan Horse. United Nations sanctions came into effect in They had a huge impact on the Libyan exchequer. The country was simply not prepared to withstand the pressure.
Unimaginative use o f the oil surplus hastened the economic stagnation. U N sanctions in threw the reforms into turmoil, and it allowed the old Qaddafi to emerge out o f the sarcophagus that he had become.
Cracks in the ruling elite at times slowed and at times speeded up the reforms. Qaddafi would enter the debate on one side, then another, speaking out o f both sides o f his mouth. M oussa Koussa was one o f Qaddafi's close allies, a man o f the tent.
His loyalty knew no bounds. In , he was sent to be ambassador to London. This was a reference to the Libyan dissidents. He was expelled from London. But he was not Qaddafi's butcher. Moussa Koussa could promise millions o f dollars from Libya's oil money. The negotiations went back and forth. To add to the pot o f blood money, Qaddafi decided to announce that Libya would "disclose and dismantle all weapons o f mass destruction. Their nuclear card prevented a repeat o f the Iraq adventure.
That Qaddafi threw the card on the table revealed his obsequious intentions. Lantos' team returned to the US with good news about Libya. President George W. Bush signed Executive Order which voided all outstanding claims against Libya. Moussa Koussa had done a remarkable job. In , Moussa Koussa opened conversations with various jihadi groups based in Europe. It is the concern o f the whole world. The US cannot combat it alone.
Qaddafi played a double game with the jihadLf. On the one side, b y about , the regime had opened a dialogue with the LIFG. He had other fish to fry. In a memorandum from , General Ward wrote, "Libya is a top partner in combating transnational terrorism. Alongside the payment o f the money came a remarkable shift in the ideological framework o f the Qaddafi regime.
Qaddafi s interpreter o f world events, Dr. Ahmed Fituri the Secretary for the Americas in the Ministry o f Foreign Affairs had begun to write summaries o f new books for the leader. It tells you something about a person if you know what they are reading. I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud o f her because she's a black woman o f African origin". Personalities did not spur the transformation.
It was rooted in the need to remove the sanctions, and to maintain the older animosities in the new era. W hen Congressman Tom Lan- tos visited Tripoli in his second visit , he sat down with Moussa Koussa, who warned him, "Iran and Iraq used to balance each other out.
Now, there is no balance. Ibrahim was known as The Donkey, largely because he tried unsuccessfully to ban the teaching o f foreign languages mainly English in the s.
Such old- school revolutionaries had been sidelined b y the late s, even as they retained a small public following among those who had faith in the revolutions promise. At no point did Qaddafi bulldoze the statue in Bab al-Azziziya o f a US warplane being crushed by a fist a sculpture to commemorate the bombing o f Libya.
Such images remained part o f the diet o f state propaganda, even as the official current moved in a direction that pleased the Atlantic capitals. There was an element o f naivety in the Qaddafi foreign ministry. As Roland Bruce St. The most important such maneuver was Qaddafis attempt to block the idea o f a Mediterranean Union mooted b y France's Sarkozy. Qaddafi called a mini summit o f the Arab League in Tripoli to denounce the Union.
It is a picture o f the hero as dignified captive, surrounded b y preening Italian army and civilian leaders as they prepared to execute the Libyan hero. Qaddafis residual anti-colonialism came out in his tussles with the Europeans. The Europeans were also eager for Libyan oil. Britain's Tony Blair and France's Sarkozy went to kiss Qaddafi's ring and pledge finance for oil concessions.
It is the reason why the British government freed Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, in August Qaddafi was willing to give up the main insurance policy o f rogue states, his nuclear arsenal. He was eager to forge some kind o f entente despite the press o f imperialism on the Global South.
CIA papers found in a cache o f Libyan government documents in an abandoned Tripoli building show that Sir Mark Allen, the former head o f counterterrorism in Britain's M I6 carefully nurtured a relationship with Moussa Koussa. Moussa Koussa was a crucial point man. It was also not an enormous surprise that Moussa Koussa fled to Tunisia in late March, and b y March 30 arrived on a private Swiss jet at Farnborough Airport, in Britain. The flight was organized b y MI6.
Moussa Koussa was the highest profile defector during the battle to eject Qaddafi. Qaddafi had become for both Britain and Moussa Koussa a "stray dog. Once Moussa Koussa had successfully spread the oil largess to erase the U N sanctions and to placate the United States, the question o f "reform" returned to the political elites o f Libya.
It was there that the main debate would flourish from the late s to The debate broke along lines familiar in many post-colonial states that had been through the epoch o f national construction o f an economy through import substitution or other means and that had b y the s been pressured by structural forces and by more overt forces, such as the IM F to globalize. The "reformers" followed the script o f the IMF, and the "hardliners" settled into an obduracy regarding the old ways and so appeared unimaginative in this new climate.
Their debates sharpened after the credit crunch o f , when oil prices oscillated and plans for privatization floundered as the ability to continue to pay out the social wages declined. It was in this maw that Qaddafi would lose very large sections o f the population that had hitherto supported him for one reason or another. The regime's hegemony collapsed long before The rebels did not have to gain the support o f the masses who held fast to Qaddafi, for such masses, b y , did not exist in large numbers.
That was the task o f the uprising. The two previous forums, in Sirte in and Benghazi in , had provided Saif al-Islam with a platform to urge on reforms o f the regime built b y his father and his clique. The first two speeches were forthright, but timid. A t the third meeting, held in a remote desert town on the Awbari Lakes, Saif al-Islam set aside his prepared remarks and spoke, nervously, from the heart. He praised his father, but said that Qaddafi had built a regime in a historically unique set of circumstances.
It was not reproducible. Things had to change. Saif al-Islam called for total privatization o f all aspects o f life. All o f them had been educated in the Atlantic world, and most o f them spent much o f their career overseas.
They are figures o f renown in their own circles, and had come to Libya on the say-so o f Saif al-Islam because they were committed to the transformation o f the rump o f the revolutionary social wage set-up into a neoliberal system. What they wanted was to build a Kuwait in the Mediterranean. In other words, to import into Libya the full spectrum o f neoliberal economic policies: open doors to finance capital, a place for finance to run its casino activities and an industrial sector premised upon an absence o f regulations.
The classic approach to deal with this Dutch Disease is to raise tariffs and subsidize manufacturing. He wanted him back as Prime Minister, to replace the technocrat al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi w ho had chanced to embroil himself in a series o f scandals that showed poor management rather than corruption, and that showed him to be a poor standard bearer for the reform agenda.
He had the fortune o f being well-regarded in the international oil world not long after he was tasked to head the N O C the 27th Oil and M oney Conference in London voted him "Petroleum Executive o f the Year" for ; over the years the winners include executives from Chevron, Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Arab oilmen such as Abdullah S.
The oil ministry was well on its way to resembling the oil sector in Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Ghanem did crucial work in the most lucrative o f Libyas sectors. But far more important reform work was taking place at the National Economic Development Board, headed b y Mahmoud Jibril. There is a still a gap o f distrust' dividing the two. As to whether Libya has a Master Plan that includes all the 11, [privatization] projects, Jibril admitted that in the past two years, Libya had started executing projects without such a plan.
At the same time, his organization has a daunting task to tackle, in terms o f rationalizing 11, development projects in the chaotic Libyan government bureaucracy and also, to train Libyans to work in new sectors outside o f the hydrocarbons industry.
Jibril has stated American companies and universities are welcome to join him in this endeavor and we should take him up on his offer. The property rights law no. Ben Halim son o f Idris' Prime Minister came back to Libya from Goldman Sachs, and was deeply aware o f the mechanisms for such reforms.
This worried another strand o f the regime, and they weighed in on Qaddafi. They wanted the old fox to take a firm stand against the reformers. This was wishful thinking.
At best, Qaddafi gave a couple o f speeches that recycled the old rhetoric. In , Qaddafi warned, "Oil companies are controlled b y foreigners who have made millions from them — now Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.
Oil m oney now slipped through the net into the Atlantic banks, where the accounts o f the oil companies, Libya's Sovereign Wealth fund and the private accounts o f the Libyan regime's elites grew substantially.
Behind the names, the old game continued. If the social wages would not be properly funded, other results awaited the Libyan people. This was classic neoliberal thought at work. B y early , the tremors in the ruling elites o f Libya came to a head. Ben Halim resigned when he found himself unable to move the banking system fully into neoliberalism. Jibril threatened to resign at least three times, but he was brought back into the fold with promises from Saif al-Islam.
In his speech to the Youth Forum, Saif al-Islam himself proposed that he w ould retire from politics. These men responded to a formidable section o f the Old Guard who had not fully bought into the reform agenda. People like Housing Minister Abu Z ayd Umar Dorda held fast to the ideals o f the revolution, or else they worried that their own leeching o f the social wealth for private gain would be supplanted by the new methods that would benefit the reform section.
Qaddafi proposed a unique solution in This was a boon to the reformers. To tie the hands o f the Old Guard Qaddafi offered a massive transfer payment scheme, to turn over oil revenues to individuals. It was privatization that looked like populism. The past forty years had to be set aside, and Libya needed to pick up on its arrested historical development.
The Old Guard returned to the fray, threatening a rise in inflation if Qaddafi simply turned over the oil money to every individual Libyan. They had become defensive and worn-down. The Congress did not appreciate the privatization o f state-owned enterprises and the creation o f free trade enclaves. The Congress tried to hold the tempo o f reforms down.
Their actions irritated the IMF, whose report on Libya concluded, "Progress in developing a market economy has been slow and discontinuous. They have their own agendas. This book will appear at the anniversary of the start of the Libyan revolt.
It is too early to tell how things will pan out. This book does not risk more than a few general remarks. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is less about predicting the future and more about showing us how the Atlantic powers insinuated themselves into the Arab Spring, to attempt to create a Libyan Winter to the advantage of their national interests, the interest of the multinational oil firms and the neoliberal reformers within Libya.
When the unwashed began to assert themselves in France, the royalty scoffed at them. What they wanted was bread, whose price skyrocketed in — Taking to the streets in remarkable numbers, the people demanded fair prices for bread, their main staple. In reaction to la guerre des farines , the flour war, Marie Antoinette proposed that the poor eat cake. Hunger broke the back of fear. It is the lesson for the ages.
It was a lesson for North Africa in late Grain prices soared by sixty percent. Protestors in Tunisia came onto the streets in December with baguettes raised in the air. In Egypt, protestors took to the streets in January chanting, They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time. Hunger and inequality drove the protests.
Their governments hastened to up their subsidies, but it was too little, too late. The question of bread reveals a great deal about the delinquent states in Egypt and Tunisia. The Nasserite state in Egypt well understood the importance of a bread subsidy, and it encouraged the domestic production of wheat for the bread needs of the citizenry.
When Anwar Sadat came to power in the s, he gradually cut off the bread subsidy, what the Tunisian intellectual Larbi Sadiki calls a democracy of bread dimuqratiyyat al-khubz.
This was part of the wave of reforms in North Africa against the economic policies that favored national development. Robust national development went by the wayside. More important was the will of the IMF and the international bond markets.
Nationalization and subsidies ended, and free enterprise zones were created by February Sadat wanted a blood transfusion for the Egyptian economy, and so the Atlantic banks began to draw pints of blood from the ailing Egyptian working-class and peasantry.
The democracy of bread was a casualty of the new thinking. In , the Egyptian people rose up in a bread intifada, with additional targets being the nightclubs and liquor stores, symbols of the openness.
Lessons were hastily learned. Subsidies returned. The new regimes tried to maintain the subsidies along with the new openness.
This money was used to buy the massive output of the industrial farms in the United States. Wheat came into the country, but at the expense of the restive peasantry, now increasingly under-employed.
In , Egypt was the leading importer of wheat in the world. Egypt relied upon its rent income for survival remittances from payment for privatization, among others. The ruling clique diverted a substantial part of the rent into the coffers of the Swiss banks. Democracy did not live within this economy. The tyrant here was the ruling clique but not operating alone. It had close collaborators in the IMF, the World Bank, the Banks, the bond markets and the multinational corporations.
Oil did not flow liberally under the sands of Tunisia and Egypt, but it did in the rest of the Arab world, from Libya to the Arabian Peninsula.
It has long been a question of the Arab Revolution that opened in the s: When will the economies of the Arab region be able to sustain their populations rather than fatten the financial houses of the Atlantic world, and offer massive trust funds for the dictators and monarchs? Cursed with oil, the Arab world has seen little economic diversification and almost no attempt to use the oil wealth to engender balanced social development for the people.
Instead, the oil money sloshed North, to provide credit for overheated consumers in the United States and to provide the banks with the vast funds that are otherwise not garnered by populations that have stopped saving in the United States wages have been stagnant since but cultural expectations for lifestyle have not declined, which means that the credit provided by the petro-dollars artificially closed the gap between empty coffers and lavish dreams.
The oil money also went toward the real estate boom in the Gulf, and the baccarat tables and escort services of Monaco the Las Vegas of Europe, which has another decrepit monarch, Albert II, at its head. It did not flow into the pockets of the Arab Street. The contradictions of the neoliberal security state in Egypt were plainly exhausted by , when the bread intifada returned in force protests in much smaller scale were seen across the Arab world, from Morocco to Syria.
The pressure was such that lines for bread increased, and by March about a dozen people died in scuffles or from exhaustion, waiting on bread. On April 6, , a mass protest in al-Mahalla al-Kubra went from the issue of bread to unemployment and onward to the normal excesses of the security state.
Mahalla is no backwater. In , twenty-four thousand workers went on strike in the textile mills of this industrial town not more than a few hours drive north of Cairo. They were the backbone of the events. This Turkish speaker and veteran of the Foreign Service was confounded by the paranoia of the Egyptian dictatorship cable sent on May 14, A year later, Ricciardone sent his assessment of Mahalla and of the tremors underfoot to his superiors at the State Department in Foggy Bottom: Although not on the scale of the or riots, Mahalla is significant.
The violent protests demonstrated that it is possible to tear down a poster of Mubarak and stomp on it, to shout obscene anti-regime slogans, to burn a minibus and hurl rocks at riot police. These are unfamiliar images that lower-income Egyptians thrill to. In Mahalla, a new organic opposition force bubbled to the surface, defying current political labels, and apparently not affiliated with the MB [Muslim Brotherhood].
This may require the government to change its script cable sent on April 16, The government did not change its script. This new opposition, strengthened by factory workers and students, the unemployed and the embittered, would take the name of April 6—and eventually find themselves in Tahrir Square by January In , twenty-first century plagues reduced the Russian wheat harvest to a third.
As the journalist Annia Ciezadlo put it, a combination of factors—droughts, wildfires, ethanol subsidies, and more—converged into a global food crisis. The epicenter of this was North Africa. World wheat prices rose beyond imagination. Tunisia and Egypt, both importers of wheat, could not maintain the democracy of bread. Unbalanced by the rising tide of discontent, Mubarak tried to return to the democracy of bread. It was far too late. As the economic belt tightened, the Egyptian population inhaled for a political battle.
On January 4, , Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire and died. Bouazizi was the breadwinner of his family, and well known in his modest neighborhood for distributing food from his cart to the poor. Harassment by the Tunisian police over his inability to pay their bribes or purchase their permits dogged Bouazizi through his life.
This was the mandate of the hard-working informal sector, to be ceaselessly humiliated by the security state for the mere fact of existence. An act of immolation in central Tunisia would normally matter very little to the intelligence and diplomatic corps in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere in the advanced financial world.
It galvanized the people of Tunisia against their suave and ruthless leader, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been praised by the governments of France and the United States, by the International Monetary Fund and by the bond markets. The infitah reforms crushed the social possibilities of the organized working-class and the peasantry, who drifted into the world of informal work. More and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs of North Africa.
A decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rates reduced the budgets of the state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people.
Less income and less services produced slumlands whose frustrations led in two directions, as the Cairo-based scholars Helmi Sharawy and Azza Khalil noted: acquiescence or revolt. Revolts of various kinds were the order of the day, since at least Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act.
Over the past decade, peasant struggles in Sarando, Bhoot and Kamshish have been commonplace. The latter, Kamshish, is not twenty kilometers from the birthplace of Mubarak Kafr el-Meselha and only eight kilometers from that of Sadat Mit Abu al-Kum. In May , as Tahrir Square remained the focal point of the Arab Spring, the farmers of Kamshish honored the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Salah Hussein who led the charge against the local landlord al-Fiqi family by founding the Union of Egyptian Farmers.
The doctors at the Zazazig Hospital and the lawyers of Port Said and Cairo, as well as the school principals of Minieh inspired other professionals to toss aside their hesitancy for dignity. The laboring classes were reacting in fury not only to their higher cost of living, but also to the mounting extravagance and conspicuous consumption of the elite.
In Tunisia, the depth of an obvious political society such as in Egypt is not apparent. One of the most spectacular punctures took place in the southwestern mining town of Redayef near the mining area of Gafsa in January The state-owned phosphate company conducted a fraudulent hiring process, cashiering the unconnected and hiring eighty-one people with connections to the upper state apparatus.
Redayef is the Tunisian Mahallah. The street protests of the workers and the unemployed expanded to include students in Tunis, Sfax and Sousse, and the broadest of the social classes from the Gafsa governorate. Wives and widows of the imprisoned workers captured the streets in April, and the police responded with their own habits. In June, two protestors were killed.
The dynamic smoldered, not erupting, but not dying down either. It has been a long-standing question in the Arab world: When will we rule ourselves? To top the obscenity, during the capture of Tahrir Square, Obama conferred with the Saudis on the democratic transition in Egypt: this is like asking a carnivore how to cook tofu.
In , the aged King Farouk of Egypt set sail on his yacht, al-Mahrusa. Guarded by the Egyptian navy, he waved to people who he considered his lesser: Nasser, son of a postman, and Sadat, son of small farmers. Nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy came alongside land reforms. But these were ill conceived, and they were not able to throttle the power of the Egyptian bourgeoisie whose habit for quick money continued, with three quarters of new investments going to inflate a real estate bubble.
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