King Idris and the monorachy were swept aside as the army rallied behind a coup in Libya. Shrouded in secrecy, a revolutionary council was established, and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi emerged as the nation’s charismatic but quixotic head of state.
In 1969, Idris I, king of Libya—who earlier in his career had succeeded at commanding popular support as both a political and a spiritual leader—was no longer able to maintain the delicate political balance in Libya, which he had done while maintaining alliances with the United Kingdom and the United States. Although the country had gained independence in 1951, the new breed of pan-Arab
Seizing the moment on September 1, a small group of military officers led by Muammar al-Qaddafi staged a coup d’état against Idris while he was in Turkey for medical treatment. They abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the new Libyan Arab republic (the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya), with Qaddafi as the “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” the new nation’s head of state.
The story of Idris’s rise to power provides the context for understanding Qaddafi’s coup and is similar to that of many other colonial leaders on the African continent, where tribal chiefs were bolstered by Western colonial powers to consolidate their power and to dominate their rivals. These tribal heads would later learn, rather belatedly, that their alliance with the Western powers had merely created a nest for rebellious movements and resentment that would eventually lead to their downfall. Idris, the grandson of al-Sanūsī, founder of the Sanūsī Muslim
In the wave of nationalism and pro-independence movements in North Africa, Idris as emir of Cyrenaica fought hard to maintain independence for his territory as Italian forces moved to colonize the entire region. Although the Italians had recognized him as emir, in 1922 Italian colonization efforts intensified,
Ironically, the torrent of events that brought independence to Libya and many other countries in northern Africa also brought a new breed of Arab nationalism that sought, more than self-rule, the complete repudiation of all ties to the Western forces that had helped to create the new states. The pan-Arab movement, which sought the unification of peoples and nations of the Middle East in the postwar period, was aimed at dismantling the domination of the Ottoman Empire. At war’s end, the movement had become opposed to colonialism and Western intervention in the Arab world. Architects of pan-Arabism, in their quest for independence from the Ottoman Empire, had sought and received the support of the United Kingdom to establish a unified state of Arabia, as stated in the 1915-1916 Hussein-McMahon correspondence,
The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted from the proposed delimitation. Subject to that modification, and without prejudice to the treaties concluded between us and certain Arab Chiefs, we accept that delimitation. As for the regions lying within the proposed frontiers, in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to interests of her ally France, I am authorized to give you the following pledges on behalf of the Government of Great Britain, and to reply as follows to your note: That subject to the modifications stated above, Great Britain is prepared to recognize and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca.
In 1916, however, the United Kingdom and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement,
The spirit of pan-Arabism was later rekindled by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Egyptian president who combined an aggressive doctrine of Arab nationalism with a deep-seated rejection of Western intervention in Arab affairs. Nasser’s tough stance against the United Kingdom, France, and Israel during the Suez crisis
Skirmishes between Israel, on one side, and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, on the other, culminated in 1967 with the Six-Day War with Israel,
Biographers of Muammar Qaddafi say that he led the military coup d’état that overthrew King Idris I. Thus, Qaddafi was connected to a core of militant revolutionaries who were admirers of Nasser, the Egyptian pan-Arab leader. As early as 1963, while studying at the Military Academy in Benghazi, Qaddafi had joined a militant organization that was aimed at overthrowing the Libyan monarchy. On his return from Britain, where he had undertaken further military studies at the Royal Academy in Sandhurst, Qaddafi became a commissioned officer in the Signal Corps in 1966. As the aging Idris left for Turkey to undergo medical treatment in 1969, Qaddafi and a small group of military officers seized power and announced the deposition of the king. Qaddafi and his group replaced the deposed king with his nephew, Crown Prince Ḥasan al-Sanūsī,
In his earliest official government statements, Qaddafi is referred to only as the “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution.” He proclaimed his regime as a strand of Arab nationalism with some similarities to a welfare state. He said the political system, “Islamic socialism,” would thrive on “direct popular democracy” and accommodate private ownership of small businesses while the government controlled the large corporations, imposed Islamic laws, and outlawed alcohol and gambling.
Qaddafi later maintained an aggressive anti-Western foreign policy, especially against the United States, and was accused of complicity in mass acts of state-sponsored terrorism in many Western capitals in the 1980’s. Among these were the 1986 terrorist bombing of a discotheque in Berlin, in which two American servicemen were killed, and the bombing in 1988 of Pan Am Flight 103
In a dramatic turn of events, Qaddafi in 2003 began to make policy changes toward the West. Libya dismantled its illegal weapons program and paid almost $3 billion in compensation to the families of those killed in the terrorist bombings of Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772.
The September, 1969, military takeover in Libya marked a critical point in the surge of revolutionary ideas that spread through much of the Arab world as the clutches of colonialism were being released amid the fervor of nationalism. The impetus for Arab nationalism exemplified by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to rekindle Arab pride and unity by renouncing Western colonialism. Arab antagonism and anger toward the West became crystallized around the most pernicious of all “intolerables,” the assault on the Arab religion, Islam.
In due course, the pan-Arab movement in most fledging Arab nations would come to define every confrontation with Western powers as a religious offensive that all the faithful must defend. To make matters worse, the Western nations’ unapologetic support for Israel became a lightning rod for the fundamentalist passions that were seething throughout Arab lands.
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Garrels, Anne. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. A comprehensive overview of the Middle East. Topics treated include Islamism, Christianity, nation studies, wars, and the birth of Israel in the postwar Middle East. -
Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. The coverage spans the entire continent, treating the major upheavals more or less chronologically—from the promising era of independence in the 1960’s to the most recent spate of infamies occurring in Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. -
Qaddafi, Muammar, with Edmond Jouve. My Vision. Translated by Angela Parfitt. London: John Blake, 2005. Qaddafi’s life story is revealed through interviews and research of Jouve, an expert in Third World Africa who first met Qaddafi in 1979. The account is given from Qaddafi’s point of view and portrays him as a leader of conviction committed to improving the lives of Libyans while resisting the threat of the Zionists and the Western influence in the Middle East. -
Simon, Geoffrey Leslie. Libya: The Struggle for Survival. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. The author goes to great lengths to produce an investigative essay on Libyan involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Also includes a descriptive sketch of modern Libya and an analytical survey of Libyan foreign policy, especially with the United States. -
Stanik, Joseph. El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi. Examines the origins of the 1980’s U.S. attacks on targets in Libya within the context of fighting terrorism.
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