Libya

C

An Italian Colony

In the 19th century the Ottomans tried to rule the area more effectively, but in 1911 Italy went to war against Turkey and occupied Libya. By this time the Sanusi, an Islamic brotherhood, had arisen in the interior of Cyrenaica. When Italian forces invaded Libya, the Sanusi led the Cyrenaican resistance against them. Although the Ottomans renounced their rights over Libya in 1912, the Italians met stiff resistance from Libyans. Italian occupation was confined to certain areas of the Libyan coast until 1922, but by 1932 it had been extended to all the interior. Until 1934 Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were separate colonies. Libya was made part of the national territory of Italy by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1939.

During World War II (1939-1945), Libya was the scene of intense desert fighting. After the Allies expelled German and Italian troops in 1943, France and Britain shared control of the country. By the peace treaty of 1947 Italy renounced all claims to the territory, and in 1949 the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for the granting of independence to Libya by January 1, 1952.

D

Kingdom Established

A national assembly, composed of delegates from Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan, convened at Tripoli in 1950. The assembly nominated Emir Sayid Idris al-Sanusi, head of the Cyrenaican government and leader of the Sanusi brotherhood, to serve as king of an independent Libya. It promulgated the Libyan constitution on October 7, 1951. On December 24 the emir, as King Idris I, proclaimed the independence of the federal United Kingdom of Libya. Elections were held in February 1952, and parliament met for the first time in March. Libya joined the Arab League in 1953 and the United Nations (UN) in 1955. In 1963 the constitution was amended to give women the right to vote, and the federation of three provinces was replaced by a centralized government system.

At the time of independence Libya’s population was poverty-stricken and largely illiterate. Britain and the United States agreed to extend economic and technical aid to the government in exchange for the right to maintain their military installations in Libya. Because of the shortage of Libyan judges and teachers, many Egyptians entered government service. As oil revenues increased during the 1960s, Libya terminated the treaties under which the last British and U.S. air bases had operated, and the last troops left by 1970.

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Libya was not a participant in the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, but it strongly supported its Arab League neighbors in opposition to Israel after the war. Libya also gave financial aid to Jordan and the United Arab Republic, as Egypt was then called, to rebuild their economies.

E

Overthrow of the Monarchy

A new era in the history of Libya began on September 1, 1969, when a group of young army officers overthrew the royal government and established a republic under the name Libyan Arab Republic. The revolutionary government, led by Muammar al-Qaddafi, a 27-year-old army officer aspiring to leadership of the Arab world, showed a determination thereafter to play a larger role in the affairs of the Middle East and North Africa. Representatives of Libya engaged in discussions with Egypt and Sudan on plans for the coordination of economic, military, and political policies of the three countries. In September 1971, Egypt, Libya, and Syria agreed to form a federation designed for mutual military advantage against Israel. This and a later agreement to form a union with Tunisia were abandoned in 1974.

In internal affairs the Qaddafi regime nationalized all banks and decreed that all businesses must become wholly owned by Libyans. Agreement was reached with foreign-owned oil companies that increased Libya’s annual oil revenues by $770 million at that time. In the early 1970s, however, Libya also nationalized the oil resources of the country. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 Libya joined in an embargo of oil sales to the West and urged higher prices to the oil-consuming countries.

F

Qaddafi’s Regime

By the mid-1970s Qaddafi’s domestic revolution was coalescing. The constitution of 1977 laid out the new political system, whereby Libya became a “state of the masses” (jamahiriya) ostensibly run by the people through a system of local and national committees. The country’s official name was changed to Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and a decade of economic upheaval began as the government seized most private property and instituted a radically egalitarian welfare state.

Under Qaddafi’s leadership Libya took a much more active role not only in Arab affairs but also in international politics. Opposing the peace initiative toward Israel of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, Libya took a leading part, along with Syria, in the so-called “rejectionist front” in 1978. Its support for the Palestine Liberation Organization later expanded to barely concealed subsidies for terrorists in other nations, and in the early 1980s the regime was believed to be linked to a campaign of assassinations directed against Libyan dissidents residing abroad. In 1974 Libya seized a segment of Chadian territory known as the Aozou Strip, claiming rightful ownership of the region under a colonial-era treaty. Over the next 15 years, Libyan forces intervened in a civil war in neighboring Chad. A peace treaty with Chad was signed in 1989.

Libyan relations with the United States deteriorated in the early 1980s. In 1981 U.S. Navy jets shot down two Libyan fighter planes that had intercepted them over international waters in the Gulf of Sidra. Libya, which claimed all of the Gulf of Sidra as territorial waters, decried the attack. In 1982 the United States imposed an embargo on Libyan oil imports. Another encounter in the Gulf of Sidra in March 1986 resulted in the destruction of two Libyan ships by U.S. Navy ships. In April, responding to heightened terrorism in Europe apparently directed by Libya against Americans, the United States bombed sites in Libya declared by U.S. president Ronald Reagan to be “terrorist centers.” Qaddafi’s home at one of the barracks was damaged and his infant daughter was killed, but the major damage was to other military sites.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Libya urged moderation, opposing both Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent use of force against Iraq. The following year United Nations sanctions were imposed against Libya for its refusal to extradite the two men suspected of the 1988 bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The United States added further sanctions against Libya in 1996.

By the mid-1990s Qaddafi had begun moving away from his self-appointed role as leader of the opposition to the international system. Decades of disappointment with failed efforts to engineer Arab unity and the added burden of international sanctions had taken their toll on the regime and the country. Moreover, developing Libyan opposition to the Qaddafi regime created difficulties at home. Starting in the mid-1970s many of the best-educated Libyans had left the country, and some formed opposition groups in exile. During the 1980s the United States supported elements of the exiled opposition, but they had little effect on the regime. In the 1990s, however, a new opposition developed. Although Qaddafi had come to power an advocate of Islam, he and the religious elite of Libya parted ways in the early 1980s, and Qaddafi’s version of Islam became increasingly heterodox. As a result, he faced the same kind of Islamist opposition many of the secular regimes in the Arab world confronted, and he found that his interests increasingly coincided with those of regimes he had once reviled, such as Algeria and Egypt. By the late 1990s observers suggested that Qaddafi had become interested in Libya’s participation in the international system not as a “rogue state,” as the United States had labeled the nation, but as a law-abiding member.

G

Recent Developments

In 1994 the International Court of Justice ruled that Chad had sovereignty over the Aozou Strip, and Libya accepted the ruling without protest. In 1999 Libya agreed to hand over the two suspects in the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie to stand trial in The Netherlands under Scottish law. Upon delivery of the suspects for transport to The Netherlands, the United Nations suspended sanctions against Libya.

The conviction of one of the Lockerbie suspects and the acquittal of the other failed to satisfy the Lockerbie families, who had become a strong lobbying group in the United States, and U.S. sanctions against Libya were extended in 2001. However, relations with the United States seemed to be thawing, and signs pointed toward Libya’s readiness to end its decades of political isolation. Qaddafi referred to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States as “horrific,” and Libya subsequently shared sensitive intelligence about terrorist networks with the United States.

In 2003 Libya disclosed that it had been pursuing a program to develop nuclear weapons but that the program had been discontinued. Qaddafi announced that Libya was forsaking weapons of mass destruction and would cooperate with international organizations in dismantling its weapons programs. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) subsequently reported that Libya’s nuclear program was more advanced than had been suspected but that Libya was still not close to developing an atomic bomb. In response to Qaddafi’s announcement and as a result of Libya accepting responsibility for the Pan American bombing, the United States moved to normalize relations between the two countries. The United States formally restored partial diplomatic relations with Libya in 2004 and established full diplomatic relations in 2006.