ARAB VISIONARY COLONEL GADAFFI GAMBLES ON HIS DREAM OF UNITY

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33155, 20 February 1973, Page 12

ARAB VISIONARY COLONEL GADAFFI GAMBLES ON HIS DREAM OF UNITY

By

DAVID HURST.

reporting to rhe "(juardian. from Tripoli)

I Reprinted by arranyemcn

Will there be union or won't there? There is really no other questioi in Tripoli today. Will the Egyptian-Libyan merger, apparently schedule ) for September of this year, really come into being? One man who will brook no doubt is Colonel Gadaffi. The union i his brainchild. It could make or break him. If he wanted. Gadafti could havt ! a quiet life. His is not a difficult country to govern. It faces no specia ! problems. Its two million people, dour, devout, and backward, are less political!y-minded than most Arabs.

Gadaffi's o.wn position, which has looked a bit shaky at times, now seems solid enough. He has established a personal ascendancy over the Revolutionary Command Council. He is Head of State and commander of the army. He is chairman of the Arab Socialist Union, the only authorised political party. He presides over the Supreme Judicial Council, which frames laws in a Gadaffist spirit. Through the recently formed Supreme National Guidance Council, he will [instruct his people in the philosophy of his revolution. Most important of all, he has loosed the governmental purse strings. Libyan oil earnings continue to rise so fast that, in spite of a deliberate cutback in production of about a third, they will this [year reach a record 1,700 (million dollars or so. In his first two years Gadaffi, lost in pan-Arab reveries and reacting with his Bedouin’s t outraged Puritanism to the (corruptions of the monarchy, (was notoriously reluctant to (invest oil revenues in the (development of Libya. His people grumbled at this excessive, if not discreditable, frugality. The money flows | But not. the money is be- ' ginning to flow like water. The first development budget, for 1970-71 was £266 millions; not more than half of it was spent. Of the £4OO million allocated for the next year two thirds was spent; £1,550 million is already allocated for the next three years. Foreign consultants are told: “Never mind whether it is economic or not, just deliver the goods.” The Libyans still treat foreigners with the same instinctive; mistrust, determined not to; be diddled, but as for the pro-| jects themselves they have, the oil-rich predilection for, the grandiose. Agriculture is; now very much the thing.

In the next ten years some £BOO million is expected to

. go on the development of ■ tour agricultural areas, bring--1 ing some 550,000 hectares i under cultivation, about five ’ times as much as the country 1 lias at present. Deep in the ! Libyan desert at Koufra. .ultra - modern farming. >[employing a minimum of ■ labour, is already in operation. For the Jebel al-Akhdar, ■ east of Benghazi there is talk, i(which many experts find far:(fetched, of bringing water to ■(to the fertile highlands by I diverting the Nile, or lifting I it, through nuclear power > and massive desalination, .(from the Mediterranean. . ( Schools, hospital and popular housing units are springI (ing everywhere, along with , all sorts of public works. .Imports are soaring from f| something over two and a jjhalf million tons last year to j'more than four million this jlyear. The ships are queueing t |up at Tripoli harbour. Two . new ports are planned at s'Dima and Misurata, and , emergency transit arrange- ■ ments have been made with ((Tunisia. . But Gadaffi. the visionary ( from the desert, does not (want an incontrovertibly ( rational one. In unity lies 'strength. That is the essence: (strength to right the wrongs done to the Arabs, chief of which is the existence of (Israel. The merger of Egypt (and Libya, also rational in itself for economic and demo- ; graphic reasons, will create a i “great State” that will lead ; on to more. Gadaffi is only • visionary in his apparent ; conviction that the Arabs, , congenitally divided, really can fulfil their yearning for unity and that he, of all men can be their instrument. “Nasser,” Prime Minister Jallud once told a Western ambassador in 1969, “is the Napoleon of the Arabs. ; Gadaffi is the Napoleon of) I Libya.” Now Nasser is dead, ■and no Arab regime, certainly! [not Egypt’s, remembered the (anniversary of Nasser’s birth [with such hopeful fervour as (Libya’s. That the time is! ripe for a new hero to rise up and seize his role Gadaffi seems to have no doubt. “The Arab regimes, from the Ocean to the Gulf, are 'feeble regimes. They have all: proved failures before the! Arab masses in spite of the! fact that some are royalists.) some are republicans, others! progressive, some extreme; Left, and some extreme Right. They all share the' same weakness and shame' “Hypocrisy and two-faced j policies” dominate the Arab; scene. In a speech he made on New Year’s Day, to mark the eighth anniversary of the Palestinian guerrilla movement, he revealed a talent for analysis which, in view of the eccentricities associated with his name is rather a surprise. Talking about the Arab world, he said, is like picking ( one’s way through a minefield; but his speech adds up) to as frank and perceptive a! description of the Arab predicament as has come from; any Arab leader except Bourgiba. Deceitful regimes When Gadaffi philosophises about the world at large, his Libyan inferiority complex, his futile spleen, the halftruths and adolescent simpli-, cities are all too obvious; but when he speaks about the mechanisms and motivations of contemporary Arab poli-l (tics, and sticks at that, he 'speaks with the authority of;, three years’ bitter experience i (and the authentic disgust of; the still uncorrupted idealist.' His basic point is that the Arab regimes are deceiving ( their peoples. They ostensibly; believe in the complete res-; toration of Palestine, but they;; really accept the existence of; Israel, and the burial of the,, Palestinian struggle which | that entails; and their clashes ;■ (with it, however violent, are'' no more than border conflicts ! between States which implicitly recognise each other. I. “The political and military'

f leaders of the front line States - are convinced that Israel s exists and that we niu-t » settle the dispute with it. > ; they must have the courage ;to declare this Thee must . say, Israel exists and nothing can be done about it. we (■ must work to settle the dis- . pute and remove the spectre of war. They must have the courage to say, we respect . Israel, although we know , that it has evicted an Arab people, seized an Arab land. , and does what it likes to and '. destroys Arab cultures." Libya, for its part, will not ' engage in the “hypocrisy" of Arab regimes It still believes in the complete liberation of Palestine and will help with 1 all means at its disposal to ■ achieve it. But what is ’ required is “courage” — a '.courage which he does not ! think Presidents Sadat and ’ Asad possess—to take the ’ political decision to embark, ’(seriously, on the war of liberation. Inevitably, no one 1 State could make such a decision effective on its own; ’ there would have to be a , “pan-Arabisation of the battle.” ■ From this logic it follows that Gadafti is resolutely unimpressed by the growing dimension of recent fighting i between Israel and Syria These are mere “skirmishes” with “Israel striking into the i interior and Syria compelled [to retaliate —sometimes.” The Syrian Foreign Minister came to Tripoli last month and told Gadafti that over 300 people, many of them civilians, died in the latest Israeli raid and that about £l5 million worth of goods—medicines, foodstuffs, and equipment—were destroyed in the bombardment of State-owned warehouses at Latakia. He pleaded for more financial aid. But Gadafti gave him a ■dusty answer. He wants from Asad a “political decision to ; storm the Golan Heights and liberate the land." From a distance All this may seem, to the targets of his criticism, so much facile exhortation from a safe distance. True, Gadafti, as one of the Arab paymasters, would seem to be entitled to some say in the way his money is spent. But ‘for the Arab “have-nots." (Libya, like Kuwait or Saudi ‘Arabia, is merely the accidental beneficiary of a malldistribution of oil wealth ■which grows more flagrant ‘every day. True, he finances (the Palestinian guerrillas, is (training perhaps 5000 «f them, and fetes returning i Black Septembrists. But Libya has yet to learn what it is like to be hit by Israeli Phantoms. Exhortation it is — but now backed by practical example. Gadaffi is throwing down the gauntlet, unmasking the “hypocrites.” Every Arab leader says he believes lin union; Gadaffi is proving [that he does. Here lie possible rewards — but great hazards, too. For what the doubters in Tripoli wonder, and what Gadafti does not explain, is how, if the LibyanEgyptian merger comes off, he can preserve an independent will for himself, and how two million Libyans, artificially rich but very backward, -can stave off annexation and eventually absorption by 35.000.000 Egyptians who for all their under-development, are quite simply an era ahead of them. Gadafti is an enigma, but one must assume that, however deep his strain of messianic self-sacrifice may be. he wants to keep himself at the helm. Only thus can he ensure that the “great State” serves the true Arab purposes, and that what he and his countrymen give up as Libyans they make up for as Arabs. Whatever one thinks of Gadaffi, and the dottier manifestations of Gadaffism, one cannot but be struck by his daring. He does not want a quiet life. And he is not going to have one.