Libya straddles isolation and re-engagement

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libya used to be one of the most hermetically sealed countries in the world, up there with, if not quite equal to, North Korea.

As with North Korea, visitors wanting to enter Libya had to come as part of a tour group, a law that survives to this day. As in North Korea, no street signs are in English, which complicates moving about for non-Arabic speakers.

There are other complications too for the independent visitor to Libya: cars and public transport are flagged down as they journey from one town to the next by security forces; foreign passengers asked to step outside and questioned; a simmering civil conflict in eastern Libya between Islamists and the government rumbles on.

But perhaps the greatest threat to seeing Libya is the rapid rate of the country’s modernization: Libya is seemingly disappearing under a tidal wave of construction that sees glass-and-steel buildings erupting out of the ground in the capital Tripoli and UNESCO World Heritage sites such as the oasis town of Ghadames undergoing mass-scale renovation.

Modern garbage amid Roman ruins in Libya. (Iason Athanasiadis/GlobalPost)

In the 1980s, Libya and its combative president Moammar Gadhafi held the role that Iran has today as the West’s main antagonist. But after a U.S. bombardment that killed Gadhafi’s adopted daughter and years of sanctions, the pan-Africanist leader made his peace and opened his country to Western investment. This was the context in which he addressed himself to the U.N. in September.

But as with so many of his past appearances, that was guaranteed to contain controversy. As I balanced out of a press box a few yards above where the Libyan colonel sat, Gadhafi reclined on his tan seat surrounded by advisers and holding a scarlet handkerchief to his face. The presidents, sheikhs and other heads of state crammed into the General Assembly for the annual inaugural meeting stood expectantly.

But for some 15 minutes, Gadhafi did not budge.

Finally, he hoisted himself up to cover the few yards to the podium just vacated by U.S. President Barack Obama. To tepid applause, he brought his hands together in the universal gesture of the struggling underdog, then began orating. Misjudging the distance he should keep from the microphone, his voice came through faint. He was introduced by his ceremonial title of “King of Kings” but faltered before settling into his rhetorical stride.

His interpreter translated in a heavily accented and nasal English but later physically collapsed as the speech dragged on over 94 interminable minutes. Gadhafi spoke of restructuring the U.N. and called the Security Council a “terror council” but by then he had lost his audience’s attention: The grand hall below him was already half empty and buzzing with the conversations of the remaining delegates. Try as he might, Gadhafi seemed incapable of either engaging or enraging his audience. Seemingly oblivious, he talked on and on, orating for the pleasure of oration. Former State Department spokesman James Rubin later noted that in steamrolling past the allotted 15 minutes given each speaker it was as if he had unburdened 40 years of speeches.

How right Rubin was. In the 1980s, Libya suffered under an embargo that saw little enter or leave the country. On a March visit, a local told me that during the embargo, it was so rare to see a plane cross the skies that people would follow its progress across the blue Mediterranean sky.

Leaving Libya was only possible by taking rusting boats that took the run to Italy, Greece or Egypt, or by riding a bus across one of the world’s most dangerous deserts.

Today Libya is no longer isolated. Open to the world since burying the hatchet with the West in 2003, corporations and businesses have been flooding into the fertile strip between the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara Desert to do business.

But just like Gadhafi’s transformation from Western pariah to "insider," the first impression his country makes on the visitor obscures the whole story. On the receiving end of Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and Italian imperialism, the elaborately named Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyyah ("State of the Masses") marked in September the 40th anniversary of the coup that abolished its monarchy and gave birth to a pan-Arab socialist Islamist Africanist state. The Jamahiriyyah is a tangle of contradictions.