Lessons for Libya from 1911

A tyrant who ruled over Libya for endless decades and kept its people oppressed and depressed has finally fallen.The future looks bright, but much depends on whether outside powers can resist the temptation of entering the country supposedly to help — but staying instead to inflict a far crueler dictatorship than the old rulers did. Will the very different and traditionally feuding tribes of the North African coast be able to work together while respecting their own differences?

Is this a description of Libya in 2011? Of course. But it also describes the condition of Libya in 1911.

The six-month popular uprising that toppled longtime strongman Colonel Muammar Qadhafi this year came on the exact 100-year anniversary of the war to expel the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the country in 1911. Qadhafi cut the Libyan people off from full access to the vibrant societies of the North African Maghreb like Morocco and Tunisia, as well as from the nations of the prosperous and booming European Community (later, the European Union) to the north. He ruled for an apparently endless 42 years, starting in 1969. He was accused by other nations of many atrocities, especially funding the 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes and the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people in 1987. Qadhafi even financed the main supply of Semtex plastic explosives from Czechoslovakia for the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland‘s civil war for many years. A century earlier, tough, ruthless, secretive and shrewd old Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid II ruled vast dominions, including the three provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan that comprise modern Libya. He held power for 33 years, from 1876 until he was deposed in 1909. His hapless successor Mehmed V, like Qadhafi's son and heir Saif al-Islam, was not able to maintain his predecessor‘s grip on power. Like Qadhafi, Abdul-Hamid was loathed throughout the advanced Western world. He was held responsible for the vicious massacres of the Bulgarian people in 1876 to crush a revolt among them, and for the frightful slaughter of Armenian Christians in 1895. Yet like Qadhafi, he was skilled at diplomacy and playing different major powers against each other. Abdul-Hamid kept the protection of the British Empire throughout his reign and increasingly won the support of Imperial Germany too. They were the two leading superpowers of their day. For his part, Qadhafi was supported, though always with a degree of distrust and caution, by the Soviet Union until the collapse of communism. He also developed surprisingly good relations with major European nations, led by Italy but also including France and Britain. He sold Libya‘s abundant oil and natural gas to them.

However, like Abdul-Hamid, the one force Qadhafi could not stand against was the rising passion for freedom and change among his own people. And just like Abdul-Hamid, his militaristic blusters proved empty when NATO airpower was deployed to support the popular rebels fighting him in 2011. Abdul-Hamid‘s forces too proved no match for the modern mechanized forces of the Italian army in 1911. Can democracy, peace and stability succeed in Libya in 2011 when they failed in 1911? The answer is: Yes, they can. But they may not be given the chance to.

SPEAKING Discuss the following statement. What did author want to say? Do you agree? Why/Why not?

Week 15 (2 hours)

Midterm test

Aims and Objectives:to develop furtherstudents skills in reading, speaking, analyzing international documents and newspaper articles, to improve their listening skills and to practise grammar.

A. Arrange a debate on the topic:

Success of NATO mission in Libya.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 777