Major Developments in Libyan Culture and History
Posted: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
by Waniss A. Otman
Department of Economics, University of Aberdeen
As part of the shoreline of the Mediterranean and the continent of Africa, Libya has been host to a succession of cultures, identified by written records as well as the vast number of artefacts and structures still standing or uncovered, known as the archaeological record. But new archaeological evidence, now available because of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of archaeology, as well as advances in technology where such disciplines as geoarchaeology, aided by for example by satellite remote sensing, and archaeobotany, are becoming commonplace, have contributed to a more complete understanding of the earth, climate shifts, and how people have adapted to change over large regions.
Earlier we stated that Libya was a synthetic political creation. However the archaeological record has recently provided data which suggests that the Mediterranean coast and the interior, the Fezzan (after Phaisania, the Roman name) have always been very closely related – so much so that a question arises “Should the main interpretive context for Libyan history be a Mediterranean-oriented one, or an African one? Seen in this light the present impetus of Libyan foreign policy, with its recent marked diplomatic successes in the AU (African Union) spearheaded by Qaddafi’s visionary concept of a “United States of Africa,” appears to be a rewriting of African history.
The Italian archaeologist Graziosi has declared that the vast area of Tassili-Acacus-Hammada of the Murzuq region of the far south of Libya and Algeria is certainly one of the richest in pre-historic remains in north Africa (Graziosi, 1969). More than a century after the first reports of prehistoric carvings by the German traveller Heinrich Barth (Barth, 1857), the rock art of the Fezzan is now universally recognized as part of humanity’s cultural heritage. In 1985 the Tadrart Acacus mountains were included on the World Heritage List by UNESCO, thus conferring upon them special status, limiting their usage and management and guaranteeing their conservation and protection.
The findings in 2002 of the Italian–Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Acacus and Messak areas close to Sebha city in the southwest of Libya have uncovered astonishing evidence of human activity there. The Tadrart Acacus and the Messak Settafet are punctuated by thousands of rock carvings and images created by the first Early Holocene communities of hunter-gatherers, dated to around 10,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Holocene these regions were richer in vegetation, and were populated by animals which have since disappeared.
The art of these ancient hunters has as its subject large animals, probably considered more prestigious, such as Bubalus antiquus, an enormous wild buffalo, already extinct in ancient times. This animal which is strikingly depicted in the wadis of the Messak Settafet, marks the stylistic phase known as the ‘Bubalus’ or ‘Large Wild Fauna’ period.
It is apparent that from as early as around 8500 years ago, the central Sahara was the scene of a flourishing painting tradition, spectacular in both themes and execution, characterized by the presence of anthropomorphic figures with rounded heads or discs completely lacking in facial features. It was this characteristic, widespread throughout the Sahara, which led a prominent archaeologist to coin the term ‘Round Head’ style (Lhote, 1958). This artistic trend seems to have been confined to part of the Sahara massifs – Tassili-n-Ajjer, Acacus, Ennedi – and spanned a considerable period, probably more than two millennia. These ‘Round Head’ paintings are fairly diverse, varying from simplified monochrome anthropomorphic figures to very large multi-coloured compositions, usually enriched by the representation of wild animals, mainly antelope and Barbary sheep within ritual scenes and enigmatic elements which are difficult to interpret.
Around 7000 years ago, the Sahara was swept by an incredible cultural movement, of amazing richness and artistic power. This is the Pastoral phase, also known as the ‘Bovidian’ period. Thousands of paintings and carvings decorate blocks of stone, rock walls, and isolated stone slabs. The human and archaeological landscape is in a state of constant flux, and the central Sahara in this period probably represents the world’s largest concentration of prehistoric art. To walk along the wadis of the Messak Settafet is genuinely like strolling around an open-air art gallery, with extraordinary scenes from everyday life, such as the building of camps, the milking of animals, and exchanges of objects (Anag et al, 2002).
In this naturalistic and narrative art, the centre of the universe has become livestock: herds of large spotted cattle move along the rock walls of Uan Tabu, Tagg-n-Tort,and Teshuinat. These animals are portrayed with enormous accuracy with the horns taking on enormous figurative and symbolic importance, and scenes of both work and social activities are shown. From these paintings we can deduce that the Sahara was thickly populated, the country fertile with large herds of cattle grazing on good pasture with abundant water for cultivation (Liverani et al, 2000).
The paintings of the Horse phase, so-called after the introduction of this animal from the east, and thus giving a precise chronological reference point (around 1000 BCE), have recently been re-evaluated within the context of research on the birth of the archaic state in the Fezzan, that of the Garamantes. Recent research has demonstrated that the Garamantian civilization had a complex social structure, based on the political, and perhaps military, control of trade routes between the Mediterranean coasts and sub-Saharan Africa (Liverani et al, 2000). Goods, people, and animals travelled along the caravan routes, and this art provides us with elements to confirm and enrich the historical and archaeological context. It is during this phase that organized irrigation systems and the cultivation of date palms were introduced, with the latter frequently appearing in the Acacus paintings. Defence infrastructures, taxation and the use of writing also characterised Garamantian civilization, with mountain passes and aqbas, outposts and check points marked by deliberately-placed fortifications or settlements, such as Aghram Nadharif, where the rocks are literally covered in ancient Libyan inscriptions.
Turning now to historical developments on the Mediterranean coastline, from at least the eighth millennium BCE the coastal plain of Libya was inhabited by settled peoples who herded cattle and cultivated crops and who later traded with other regions of the Mediterranean. In fact between the eighth century BCE and the eighth century CE the North African coast harboured nascent African kingdoms, a series of Phoenician colonies, including the metropolis of Carthage, the Greek colony of Cyrenaica and later several provinces of the Roman empire, The Phoenician settlements in what is now Tunisia were made by of those distinct Mediterranean peoples, nowadays almost forgotten with their language surviving as Maltese. Carthage was their greatest achievement, threatening the power of Rome itself.
Cyrenaica itself was an early objective of Greek colonization and it eventually emerged as a local centre of Hellenistic culture. Its first colonial language was Greek but in time it developed its own peculiar dialect of Greek, and its cultural orbit was with Crete and eastern Mediterranean rather than with Tripolitania to the west, which was part of a different Mediterranean world. Detailed study of the most numerous diagnostic artefacts of trade in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods – fine ceramic wares and transport amphorae – has revealed in the most striking fashion possible the almost total separation of these two worlds. The fine ceramics and amphorae connected with the agricultural exports of Tripolitania, at the easternmost extension of the Maghrib, circulated wholly within a western Mediterranean world of exchange, whereas those of Cyrenaica were limited almost wholly to eastern circuits of trade, with Greece and the Levant coast (Fulford, 1989). Whereas Cyrenaica looked to the Aegean and north-east Mediterranean, Tripolitania looked to Tunisia, Western Italy and Sicily (Shaw, 2003). These cultural and geographical distinctions reflect the difficulties faced in the post WWII era by the great powers in “welding together” these regions, together with the Fezzan, into one country.
The Romans had always had an interest in North Africa particularly as their great rival, the city-state Carthage, was North African. Roman settlement into North Africa was encouraged under the reign of the emperor Augustus during the first century BC and important cities were established near the coast (Haynes, 1965). The best known of these are Sabratha and Leptis Magna close to Tripoli which have been wonderfully preserved in almost their original form by the pure desert air. These two cities are famed as some of the finest examples of the Roman architectural expression to be found anywhere.
They used the word Libya in a general sense to describe the whole of North Africa and in an administrative sense as an official name for the region between Alexandria and Cyrenaica (Reynolds, 1976). But as we have seen the Romans were by no means the first Mediterranean colonists to establish a presence in north Africa although the name Tripoli (Tri-polis, three cities) was given by them to the three cities of Oea (Tripoli itself), Sabratha and Leptis Magna. The importance of North Africa within the Roman empire cannot be in doubt. As one of the Roman provinces, the proconsular province of Africa, was one of the two elite senatorial gubernatorial postings of the Roman imperial state. At the height of its development, this single North African province was ranked amongst the wealthiest parts of the Roman Empire (Shaw, op cit).
Subsequently, North Africa was the seat of a Vandal kingdom, and then a prefecture and an exarchate of the Byzantine state, for by the fifth century AD the centre of gravity of the Roman empire had shifted from Italian Rome to Greek Byzantium, Constantinople, although its peoples still called themselves Roman and were regarded as such by other nations. The eastern Roman Empire, Rum, was a Christian polity, although becoming increasingly distant from the Christianity of Rome. Its domains stretched along the North African coast from Egypt to as far west as Tunisia. However the Byzantines were undoubtedly despotic and cruel rulers who lost the adherence of many of their subject peoples. Eventually the dominance of Christianity in Byzantine Libya was challenged by the rise of Islam.
This unforeseen and unforeseeable event in the middle of the 7th century C.E was destined to have a permanent influence on Libya and the whole of North Africa. Islam swept through the entire region spreading west from Egypt when the Arab general 'Amr ibn al-As under Caliph Umar ibn al Khattab, led the invasion of Egypt in 640, besieging Misrah (Memphis) for seven months. Its capital Alexandria was subsequently besieged for fourteen months and succumbed in 642 CE. In the same year Amr conquered Cyrenaica, establishing his headquarters at Barce. In 643 AD he had siege to Oea, Arab Tripoli, and the city fell to him in November 643. By the end of the decade, the isolated Byzantine garrisons on the coast were overrun and the Arabs control of the region consolidated. Uqba inb Nafea, another Arab general, invaded the Fezzan in 663, forcing the capitulation of Germa (Christides, 2000).
Contrary to popular belief, the Muslim conquest of North Africa was the work of decades and its effective Islamicisation the work of centuries. At first it was spread into the cities through conquest, but it was only in the 15th and 16th centuries CE that Islamicisation of the interior Berber tribes was consolidated through the Sufi movement, who, concerned about Spanish and Portuguese military gains on the North African Mediterranean coast, successfully disseminated Islam into the interior of the Sahara in a way that the urban-based orthodoxy had never achieved (Holt et al, 1997).
In the last quarter of the 11th century, Islam dominated the Mediterranean world. with the Muslim conquests in North Africa and South Europe virtually defining the Mediterranean as an Arab lake. However the expulsion in the 11th century of the Saracens from Sicily and Southern Italy by the Normans was followed by attacks on Tunisia and Tripoli. Somewhat later a busy trade with the African coastlands, and especially with Egypt, was developed by Venice, Pisa, Genoa and other cities of North Italy. By the end of the 15th century Spain had succeeded in expelling the Muslims, but another European maritime nation, Portugal was strong enough to carry the war into North Africa and in 1415 a Portuguese force captured the citadel of Ceuta on the African coast.
Throughout the 16th century, Spain and the Ottomans were pitted in a struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean. Spanish forces had already occupied a number of other North Africa ports when in 1510 they captured Tripoli, destroyed the city, and constructed a fortified base from the rubble. Tripoli was of only marginal importance to Spain, however, and 1524 the king-emperor Charles V entrusted its defence to the Knights of St. John of Malta.
Khair ad Din, also known as Barbarossa, seized Algiers in 1510 on the pretext of defending it from the Spaniards. Barbarossa subsequently recognized the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan over the territory that he controlled and was in turn appointed the Sultan’s regent in the Maghrib. Using Algiers as a base, Barbarossa and his successors consolidated Ottoman authority in the central Maghreb, and extended it to Tunisia and Tripolitania.
In 1711 Ahmed Karamanli, a Turkish cavalry officer, seized Tripoli and then purchased his confirmaton by the sultan as Pasha with the property confiscated from Turkish officials he had massacred during the coup. Intelligent and resourceful, as well as ruthless, he increased his revenues from piracy, pursued an active foreign policy with the European powers, and used a loyal military establishment to win the allegiance of the interior tribes, later extending his authority into Cyrenaica.
However the Karamanlis in 1835 were forced to surrender to Ottoman rule again, when it became progressively clear that Yusuf Pasha was faced with problems that he could no longer solve. These were largely brought about by the new relationship and obligations that the European powers had imposed on him during the Napoleonic wars, which culminated in steps taken by the European powers in 1819 to force the Barbary states to give up entirely the attacks on Mediterranean shipping on which they, and particularly Tripoli, depended for their revenues (Hume,1980).
It was mainly out of fear of a European takeover of Tripoli, encouraged by France’s seizure of Algiers in 1830, that the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II sent Turkish troops to Tripoli, ostensibly to put down the numerous rebellions against the Pasha and to restore order, but in fact to reinstate Ottoman rule in Tripoli.
The administrative system imposed by the Turks was typical of that found elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Tripolitania, as all three historic regions were collectively designated, became a Turkish Vilayet (province) under a Wali (Governor-general) appointed by the Sultan. The province was composed of four Sanjaks (sub-provinces), each administered by a Mutasarrif (Lieutenant governor) responsible to the Wali. These sub-provinces were each divided into about fifteen districts, with Executive officers from the governor general downward Turks. The Mutasarrif was in some cases assisted by an advisory council and, at the lower levels, Turkish officials relied on aid and counsel from the tribal chiefs. Administrative districts within each Sanjak corresponded to the areas that remained the territorial focus of the each tribe.
Although the system was logical and appeared efficient, it was never consistently applied throughout the country. Although the Turks encountered strong local opposition through the 1850’s, they established southward posts in Gadamès in 1862, in Murzuk in 1865 and at Ghat in 1875. These strategic oases lay along the main trade routes from Tripoli, and at the time, a European traveller into the interior had first to obtain a laissez-passer from the Wali of Tripoli. There was a constant north/south flow of commerce along these routes and the Wali was in frequent communication with his fellow Islamic tribal chiefs and in the Sudanic Sultanates.
In 1879 Cyrenaica was separated from Tripolitania, its Mutasarrif reporting thereafter directly to Constantinople. After the 1908 reforms of the Ottoman government, both were entitled to send representatives to the Turkish parliament. In an effort to provide the country with a tax base, the Turks attempted unsuccessfully to stimulate agriculture. However, in general, nineteenth-century Ottoman rule in Libya was characterized by corruption, revolt, and repression. The region was perceived as a backwater province in a decaying empire that had been dubbed the "sick man of Europe." Nonetheless the Ottoman administrative structure established in 1835 lasted until the Treaty of Ouchy of 15 October 1912, which required the Ottoman Empire to withdraw from Tripolitania and its hinterland, which the Ottomans had been attempting to secure from a three-pronged French aggression from West Africa, the French Congo and Algiers, which eventually lead to France’s convergence on Lake Chad in the year 1900 (International Court of Justice, 1993).
Throughout the 19th Century Anglo-French rivalry had precipitated “the scramble for Africa”, which lead to the General Act emerging from the 1885 Berlin Conference, which gave new impetus to the colonial scramble for Africa. As Jules Ferry, Prime Minister of France stated in 1885, “a policy of withdrawal or abstention is simply the high road to decadence! In our time nations are great only through the activity they deploy; it is not by spreading the peaceable light of their institutions...that they are great, in the present day”(Robiquet,1987). Anglo-French rivalry continued throughout the 19th century and culminated in 1898 in the Fashoda crisis, which almost led to war between Great Britain and France.
In 1830 the French occupied Algiers, but subsequently came up against the Berber jihad launched by the Qadariyya brotherhood under the leadership of Abd al-Kadir. Persistent and tireless in his opposition to the French, Abd al-Kadir was not defeated until 1847 when he was exiled. Shortly after Louis Philippe's constitutional monarchy was overthrown in the revolution of 1848, the new government of the Second Republic ended Algeria's status as a colony and declared the occupied lands an integral part of France which it remained until 1954.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Tunisia had a prosperous economy and cosmopolitan culture. Under Ahmed Bey there was a modest programme of modernisation. But foreign debts mounted giving France an excuse to establish a Finance Commission, leading to Tunisia in 1881 becoming a French Protectorate.
In Egypt a nationalist movement began to take root by the late 1870s which alarmed the British. Riots and military rebellion prompted the British to send in an army of occupation in 1882, which provoked a further rift between the British and the French.
Morocco remained independent in the 19th century when European style modernisation was instituted under Hasan 1 (1873-94) but plans for secular education and the levying of taxes met with resistance from Muslim clerics. Morocco finally lost its territorial integrity in 1912 and was partitioned between France and Spain.
Italy was one of the last European powers to engage in imperial expansion. The Italian city-states were not unified until the second half of the 19th century. Consequently, the Italian government was unable to exploit effectively the early colonial opportunities that Africa offered to France, Britain and the other European states.
On January 1, 1890, the Italian king Umberto I, proclaimed the Colony of Eritrea, and his army secretly began plans for the invasion of Ethiopia. The invasion plans were implemented in November, 1895. After losing a few skirmishes near Makalle, the Italians attacked Adowa. In one of the the only major battles in which an African power has defeated a European one, Menelik's armies outfought the Italians in the three-day battle and drove them back across the Mareb river. It was a great victory for Menelik and a humiliating defeat for Italy, who lost 12,000 soldiers as well as international prestige, although Eritrea was retained by Italy and a protectorate established over much of Somaliland.
It was in part the humiliation of Adowa that led to Italy’s seizure of Tripoli in 1911. In December 1902, France and Italy created spheres of interest in North Africa, when they concluded a secret treaty that recognized the ‘special interests’ of France in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Many Italians believed it was their historic right and obligation to apply Italian sovereignty in Libya, once ruled by the Roman Empire.
Italy declared war on Turkey on September 29, 1911, because the latter had failed to accept the Italian 24-hour ultimatum to allow Italy to occupy Tripoli and Cyrenaica. By formal royal decree on November 5, 1911, confirmed by an act of Parliament, February 25, 1912, these two provinces were declared to be under the full and entire sovereignty of the Italian Kingdom.
The Italian colonization of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was never wholly successful. In September 1911 the Italian army invading the two provinces expected to carry out a quick, overwhelming occupation of a long-coveted colony in North Africa. Instead the ensuing war presented the spectacle of a massive Italian army stalemated in Libya for a year by a few thousand Turks and their indigenous allies (Herrmann,1989). One reason for the stiff resistance was the attitude of the Young Turks after the reforms of 1908. One fundamental concern of the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) was to “save” the state from separitist movements and European penetration that had eroded the Ottoman empire under the old regime (Lewis,1968).
Several major reorganizations of the colonial authority were made necessary, in the face of the armed Libyan opposition. From 1917 to 1923, known as the period of accords, the Italian government attempted to negotiate with a variety of Libyan factions in an effort to consolidate peacefully its occupation of the country.
But after the Fascist takeover in October 1922, the Italian government of Benito Mussolini implemented a much more rigid colonial policy. In early 1923, the Italian armed forces embarked on a brutal reconquest of Libya. Enjoying an overwhelming superiority in men and equipment, the Italian army had some 20,000 men in the field, while Libyan guerrilla forces seldom numbered more than l,000. Even Graziani, later the Governor of Libya, reluctantly conceded that the resistance was largely due to “our irreducible enemy, the faithful and able servant of Idris, the indomitable Omar Al Muktar, the heart and soul of the Cyrenian rebellion” (Herrmann, op cit).
Administratively, in the period 1919 to 1929 the Italian government maintained the two traditional provinces, with separate colonial administrations. A system of controlled local assembies with limited local authority was set up, but it was revoked 9 March 1927. In 1929 Tripoli and Cyrenaica were united as one colonial province, then in 1934, as Italy struggled to retain colonial power, the classical name "Libya" was revived as the official name of the colony, which was split into four provinces, Tripoli, Misurata, Bengasi, and Derna.
The Libyan population by the mid-1930s had been cut in half due to emigration, famine and war casualties. The loss of much of the educated elite and middle class, in the face of a severe disruption of coastal agriculture and domestic trade, was especially significant. When assessing the full impact of Italian colonial practices, it is telling to note that the Libyan population, approximately 1.5 million in 1911, was at the same level in 1950 (St John, 1998).
On January 9, 1939, the colony of Libya was incorporated into metropolitan Italy and thereafter considered an integral part of the Italian state, until the North African campaigns of World War II left Libya in British and French hands.
On 9th August 1940, some time after the Italians had declared war on the Allies, the Libyan freedom-fighters offered their military co-operation to the British. Five battalions of the new Libyan Arab Force were recruited from amongst the exiled community and from Libyan prisoners-of-war. After the collapse of France the British and the empire troops fought on alone unaided against the Fascist powers of Germany and Italy. For the Germans the conquest of North Africa was a necessity since it provided a direct route to the Suez Canal and to the oilfields of Iraq and Iran.
After some initial reverses the British forces under General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery smashed Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 and advanced into Cyrenaica (Crump,1974). Meantime the Free French had fought their way up from Chad and had occupied Kufra, defeating the Italian garrison there (Rodger, 1944). The British fought their way throughout Libya defeating the Afrika Korps rapidly proceeding to Tunis where the Germans finally surrendered (Douglas, 1966).
At the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies had decreed that the Italian colonies liberated during the war, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Libya would not be returned to Italian control. After the war and under the authority of the United Nations the British established a mandate over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica whilst the French retained the Fezzan. In 1949 the UN voted to confer complete independence on Libya which it attained on 1st January 1952 as the Kingdom of Libya. Initially the kingdom was federated with three provinces of equal weight and with their own regional centres of government. Later on in 1963 the federal constitution of the country was amended by Law No.1 of that year and a unitary government established itself in Tripoli (Wright, 1969).
The form and existence of Libya as a nation can be traced to a statement made in the British Parliament by Sir Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, on Jan. 8th 1942, when he asserted that the Sanusi tribesemen of Cyrenaica, who had actively collaborated with the British forces in the North African Campaign of WWII, would in no circumstances be again ruled by Italy (Louis, 1984). This was the initial step in Britain’s policy of securing what eventually became Libya as a client state strategically sited in the centre of the North African littoral. Before the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, this key location was perceived both by Britain and its WWII ally, the US, as an important staging post and airbase for long-distance bombers. The Anglo-American role in the creation of Libya has been described as ‘an unblushing venture of military and economic imperialism’ (Blackwell, 2003).
From 1945 a series of political and diplomatic manoeuvrings in which the UN, Britain, the US, Italy, France, the USSR and Egypt played key roles, eventually led to Libya’s independence in 1951. Given its legitimization through Islam, its pre-colonial political social and economic influence, and its critical role in resisting Italian colonialism, and British promises made in 1942.
Like so many post-colonial nations of the Middle East and Africa, Libya was in fact an artificial creation, similar to those created in an earlier era by the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, where Britain and France defined spheres of influence over independent Arab nations emerging from the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. It welded together three distinct regions of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan, which had developed separately since the beginnings of recorded history in the Phoenician, Ptolemaic, Roman, Meccan and Ottoman eras. It can be said that it emerged by default in its definitive form at the time of Libyan independence, with political elements in two of its three regional components (Cyrenaica and Tripolitania) pressing for recognition as individual independent territories.
As we stated in the beginning of this brief review of Libyan history, its somewhat artificial creation was primarily due to British and American strategic requirements emerging from the remnants of the Italian colonial era. The monarchy, backed by a constitution that created an authoritarian federalist monarchy, pursued an external policy after 1952 that revealed an accommodating attitude to the Western powers. Among the first initiatives of his foreign policy was signing the Anglo-Libyan treaty in 1953, and in the following year an agreement with the Eisenhower administration confirmed American military base rights in return for economic aid. In fact in 1956 the British were also considering establishing their own regional nuclear deterrent at their El Adem base in Cyrenaica (British Foreign Office, 1956).
In the context of overall British strategy in the Middle East, Britain was correct in its evaluation of the strategic location of Libya, since by the late 1950s Libya was the focus of an intense conflict for influence between Nasser, the Soviet Union and the Western powers which increasingly revealed the weakness of the post-war Anglo-American reliance on conservative rulers, besieged by popular radical Arab nationalism promoted by President Nasser in Cairo, aimed at subverting pro-Western Arab regimes. When Anglo-Egyptian antagonism eventually resulted in the Suez crisis, London was unable to use its forces in Libya against Nasser due to political objections from the Libyan government whose explicit view was that wider considerations of Arab nationalist opinion ruled out any use of troops based in Libya against Egypt. As a consequence the new British government under Harold Macmillan considered abandoning Libya in 1957 before it relented under pressure from Washington. The British subsequently concentrated on keeping the Libyan monarch alive and in power, a policy that led to direct military intervention in July 1958.
In 1958 the overthrow and murder of the Hashemite royal family in Baghdad on 14th July significantly heightened the possible consequences of the subversive threat to the Libyan regime. The suddenness of the revolution and the collapse of the Arab Union of Iraq and Jordan were seen in Libya as the harbinger of a general regional uprising. The King and his ministers were ‘seriously alarmed’ by news of the Baghdad coup, and London’s immediate response was to order the destroyer HMS Bermuda with a company of Royal Marines to Tobruk. Plans were also made to reinforce the British units in Libya and move troops already stationed in Tripolitania to Cyrenaica in order to safeguard the government (British Foreign Office, 1958).
The July intervention had effectively forestalled a coup in Libya, but the survival of the Libyan monarchy remained a problematic issue for Britain and the U.S. The close call he experienced in 1958 induced the king to cling more tightly to British protection, alienated from the most of the people and especially from the younger generation of Libyans. The fragility of the regime raised further doubts in London and Washington over long-term policy towards the country. The State Department in particular increasingly felt that the Anglo-American military presence in the country was untenable and that due to the awakening of Arab nationalism in Libya, the situation could not continue indefinitely”.
Somehow the Libyan monarchy managed to remain in power until the Libyan revolution in 1969. The upheavals experienced in the late 1950s nevertheless indicated that the King’s legitimacy was exhausted and depended on external powers to guarantee his survival. In addition to this the political consequences of the massive oil strikes of the 1960’s could not be so easily contained. The Standard Oil Company began exporting oil from the country in 1961 and by 1970 Libya had become the fourth largest oil producer in the world.
The awareness of the potential wealth of the country, combined with the perception that the oil revenues actually benefited only a small minority of the population, further polarized Libyan politics. More importantly, the young officers of the armed forces became increasingly influenced by Nasser’s nationalist ideology. In the early 1960s London tacitly acknowledged the bankruptcy of the policy of using troops to prop up the monarchy. A tentative rapprochement with Cairo also increased British embarrassment over the presence of armoured forces in Libya. The result was a quiet and gradual disengagement with the majority of the British troops being withdrawn by 1966. The eventual success of the revolution of 1969 had been anticipated by the crisis of 1958, and the outcome of the military coup itself was accepted with muted resignation by the Labour government in London (Healey, 1989).
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