For the first decades of Qaddafis rule, the Jamahiriya was in certain respects an improvement for many Libyans. In a country where more than eighty per cent of the population had been illiterate, a program of free education, up to the college level, helped push the literacy rate above fifty per cent. Medical care, if rudimentary by American standards, was free. The average annual salary, which had been two thousand dollars under King Idris, rose to ten thousand dollars. All these programs were underwritten by the increasingly rich oil economy. The worldwide oil crisis of 1973 sent prices soaring, and Libya made a fortune. Qaddafi funnelled money and jobs to his citizens, through patronage, infrastructure projects, and a public sector that at one point employed three-quarters of the working population....
Sullivan came away convinced that Qaddafi was a madman who had turned Libya into an insane asylum. One day, driving into Tripoli, I saw dead camels everywhere, he recalled. Qaddafi had decided that having camels within the city limits made Tripoli look like a backward place. Since he was trying to become the head of the Organization of African Unity, that wasnt a good thing, so he had all camels shot that were on the road into the city.
That mix of paternalism and violence was typical. As one former Libyan diplomat told me, The ideology of the regime was not convincing at all, but the terror was very efficient. Qaddafis secret police and revolutionary committees nurtured a comprehensive network of informants, set up with the help of the East Germans. A former intelligence officer described the process: We would be given the names of civilians. Then we would move people around to surveil the person and also use technical surveillancewiretaps and so on. By the time the file got to the director, there would be enough information on that person to become his best friend. ...
Recalcitrant students and political dissidents were picked up, tortured, given show trials, and either imprisoned or hanged. The hangings often took place on the grounds of universities, with fellow-students and parents forced to watch. An especially vivid and exemplary execution came in 1984, when a young man named Sadiq Hamed Shwehdi was tried in Benghazis basketball stadium on charges of terrorism. Hundreds of schoolchildren were bused in to attend, and the trial was broadcast live on national television. Shwehdi, on his knees, wept as he confessed to joining the stray dogsQaddafis term for his exiled opponentswhile he was studying in the United States. A panel of revolutionary judges sentenced him to death, and he was led to a waiting gallows. Shwehdi hung from the noose, slowly strangling, until suddenly a young woman in an olive-green uniform, a volunteer named Huda Ben Amer, strode up and violently pulled on his legs. Qaddafi rewarded Ben Amer for her show of revolutionary zeal, and she later served two terms as the mayor of Benghazi.
