My experience of Libya from the 1970s to the 1990s defined what would become my third-camp politics.
My parents were migrant workers in Libya — working in the central oil fields region around Brega, part of a community of expatriate workers from all around the globe including Filipino, Sudanese, Palestinian and American workers.
The Brega camp where both migrant and Libyan workers lived was the site of an old Italian concentration camp and there were many monuments to the old Italian occupation which was remembered with anger by many Libyans — so much so that many of the Italian migrant workers were mistreated by Libyan managers. Having visited the memorial to the Libyan resistance fighter Omar Mukhtar on his execution ground near Benghazi I could sympathise with those who resisted and those who remembered that terrible occupation under Mussolini’s fascists.
As anybody knows who has either lived under or read novels about totalitarian regimes, they are comprised both of tragedy and farce. Unwilling to countenance that Libya could have been occupied twice by Italian forces Qadaffi at one point issued a decree that the magnificent Roman cities at Sabratha and Leptis Magna were actually Arabic! Despotism could win that point by allowing no other opinion — hence eliminating the terrain of real history.
Also farcical is the cult of the leader, particularly when po-faced Stalinised personality cults are put in place by tyrants who are wilful in their abject stupidity. Qadaffi’s green book was a classic example of stupidity manifesting itself as wisdom. It is reminiscent of Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism mixed with an Arabian Nights conception of Islam. Slogans from it adorned our town and of course its authority was unquestionable.
More tragic was the routine execution of students, and the bodies that would turn up in the squares of Tripoli and Benghazi — undoubtedly at the hands of the security forces. Executions were regularly televised and were often public.
As children, myself and friends would often stay in the Libyan Palace hotel in Tripoli — playing and running in the corridors past many of the Soviet advisors who lived in these hotels and probably up to nefarious activities including the training of the large Palestinian diaspora in Libya — who Qadaffi sent to the war in Chad — many of them never to return.
I travelled widely in Libya and grew to love it immensely — the ruined tanks in the deserts, the green mountains of Cyrenaica. But I also respected the people, many of whom were dissidents. Most of these were monarchists who had been dispossessed under the new regime and who were not trusted by the government.
In private they would tell us about the rumours of new executions or revelled, as many did, in sordid details of the private lives of the elite. These very same people, correctly I think, blanked us in public in case the security personnel focused on their closeness to British workers. One close friend of mine, from a monarchist family, faked insanity rather than go to fight in Chad. He survived but as a punishment was sent to work in a Cola factory.
By the late 1980s it was clear that there was some kind of Islamist opposition developing and we heard of gun battles being waged in the cities. At one point Libyan workers warned foreign migrant workers against the wearing of beards in case they were mistaken as Islamists by gun-toting militias. Demonstrations in the 90s took on an increasingly Islamist hue but it was also clear that the organised Al-Qaeda forces were relatively marginal.
Being very aware of imperialism, racism and class politics by the mid 80s I was becoming increasingly politicised as a socialist. Having spent time in both Libya and the UK during the miners’ strike, I was very aware of the two polarities popular in left circles — imperialism and anti-imperialism.
At the Anti-Fascist Action Remembrance Sunday demo against the National Front in November 1986 I listened to Royston Bull, then of the International Leninist Party, banging on about Libya being the workers’ paradise. I pointed out to him and his comrades that, if so, it was one in which the workers were quite regularly executed. “Lies”, he shouted at me, “Lies and imperialist slanders against the Libyan People’s Socialist Arab Jamahiriya!”
For these people Libya was a bastion against US and UK imperialism. For me the Libyan regime had very little to do with socialism and it taught me a clear lesson about where my politics should lie — not with my own ruling class or with any other sub-imperialism like the Libyan regime — but with the global working class.
The global working class, however, was not some abstraction to me. I had seen it in the bonds of solidarity between American, Libyan, British and Filipino workers on the oilfields of my childhood. Just as I had seen it when I stood again on a long-ago Sunday morning in Trafalgar Square —the massed ranks of Imperial Whitehall and Horseguards Parade behind me and froth-mouthed pedants and self-deceivers before me.
