Libya, a backward desert nation, will soon take, its place among the five leading oil-producing areas in the world. Now, Pan-Arab firebrands reach hungrily for this prize.
Country in Peril
By ERNEST O. HAUSER
Photographs by Claude Jacoby
Above: King Idris, 70-year-old supreme ruler of Libya. Because of the unpopularity of his heir, Crown Prince Hassan (below), "the country's fate depends on the developments during the first 24 hours after the king's death," says one worried Libyan.
Tripoli, one of Libya's twin capitals. Here 170,000 people live in"helter-skelter " compromise" between the ancient and the new.
Libya, which is more than twice as big as Texas, lies on Africa's strategic Mediterranean coast-and alongside Egypt and unpredictable, acquisitive Nasser.
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Above: Max Burgett (left), an American, directs workers at a Canadian oil rig in the Libyan Desert. Foreign companies here must divide their profits equally with the government. The result: a new flood of wealth in a once-poor country.
Below: Master Sgt. Bonnie Sadler (seated) and Dr. Donald Farrell with their families at the ruins of the ancient city of Sabratha. The two families are among the 10,000 Americans stationed at Wheelus Air Force Base, in nearby Tripoli.
Libyan University, Benghazi: This school was set up with U.S. money,but most of the students here are violently ant-American.
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TRIPOLI, LIBYA.
You smell oil almost from the minute you set foot in Libya. The people who get off the plane with you are drillers, oil-company executives, geologists. Your hotel is packed with oilmen who, like yourself, have fought hard for a room. New, shiny, brass plates at the doors of Tripoli office buildings identify their tenants as the X, Y or Z petroleum company. The local English-language papers-both of them weeklies - devote much of their space to progress reports on this or that new oil well and to plans for pipelines and refineries. The Libyan Desert, you will soon find out, has come alive with Texas and Oklahoma accents.
Great expectations are in the air. Already, on the strength of the most recent oil strikes, it is safe to predict that Libya will soon take its place among the world's five or six chief petroleum-producing areas. Wells with a capacity of up to 17,500 daily barrels, brought in during the last twelve months, justify the belief that Libya's petroleum fields will prove even richer than those opened up in nearby French Algeria. American oilmen, who have barely begun to scratch the surface here, envision wells producing 30,000 daily barrels, which would approach some of the best Middle Eastern yields.
What makes the Libyan bonanza so interesting to Americans is that it lies outside the reach of Egypt's President Gamel Abdel Nasser-and that it would presumably keep right on flowing if the whole Middle East went up in reddish smoke. Most of the oil concessions that now overlay, with their intricate pattern, the map of Libya, have been staked out by American petroleum companies. These companies mean business. One American group alone is budgeting $43,000,000 on Libyan development this year, and other companies are making comparable efforts. We are likely to hear a great deal about this sprawling, almost-empty desert kingdom from now on.
Whether the news from Libya will stay good is another question. By great good luck we are still on friendly terms with this eight-year-old nation whose independence the United States helped bring about. A huge American air base gives us an anchor here, an American aid program keeps well over 100 American technicians in daily touch with the Libyan Government and people, and a small, active military- assistance program is giving Libya's young army a welcome flow of American equipment. We are present here, and we would like to stay. But, in the shifting sands of Africa, what guaranty can there be of tomorrow?
Most of us had given but little thought to this former Italian colony since World War II when German General Rommel chased the British, and then the British Eighth Army chased Rommel, across the Libyan desert-and when such Libyan cities as Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli made headlines. The facts of life are easily ticked off.
A little more than two and a half times the size of Texas, Libya lies roughly in the center of Africa's Mediterranean seaboard, between Tunisia and Egypt, and just across the narrow sea from Southern Italy and Greece. Its vague and sand-blown inland borders make it a neighbor of Algeria, French West and Equatorial Africa and the Sudan. Most of the country is desert, with a few fertile areas along the coast. The population, estimated at 1,200,000, is of mixed Arab-Berber stock, speaks Arabic and worships Allah, and consists to a large extent of camel-herding tribesmen.
Americans are, as a nation, no strangers to the shores of Tripoli. Late in the eighteenth century Tripoli, then a stronghold of the Barbary pirates, received-in line with the prevailing custom-a tribute from the United States in return for a promise not to molest American shipping. The price kept going up, however, and one fine day in 1803 an American naval squadron began bombarding Tripoli. It was then that the frigate Philadelphia, giving chase to a Libyan ship, was captured by the pirates and its crew of 300 led through the streets of Tripoli in chains before being thrown into a dungeon.
The Philadelphia, meanwhile, was being refitted by her captors and would have put to sea again as a Tripolitan warship had it not been for the heroic spirit of young Stephen Decatur ("Our country! . . . may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."), then a lieutenant in command of the U.S.S. Enterprise, one of the ships in the American task force. On February 16, 1804, under the cover of approaching darkness, he sneaked a captured ketch renamed the Intrepid into Tripoli harbor and managed to set fire to the Philadelphia and blow her up before the enemy could rally. When the big, shore-based guns did open up, Decatur and his raiding party of American sailors were well on their way back, and not a man was lost. The tall, proud mast now topping Tripoli's Castello, believed to be a relic of the Philadelphia, perpetuates the memory of the historic exploit.
When the United Nations, in 1949, debated what to do with orphaned Libya, it was the United States-should auld acquaintance be forgot?-that strongly favored independence. Still, it was common knowledge that the new nation saw not viable. There were no known resources to speak of. There were no industries, no skills, no ready cash, no trained technicians, no civil servants, no middle class, no teachers and no schools. Only one in every ten Libyans knew how to read and write, and there were only sixteen college graduates in the country.
Worse, there was no tradition of working together, of being a nation in the modern sense. Although the country- officially on its own since Christmas Eve, 1951-gave itself a constitution and enthroned Sayed Mohammed Idris el Senussi, the spiritual head of the Senussi sect of Islam, as King Idris I, the concept of national unity could only take root by and by. To this day the existence of two national capitals, Tripoli and Benghazi- 640 miles apart by land-reflects the country's deep division between its two major components, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which with the desert region of the Fezzan now form the United Kingdom of Libya.
And there she is, hanging on for dear life: Her poverty makes Libya a poor relation even to her Arab cousins. The annual per capita income, about thirty-five dollars, is one of the world's lowest. The masses live the way they have lived for centuries, scraping the soil with handmade wooden plows, growing peanuts and dates, raising goats or wandering across the desert with their camels. Like Arabs everywhere, they shy away from modern farming. Many of the fine farms laid out by the Italians along the coast are in decay-you may find animals stabled in the farmhouse while the Arab owner and his family live in a tent outside. They are a friendly people when approached with friendliness, and the proverbial Arab hospitality lives on in villages and oases.
Tripoli, now a city of 170,000, remains a helter-skelter compromise between two clashing ways of life. The modern town, with its majestic waterfront, its tree-lined avenues and modern office buildings, brushes against the ancient Arab town with its covered bazaars and domed and minareted mosques. A Bedouin draped in a sheetlike barracan marches his camel past a fancy sports car. An Arab woman veiled from top to toe, with only one eye showing, views a shop window full of shiny kitchen gadgets. Sheep graze in an empty lot near the American embassy.
Although a member of the Arab League, Libya does not indulge in the fiercer kind of Arab nationalism. Her relations with the Soviet bloc are formal and aboveboard. Communism, so far, has made no headway with the Libyan people. But that does not mean that all is well here.
In fact, the frail young kingdom is beset with all the infant maladies of a new, artificial nation. Long-standing feuds continue to divide Tripolitania and Cyrenaica Corruption is widespread, and local politicians, in the absence of a strong central authority, sometimes find it expedient to attach themselves to this or that powerful pressure group. Conspiracy is rampant. Intrigue is in the air. Behind the sunny, picture-postcard front, behind the palm trees, Bedouins and camels, plotters are waiting for their chance to strike.
The cast of -characters has a Shakespearean ring: An aging, childless king; a melancholy crown prince, the king's nephew; the Black Prince, an ambitious cousin; the ghost of the king's favorite attendant, slain by a nephew of the queen; the victim's son, now the king's chamberlain; malcontents, princes, generals, officials, merchants. ,
The curtain rises over a modest palace at Tobruk, home of King Idris and Queen Fatima. The king is seventy years old. As head of the Senussi clan, he is the spiritual ruler over a large, scattered brotherhood of faithful Moslems who follow the strict moral and religious code set up by his grandfather, the "Grand Senussi," a religious reformer who came to Cyrenaica from his native Algeria. Though Libya is a constitutional monarchy, with a freely elected parliament, the king in practice rules supreme. He picks as prime minister whom he likes-there are no political parties here-and his decrees are law.
Idris is a wise man, inspired by high moral principles, who has used his authority for the best of his country. He led the anti-Fascist resistance here during the last years of Italian rule and he has never wavered in his friendship for the United States and Britain. But a desire for privacy makes him a virtual recluse in the remoteness of his palace by the sea, far from both Libyan capitals and their political maneuvers.
The queen, Fatima, is the king's first cousin. A lady of good looks, the color of light coffee, she is a clever, gracious, modern-minded person. She wears Paris originals and has lately made good progress in speaking English. But she is troubled by dark memories of murder. It was her brother's son who, in 1954, shot Ibrahim Shalhi, the king’s loyal attendant, and who was promptly hanged for his, grim deed. The motives for the murder were obscure. Shalhi had possibly become too influential for the taste of several Senussi princes. King Idris, grieved and outraged, banished a few of them to isolated villages and farms. And he took Shalhi's son, Bouseiri, into his house as royal chamberlain.
Here the plot takes on form. Bouseiri Shalhi, a smart-looking young man who wears a knife-thin mustache over lips curled in permanent disdain, now wields enormous power. King Idris, who trusts him completely, treats him like a son; all those seeking favor from the king must pass through him. He is kowtowed to and he is despised. But will his power last beyond King Idris’ life span?
If he wants to hold on, the young man will need allies. And he has found them. Among prominent Libyans associated with Bouseiri Shalhi in a conspiracy to gain control of Libya after King Idris' death are such important figures as the chief of the royal household, the commander of the Cyrenaica state defense force, several high Tripolitania state- police officers, two or three top officials in the Fezzan, and other military and civilian notables throughout the country. Shalhi's chief ally, however, is Prince Abdullah Abed, known as the Black Prince.
Six feet three inches tall, filled with incredible vitality, the forty-year-old bearded prince is the son of one of the first cousins of the king and a dark-skinned freedwoman. He is Libya's richest individual. From movie theaters to road construction, there is no pie in which his fingers have not been observed. Ruthless, highly intelligent and always full of beans, he is a living contrast to his melancholy relative, Hassan, a thirty-two-year-old nephew of the king who, in absence of direct heirs to the throne, has been named crown prince.
The question is, will the conspirators permit Prince Hassan to ascend the throne upon King Idris' death? The heir apparent is a lad of sterling character but of an apathetic disposition who goes through public functions with an air of martyrdom. His good intentions, when the chips are down, may not be a sufficient compensation for his lack of strength. He is neither loved nor hated by the populace. Being a younger son of the king's younger brother, he is not likely to inherit his uncle's spiritual authority.
"The country's fate depends on the developments during the first twenty-four hours after the king's death," one worried Libyan said. One of the country’s top officials told me all he could say in answer to my question about the future of the monarchy was that he was praying every day that "Allah may preserve His Majesty for many years to come."
Although the plotters call themselves the "Revolutionary, Council," observers here doubt that their plans call for violent action. Their idea, in the opinion of those qualified to judge, is to spare neither gifts nor blandishments in order to obtain control over Prince Hassan's mind. Once on the throne, they hope, he’ll be their man.
At this point the conspiracy takes on a horribly familiar pitch. This is no mere palace intrigue. The chief conspirators are known to have Egyptian backing-and to be in close, constant touch with Cairo. Not only would poor Libya, with such men at the helm, wind up in a morass of lawlessness and graft; but she would also lose her independence, becoming, if not an outright member of the United Arab Republic, a satellite of Egypt.
The plotters, in seeking closer ties with Egypt, could count on the support of an important segment of public opinion here. In fair Benghazi, where ruins still remind the visitor of the furious battles fought around the town in 1942, I spent an afternoon with a group of Libyan University students. Their views on politics were uniformly violent. To them all, Nasser was the heroic leader of the Arab world who had defied the western powers and turned his own weak and neglected country into a power to be reckoned with. The United States, by contrast, was to these Libyan students the enemy of the Arab people- being responsible, in their opinion, for the rise of Israel and for the continuation of the Algerian war.
"Our Arab brothers in Algeria are being slaughtered with American arms!" was the angry refrain.
This, I had to remind myself, was Libya's elite. Within a few short years these outspoken young men would be the country's government officials, civil servants, professionals and businessmen. Ironically, the Libyan University at which they were enrolled was set up with American aid funds. The door had been wide open to American teachers. But because qualified Americans, with two or three exceptions, were not available, Egyptians had poured in to fill the gap. Today the majority of professors at both branches of the young university-at Benghazi and Tripoli-are Egyptian citizens, their salaries paid by Cairo. Their propaganda falls on willing ears.
Almost completely devoid of trained men, Libya has had to borrow talent wherever talent could be had. Next-door neighbor Nasser was happy to oblige. Egyptians serve as advisers to the Libyan Government. Libya's attorney general, as well as two Supreme Court justices, are Egyptians. (An American and two Britons, it is only fair to add, also serve on the Libyan Supreme Court bench.) And some 350 Egyptian teachers are now employed in Libyan schools.
But these are not the only channels through which Egypt's appeal for an aggressive brand of Arab nationalism reaches the Libyan public. Arab Cultural Centers, setup under Egyptian patronage, enjoy great popularity with Libyan town dwellers. Egyptian films play to full houses. Egyptian books and magazines are snapped up by those who can read. Radio Cairo's entertaining-and often strongly antiwestern-programs find eager audiences in Libya's coffee shops, homes and bazaars.
None of this is surprising. Neglected and exploited and beaten down through-out their history, Libyans find themselves suddenly caught up in the great surge of a renascent Arab world. They feel part of a teeming brotherhood of Islam that numbers 420,000,000 souls and forms a crescent-or a scimitar-reaching from Indonesia to Morocco. What Libyans want, after those centuries of oppression, is human dignity. Is it not understandable that they turn with admiration and affection to Big Brother Nasser, who speaks their language, eats their kind of food, and who can point with pride to his achievements?
"Compared to that, what can we offer them?" asked one American stationed in Libya.
Even without the new-found oil, the western stakes here would be high. When the United Nations thrust independence upon Libya, it was considered necessary, in the new nation's interest, to station foreign troops within Libyan borders and to give the country financial aid and technical assistance. Britain, whose forces had administered most of Libya after Italy's collapse, signed a mutual-defense pact with the Libyan Government, and to this day keeps some 5000 troops, including armored units, in the country.
The United States, which has no treaty obligation to fight for Libya's independence, maintains an air base-Wheelus Field-just outside Tripoli. This gives us a welcome toe hold in a strategic corner of the world, but the Libyan field serves no "strategic" purpose. Wheelus is no jump-off place for long-range bombers and has no nuclear capacity. The function of the base is to keep our Europe-based fighter pilots in trim.
This function makes it one of the world's busiest airports. Twice every year 600-odd American fighter pilots fly from their European stations to Wheelus Field for periods of intensive training. They drop an annual total of 75,000 dummy bombs over the desert, fire 250,000 rounds of ammunition and fly more than 40,000 hours. This would not be possible in crowded Europe. Not only does Libya provide the empty space, but Libyan weather, except for an occasional ghibli- the desert sandstorm that blacks out whole cities-is fine the year round.
Americans have reason to be proud of Wheelus Field. Looking like a suburban area in Southern California, the sprawling base, with its friendly white buildings half hidden among palm and eucalyptus trees, is an authentic slice of America. About 5000 officers and airmen are permanently stationed here, forming, with their families, a community of 10,000. You'll see American children on their way to grammar school and high school, house-wives gossiping and shopping, and families coming out of church or driving off for a picnic. Clubs, sports grounds, an open-air theater, a clean, white beach, a modern hospital and even a local tele-vision station round out the picture of America-in-Africa. And all day long the vicious-looking jets roar overhead.
The United States does not pay "rent" for Wheelus Field. But our base accord with Libya, signed in 1954 and running until 1970, was complemented by an economic-aid agreement. If ever a nation was "underdeveloped," Libya was it. There is no doubt that without our aid and the annual $10,000,000 granted Libya by the British Government the Libyan nation never would have survived.
American aid during the last twelve months amounted to some $32,000,000 in cash grants, projects, loans and surplus food. This constitutes one of the highest per-capita contributions the United States is making anywhere in the world. Much of our effort goes into such basic necessities as power plants, roads, bridges, soil conservation, public-health projects and school buildings. Some of our agricultural experts, earnest and devoted men, have spent much of their time clearing the debris from hundreds of old Roman cisterns which are today as good as new. On the other end of the scale, our technicians have given Libya the most modern telecommunications system in the world.
The Libyans know that without American help they would have had to fold their tents. But we are dealing with a volatile, self-conscious people in whom the twin factors of "charity" and foreign troops tend to create a complex. There is no end of bickering over details, no end of criticism of the "strings" attached to our aid-meaning American controls on how the funds are spent. It is only the exceptional wisdom of United States Ambassador John Wesley Jones-one of our ablest professional diplomats-that has kept Libyan-American relations from breaking down occasionally under the weight of Libyan irritation.
And now there is oil-enough of it to turn the country almost overnight from a have-not into a have, and cause a social and economic revolution. I visited a drilling site in Zelten, a desert region in the eastern part of Libya, about 100 miles in-land, which has thus far produced the richest strikes. With understandable pride, the handful of American drillers and tool pushers who, with their Libyan helpers, made up this tiny speck of life in the great, glaring emptiness, took me to see their "Christmas tree" -a five-foot stem of pipe, decorated with high-pressure valves, sticking out of the yellow sand at the edge of their trailer camp. This was the recently completed well, Zelten No.4. Already Zelten No.5, some fifteen miles away, was coming in. And no dry hole, as, yet, offered a clue to the limits of this - fabulously rich oil-bearing structure which was but one of many fields found in the desert.
No one will attempt to guess the size of the oil reserve in Libya. It is not as deep down as the much-talked-about oil in the French Sahara. There is more of it, and it is better oil, allowing for a larger cut of fuel oil, of which there is as yet no surplus.
Of the fifteen foreign companies that have taken out concessions in the Libyan desert since the oil rush began in 1955, nine are American, the others, British, Anglo-Dutch, French, German and Italian. Twenty-five wells, by now, have been completed, and many more are being drilled. The first of several pipelines to the sea is about to be constructed. There is talk of a refinery or two.
But what will all this do to Libya? Although the Libyan petroleum law, in prescribing a fifty-fifty split of profits between the producer and the Libyan Government, ordains that most of Libya's share be put into long-term development projects, there is, of course, no guaranty that honesty will triumph. Already - the more blatant aspects of the boom can be observed. Libyans who have been able to get in on the bonanza now drive around the streets of Tripoli in shiny cars. Truck drivers running oil supplies out of Benghazi now charge $1.50 a mile. Rents for apartments are skyrocketing. Soon there may even be a night club in Tripoli.
The spoils of power, from now on, will be worth taking. And the conspirators now planning to take over here after King Idris' death are aware that Libya is well on her way from rags to riches. But-and here the Libyan story develops a sardonic twist-even our friends among the Libyans are likely to press for an end of western influence as soon as Libya can afford it. "We are only waiting for our oil royalties," one prominent Libyan friendly to the West remarked, "to get along without assistance. One can't go on receiving charity forever."
No one here doubts that Libyan pressure to get rid of the American "presence" -and that means Wheelus Field, as well as economic aid-is bound to grow as royalties start flowing. Likely as not we will have little choice but to leave the Libyan people to their own devices-and to the tender mercies of their mighty neighbor-just when they are at the threshold of a social revolution fraught with uncertainties and risks.
True, nothing is as yet irrevocably lost. As one talks with Libyans from all walks of life, one feels that it would still take little to demonstrate to these awakening and groping desert people that the United States is with them come what may in their quest for a little human dignity and for a better life. But it is getting late. And rather than attempt to gain the lasting friendship of the young, we have tied our fortunes to the ebbing years of one old man. THE END
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