Qaddafi Dreams of Empire

...Qaddafi defies facile analysis As a major, he overthrew a corrupt and decaying monarchy in a once sand-poor country that endured an oppressive Italian occupation for over two decades He instituted a regime that has given virtually every Libyan a fair share of the benefits from what he looks upon as a sudden divine windfall, oil He is a colonel, not a president, to this day, living on a New York typist's salary, and his foreign minister continues to hold the rank of major...

...Perhaps, but not much Chad is a special case should the U S be concerned...

...Should France be concerned that, if a government friendly to it falls, others may question their links with the French...

...The Libyan soldiers, moreover, are not 10 feet tall Qaddafi sent them to Uganda to help sustain his ally there, Idi Amin, and they were driven out by the Army of Tanzania Hardly an elite force, the Tanzanians were nevertheless fighting in terrain more familiar to them than to the Libyans...

...In short, the Africans should win the war themselves, as the Tanzanians did in Uganda If Hissen can't do it, someone else will It may take longer, but Africans believe that "when God made time, he made plenty of it ". Decades of warfare may seem intolerable to outsiders In Chad, however, it is business as usual Peace in Chad would send us students of African history scurrying off to find out what the heck had happened More important, peace will not come from foreign intervention The French, who ruled the country for 60 years, discovered that So will Qaddafi...

...Qaddafi's practice of statecraft remains as abysmally medieval as that of his Iranian equivalent, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he detests because Khomeini is a Shute Moslem, a heretic in his eyes and those of the Sunni mainstream He has both the naive freshness and the proud ignorance of the desert nomads among whom he was born and his knowledge of Islam is less than scholarly...

...Bangladesh is the world's poorest nation because it is overpopulated Chad comes second because it is too remote and has no mineral resources that can be transported to the coast economically It is roughly divided into a northern three quarters that began converting to Islam a millenium ago, and a savanna south that still largely follows traditional faiths (Most of the 500 Americans in Chad are Christian missionary families in the south ). At Chad's independence in 1960, France agreed to leave forces there for five years to help the infant government in Fort-Lamy (now Ndjamena) maintain order between the Moslem chieftains The French themselves had trouble with these medieval conflicts, but their rule was respected, if resented It was clear that a government led by a Chadian who, if the friend of one chieftain, would be the enemy of another, would face opposition (To make things worse, the first President, shoehorned into place by Pans, was a Christian, Felix Tombalbaye) By the time the French forces withdrew nothing concrete had been achieved, except a military training program Both Gaullist administrations and that of Valery Giscard d'Estaing sent in troops in response to the occasional Maydav messages from Fort-Lamy...

...Although Qaddafi is unlikely to succeed, his intentions are a matter of legitimate concern to the governments in those countries, and to black Africans as a whole Most of the territory he covets is as Moslem as he is (in the measure that anyone could be quite as hard-shell as Qaddafi or Khomeini), nevertheless, to black Africans he is the wrong color Chad, Niger and Mali belong to black Africa, since most of their citizens are black...

...To his credit, Francois Mitterrandwho had been an ultracolonialist minister of overseas territories in the last pre-de Gaulle government (before 1958), and a forceful opponent of self-government in black Africa as well as independence in Algeria-came to office in 1981 declaring that France was getting out of the neocolonialism business An intellectual version of Lyndon Johnson, Mitterrand had seen the light about race His hyperkinetic foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, is still more of a Third-Worldophile...

...A sort of Islamic Jerry Falwell, Qaddafi abolished alcohol, prostitution and banks, and created an uncorrupt state based on the Shari'a-Islamic law When all of his small population (less than 3 million) had access to housing, schools, free medicine, and a family car, he started spending surplus oil funds to fulfill God's will in other ways-notably by building up military forces to defend the Islamic nation against any despoilers Israel, the imperialists, you name it...

...Probably even less...

...But Qaddafi's strong feelings about Israel, the late Anwar Sadat, Lebanon's Christian President Amin Gemayel, nightclubs in Dubai, and so on cannot disguise his empire-building-even if in the name of God He has already seized the Auzu Strip of northern Chad (which reportedly may contain uranium), and Chad long ago accepted this annexation, theoretically based on a tribal claim Like King Hassan of Morocco, whose attempted seizure of Western Sahara is based on a misreading of the historical past, Qaddafi maintains, and may well believe, that everywhere the Tuareg of the Sahara roam belongs to Libya, the quintessentially Tuareg, Saharan nation, regardless of whether their genes are today intermingled with those of black Africa...

...Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who loved to tell after-dinner stories, relished his memory of Qaddafi coming to the Nassers' table for the first time and refusing to eat the beautiful Red Sea langoustines because the giant shrimp had not been slaughtered by a Moslem butcher He would have been justified in refusing them as scaleless seafood, taboo under both Moslem and Judaic law A desert Tuareg, he had never seen shellfish before...

...CONTAINING TRIPOLI Qaddafi Dreams of Empire by russell warren howe When the grasslands of North Africa began to dry up nearly three millenia ago, creating the sand ocean of the Sahara, what is today called Chad was cut off from the Mediterranean along with the rest of black Africa By the time Europe north of Rome and Greece emerged from the caves and learned to wear boots, black Africa's contacts with the outside world were limited to occasional desert caravans and a few hardy Phoenician (and later Portuguese) seamen The lands south of the desert produced no navigators of their own...

...Cheysson told me this year, when the latest challenge by former Chief Executive Goukouni Ouedei to President Hissen Habre occurred, that it was the "war of the chieftains again " Both Hissen and Goukouni are usurpers who used their military commands to seize power, a process as customary in Chad as elections are in the United States Indeed, France would not be reluctantly allowing its equivalent of Rangers to prop up Hissen, and the U S would not have sent in awacs intelligence gathering planes with F-15 escorts, plus Redeye shoulder-launched missiles and a few instructors, were it not for a third party to the present conflict-Muammar Qaddafi...

...This situation helped arrest the continent's development, most dramatically in the tiny warlord kingdoms of the interior Chad, a collection of small chieftaincies drawn into one colony (and later a nation) by France at the turn of the century, is a typical example...

...Qaddafi helped put Goukouni in power and is helping him try to win back power in the latest "War of the Roses," as British magazines have dubbed it With Goukouni in Ndjamena, he could hope eventually to expand, in the manner of some latter-day Ottoman, into Niger and some of Mali and perhaps parts of Sudan and Egypt...

...Russell Warren Howe, a frequent contributor to The New Leader, is a veteran observer of the African scene...

...Attempts by Morocco over the centuries to drive south also have always met with defeat There seems no reason to believe that Africa just south of the Sahara will not continue to absorb and beat any armies that invade from the north But if Qaddafi's drive is halted by French soldiers, or French pilots directed by American battlefield-control aircraft, he will have been transformed from a bully into a victim, and perhaps try again...

...By all means sell, or even give, the black Africans weapons to fend off invasion Chad's Sudanese and Egyptian neighbors have dispatched token forces to help, fine, Qaddafi is their enemy, too The corrupt and brutal Mobutu regime in Zaire has similarly sent in troops, enabling Qaddafi to score a few points in an interview with Le Monde's veteran Eric Rouleau, yet at least Mobutu's contribution is overtly in the name of defending black Africa...