Ever since Colonel Muammar Al-Qaddafi took over power in Libya in a military coup in early September 1969, the country has been living without a constitution. This makes randomness and improvisation, both in the constitutional and legal sense, the alternative for organizing political and administrative life in the country, to which must be added Qaddafi's changing moods and his inclination towards oddities and provocation, this without any restraints. Libya's situation could have gone by without much concern, had not the country enjoyed two exceptional characteristics: its strategic location in the Arab Maghreb and its tremendous wealth of high-quality oil, one that enjoys proximity to its markets of consumption. Thanks to such a location and to the need for oil and the wealth it brings, Tripoli has become a favored destination. However, this has at the same time allowed the Libyan regime to be quarrelsome, spoilt and provoking, turning such behavior into a new political style, not just in domestic administration but also in international relations. And it is no coincidence for this aspect of the practice of the Libyan ruling regime to increase exponentially with the proclamation of “the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” in 1977, in which the people would exercise “direct power”, political parties and political work would be forbidden, and “popular councils” would be established. These councils have become the façade of power, which is in fact tightly held by the hardcore leadership made up of Qaddafi in person and the security apparatus under his direct control, supported by a segment of the population benefiting from the oil wealth, which still constitutes the main obstacle before any attempt to find any kind of mechanisms of restraint, supervision and accountability. Perhaps the obstacles faced by the Colonel's son and potential heir, Saif Al-Islam Al-Qaddafi, when he called for setting down a constitution for the country and later renounced it, reveal the extent of the resistance shown by this segment of the population to any reform. Such institutional and constitutional vacuum has been kept busy by Qaddafi with external battles. Indeed, ever since he took power forty years ago, he has raised the banner of hostility to the West and to “imperialism”. Yet his spectrum of interference was not limited to that. Few are the countries in which Qaddafi did not seek, through Libyan oil money, to interfere, especially by supporting armed splinter groups and opposition groups. The purpose of this was to bring the authorities of those countries to come to Tripoli and implore the “Leader of the Revolution” for help, i.e. ceasing to interfere, thus making him a world leader. At the Arab level, where Qaddafi began by calling for immediate political unity, and ratified a number of failed unity agreements, not a single Arab country was spared his interferences and his rivalries, reaching up to small wars, attempts at destabilization, public calls for assassination and blackmail with accusations of treason within Libya. Each of Egypt, Tunisia and Sudan has had numerous bitter experiences in this respect. As for Qaddafi's stances on the Palestinian Cause, the national leadership of which he fought against for a long period of time, they come down today to calling for “Isratine”. And when the Colonel realized, especially after the Lockerbie bombing, that Arab countries like all other countries in the world could not transgress the UN sanctions imposed on his country, he began to defame the Arabs and their nationalism, and preaching the greatness of Africa and of its culture, declaring himself “king of its kings”. This is after he had excelled at attracting the spotlight to his person in Arab forums, with his eccentricities and strange ideas. To come out of the predicament of sanctions, he recognized in an indirect manner his responsibility for the Lockerbie (1988) and UTA (1989) bombings, and offered financial compensations to the families of the victims of the two flights from the oil money that had been accumulated while Libya was under sanctions. He also willingly dismantled a fledgling Weapons of Mass Destruction program under US supervision. Thus began a new phase of Western officials traveling to Libya in order to harvest contracts and investments, while the Colonel's trips abroad turned into the story of his famous tent. What is important is for the man to stay at the center of events, be the focus of attention and a pole of attraction for foreign leaders, regardless of how this is achieved. What he has done in the past, in terms of supporting opposition movements under the banner of “confronting imperialism”, and what he does today, in terms of distributing contracts and repressing freedoms, has one purpose, that is for the “Leader of the Revolution” to have an active role – and this is the process at which Qaddafi has excelled, in order to stay in power for the past forty years.
