Sebha, a town of less than 40,000 people deep in the Fezzan desert, the geographical heart of Libya, provided a genesis for Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Revolution.
It is conceivable that Sebha may also be Qaddafi's nemesis.
It was in Sebha high school in 1959 that the 15-year-old son of Abu Meniar and Aissha al-Qaddafi first heard Egypt's charismatic leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, on the radio program, "Voice of the Arabs," beamed from Cairo.
As Colonel Qaddafi, now 44, said recently in an interview with Peter Enahoro of Africa Now: "Nasser was the hero of the Arab nation. He was the pioneer of Arab union and Arab nationalism. He was a powerful opponent of colonialism all over the world, and he was loved by the ordinary masses, the simple masses." Certainly Nasser became an inspirational force and the intellectual mentor to Qaddafi.
Libya had been ruled since independence in December 1951 by King Idris al-Sanussi, childless, ascetic, and a former head of the Sanussi Islamic order. He was surrounded by corrupt, officials in his own government, from the oil companies, and from foreign corporations. While Idris was a reclusive ruler, his government generally did nothing out of step with Western interests.
For example, Libya gave little support to President Nasser or to the Palestinian cause against Israel. And though it promoted the Sanussi Islamic order and its calls for practicing a simple, Koranic life, the regime was exceedingly lax about enforcing Islamic laws against alcohol and similar vices.
Revolution In The Classroom
Under the inspiration of Nasser's vision of a pan-Islamic empire, the young Qaddafi formed a revolutionary cell among his classmates. Some of his Sebha high school classmates he later persuaded to follow military careers in order to place themselves in a position to take power. These men became the core of Qaddafi's Free Officers movement and the coup of September 1, 1969.
The names of the other cell members, then of little significance, now are critical to an understanding of Qaddafi. They included Abdel Salem Jallud, second in command to Qaddafi, Bashir al-Hawadi, Mustafa al-Kharoubi, Abu Bakr Yunis Jabir, and Ali al-Houdry.
For the past 25 years, they have been loyal and trusted advisers to Qaddafi, and serve and have served in such posts as chief of staff, head of intelligence, army chief of staff and ambassador to the United States. From then until the present, the powerful elite of the Qaddafi regime have been his own tribesmen and those of Major Jallud's Meghara tribe. Some 300 of their kinsmen hold various offices.
But there is now much more to Sebha than the genesis of Qaddafi's revolution and its modern airport and huge building complexes. Sebha, in fact, for some time has been a prime topic of conversation in Libya's coffee shops and in the intelligence agencies of the West. Within a year of his seizure of power, Qaddafi dispatched his chief of staff, Jallud, to Peking on a cash-and-carry mission for
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