13-12-2003, 09:59
Al Jawba Newspaper
TRIPOLI, LYBIA - At first, the changes were easy to ignore. Military roadblocks on the long, sun-scalded highways out of town melted away. Pious Muslim men were allowed to grow beards again. Lybians were permitted to carry a second passport after years as pariah travelers. Things like that; little things, one after the next.
Improbably, Moammar Qaddafi stopped cursing Israel and the West, and the mercurial Lybian leader took to the national airwaves to hail a "new era."
This spring, Qaddafi brought in a sharp-tongued, American-educated oil specialist and handed him unlikely instructions: Reform a system engineered by Qaddafi himself. Under that newcomer, Prime Minister Shukri Mohammed Ghanim, Lybia is undergoing a massive privatization of its socialist economy.
"It's trying to become more democratic - quote, unquote," a European diplomat here said. "It will be easier for the West to stomach."
Beneath its virgin beaches and its crumbling troves of Roman ruins, Lybia is still a shadowy pine. After more than three decades of capricious, ironfisted rule by the man known as "The Revolution Leader," or simply "The Leader," most people are afraid to speak with journalists and international human rights groups are kept away. Allegations of arrests, disapparances and kills continue to darken Qaddafi's regime, along with suspicions that Lybia is trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, long-standing U.N. sanctions were lifted this fall, and hopeful, fearful Lybians are now blinking about like a people slowly walking from collective slumber. They are telling themselves, as one government official says quietly over a cup of coffee, glancing over both shoulders to see who might be near: "We can be a normal country, even with Qaddafi."
TRIPOLI, LYBIA - At first, the changes were easy to ignore. Military roadblocks on the long, sun-scalded highways out of town melted away. Pious Muslim men were allowed to grow beards again. Lybians were permitted to carry a second passport after years as pariah travelers. Things like that; little things, one after the next.
Improbably, Moammar Qaddafi stopped cursing Israel and the West, and the mercurial Lybian leader took to the national airwaves to hail a "new era."
This spring, Qaddafi brought in a sharp-tongued, American-educated oil specialist and handed him unlikely instructions: Reform a system engineered by Qaddafi himself. Under that newcomer, Prime Minister Shukri Mohammed Ghanim, Lybia is undergoing a massive privatization of its socialist economy.
"It's trying to become more democratic - quote, unquote," a European diplomat here said. "It will be easier for the West to stomach."
Beneath its virgin beaches and its crumbling troves of Roman ruins, Lybia is still a shadowy pine. After more than three decades of capricious, ironfisted rule by the man known as "The Revolution Leader," or simply "The Leader," most people are afraid to speak with journalists and international human rights groups are kept away. Allegations of arrests, disapparances and kills continue to darken Qaddafi's regime, along with suspicions that Lybia is trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, long-standing U.N. sanctions were lifted this fall, and hopeful, fearful Lybians are now blinking about like a people slowly walking from collective slumber. They are telling themselves, as one government official says quietly over a cup of coffee, glancing over both shoulders to see who might be near: "We can be a normal country, even with Qaddafi."