Libya: Heeling to Brother Gaddafi

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A revolution guided by the Green Book, sweetened with oil

Only days after President Reagan called upon all U.S. citizens to leave Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, the first of some 1,500 Americans expected to depart by the end of next month were dutifully queuing up at the Tripoli International Airport for the flight home. Despite well-publicized U.S. reports that Gaddafi had dispatched hit men to assassinate Reagan, few believed that they were in any real danger of Libyan retaliation. For the occasion, Gaddafi eased usually tight restrictions on journalists to invite members of the foreign press to hear him, presumably, denounce Washington's claims. TIME Correspondent Jonathan Beaty flew to Tripoli for a firsthand look at the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (state of the masses), as the nation has been renamed. His report:

The press conference, or rather the non-conference, was vintage Gaddafi. After two days of waiting, anxious revolutionary committeemen herded the press out of our hotels for a breathtaking, Libyan-style drive through the narrow streets of Tripoli. Lights blinking and horns blaring, the wild caravan raced to a walled compound where soldiers wielding submachine guns waved us through a gate flanked by two Russian T-72 tanks. For the fifth time since my arrival I was thoroughly searched. Inside the handsome government offices with beautifully crafted wooden Arabic arches, television crews set up their equipment on priceless rugs. Then a top Gaddafi aide, sporting a natty pinstripe suit under immaculate Arab robes, announced that the interview had been canceled. The presumed reason: the media-wise Gaddafi, who appeared, briefly, wearing a European-cut suit with a British overcoat flung over his shoulders, realized that the crisis in Poland had pushed him off the front pages and evening news broadcasts in Europe and America.

It is difficult for Westerners to grasp the extent to which Gaddafi is the sole spirit and voice of a revolution that in twelve years has transformed this North African desert wasteland. In 1969, armed with Islamic zeal and a near fanatical belief that he was the heir to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabic nationalism, Gaddafi and eleven other young officers deposed the conservative King Idris in a bloodless coup. Gaddafi has since established iron political control of his countrymen, largely by spreading Libya's abundant oil wealth among them. Says Fouad Zlitni, a true believer: "The people decide everything, but it is the thoughts of Brother Gaddafi which guide us on to the proper path."

Those thoughts are enshrined in the Green Book, a three-volume work of revolutionary philosophy penned by Gaddafi. Cryptic excerpts are plastered all over Tripoli. "Representation is a falsification of democracy ... In need, freedom is latent . .. The party system aborts democracy." In the airport, the traveler is inundated with illuminated signs in Arabic and English that read: NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT POPULAR CONGRESS. Portraits of Gaddafi are everywhere, in private homes, musty old hotels, on billboards in service stations. Pointedly, there are also anti-American posters depicting Libyans shoving a spear through the head of a bleeding pig clothed in Uncle Sam's red-white-and-blue suit, with doves soaring aloft carrying little Green Books.