Libya

The Phoenicians founded colonies on the coast of Tripolitania, which were conquered by Carthage in the 6th century BC. Greeks subsequently established settlements in Cyrenaica. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, described the Garamantes people of the Fezzan, who were sedentary farmers and used horse-drawn chariots in warfare. His account has been verified in the 20th century by ancient cave art, discovered in the Jabal Akakus (jabal means "mountains") of the western Fezzan and the Jabal al 'Uwaynat near the Egyptian border. Libya later became a Roman possession, until it was conquered by the Vandals in AD 455. After a reconquest by Byzantium in the following century, the region was won by the Arabs under Amr ibn al-As in 643. Ruled successively by the Umayyads, Fatimids, and a Berber dynasty, the country was partly conquered by the Normans in 1146 but soon abandoned to Almohad control. During the following centuries Libya, or parts thereof, frequently changed hands until it was finally conquered, in the 16th century, by the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century the puritanical Sanusi sect arose in the interior. The Sanusi led the resistance to the Italians, who began their conquest of Libya in 1911. The Ottomans renounced their rights over Libya in 1912, but the Sanusi resisted until 1931. During World War II (1939-1945), Libya was the scene of intense desert fighting between Italo-German and Allied forces. Following the expulsion of Axis troops in 1943, France and Great Britain shared control of the country. On November 21, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for the granting of independence to Libya by January 1, 1952. Kingdom Established A national assembly, composed of an equal number of delegates from Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan, convened at Tripoli in 1950 and designated Emir Sayid Idris al-Sanusi, head of the Cyrenaican government and leader of the Sanusi sect, king-designate. The assembly promulgated the Libyan constitution on October 7, 1951. On December 24 the emir, as King Idris I, proclaimed the independence of the federal United Kingdom of Libya. Elections were held in February 1952, and parliament met for the first time in March. Libya joined the Arab League in 1953 and the United Nations (UN) in 1955. In 1963 the constitution was amended to give women the right to vote, and the federal system was replaced by a unitary system. Great Britain and France agreed to extend financial aid to the government in exchange for the right to maintain their military installations in Libya. The United States, wishing to retain the vast Wheelus Field air base near Tripoli, promised economic and technical assistance. Libya established diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1956 but rejected Soviet offers of economic aid. In 1964 negotiations were begun between Libya and the United States and Great Britain for the withdrawal of troops and the closing of air bases. The last contingents of British and U.S. troops left in 1970. Libya was not a participant in the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, but it strongly supported its Arab League neighbors in opposition to Israel after the war. Libya also gave financial aid to Jordan and the United Arab Republic, as Egypt was then called, to rebuild their economies. Beginning in the mid-1950s, development of the oil industry made rapid progress and turned Libya into a boom country. In 1956 the Libyan government granted two American oil companies a concession of some 5,668,000 hectares (14 million acres). In 1961 King Idris opened a 167-km (104-mi) pipeline linking important oil fields in the interior to the Mediterranean Sea. The new facility made possible the export of Libyan oil for the first time. In the same year a royal decree provided that in future agreements with oil companies the government share of the profits would be increased from 50 percent to 70 percent. In the late 1960s numerous oil companies of various nations had been granted concessions, and oil production reached more than 85 million barrels per month. Overthrow of the Monarchy A new era in the history of Libya began on September 1, 1969, when a group of young army officers overthrew the royal government and established a republic under the name Libyan Arab Republic. The revolutionary government, dominated by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, a devout Muslim aspiring to leadership of the Arab world, showed a determination thereafter to play a larger role in the affairs of the Middle East and North Africa. Representatives of Libya engaged in discussions with Egypt and the Sudan on plans for the coordination of economic, military, and political policies of the three countries. In September 1971, Egypt, Libya, and Syria agreed to form a federation designed for mutual military advantage against Israel. This and a later agreement to form a union with Tunisia were abandoned in 1974. In internal affairs the Qaddafi regime decreed that all businesses must in the future be wholly owned by Libyans; all banks were nationalized. Agreement was reached with foreign-owned oil companies that increased Libya's annual oil revenues by $770 million at that time. In the early 1970s, however, Libya also nationalized the oil resources of the country. Even before the Yom Kippur War between the Arabs and Israelis in 1973, Qaddafi urged his fellow Arabs to refuse to trade in oil, so vital to the industrialized countries of the West, with any nation supporting Israel. After the war Libya joined in an embargo of oil sales to the West and urged higher prices to the oil-consuming countries. Qaddafi's Regime Under Qaddafi's leadership Libya took a much more active role not only in Arab affairs but also in international politics. Opposing the peace initiative toward Israel of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat, Libya took a leading part, along with Syria, in the so-called rejectionist front in 1978. Its support for the Palestine Liberation Organization later expanded to barely concealed subsidies for terrorists in other nations, and in the early 1980s the regime was believed to be linked to a campaign of assassinations directed against Libyan dissidents residing abroad. During this same period, Libyan forces intervened in a civil war in neighboring Chad. A peace treaty with Chad was signed in 1989. Libyan relations with the United States deteriorated in the early 1980s. In 1981 two Libyan fighter planes were shot down by U.S. Navy jets over the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed as territorial waters. In 1982 the United States imposed an embargo on Libyan oil imports. Another encounter in the Gulf of Sidra in March 1986 resulted in the destruction of two Libyan ships by U.S. Navy ships. In April, responding to heightened terrorism in Europe apparently directed by Libya against Americans, the United States bombed sites in Libya declared by President Ronald Reagan to be "terrorist centers." Qaddafi's home at one of the barracks was damaged and his infant daughter was killed, but the major damage was to other military sites. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Libya urged moderation, opposing both Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent use of force against Iraq. Ties with Egypt were strengthened during 1991, but those with the United States worsened, especially in 1992 when it was charged that Libya was manufacturing chemical weapons. In April 1992, United Nations sanctions were imposed against Libya for its refusal to extradite the two men suspected of the 1988 bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 1994 the International Court of Justice ruled that Chad had sovereignty over the Aozou Strip, a territory that had been occupied by Libyan military forces for over 20 years.