Libya: From Colony to Nation 47 2.1 libya: from colony to nation The modern nation-state of Libya is situated in the Maghreb of northern Africa between Tunisia and Egypt, along the Mediterranean Sea. It is comprised of three regions: Tripolitania in the northwest, which encompasses the capital city of Tripoli; Fezzan in the southwest; and Cyrenaica in the east, which includes Libya’s second-largest city of Benghazi. Captured by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, Libya remained part of the Turkish empire until it was taken by the Italians in 1912. Between the World War I and World War II, Libyans resisted colonial rule via insurgency led by Omar al-Mukhtar of Cyrenaica. The Italians responded without mercy to popular demands by the indigenous communities, including the Amazigh, for their rights.3 By imprisoning and starving the population in concentration camps, their efforts to keep control ended up imprisoning more than 110,000 civilians and murdering forty to seventy thousand (Ahmida 2006; St. John 2017). After the Allied powers captured Libya from the Italian fascist regime in 1942 during World War II, Britain and France split the country and governed different regions. Libya’s King Idris returned from exile in Egypt, and the United Nations declared the country independent by 1951. The constitution, drawn up under the auspices of a black, red, and green flag, was modeled on the West and instituted a respectively liberal state guaranteeing many civil rights. Idris was a weak king, however, and perceived by many as a stooge for Western powers, which profited greatly from economic trade and the use of its coastal ground as a base for American military forces. At this time, Libya’s population was only about three million people, despite residing in the fourth-largest nation in Africa. On September 1, 1969, a cabal of military men calling themselves the Free Officers Movement overthrew King Idris in a bloodless coup d’état. They were led by a twenty-seven-year-old captain named Muammar al-Gaddafi. Sporting a starched beige uniform and a gold-threaded officer’s cap, Gaddafi was virtually unknown at the time, but it would not take long for his name to become synonymous with Libya itself. After expelling Western powers, the political elite, and banning the Latin script, Gaddafi was hailed by many outsiders as an anti-imperialist hero. Over the course of his forty-two-year rule, however, the Libyan people became the subjects of a brutal political experiment requiring total acquiescence. The regime constructed numerous internal security forces dedicated to coup-proofing the regime. As in other totalitarian societies of the twentieth century, a huge percentage of the population was incorporated into 3 Libyan tribes include Arab, Tuareg, and Tabu, the latter of which dominate the southern Fezzan region. The Tabu were historically “a clan-based society of camel herders, speaking a language of Nilo-Saharan origin,” while the Tuareg are originally pastoral nomads whose populations span “the Sahara and the Sahel in southern Libya and parts of Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger” who speak “a dialect of Amazigh (or Berber) known as Tamasheq” (Wehrey 2017). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press