Stories of the Revolution

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The Ghadaffi regime was brought to power by revolution of September 1, 1969. As anyone who knows Libya might expect, this revolution was not without its dramatic – and its funny – moments.

Here are some parts of the inside story that I heard from various Libyan friends. I can’t swear to the accuracy of these stories but I heard each one from several different sources. Also, I think anyone who has lived in Libya will feel the stories have a ring of truth about them.

The revolution was actually born, not in Tripoli, but in England. Muammar Gadaffi and several other young Libyan army officers were attending an English language school in London. One night, a friend invited Ghadaffi to go with him to a night club. There the young officer watched in disgust as a Libyan prince gambled away over one million pounds. Ghadaffi turned to his friend and said, “When we go home, we’re going to plan a revolution.” He was as good as his word.

Planning the revolution turned out to be very tricky for Ghadaffi and the eleven other junior officers who agreed to take part in it. One problem was that King Idris did not trust his army and so the troops were allowed to have very little ammunition. The police, on the other hand, were well armed and well supplied with munitions.

Another even more serious problem lay in the fact that Libya was made up of three distinct provinces. The people in each province were suspicious of or even hostile to the people in the other provinces. So Ghadaffi realized that the revolution could only succeed if he and his colleagues seized power and broadcast news of the coup in all three provinces simultaneously.

So, on the appointed day, the plotters swung into coordinated action in the three provinces. And things at once started to go wrong.

The plotters didn’t have to worry about King Idris, because he was travelling abroad. However, they did have to worry about his nephew, the so-called Black Prince and the power behind the throne. On the night of the coup, one group of soldiers raced to the Blue Palace in Tripoli to arrest the prince. They searched the palace but found no sign of him. They were panic-stricken. Had the prince found out about the coup and was he even now rallying support against it? In fact, the officers searching the palace had somehow failed to notice that the prince was exactly where he should have been, in his bedroom. He slept through the whole episode and, luckily, didn’t wake until the coup had succeeded.

Elsewhere, another group of officers was charged with seizing the main broadcasting station and holding it until they could announce that the coup had been successful in all three provinces. This group ran into problems even before they got to the broadcasting station. They were stopped by a police patrol and arrested because the police mistakenly believed that a bottle of water in the soldiers’ vehicle was really a bottle of alcohol.

After the soldiers had managed to talk their way out of the arrest, they rushed to the broadcasting station only to find that the doors were locked. They had to sit outside and wait until the doorman turned up with the keys at the station’s normal opening time.

Still, all’s well that ends well, and Ghadaffi and his fellow officers somehow managed to bring the coup to a successful conclusion.

Footnote 1

By coincidence, a Libyan general based in Benghazi had been planning a coup of his own, due to take place a few days after Ghadaffi’s revolution. On September 1, he was awakened by loud knocking at his front door. He got up and went to the door. “Who’s there?” he asked.

“Open in the name of the revolution,” came the reply. “Go away, you fools,” the general yelled. “The revolution isn’t until next week.” He opened the door and was promptly arrested.

Footnote 2

Five of the twelve officers who led the revolution and became the Revolutionary Command Council were students at the IH school in Tripoli. They were lieutenants. A few days before the revolution, they had to take an English exam. If they passed the exam, they were to be promoted immediately to the rank of captain. As the five were excellent students, they seemed certain to do well. So Ben Warren, the IH director, was very surprised when all five officers failed the exam, and failed it disastrously. He couldn't work out what had happened. He only understood later, when he learned that that well before the day of the exam the plotters had issued orders that all officers with the rank of captain or higher should be arrested on September 1st.

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