Libya's Slow Trek Out of the Shadows
After more than three decades of ironfisted rule, Moammar Kadafi is changing course. But it will be a long journey for the pariah nation.
By Megan K. Stack
Times Staff Writer

December 12, 2003

TRIPOLI, Libya — 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. Libyans were permitted to carry a second passport after years as pariah travelers. Things like that; little things, one after the next.

Improbably, Moammar Kadafi stopped cursing America and the West, and the mercurial Libyan leader took to the national airwaves to hail a "new era." Libyan officials began reminding anybody who cared to listen that this sandy Mediterranean nation issued one of the first arrest warrants for Osama bin Laden.

Then, this spring, Kadafi brought in a sharp–tongued, American–educated oil specialist and handed him unlikely instructions: Reform a system engineered by Kadafi himself. Under that newcomer, Prime Minister Shukri Mohammed Ghanim, Libya 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, Libya is still a shadowy place. 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, disappearances and killings continue to darken Kadafi's regime, along with suspicions that Libya is trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless, long–standing U.N. sanctions were lifted this fall, and hopeful, fearful Libyans are now blinking about like a people slowly waking 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 Kadafi."