Gaddafi's Coup — Al-Fateh Revolution
Muammar Gaddafi and a group of junior officers seized power in Libya on 1 September 1969 while King Idris was abroad taking a cure in Turkey. He was twenty-seven, a signals captain, and the coup was almost bloodless — the radio station, the barracks and the ministries taken in a night by a Free Officers movement modelled deliberately on Nasser's in Egypt. Libya had been independent since 1951 and was among the poorest countries in the world until oil was found in 1959. By 1969 it was a substantial exporter with a monarchy widely seen as corrupt, sclerotic and dependent on Britain and the United States, which held the largest air base in Africa at Wheelus outside Tripoli. Gaddafi closed the British and American bases within a year, expelled the remaining Italian settlers and the Jewish community's property, and nationalised the oil industry — negotiating first with the smaller independent producers who could not afford to lose Libyan supply, and using the terms he won as leverage on the majors. That sequence was widely copied and contributed directly to the price rises of the 1970s. He published the Green Book from 1975 setting out a Third Universal Theory between capitalism and communism, abolished the government in favour of people's committees in a system he called the Jamahiriya, and held no formal office at all. He funded the IRA, the Red Brigades and a long list of others, fought Chad, and was implicated in the Lockerbie bombing. He ruled for forty-two years. He was killed by a crowd near Sirte in October 2011, and the country has not had a single government since.
- Year: 1969 CE
- Category: Diplomacy
