Libyan Independence — United Kingdom of Libya
Libya became independent on 24 December 1951, the first country to receive its independence from the United Nations. The territory had been Italian since 1911 and had been fought over for three years during the war, and in 1945 nobody knew what to do with it. The Allies could not agree. The Soviet Union asked for a trusteeship over Tripolitania, which alarmed everyone else; France wanted the Fezzan attached to its African territories; Italy wanted its colony back; and Britain held Cyrenaica and had promised the Senussi leadership that it would never be returned to Italian rule. The Bevin-Sforza plan of 1949 proposed dividing it three ways and was defeated in the General Assembly by a single vote, cast by Haiti after lobbying. The Assembly then resolved that Libya should become an independent sovereign state before January 1952, which is the first time the organisation had created a country. A commissioner and a council of ten spent two years assembling one out of three provinces with different colonial histories, no common administration and a literacy rate in single figures. The federal constitution gave each province its own government and made Idris king, since the Senussi order was the one institution with standing in more than one of them. The country was among the poorest in the world until oil was found in 1959. The federal structure was abolished in 1963 and the monarchy in 1969. The precedent mattered more than the country at the time. A territory nobody could agree about was made a state by vote rather than by conquest or by a colonial timetable, and the machinery invented for it was used again for Namibia forty years later.
- Year: 1951 CE
- Category: Independence
