Fezzan

Libya’s Fezzan: A Bulwark of the Gaddafi Regime

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Compared to the Sahara, the deserts of North America hardly deserve the name. Whereas Las Vegas, the quintessential desert city in the U.S., receives about four and half inches (115 mm) of rain a year, and Death Valley, the continent’s driest spot, gets a little less than two inches (50 mm), roughly half of the Sahara receives less than eight-tenths of an inch (20 mm) annually. Over vast expanses of Saharan land, no vegetation can be found. The Sahara is also huge; roughly the size of the United States, it dwarfs all the deserts of North America put together.

But despite its extreme aridity, the Sahara contains pockets of relatively dense human habitation. Libya’s Fezzan region, located in the heart of the desert, has long supported sizable towns and extensive areas of irrigated agriculture, and is today home to almost half a million inhabitants. Most reside in oases where subsurface water allows the cultivation of dates and other crops. The oases of Fezzan tend to sprawl, with palm groves interspersed with uncultivated tracts stretching over many miles of terrain, punctuated with villages and small cities (see the Google Earth image above). On the economic map of Libya posted above, the Fezzan oases are deceptively large, as much of the land mapped in green is actually barren.

The extent of cultivated land in the Libyan Sahara has, however, vastly increased over the past several decades. The population of the region has also surged during the same period. While Fezzan held 60,000 inhabitants in 1954, by 2006 its population reached 442,000. Since the 1980s, it has grown at a much more rapid clip than the rest of the country. In 1984, Fezzan was home to 5.9 percent of Libya’s total population, whereas in 2006 it held 7.8 percent of the total. Relatively little of this expansion is linked to the oil industry, which is focused outside of Fezzan to the northeast. Recent growth here is associated instead with massive new irrigation facilities and with road-building and other infrastructural projects undertaken by the Libyan government. Some of this activity has been aimed at linking Libya more closely to sub-Saharan Africa, one of the cornerstones of Gaddafi’s ambitious foreign policy agenda.

As of March 1, 2011, Fezzan remained firmly under the control of the Gaddafi regime, with no indication of rebel activity in any of its cities or towns. The region’s loyalty to Gadaffi is linked to its relative isolation, as well as to the development funds that have been lavished upon it. But parts of Fezzan have also been singled out as bulwarks of the regime. Gaddafi attended secondary school in Sabha, the metropolis of the region (population 130,000). Many members of his own tribe, the Qaddadfa, subsequently relocated to the city, even though the tribe is based on the north coast. Sabha also supports a Libyan air base, which was linked to the country’s discontinued nuclear program, and has been used for rocket testing. The city is noted for its numerous migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, whose presence has been encouraged by Gaddafi and whose future in the country may be jeopardized by a regime change. Bands of Chadian and Nigerian mercenaries hired by the old regime are also reported to be present in the area. Although Gaddafi’s power in northern Libya has largely been reduced to Tripoli and its environs, it remains entrenched in the southwest. It will be interesting to see what happens in Fezzan if and when Gaddafi falls in north.

Regardless of the fate of the Gaddafi regime, it is unlikely that the new agricultural developments in the Libya desert will prove sustainable, as the next Geocurrents posting will explore.

Libya’s Geographical Divisions and the Challenge to National Unity

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Libya’s national unity faces challenges beyond those imposed by its tribal background. Countries that contain two distinct core regions of roughly equivalent population are often burdened by regional rivalry, and Libya is no exception. Its bifurcation is stark, with population highly concentrated in two areas located on opposite sides of the country’s Mediterranean coast. The capital city, Tripoli, is situated in the northwest; its counterpart in the northeast, Benghazi, formerly functioned as a kind of secondary capital. According to the Wikipedia, the latter “continues to hold institutions and organizations normally associated with a national capital city.” But as the Gadaffi regime ensconced itself in Tripoli, the eastern core around Benghazi emerged as a center of anti-Gadaffi sentiments. It is no coincidence that the current Libyan rebellion scored its initial successes in the northeast.

This bi-polar demography is rooted in physical geography. One of the driest countries of the world, Libya has few areas capable of supporting agriculture. Apart from a few oases in the Sahara, farming populations were until recently limited to the two relatively small coastal strips that receive more than twelve inches (300 mm) of average annual rainfall: one in the northwest, the other in the northeast. Historically, the two areas remained geopolitically and culturally separate. The disparity was particularly pronounced in ancient times, when the northeast was part of the Greek world while the northwest belonged to the Phoenician realm.

Libya’s unity came about in part through the actions of European colonialism. Historically, the area now known as Libya was regarded as three separate regions: Tripolitania in the northwest, centered on Tripoli; Cyrenaica in the northeast, focused on Benghazi; and Fezzan in the southwest, anchored by a few scattered oases. In the 1700s most of the region was ruled by the Karamanli Dynasty based in Tripoli, nominal vassals of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans regained direct control in the 1830s, continuing to administer the area through Tripoli. Ottoman authority, however, was increasingly challenged by the Senussi order of Sufi Muslims, which was especially strong in the southern oases. Italy expelled the Ottomans from the region during the course of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, incidentally the first conflict to see the extensive use of aerial bombing. Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire after a little more than a year of fighting, but it took more than a decade to secure the region. Although Tripolitania was subdued within a few years, resistance persisted in Cyrenaica in the northeast and Fezzan in the southwest, organized by local tribes and especially the militant Senussi order. In 1934, after colonial control had been firmly established, Italy merged Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan into a single colony that it called Libya, deriving the name from the ancient Greek term for Africa. When Italy lost control of its North African colony during World War II, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania passed to Britain while France took Fezzan. The three regions were once again stitched together in 1951 with the independence of what was initially called the United Kingdom of Libya.

Following independence, Libya’s internal political geography was reorganized on several occasions, such that the historical regions of Cyrenaica, Fezzan, and Tripolitania ceased to have any administrative significance. Yet they remain distinctive, as highlighted by the current uprising. As mentioned above, Gaddafi’s power evaporated first in Cyrenaica in the northeast. Most northwestern cities subsequently fell to the oppositional forces, with the regime’s power in Tripolitania largely limited by February 28 to the capital city of Tripoli. As the Wikipedia map posted above indicates, the oases of Fezzan also remained at this time firmly under pro-Gaddafi forces. The only other area remaining under the power of the old regime was Sirt, located on the arid central coast between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Not coincidentally, Sirt is Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown.