GADAFY'S 'GREEN BOOK':Copies of the Libyan leader's rambling political manifesto, mandatory on school curriculums, are being burned in public, writes MARY FITZGERALD
FATIMA STUDIED political science at university in Benghazi, but her loathing of Muammar Gadafy’s regime meant she could never teach in her home country.
"Working as a teacher in Libya would have involved teaching The Green Bookand I refused to do that on principle," she says. "That book is an insult to our intelligence. Do you know that there are lines in it like: 'The man is male and the woman is female'? It is a crazy book written by a crazy man."
When protests in eastern Libya last month evolved into a full-fledged revolt against Gadafy's 42-year dictatorship, those rebelling against the regime targeted one of its most potent symbols – The Green Book, a three-volume political manifesto written by Gadafy in the 1970s. Protesters smashed huge concrete and marble representations of the tome in towns and cities across the east and burned down libraries devoted to its study.
Last week in Benghazi, the city that has acted as a nucleus for the uprising, demonstrators chanted and danced with glee as they pitched hundreds of copies of the book, which outlines the ideology underpinning Gadafy’s regime, on to a large bonfire, sending thick plumes of smoke and ash into the air.
One man held a sign that read, in Arabic and English: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Among those whooping and cheering was student Ali Mohammed Najib. “You have no idea how much we hate this book,” he said. “It represents everything about this mad regime.”
The Green Book– subtitled The Solution to the Problem of Democracy; The Social Basis to the Third Universal Theory– is a rambling collection of Gadafy's idiosyncratic thoughts on politics, economics and society. The Libyan leader had it translated into dozens of languages.
In 1986 he told a French journalist that he wished "in this century . . . [that] the Green Bookbecome the bible of the modern world." One writer summed up its content, which ranges from musings on the slavery of wages to black power and the failings of parliamentary democracy, as "Marx meets Malcolm X".
Dirk Vandewalle, a professor at Dartmouth College in the US and author of A History of Modern Libya,describes the work as "very difficult to understand in part because it really is not a coherent thought if you compare it, for example, to The Little Red Bookof Mao . . . where you get at least a consistent argument. The Green Bookcontains really a set of aphorisms more than a completely thought-out integrated philosophical statement."
In the 1980s the Tripoli-based World Centre for Green Book Studies enjoyed a multimillion-dollar budget with branches across the globe, and Gadafy's theories were debated at international conferences, paid for by his regime. Libyans must study The Green Book's21,000 words at school, but its ubiquity extends far beyond the classroom. Exhortations from the book – the most common being "Partners, Not Wage Earners" – are emblazoned on public buildings and on huge green gates that arc across the country's roads and highways.
"This book has been an attempt to brainwash a whole nation," said Lubna, a mother of two, as she stood watching flames lick at the pile of copies at last week's bonfire. Lubna, whose father worked with the Arab League, avoided mandatory study of The Green Bookbecause she grew up outside Libya.
“It upsets me when I see my own children struggle with it now at school,” she says. “I tell them: ‘This is not the truth, it is all a lie.’ It makes me very happy to see it burn today.” Gadafy’s attachment to the colour green is not just limited to the eponymous book. Green, a colour sometimes associated with Islam, is the chosen shade of his “Eternal Revolution”. In 1977 he decreed that Libya adopt a solid-green flag as its national standard. Anecdotes tell of Gadafy refusing to write in anything else but green ink. During the current upheaval, he has called on supporters to wear green armbands to show their loyalty.
Visitors to Libya will notice that all shop shutters are painted green – a Gadafy edict, I was told. Public buildings, military compounds, and even private homes and apartment complexes are often ringed with green paint.
“Green is the colour of life and nature,” said one Benghazi resident as we drove around her crumbling, neglected city. “But Gadafy made us hate the colour.”
Extracts from Gadafy's Green Book
“Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth . . . Women are different from men in form because they are females, just as all females in the kingdom of plants and animals differ from the male of their species . . . According to gynaecologists, women, unlike men, menstruate each month . . .
“Since men cannot be impregnated they do not experience the ailments that women do. She breastfeeds for nearly two years.”
“There are inevitable cycles of social history: the yellow race’s domination of the world, when it came from Asia, and the white race’s attempts at colonising extensive areas of all continents of the world. Now, it is the turn of the black race to prevail in the world.”
“While it is democratically not permissible for an individual to own any information or publishing medium, all individuals have a natural right to self- expression by any means, even if such means were insane and meant to prove a person’s insanity.”
“Mandatory education is a coercive education that suppresses freedom. To impose specific teaching materials is a dictatorial act.”
“If a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body.”
“Placing a child in a day nursery is coercive and tyrannical and a violation of the child’s free and natural disposition.”
“Labour in return for wages is virtually the same as enslaving a human being. In a socialist society, no person may own a private means of transportation for the purpose of renting to others, because this represents controlling the needs of others.”
“No representation of the people – representation is a falsehood. The mere existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people.”