World: TEXTBOOK COUP IN A DESERT KINGDOM

It was a textbook coup. At 3 a.m., shortly before the most faithful Moslems would answer the call to early morning prayers, columns of trucks loaded with troops rolled through Tripoli, spearheaded by British-made Centurion tanks. Swiftly, soldiers surrounded army headquarters, the security police building, the Royal Palace and the national radio station. Teleprinters in the national news agency fell silent. The borders were sealed tight, and at the airports, controllers got orders to suspend all air traffic indefinitely.

Libya had long been ripe for a coup. Flanked by socialist regimes in Algeria and Egypt, the kingdom was rolling in oil wealth, but much of it was being pocketed by corrupt officials. The country was ruled by a frail and feeble old man, King Idris, 79, who had offered to abdicate five years ago but was persuaded to stay on by the Cabinet. Crown Prince Hassan Rida, 40, obviously lacked the capacity for leadership. Even so, neither foreigners nor Libyans had expected the upheaval to come before the death of Idris, who is both the father of his country (with Britain as midwife) and the religious leader of the potent Senussi, a Moslem sect.

When Libyans woke on Monday morning last week, the radio had returned to the air and was blaring Sousa marches. Startled listeners were told that the King, who was at a Turkish spa being treated for poor circulation in his legs, had been overthrown and Parliament dissolved. The Kingdom of Libya, said Radio Triooli, was now the “Libyan Arab Republic” controlled by a Revolutionary Council of army officers. An around-the-clock curfew was imposed.

Legalized Regime. Throughout the week, extreme secrecy was maintained, and almost no foreigners were allowed to cross the borders. Much of the coup seemed to be run by radio; an announcer would say which officials had been dismissed and which kept in office and all, amazingly, seemed to obey. Only one name was given prominence in connection with the coup—Colonel Saaduddin Abu Shweirib, who was made the army’s new Chief of Staff. Shweirib, who is in his 30s, studied at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Sacked from the army in 1967 because he was suspected of republican sympathies, he has since worked as a notary public—prompting some wits to point out that he could legalize his own regime. If it is his regime. Reports in some Arab capitals said that Shweirib was merely a front man.

There were other puzzling aspects. While Radio Tripoli proclaimed “a revolutionary Libya, a socialist Libya,” representatives of the 40-odd foreign oil companies (38 of them American) were assured on two separate occasions that their investments were safe. U.S., British and French diplomats heard promises of friendship and good faith. At the British airbase at El Adem, near Tobruk, and at the huge, $100 million Wheelus airbase, manned by some 3,000 Americans, the commanders tactfully suspended training flights, and the new regime requested that the flights remain suspended “temporarily.” In every case, the spokesmen for the new regime were junior officers—lieutenants and captains. Nobody could be sure whether they were the shock troops of the revolution or its leaders. One reason for the secrecy may be the fact that the intellectual elite in Libya is so small, and most of its personalities so well known, that the mere naming of the new Cabinet will indicate whether the regime is pro-Nasserite, Marxist, or middle of the road. One rumor had it that the actual leader is a civilian, which could point toward Abdel Hamid Bakoush, an ex-Prime Minister and a bright, progressive, nationalist lawyer.

Urban Bedouin. What is at stake is a sparsely populated nation more than twice the size of Texas and even more desolate in appearance. The Turks ruled Libya from the mid-16th century until 1912, when Italy gained the upper hand. The British administered the country from the end of World War II until independence in 1951. Once one of the poorest of Arab lands, Libya has become one of the wealthiest since vast reserves of oil were discovered a decade ago. In 1960, Libya’s exports consisted of such commodities as esparto grass, olive oil, sponges and camels, and amounted to a paltry $8,500,000. Last year the figure rose to more than $1 billion, 99% of it from oil. Libya now pumps more than 3,000,000 barrels of oil a day, and before long it is expected to overtake Iran and Venezuela to rank third among the world’s oil-producing nations, after the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The country’s sudden wealth has disrupted social patterns, and relatively little has trickled down to its 1,800,000 people. The vast oil industry employs only 8,000 workers and technicians, many of them foreigners. Only 2% of the land is under cultivation, and even workable farm land has been ignored as inflation, and the illusory promise of jobs spurred an exodus from the countryside. Even the nomad Bedouins have left the desert to live in the filth-ridden shantytowns that now encircle Tripoli and Benghazi. What little industry or trade exists, besides the oil business, is mainly controlled by Italians.

Docile King. Only in education had King Idris’ government done a good job—and that may have backfired. When new schools were built, there were not enough competent Libyan teachers to staff them. The shortage was eased by importing Egyptians, many of whom were aflame with Nasserite notions of Arab unity and socialism. During the brief periods when the curfew was lifted last week, young men in Tripoli swarmed out to cheer the revolution, and schoolgirls built triumphal arches of branches and flowers on scores of streets. Libyan embassies in Damascus, Rome and Athens were seized by young Libyan students and officers studying abroad.

At week’s end, the Revolutionary Council confirmed that its troops had occupied Benghazi, the principal city of Cyrenaica in eastern Libya and stronghold of King Idris and his Senussi sect. The continuation of the curfew suggested that the rebels might be encountering opposition, possibly from the more than 6,000-man British-trained Cyrenaican militia or the national police force, which is almost twice the size of the 10,000-man Libyan army. Radio Tripoli was heard urging rebel troops to seize the “police helicopters” and to “be ready to counter any internal and external acts against the republic.”

There were no signs of such acts, however, from King Idris and his small retinue. The ailing monarch paid a $24,000 tab at his Turkish spa and moved on to a Greek one at Kammena Vourla, near Thermopylae, where he booked 36 rooms for a 20-day visit. Would he return to Libya? He let it be known through aides that he would, if the regime permitted. If not, he said, rather poignantly, “somewhere in the world there will be a place for me to live.”