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Libya
ليبيا‎
Timeline: 1983: Doomsday
Flag of Libya (1977-2011) Coat of arms of Libya
Flag Coat of arms
CapitalTripoli
Other cities Benghazi, Sirte, Misurata, Tobruk, Kufra
Official languages Arabic
Other languages Tamazight
Religion Islam
Demonym(s) Libyan
Leaders
 -  Various titles Muammar Gaddafi
Establishment
 -  Independence from Britain and France 1951 
 -  Gaddafi's coup d'etat 1969 
 -  Civil war and dissolution 1984 
Area
 -  Total 1,759,541 km2 
679,359 sq mi 
Population
 -  Estimate 3.615 million 
Currency Libyan dinar
Time zone UTC+2

Libya was a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa and was once the fourth largest country in Africa by area. The three traditional parts of the country are Tripolitania, Fezzan and Cyrenaica. Tripolitania and Cyrenaica are separate states today, while other portions of Libya have been annexed to Egypt, Tunisia, and Tamahaq or are autonomous tribal areas.

History[]

Pre-Doomsday[]

Libya has for many thousands of years been fought over by various world superpowers: the Romans, then the Arabs, then the Ottoman Empire, finally Italy until the end of the Second World War. After the war ended, the United Kingdom took control of the country as a British colony. Then in 1951, the nation declared independence from the United Kingdom as a constitutional monarchy under King Idris.

On September 1, 1969, a small group of military officers led by then 27-year-old army officer Muammar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d'état against Idris, launching the Libyan Revolution. At the time, Idris was in Turkey for medical treatment. His nephew, Crown Prince Sayyid Hasan ar-Rida al-Mahdi as-Sanussi, became king. It was clear that the revolutionary officers who had announced the deposition of Idris did not want to appoint him over the instruments of state as king. Gaddafi was at the time only a captain and his co-conspirators were all junior officers. Nevertheless the small group seized Libyan military headquarters (due to the sympathies of the stationed men) and the radio broadcasting station with just 48 rounds of revolver ammunition. Before the end of September 1, Sayyid Hasan ar-Rida had been formally deposed by the revolutionary army officers and put under house arrest. Meanwhile, revolutionary officers abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Libyan Arab Republic. Gaddafi was, and is until Doomsday, referred to as the "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution" in government statements and the official press.

Since the early 1980's Libya began to distance itself from the United States. On August 19, 1981 the US Navy was sent close to Libya's coast which resulted in a confrontation where two of the SU-22 fighters supplied to Libya by the Soviet Union were shot down. Following this, Libya was implicated in committing massive acts of state-sponsored terrorism.

Doomsday[]

On Doomsday, Libya itself was not attacked. However, due to the destruction of many of its trade partners and the fact that the military were fighting a war on the border with Chad to the south, the military and government leaderships were stretched to the breaking point. Emergency plans were immediately put into to place to maintain order and stability. The Libyan Navy also began deploying to intercept European refugees and turn them back.

By October 1983, Colonel Gaddafi ordered the military to withdraw from the war with Chad to guard the borders from possible invasion from Egypt and maintain internal order.

Civil war[]

In the months following the nuclear exchange, Libya experienced extraordinary increases to its rainfall. But this failed to solve the nation's cascading food crisis. Mismanagement of land caused runoff and floods instead of water percolating into the ground, and the nation faced famine. The majority of its food had been imported, and now without international trade, starvation began to set in.

Gaddafi's soldiers forcefully took the growing harvests of the east and diverted them to the west, leaving the region of Cyrenaica in a precarious position. The first riots in Benghazi began in late 1983, and feuding broke out within the regime itself. Top officers doubted the Colonel's ability to keep the country running during the emergency.

In early January 1984, the military staged a coup to overthrow Gaddafi. He fled to Sirte with a group of loyalists, where he held out for a few months. From there, he was forced into the deserts of Fezzan, whence he disappears from the historical record. But the coup could not solve Libya's underlying problems. The country was still starving and the military could not hold it together. The siege of Sirte transitioned quite smoothly into a general civil war throughout the country.

By the middle of 1984, Libya had collapsed. A faction in Benghazi declared its loyalty to Hasan as-Senussi, the heir to Libya's throne, who had been under house arrest in Tripoli before escaping to the east amid the chaos. This faction consolidated its control over Cyrenaica, building effective barricades to block advances from Sirte and seizing control of the region's supplies of water and petroleum. This faction declared independence as the Kingdom of Cyrenaica on 2 September.

Outside Cyrenaica, the country descended into warlordism. Military and tribal factions fought each other from bases in the towns or countryside. A faction loyal to Gaddafi's memory re-emerged in Sirte. In Misrata some military officers managed to set up a stable regime and even a partial democracy, which held on for a few years. In the Nafusa Mountains, the Berber tribes armed themselves and fought to maintain their newly-won independence. By early 1985, there was no government to speak of left in the capital.

The fighting spent itself because Libyan society itself could not survive the new conditions. The modern civilization that had grown under colonial and Gaddafian rule could not be sustained. Physical damage during the fighting, together with the total economic collapse and the underlying weakness of the economy, meant that the land could not support its population. Those who could, fled. Western Libya fluctuated between fragile peace and low-intensity warfare.

After Libya[]

Cyrenaica emerged from the civil war with a secure government - in fact, it was one of the most stable states in the entire eastern Mediterranean. As its neighbors also emerged from the chaos of the 1980s, Cyrenaica was able to start selling them oil, using foreign investment from Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere to rebuild its petroleum industry.

In 2002, Sicily revived the old Italian program of colonization in Tripolitania, using it especially as a place to resettle refugees and displaced persons from mainland Italy. A number of Italo-Libyan settlers, forced to leave the colony at the start of Libya's independence, formed an important nucleus of the new settlements. By 2009, Italians had effective control of almost all of Tripolitania, and they used it to stage attacks on Greek wells and pipelines during the Second Sicily War. After the war, Tripolitania was reorganized as an independent republic in which an Italian minority and Arab majority coexist in an uncertain state.

During the same era, Italian ally Tunisia advanced into parts of Libya and seized some of its oilfields. By switching sides before the end of the Sicily War, Tunisia managed to keep many of its gains.

In 2004, Egypt announced its annexation of southeastern Libya, centered on the oasis town of Al-Kufrah.

The Touareg, Tebou and Berber tribes that inhabit southwestern Libya resisted Italian and Tunisian incursions and kept the area independent. However, the slow degradation of water extraction systems and the collapse of agricultural imports decimated the population of the region. From a pre-Doomsday population of roughly 400,000, the population of southwestern Libya was reduced to just 50,000. What remains of the population is scattered among small oasis towns across the desert.

Touareg[]

Before Doomsday, the Toureg were strong supporters of the Gaddafi regime. After the coup that toppled him, the Touareg were one of the earliest groups to rebel against the central government, and they may have given him shelter after he fled his stronghold of Sirte. Once the civil war began, the Touareg were able to drive out forces from all factions. During the anarchy that ensued, they established their de facto autonomy.

The Libyan Touareg (along with remaining Tebou People) joined with their peers in the nation of Tamahaq, which expanded into parts of southwestern Libya in the late 1990s.

Politics[]

Relations between the various states and tribes in Libya are complex. The people of Cyrenaica generally view Tripolitania with intense mistrust. They remember Gaddafi's policies favoring the west and have no desire to move toward anything that might resemble a reunification. Cyrenaica has generally oriented itself toward its neighbors to the east instead, just as Tripolitania's most important ties are to the west.

Cyrenaica and Egypt have cooperated for a number of years. However, some fiction between the two nations occurred when Egypt occupied Kufrah without getting Cyrenaica's consent. Not long after, Egyptians began exploring to the north, hoping to extend their control into some of the lucrative oil-producing lands. This led to a crisis, and Egypt had to relent rather than commit to a war of conquest. The two sides struck an agreement over exploitation rights and a pipeline, but mistrust remained.

The arrival of the Italians in Tripolitania prompted a mixed reaction. On the one hand, the new colonization brought stability after a decade and a half of factious military rule. However, it was an obvious parallel to a dark time in Libyan history, raising clear and raw memories of fascist rule. And the situation left in the colony's wake, a fragile republic stewing in ethnic tension, is hardly a recipe for stability.

Tripolitania still has strong economic ties to Italy and is a major source of fuel for the republic. Tripolitanian Arabs have sought to trade with a more diverse range of neighboring states in effort to offset their dependence on these ties.

Tunisia's annexation of Libyan territory is also seen as opportunistic to the extreme. But here too there is complexity beneath the appearances. Tunisia was the top destination of Libyan refugees during the civil war, and many of these families are receiving land and jobs in the annexed areas.

Relations between the Libyan tribes and the coastal states are much more frayed. Egypt has managed to maintain a somewhat positive relation with the tribes because of the nature of their annexation of eastern Libya and Arab ancestry. Local, mainly Toubou, tribes, villages, and towns accepted Egyptian control of the area, now known as Egypt's Al Kufrah province. In exchange, Egypt has begun to invest in irrigation for the region. The nature of the Egyptian takeover has also helped maintain good relations with other tribes in western Libya, though some, mainly Arab, tribes continue to resent, if not act against, their presence.

Demographics[]

Ethnic Map of Libya

Libya is a land of diversity. It is inhabited by Arabs, Touregs, Toubou, and Berbers. Some Greek, Italian, and Turkish refugees crossed over in the 1980s, though what they found was no better than the homes they had left behind, and many kept moving. In the 2000s, a few tens of thousands of Italians came to Tripolitania, and many have stayed.

Small populations of Greek and Turkish refugees, as well a Syrian minority, are concentrated in the coastal cities of Benghazi and Baida, while the Italians mainly reside in Tripoli and Misurata, with some farming Tripolitanian plains and hills near the Mediterranean Sea. A small Egyptian population resides in Al Jawf, capital of the Kufrah Department.

The interior of Libya is controlled by a handful of Arab, Berber, Toubou, and Toureg tribes. The Berber, Toubou and Toureg tribes have largely banded together to form ethnic blocs. The Berbers, who call themselves the Amazigh, have established a tribal homeland in the Nafusa Mountains that stretches from Yefren in the north towards Ghudamis in the south. The Toureg maintain control of southwest Libya and cooperate extensively with their fellow tribes in Algeria and Niger. The Toubou tribes control most of southern Libya and make up most of the native population in the Egyptian controlled areas. They also cooperate with their tribal brothers in Niger and Chad.

The Arab tribes of Libya are more numerous. Arab-controlled territory stretches from Bani Walid in the north to south of Sabha. Numerous Arab tribes inhabit the area, including the larger Warfalla and Hassawna tribes. Arabs represent the largest population throughout most of Libya.

Climate[]

After Doomsday, the climate across the world was heavily impacted. Thanks to the dust and fallout ejected into the atmosphere by the nuclear blasts, there were several years of devastating drought. However, the climate of northern Africa has recently stabilized and has become wetter than pre-DD. Rainfall has increased slightly since Doomsday and the desert is beginning to recede in certain areas. The fertile Libyan coastal strip has expanded southward. Additional savanna-like characteristics are slowly coming to the Sahara.

In addition to overall climate changes, eastern Libya has experienced slight greening thanks to Egyptian engineering. Several aquifers have been dug with Egyptian assistance to provide more water to the local population. The irrigation systems from these aquifers have artificially greened several urban areas in eastern Libya, though these changes are fragile and entirely dependent on the continued operation of the irrigation systems. Some lakes fed by naturally pressured springs and aquifers have also been formed.

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