Libya's history: three provinces made one state by a UN vote

How Tripolitania and Cyrenaica grew apart in antiquity

The Sahara that now covers roughly 90% of the country once held lakes and grassy plateaus, and rock paintings at Wadi Mathendous and in the Acacus mountains show rivers, giraffes and crocodiles. In the Fezzan the Garamantes, a Saharan people of Berber origin based at Germa, farmed with an underground irrigation system and were a local power from about 500 BCE to 500 CE.

The two coasts were settled from opposite directions. By the 5th century BCE Carthage held the Punic towns of Oea, Libdah and Sabratha in the west, an area called Tripolis, the Three Cities, from which Tripoli takes its name. In the east Greek colonists founded Cyrene in 630 BCE, and with the cities that grew up around it, Euhesperides, the later Benghazi, among them, it formed the Pentapolis. Persia took Cyrenaica in 525 BCE, and from 331 BCE it belonged to the Ptolemies of Egypt.

Rome annexed Cyrenaica in 74 BCE and joined it to Crete as one province, while Tripolitania went into Africa Nova and reached its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when Leptis Magna was home to the Severan dynasty. For more than 400 years the two shared a language and a legal system, yet the towns of Tripolitania stayed Punic in character and those of Cyrenaica Greek. The west exported olive oil and the ivory and wild animals the Garamantes brought to the coast; the east sold wine, drugs and horses.

Cyrene, Leptis Magna and Sabratha were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982. On 14 July 2016 the World Heritage Committee put all five of Libya's sites on the List of World Heritage in Danger, noting armed groups on them or in their immediate surroundings.

Which neighbours Tripoli and Benghazi looked towards

Arab horsemen entered the Pentapolis in September 643 and renamed it Barqa. Tripoli fell for good in 647 and the Fezzan in 663, and from then on the coasts answered to different capitals. Tripolitania was ruled from the west, by the Aghlabids from 800, by the Fatimids from Mahdia, by the Zirids, by the Normans of Sicily from 1146 and by the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis for nearly 300 years. Cyrenaica belonged to states based in Egypt until the Ottoman conquest of 1517.

Britannica's history of the country states the pattern directly. Tripolitania was more closely linked with Tunisia, and Cyrenaica with Egypt, than either was with the other, and even in the Ottoman era the country was divided into two parts, one tied to Tripoli and one to Benghazi.

The Ottoman admiral Sinan Pasha took Tripoli from the Knights of St John in 1551. In 1711 a cavalry officer, Ahmed Karamanli, killed the dey, had the sultan recognise him as governor and made the post hereditary. His family paid the sultan nominal tribute and collected tribute from the states whose ships its corsairs spared, and Tripoli, the only city of any size at the end of the 17th century, had about 30,000 people. In 1835 the Ottomans used a succession dispute to restore direct rule, which lasted 77 years.

The one movement of the period that reached beyond a single province started in the east. The Sanusiyya, an Islamic order founded in 1837, opened its first lodge in Libya, a zawiya, near the ruins of Cyrene in 1843, and later moved its headquarters to the oasis of Jaghbub and in 1895 to Kufra. It spread through Cyrenaica and into the south. Britannica records that it never really penetrated the more populous northwest.

What the Italian conquest cost Cyrenaica

How the Sanusi resistance was fought

Italy invaded in 1911 and the Ottomans sued for peace in 1912, but for most of the next twenty years Italy held only the coast. A Tripolitanian Republic proclaimed in 1918 fell into civil war after its leader Ramadan Asswehly died in August 1920. Idris, head of the Sanusi and Emir of Cyrenaica, went into exile in Egypt in December 1922, the year a Fascist government took power in Rome, and coastal Tripolitania was subdued by 1923.

Cyrenaica held out under Umar al-Mukhtar, a Sanusi shaykh from the Jabal al-Akhdar who united its tribes into a guerrilla force. Generals Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani answered with chemical weapons and mass executions. In 1930 and 1931, 12,000 Cyrenaicans were executed and the nomads of northern Cyrenaica were moved into camps, where on average about 20,000 Bedouin and their animals were crowded into one square kilometre. Italy ran a barbed-wire fence from the coast to Jaghbub to cut the resistance off from Egypt. Al-Mukhtar was captured at the age of 73 and hanged on 16 September 1931 in front of 20,000 prisoners. When the camps closed in September 1933, 40,000 of their 100,000 internees had died.

How many Libyans died under Italian rule

The counts disagree. Wikipedia's account of Italian Libya gives the dead as one quarter of Cyrenaica's population of 225,000. The historian Ilan Pappé estimates that between 1928 and 1932 the Italian military "killed half the Bedouin population (directly or through disease and starvation in camps)", and Emilio Gentile puts the victims of the repression at about 50,000. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, who spent ten summers finding and interviewing survivors in eastern Libya, describes 100,000 to 110,000 people driven with their herds to the deserts of Sirte, two-thirds of whom perished, and his book on the camps calls it genocide.

Sheep numbered 810,000 in 1926 and 98,000 in 1933, and over the same years camels fell from 75,000 to 2,000. Al-Mukhtar became a national hero after independence, and his portrait is on the ten-dinar note.

How Italy made one colony of three provinces

The Italian geographer Federico Minutilli revived the name Libya in 1903. Italy governed its conquest as Italian North Africa from 1912 and as two colonies, Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica, from 1927. In 1934 Governor Italo Balbo merged them with the Fezzan into one colony called Libya, with its capital at Tripoli, and on 9 January 1939 its coastal provinces were made part of metropolitan Italy as the Fourth Shore.

Settlement grew through the 1930s. One count has 26,000 Italians in 1927 and 119,139 in 1939, 13% of the population and 41.62% of Tripoli; Britannica puts the number at some 150,000 by the outbreak of war, roughly a fifth. By 1939 Italy had built 400 kilometres of railway and 4,000 kilometres of road, among them the Via Balbia along the coast from Tripoli to Tobruk. In the school year 1939 to 1940 the Italians, about a tenth of the population, had 81 elementary schools and the Libyans 97, and by 1940 Libyans had three secondary schools.

The war undid most of it. Cyrenaica changed hands three times between 1941 and 1943, by the end of 1942 all its Italian settlers had left, and in February 1943 the last German and Italian forces left Libya. Idris had raised a small army in exile, the Libyan Arab Force, under British command in 1940, and in 1942 the British foreign minister pledged that the Sanusi "would not again be subjected to Italian rule". From 1943 to 1951 Britain administered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and France the Fezzan, and Fanack writes that Britain seems to have considered setting up the two northern provinces as separate countries.

Why the United Nations decided Libya's future

Italy gave up its claim in the peace treaty of 1947, and the great powers spent four years failing to agree on a successor. Britain and France had intended to divide the country between their empires, and Fanack records that the Soviet Union vetoed a permanent division because of the advantage it would give the Western powers in the central Mediterranean. The question went to the General Assembly, which passed resolution 289 on 21 November 1949.

Who made the state is itself disputed. Wikipedia's account says Idris represented Libya in the UN negotiations that followed. Fanack writes that the great powers appointed the first king and that no Libyan was involved in creating the new state. A national assembly chose Idris as king in 1950 and adopted a constitution, drafted under UN auspices, at Benghazi on 7 October 1951. On 24 December 1951 Idris declared independence in a radio address from Benghazi, and ConstitutionNet describes Libya as the first nation to declare its independence under the auspices of the UN.

The kingdom was built around its provinces. Each kept a government and a legislature of its own, the Senate seated eight members from each of the three, and Tripoli and Benghazi alternated as the national capital every two years while Idris built a new seat at Al-Bayda. Fanack gives the weight of each tier in 1959: the central government employed 1,200 people, the provincial government in Tripoli 6,000 and the one in Cyrenaica 4,000. Political parties were abolished after the election of 19 February 1952, in which the National Congress Party, which had campaigned against the federal form of government, was defeated throughout the country.

The new state had little to run on. Fanack puts illiteracy at 94% and income at about US$35 a head at independence in 1951, counts 14 Libyans with a university degree, and names the two biggest exports as esparto grass and scrap metal from the battlefields. Foreign aid covered more than half the national income, and agreements of 1953 and 1954 gave Britain and the United States military bases, Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli among them.

How oil money ended the federal kingdom

In June 1959 prospectors from Esso confirmed major deposits at Zaltan in Cyrenaica, and more finds followed in both Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Concession holders paid half their profits to the government in tax, and the petroleum law of 1955 was amended in 1961 and again in 1965 to raise the state's share. Britannica describes the change as abrupt, from a monarchy living on foreign aid and the rent from American and British air bases to one with income on a vast scale.

The federal form had proved inefficient and cumbersome. In April 1963 Prime Minister Mohamed Othman Essed carried a bill through parliament, endorsed by the king, that abolished it. Ten governorates under appointed governors replaced Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, and the United Kingdom of Libya became the Kingdom of Libya. The constitutional change of 25 April 1963 also gave women the vote.

Resentment grew at the concentration of the new wealth around the king, and Egyptian teachers carried Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism into Libyan classrooms. The Six-Day War of June 1967 set off attacks on the British and American embassies and on the Jewish community, and almost all remaining Libyan Jews emigrated. Britannica traces the coup that followed to the king's failure to speak out against Israel during that war. On 1 September 1969, while Idris was in Turkey for medical treatment, about 70 young officers seized power in a coup launched at Benghazi and completed within two hours. Idris settled in Egypt and died there in 1983.

What the Jamahiriya did with the oil

A twelve-member Revolutionary Command Council led by Muammar Gaddafi, then 27, proclaimed the Libyan Arab Republic. Britain left El Adem and the naval base at Tobruk on 27 March 1970, and the last Americans handed over Wheelus on 11 June 1970. In October 1970 the state expropriated all Italian-owned property and expelled the Italian community of 12,000, along with the smaller community of Italian Libyan Jews. Early in 1971 the oil companies accepted a price rise from US$0.90 to US$3.45 a barrel, British Petroleum's holdings were nationalised in December 1971, and by early 1974 the state controlled about 60% of domestic production.

Politics narrowed as the income grew. The Arab Socialist Union became the only legal party in 1971, and Law 75 of 1973 made political dissent illegal. On 2 March 1977 the General People's Congress declared the country a Jamahiriya, a word Gaddafi coined that is usually translated as "state of the masses", run through people's congresses and committees that were officially a direct democracy. From 1977 onward income per head rose to more than US$11,000, and the Great Man-Made River was built to carry water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the Sahara to the coastal cities.

The BTI country report describes oil rents distributed to support networks in the rural and desert hinterland of Tripolitania, while opposition groups and territories in Tripolitania and most of Cyrenaica were pushed to the economic, political and social margins.

Abroad, the claim to the Aozou Strip, which Italy had obtained from France in a 1935 agreement France never ratified, led to intermittent war in Chad, and in 1987 Chad's more mobile troops beat the Libyan forces. The United States bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. Libya was accused of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, which killed 270 people, and the UN imposed sanctions in 1992. In the late 1990s Libya handed over the accused and accepted the ruling of the court in The Hague that the Aozou territory belonged to Chad. UN sanctions were lifted in 2003, and in December 2003 Libya announced that it would end its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.

How the February uprising ended the Jamahiriya

The revolt began in the east. On 15 February 2011 demonstrators in Benghazi protested the arrest of the human rights lawyer Fethi Tarbel, a full revolt broke out on 17 February, and by 23 February rebels and defecting army units had expelled most government troops from the east. Demonstrators in Cyrenaica carried portraits of King Idris, flew the monarchy's tricolour and played its anthem, "Libya, Libya, Libya". A National Transitional Council formed in Benghazi on 27 February 2011 and claimed Tripoli as its capital.

On 17 March 2011 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 by ten votes to none with five abstentions, authorising a no-fly zone and "all means necessary" to protect civilians, and NATO aircraft flew 14,202 strike sorties in 2011. Rebel fighters entered Tripoli by 22 August, and on 20 October 2011 Gaddafi was captured and killed at Sirte, his birthplace. At least 30,000 Libyans died in the war. The council's Constitutional Declaration of 3 August 2011 had already restored the 1951 flag and the name Libya, and since December 2017 the official name has been the State of Libya.

Why two governments have claimed Libya since the war

On 7 July 2012 Libyans elected a 200-member General National Congress. Its mandate expired in January 2014 with no new election held, General Khalifa Haftar opened Operation Dignity against Islamist groups in May 2014, and on 25 June 2014 voters chose a House of Representatives to replace the Congress. Islamist members of the Congress declared its mandate continuing, armed supporters of the Congress occupied Tripoli, and the House moved to Tobruk, where it had the loyalty of Haftar's Libyan National Army.

The Libyan Political Agreement, brokered by the UN and signed at Skhirat in Morocco on 17 December 2015, created a Government of National Accord in Tripoli and made a State Council, the High Council of State, the highest consultative assembly. The House in the east refused to endorse the new government's ministers, and in January 2018 it appointed its own governor to the eastern branch of the Central Bank. In August 2015, a year into the split, the National Federal Bloc, a Cyrenaican party, asked parliament to endorse the 1951 constitution for the whole country.

On 4 April 2019 Haftar ordered his army to advance on Tripoli. The siege lasted 14 months, Russia sent mercenaries to the eastern side and Turkey deployed troops for the Tripoli government, and on 23 October 2020 the 5+5 Joint Military Commission signed a permanent ceasefire in Geneva. A Government of National Unity formed on 10 March 2021 to hold elections in December 2021, and the elections were postponed. In February 2022 the House voted confidence in a rival Government of National Stability, and the BTI report, covering events to early 2025, describes the country as split in two, with two governments and state institutions torn between them. The Central Bank was reunified in 2024, and after its governor fled the country in August 2024, UN mediation produced a compromise on a new governor and board in late September 2024.