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The former Italian colony was, and for the most part still is, a vast desert, more than three times the size of France but inhabited by fewer than 2,000,000 people. Their chief exports consisted of camels, dates and scrap metal from the battle wreckage of World War II. Their per capita income: $50 a year. But underneath the desert, undiscovered until the late 1950s, lay the oil that would fuel Gaddafi's ambitions for Libya.
As chairman of a twelve-man Revolutionary Command Council, Gaddafi has given his country his own special brand of nationalist revolution. He quickly ousted the Americans and British from their Libyan airbases, but he has also been consistently anti-Soviet. He expelled not only the 25,000 descendants of Italian colonialists who were still living in Libya but also threatened to ship home 21,000 Italian bodies that had been buried there over the years. He ordered that all signs and documents be written only in Arabic.
Gaddafi's nationalism and puritanism color all aspects of life. Foreigners arriving in Libya are sometimes refused entry because their passports have not been translated into Arabic. Immigration men once turned back an entire Italian circus, complete with animals, for this reason. A non-smoker and nondrinker in the strictest Moslem manner, Gaddafi closed all nightclubs, bars and casinos. Last fall he restored the practice of amputations for thievery, in accordance with Koranic law—loss of the right hand for mere theft and the left foot as well for armed robbery.
Such gestures may seem absurd to foreigners, but Gaddafi justifies them as a return to Islamic principles of old. "When we do these things," he says, "we purge ourselves of impurity that is a product of imperialism and return to the true values of Islam." Gaddafi still lives in a barren two-room apartment at the Aziziya army barracks with his second wife Safiya, a former nurse whom he met two years ago while he was recovering from an automobile accident. She has presented him with a son, whom he named Seif al-Islam (sword of Islam), and is expecting a second child. Gaddafi's father lives in a shack in one of Tripoli's slums, and Gaddafi has vowed that "he will be the last to have a house," meaning that everyone else must be properly housed before his own family. Gaddafi expects his colleagues—whom he addresses as "Brother"—to live in a similar fashion. When Prime Minister Abdul Salam Jalloud moved from a spare apartment into a villa in Tripoli, Gaddafi ordered Jalloud's furniture moved back to the apartment. Jalloud got the message and abandoned the villa.
Test. In the manner of Harun al-Rashid, the Arab caliph who ruled Baghdad in the 8th century, Gaddafi sometimes disguises himself in Bedouin robes and roams the city at night to see if his people are behaving properly. One time he appeared at Tripoli's Central Hospital and, to test the institution's efficiency, pretended that his father desperately needed a doctor. When a Taiwanese medic blithely suggested that a few aspirin would suffice, Gaddafi stripped off his robe and denounced the doctor: "You will regret that decision all your life." The doctor was fired.