Photographs by Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters
In the weeks that followed Qaddafi’s death, Farkash was seized by a vision of how rebuilding the country might also be a pathway to personal riches. The more he studied Libya, the more convinced he became that it was a gold mine—a strip of coastal desert in North Africa, next to Egypt, with a relatively well-educated population of 6 million in need of seemingly every kind of consumer product and service, for which the country would easily be able to pay by continuing to pump its usual 1.3 million to 1.5 million barrels of oil per day. The Central Bank of Libya, according to Reuters, had more than $100 billion in foreign reserves, mostly money collected from oil sales under
Qaddafi. The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), the overseas investment arm of the Qaddafi government, had about $70 billion invested with blue-chip Western companies such as Société Générale (GLE:FP) and Goldman Sachs (GS), and an additional $50 billion or more invested throughout Africa. And in Libya, every asset you could imagine was dirt-cheap. “It was a clean page,” he remembers. “You could start from scratch.”
Farkash returned to Libya that very month, along with two friends from London. Together, they started a Libyan investment bank with offices in Tripoli and Benghazi, with the aim of encouraging direct foreign investment in Libya. “You could smell that there were deals everywhere. Attractive deals,” he recalls. “Deals about to be done, and deals waiting to be done.” Land was inexpensive and increasing by the day in value, he says. You could fill your gas tank for $5.
His first inkling that something was rotten came several months after he arrived when the National Transitional Council, then Libya’s chief governing body, decided to give every family a cash payout of $2,400 from the national treasury. That implied an outlay of billions. “I thought that money would have been better spent collecting all the weapons in the country,” he says. “I thought, ‘We’re not going in the right direction.’ ”
As months passed, the system of cash giveaways by the central government became institutionalized, with payments—easily exceeding $20 billion in total—being distributed to the general populace of Libya but also additionally to anyone who claimed to have fought or been injured in the revolution. While many of the so-called revolutionaries had only a distant connection to overthrowing Qaddafi, they formed the core of the militias, which set themselves up as permanent fixtures in Libya’s cities in place of the army and the police, whose members had been sent home or jailed for collaboration with Qaddafi, regardless of whether they had actually done anything wrong.
“Anyone could stop you on the street and ask you for identification,” Farkash says. Out of fear, he usually complied. The militias began fighting each other for territory and for the cash payouts from a central state authority that was effectively held hostage as billions of dollars per month were drained from its treasury.
In June 2012, Farkash learned that people were being tortured in underground prisons in Benghazi. What made the discovery particularly upsetting was that the largest of these torture chambers was located in the 17th of February revolutionary camp, right down the street from the apartment where he was living. Farkash had always thought of the 17th of February crew as the good guys.
“I didn’t sleep that night,” he says. “The first thing that ran through my mind was, ‘If that’s happening now, what difference does it make that there was also injustice in the time of Qaddafi?’ ” The person who had told him about the torture chambers was a member of the Libyan state security apparatus, and Farkash was afraid to act. “I realized it was too dangerous to say anything,” Farkash says, still looking horrified. “This was not why I came back over. I don’t want to be part of a new nation that is being built on torture and injustice.”
Farkash left Libya two days later—then changed his mind and went back. He decided to close up shop in Benghazi, where his family is from, and join his partners in Tripoli. The capital city felt safer because of the presence of foreign embassies, which employed their own security forces. He shared an apartment with a friend who worked as a reporter for the New York Times and CNN. Night after night after work he watched footage of the street battles fought by militias who had little training in warfare, but all the equipment of a modern army. In the homes of friends and business associates, he saw heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and shoulder-held antitank missiles. He left soon after, for good. “These are rockets used in war,” he says. “They have them stored in their houses. So if these people get pissed, what will they do with it?”
In the last few months, the Libyans have been finding out. Warring militias have destroyed large sections of Tripoli’s international airport with mortars, shoulder-launched missiles, rockets, and tanks. The fighting made the news again in July when a rocket or shell set a large oil depot on fire, sending clouds of choking black smoke over Tripoli. Shortly thereafter, 27,000 Libyans fled the fighting on foot in a single day, arriving as refugees in neighboring African countries. In just one week in July, according to a brief issued by the Soufan Group, a consultancy specializing in the Middle East, more than 60 people were killed in Benghazi, and the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Canada have evacuated their diplomatic personnel.
Libyan oil production has declined to about 300,000 barrels a day, and a half-dozen prominent figures on the Libyan political scene, whose names had appeared in optimistic Western newspaper articles about the brave Libyans who opposed Qaddafi and fought for a more equal and democratic future, have been murdered. Their deaths have passed without any demonstrations or other significant forms of public notice inside Libya, a measure of how irrelevant the causes for which Libyans fought three years ago have become.
Libya’s economic future, once touted as the brightest in Africa, looks equally bleak. Western news sources around the time of Qaddafi’s death reported that the dictator had stashed tens of billions of dollars away in overseas accounts that the country desperately needed to pay its bills. After the dictator was toppled, the search began for his hidden personal fortune—an El Dorado of imagined gold that was built in part on the confusion between Qaddafi’s personal assets and state-controlled assets such as the LIA. This fortune was estimated in various publications to be from $70 billion to $100 billion and quickly gave rise to a cottage industry in which fortune hunters struck deals with representatives of Libya’s National Transitional Council to locate missing assets in return for 10 percent of the take.
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