UPDATE 21st Feb 2011: Despite the general tone of this post, in which I show admiration for the achievements of the Great Manmade River Project and sympathy for Gadaffi’s political philosophy of direct democracy – I have no illusions about the real nature of the regime, and I FULLY SUPPORT any revolutionary pro-democratic action that is now taking place, and ABSOLUTELY CONDEMN the violent actions of the government.
I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart from anything else the project is beautifully simple, audacious and progressive. According to Unesco it’s the largest engineering scheme currently being carried out in the world, and it has also been described as the eighth wonder of the world. From where I sit in mean little Britain, which made such a cynical fuss about the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament building, it’s very inspiring.
In the sixties, during oil exploration in Libya’s part of the Sahara desert, they found vast quantities of underground water in fossil aquifers. As it turns out there are four major underground basins, three of which combined contain 35,000 cubic kilometres of water. That’s 35,000,000,000,000 cubic metres (what’s that, 35 trillion?)
Scratching a living from the desert ain’t much fun, so around 1980, “The people of Libya under the guidance of their leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi”, began looking into the possibility of accessing it. The Great Man-made River Authority was created in 1983 to organize the project, which was mainly about getting the water from the aquifers all the way to the populated coastal regions on the Mediterranean in the north of the country. The solution was simple: huge pipes.
The importance of the project for the development of Libya’s society can hardly be overstated. To create a thriving agriculture from a desert land is a beautiful thing, and despite the scepticism in the Western media – a few years ago I read a newspaper article that described it as a vanity project of Gadaffi’s that was doomed to failure – it has worked. Phases one and two are complete. Phase one provides two million cubic metres per day along a 1,200km pipeline to Benghazi and Sirt. Phase two delivers a million cubic metres a day to the fertile Jeffara plain, and to the capital Tripoli. Phase three is now in full-swing.
I don’t understand the attitude of the Western press. Here’s a quote from a website about the project which describes what I’m on about:
London and Washington circles were apoplectic about the opening of the new Libyan water project. The London Financial Times ran criticisms of the project from Angus Henley of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest. The pipeline, he said, was ‘Qaddafi’s pet project. He wants to be seen as something other than the scourge of the West.’ The Financial Times called the project Qaddafi’s ‘pipedream,’ stating that critics may be awed by the engineering involved, ‘But they regard the dream as a monument to vanity that makes little economic sense in a country where the U.N. Development Program says 94.6% of territory is desert wasteland.’
Am I missing something? It is precisely because Libya is mostly desert wasteland that this project is important. And as to the economic argument, here’s the quantity of water per Libyan dinar obtained for each of the available options:
(Great Man-Made River Authority )
Also online you can find the results of a study carried out by some American water engineers, which supports the economics of the project: The Great Man-Made River in Libya, Does it Make Sense? (PDF)
Listening to the radio program, several things were apparent. The people overseeing and working on this project have an innocent love for their work. They are engineers making life better for the people: sometimes it is just that simple. And they had an openness about the project which the journalist hadn’t expected in this demonized country. Also, it’s both an international effort and strongly Libyan: they’ve taken expertise from around the world (even American), and used it to learn from and develop their own self-sufficient expertise, to realize this very Libyan dream.
The river is a new lesson and an example in the struggle to achieve self-sufficiency, food security and true independence. No nation that depends on a foreign country to feed its people can be free. The Great River is a triumph against thirst and hunger. It is a defeat against ignorance and backwardness. It reflects the determination of Libyans to resist colonial pressure, to acquire technology, to develop, to improve their lives, and to control their own destiny in accordance with their own free will.
Ali Baghdadi
It got me to thinking about Libyan society, which is referred to by the Libyans as a democracy, in contradiction to our common understanding of the word. The theoretical basis is set out in Gadaffi’s Green Book, the full text of which is presented quite nicely at this site.
According to the website of the Great Man-Made River Project, the project was implemented by the people:
…the decisions for the implementation and funding of The Great Man Made River project were made at the grass roots level by the basic people’s congresses that were then compiled and made into laws by the General Peoples Congress. The project is funded directly by the Libyan people in the form of levies on fuel, tobacco and international travel etc.
On the surface it sounds like a good system to me.
Now, I am aware of the concerns about human rights in the country. Currently there is a foreign medical team there under penalty of death (see the Wikipedia article), and there has been much political repression, including assassinations of dissidents and exiles. The Berber minority was mistreated and derided for decades, and there doesn’t seem to be a place for freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
I certainly do not want to dismiss all of that, so I hope I don’t seem glib in saying that the theory on which the system is based strikes me as good. Gadaffi says that electoral democracy is not democratic at all, because it is so indirect. The solution is direct democracy, in which all participate in the study and debate of issues and policies confronting the nation. Partcipation as opposed to representation. This is the Athenian model, and was possible in city-states because of their small populations. But to implement it on a large scale requires the following set-up:
First, the people are divided into Basic Popular Conferences. Each Basic Popular Conference chooses its secretariat. The secretariats of all Popular Conferences together form Non-Basic Popular Conferences. Subsequently, the masses of the Basic Popular Conferences select administrative People’s Committees to replace government administration. All public institutions are run by People’s Committees which will be accountable to the Basic Popular Conferences which dictate the policy and supervise its execution. Thus, both the administration and the supervision become the people’s and the outdated definition of democracy – democracy is the supervision of the government by the people – becomes obsolete. It will be replaced by the true definition: Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.
The trouble is, in real Libya this is just one side of things. In practice, it is not the theory on which the society’s organization is based, because overseeing everything you have the Revolutionary Committees, headed by Gadaffi and the military, with unlimited powers: a revolutionary dictatorship that refuses to wither away. So despite how attractive the system of democracy may look to a socialist or anarchist, it cannot be taken to be all-encompassing and the country in general cannot be taken to be truly democratic. But if the democratic aspect of the system were to be all-encompassing, and the military dictatorship done away with, it would be a true democracy.
Further reading:
Great Manmade River Project:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4814988.stm
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/man_made_river_libya.htm
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
http://www.unesco.org/water/ihp/prizes/great_man/gmmrp.shtml
Summary of the Green Book: http://www.country-studies.com/libya/the-green-book.html
Human rights:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde190022004
http://members.tripod.com/~sijill/
Sometimes it seems that you are the only person I know who has the courage to use their own reason. I keep coming back to your blog and will continue to do so. Happy to see that you also remember to have fun. Continue to be special.
Great job. you never know when and where someone ll get benefit from your writing. and of course when the writing is such a nice. i like of reading your words about Great man-made river. you have touch almost all the important aspects or at least gave a clue to it.
thank you very much again and keep it up. God speed
[...] was just beginning. You can still listen to it here. Also, have a look at my other posts, on the Great Man-made River Project and the Loch Sloy Power [...]
My name is Mohamed AlFaitouri from Benghazi, Libya. Now Iam PhD student in the USA.I worked as a geology in 1997-1999 with GWA ( with mr Abdellah ElSonni). Since my PhD project about the great man mad river I hope I could get some help in the near future for my PhD.
Thanks for the nice comments people.