With the discovery of significant oil reserves in 1959, Libya changed abruptly from being dependent on international aid and the rent from U.S. and British air bases to being an oil-rich monarchy. Major petroleum deposits in both Tripolitania and Cyrenaica ensured the country income on a vast scale. The discovery was followed by an enormous expansion in all government services, massive construction projects, and a corresponding rise in the economic standard and the cost of living.

Precipitated by the king’s failure to speak out against Israel during the June War (1967), a coup was carried out on September 1, 1969, by a group of young army officers led by Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, who deposed the king and proclaimed Libya a republic. The new regime, passionately Pan-Arab, broke the monarchy’s close ties to Britain and the United States and also began an assertive policy that led to higher oil prices along with 51 percent Libyan participation in oil company activities and, in some cases, outright nationalization.

The Qaddafi regime

Equally assertive in plans for Arab unity, Libya obtained at least the formal beginnings of unity with Egypt, Sudan, and Tunisia, but these and other such plans failed as differences arose between the governments concerned. Qaddafi’s Libya supported the Palestinian cause and intervened to support it, as well as other guerrilla and revolutionary organizations in Africa and the Middle East. Such moves alienated the Western countries and some Arab states. In July–August 1977 hostilities broke out between Libya and Egypt, and, as a result, many Egyptians working in Libya were expelled. Indeed, despite expressed concern for Arab unity, the regime’s relations with most Arab countries deteriorated. Qaddafi signed a treaty of union with Morocco’s King Hassan II in August 1984, but Hassan abrogated the treaty two years later.

The regime, under Qaddafi’s ideological guidance, continued to introduce innovations. On March 2, 1977, the General People’s Congress declared that Libya was to be known as the People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamāhīriyyah (the latter term is a neologism meaning “government through the masses”). By the early 1980s, however, a drop in the demand and price for oil on the world market was beginning to hamper Qaddafi’s efforts to play a strong regional role. Ambitious efforts to radically change Libya’s economy and society slowed, and there were signs of domestic discontent. Libyan opposition movements launched sporadic attacks against Qaddafi and his military supporters but met with arrest and execution.

Libya’s relationship with the United States, which had been an important trading partner, deteriorated in the early 1980s as the U.S. government increasingly protested Qaddafi’s support of Palestinian Arab militants. An escalating series of retaliatory trade restrictions and military skirmishes culminated in a U.S. bombing raid of Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, in which Qaddafi’s adopted daughter was among the casualties. U.S. claims that Libya was producing chemical warfare materials contributed to the tension between the two countries in the late 1980s and the ’90s.

Within the region, Libya sought throughout the 1970s and ’80s to control the mineral-rich Aozou Strip, along the disputed border with neighbouring Chad. These efforts produced intermittent warfare in Chad and confrontation with both France and the United States. In 1987 Libyan forces were bested by Chad’s more mobile troops, and diplomatic ties with that country were restored late the following year. Libya denied involvement in Chad’s December 1990 coup led by Idriss Déby (see Chad: Civil war).

In 1996 the United States and the UN implemented a series of economic sanctions against Libya for its purported involvement in destroying a civilian airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. In the late 1990s, in an effort to placate the international community, Libya turned over the alleged perpetrators of the bombing to international authorities and accepted a ruling by the international court in The Hague stating that the contested Aozou territory along the border with Chad belonged to that country and not to Libya. The United Kingdom restored diplomatic relations with Libya at the end of the decade, and UN sanctions were lifted in 2003; later that year Libya announced that it would stop producing chemical weapons. The United States responded by dropping most of its sanctions, and the restoration of full diplomatic ties between the two countries was completed in 2006. In 2007 five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been sentenced to death in Libya after being tried on charges of having deliberately infected children there with HIV were extradited to Bulgaria and quickly pardoned by its president, defusing widespread outcry over the case and preventing the situation from posing an obstacle to Libya’s return to the international community.

In the years that followed the lifting of sanctions, one of Qaddafi’s sons, Sayf al-Islam al-Qaddafi, emerged as a proponent of reform and helped lead Libya toward adjustments in its domestic and foreign policy. Measures including efforts to attract Western business and plans to foster tourism promised to gradually draw Libya more substantially into the global community.

Revolt in 2011

In February 2011, in the midst of a wave of popular demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa, antigovernment rallies were held in Benghazi by protesters angered by the arrest of a human rights lawyer, Fethi Tarbel. Libyan security forces used water cannons and live fire against the crowds, resulting in a number of injuries and deaths.

Strong government response to protests

As protests intensified, with demonstrators taking control of Benghazi and unrest spreading to Tripoli and other areas of the country, the security forces and squads of mercenaries loyal to the government began to use lethal force freely, firing indiscriminately into crowds. The regime restricted communications, blocking the Internet and interrupting telephone service throughout the country. On February 21 one of Qaddafi’s sons, Sayf al-Islam, gave a defiant address on state television, blaming outside agitators for the unrest and saying that further demonstrations could lead to civil war in the country. He vowed that the regime would fight “to the last bullet.” The next day Muammar al-Qaddafi delivered an angry rambling speech on state television, condemning the protesters as traitors and calling on his supporters to fight them.

The government’s use of violence against civilians drew condemnation from foreign leaders and human rights organizations. It also seemed to damage the coherence of the regime, causing a number of high-level officials to resign in protest. A number of Libyan embassies around the world signaled their support for the uprising by flying Libya’s pre-Qaddafi flag.