Libya Orchestrates Anti-U.S. Rally, but the Old Fervor Just Isn’t There

TRIPOLI, Libya — A funny thing happened at the big anti-imperialist rally here Thursday night: Most of the demonstrators got bored.

There were brass bands, volleys of cannon fire and groups of fatigue-clad revolutionaries flashing victory signs and shouting “Down, Down Reagan!” in front of Western camera crews.

But the knots of young people hamming it up for the TV cameras were just large enough to fill the frames of those cameras. Off camera, they stood around smoking cigarettes, chatting and looking unconcerned. Few, if any, appeared to be paying anything more than polite attention to the speaker railing against the United States and Britain from a platform at one end of Algeria Square.

“Because I was told to,” one off-camera young man replied when asked why he was demonstrating. “But aren’t you angry at the United States?” he was asked. “Oh yes, that too. Down with America,” he said.

Rally for the Media

The rally, by several thousand people, many of them bused into town for the occasion, was originally intended to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the British withdrawal from Libya on March 28, 1970. But because of the Gulf of Sidra crisis between Libya and the United States, it was amended to include anti-American protests staged for the benefit of the foreign press, which has descended upon this normally placid city in droves for the second time in three months.

The first time was in January, when the U.S. 6th Fleet held maneuvers off Libya after President Reagan imposed economic sanctions against Col. Moammar Kadafi’s regime for its alleged involvement in terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports that left 20 people dead, including five Americans and four terrorists.

That crisis was less serious because the fleet did not then cross Kadafi’s “line of death,” the seaward frontier marking the Libyan leader’s claim to sovereignty over the whole of the Gulf of Sidra in the central Mediterranean Sea.

This time units of the fleet crossed the line to demonstrate Washington’s rejection of Kadafi’s claim to the gulf, most of which lies beyond the universally recognized 12-mile offshore limit to territorial waters.

When Libya responded by firing surface-to-air missiles at U.S. planes, all of which missed their targets, the fleet retaliated by attacking Libyan missile patrol boats and a missile-launching site on the Libyan coast.

24 Sailors Killed

East European diplomatic sources here said they have been told that 24 Libyan sailors were killed and four were listed as missing in the attacks on the patrol boats. A Spanish ship picked up several survivors in life rafts and turned them over to the Libyans on Thursday, other diplomatic sources said.

‘No Emotion on Streets’

Although the confrontation this time has given the Libyans more to be angry about than before, the crisis has had a surprisingly soft impact on life in Tripoli where, apart from the efforts to entertain about 200 visiting journalists, it has pretty much been business as usual.

“There is absolutely no emotion on the streets over this,” a Western diplomat said. “It is difficult for Libyans to visualize this crisis,” he added. “Most of them are preoccupied with their overriding economic problems. More anti-American demonstrations . . . well, who cares?”

Part of the problem is that anti-American demonstrations are so frequent here--and so carefully stage-managed--that they have become as much a part of everyday city life as traffic and food shortages.

“They bus people in from schools and factories for them so often that I don’t pay attention to them anymore,” said one foreign resident who, like others, spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

Even the many anti-American posters on the streets are old--leftovers from the “Second General International Conference of the World Center for Combatting Imperialism, Zionism, Racism and Fascism,” a convention of liberation movements held here two weeks ago.

Dubbed by diplomats “The Second International Conference Against All the Isms in the Dictionary,” the convention brought together more than 1,000 delegates, among them Irish Republican Army members, Basque separatists, Filipino guerrillas, Kurdish rebels and Black Muslims from the United States.

Farrakhan In Tripoli

All have since left with the exception of Louis Farrakhan, a leader of the Black Muslim movement in the United States. Farrakhan refuses to talk to reporters and is obviously discomfitted by the presence of so many of them in the hotel where he is staying.

Despite U.S. denials, the 6th Fleet maneuvers that ended Thursday were widely viewed by diplomats here as an attempt to encourage disaffection with Kadafi among Libya’s 73,000-man armed forces by baiting him into taking a rash military action with disastrous consequences.

The diplomats say there have been signs of growing unrest in the military and on university campuses because of chronic food shortages, the elimination of imports and other austerity measures taken to cope with the collapse of prices on the world oil market, Libya’s only source of foreign exchange.

Army Loses Privileges

Among those measures was a suspension of privileges that the army had to shop in special stores selling imported goods at subsidized prices, diplomatic sources said.

Although Washington has denied that the maneuvers were meant to provoke Kadafi, the diplomats noted that the exercises were out of the ordinary due to the size of the U.S. armada massed along the “line of death.”

“The amount of U.S. firepower out there was 10 times what the British had in the Falklands,” one Western diplomat said, speaking of the 1982 Argentine-British conflict over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. “They could have taken out Mars.”

Disaffection within the military is hard to gauge, and it remains to be seen whether the Gulf of Sidra crisis will add to it. Diplomats here are divided. Some think it will, but others doubt it.

For the moment, Kadafi seems to have manipulated the media dimension of this latest crisis to score a propaganda victory for himself in the Arab world.

“The colonel has reasons to be glad about this because it comes at a time when Libya was very isolated,” a Western diplomat said. “Now all of a sudden all the Arabs are behind him and all the world’s television cameras are here.”