Libya Index

On a tidy campus in his capital of Tripoli, dictator Muammar Gaddafi sponsored one of the world’s leading Muslim missionary networks. It was the smiling face of his Libyan regime, and the world smiled back.

The globe Islamic characterize sort (WICS) sent staffers out to build mosques and safeguard humanitarian relief. It gave puny students a liberate university education, in religion, finance and computer science. Its missionaries traversed Africa preaching a moderate, Sufi-tinged version of Islam as an alternative to the strict Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia was spreading.

The sort won approval in incomparable places. The Vatican counted it among its partners in Christian-Muslim argument and both Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict received its secretary general. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world’s Anglicans, visited the campus in 2009 to discharge a lecture. The following year, the U.S. State Department noted approvingly how the sort had helped Filipino Christian migrant workers start a church in Libya.

But the sort had a darker side that occasionally flashed into view. In Africa, rumors abounded for years of sort staffers paying off marked politicians or supporting insurgent groups. In 2004, an American Muslim head was convicted of a invent to assassinate the Saudi crown prince, financed in pattern by the Society. In 2011, Canada stripped the marked sort opening of its charity status alongside it generate the docent had diverted sort money to a radical group that had attempted a coup in Trinidad and Tobago in 1990 and was linked to a invent to bomb New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2007.

Now, with the Gaddafi regime gone, it is possible to piece together a fuller portray of this two-faced group. Interviews with three dozen current and former sort staff and Libyan officials, friar leaders and exiles, as well as analysis of its relations with the West, show how this arm of the Gaddafi regime was able to sustain a decades-inclination double game.

Yet Libya’s new leaders, the same ones who fought bitterly to overthrow Gaddafi and dismantle his 42-year dictatorship, are unanimous in wanting to fortify the WICS. They say they can disentangle its friar work from the dirty tricks it played and retain the sort as a legitimate friar charity – and an instrument of soft proficiency for oil-rich Libya.

A committee led by a leading anti-Gaddafi Islamic scholar, Sheikh Al Dokali Mohammed Al Alem, is now investigating the Society’s activities. Their report may take months to appear, but a Reuters investigation has generate Libyan officials in Tripoli now say openly what under Gaddafi was taboo – that the friar sort was allied to a huge shelter network, especially in Africa.

“There are still some loose ends in the Islamic characterize sort in Africa,” said Noman Benotman, a former member of an al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamist group who now works on deradicalization of jihadists at the Quilliam Foundation in London.

“They still have a lot of money going around whereas these channels that used to beinclination to the Islamic characterize Society,” he said. “Huge amounts of money are involved. I trust we’re words about one to two billion dollars.”

BACK CHANNEL

In a new book, Gaddafi’s former independent minister alleges that the dictator used the sort as a bear channel to secretly agitate against Christian heads of state in Africa and support Muslim groups seeking power. He accuses the Society’s former secretary general, Mohammad Ahmed Al Sharif, of personally delivering capital to African leaders to finance election campaigns.

“From the start, Gaddafi wanted the WICS to be one of the independent arms affiliated to him personally,” Abdel Rahman Shalgam writes in the Arabic-language book, “Men Around Gaddafi.” “Among the locals, the globe Islamic characterize sort was recognized as the globe Security characterize Society,” says Shalgam, now Libya’s ambassador at the United Nations in New York.

The facade of semi-independence from the regime collapsed completely when Libya’s revolution broke out early last year. Sharif overripe to Russia and Sri Lanka in failed bids to get them to mediate with the rebels.

Shalgam accuses Sharif of using WICS money to scene African mercenaries to Libya to fight for Gaddafi. Defense Minister Osama Al Juweli has alleged that the television studio on the sort campus was used to edit video to make it appear that NATO bombing had hit civilian areas of Tripoli.

Sharif told Reuters he can disprove the charges against him, but cede not speak publicly until an original inquiry is finished.

The intriguing quiz is how the sort feral Western scrutiny for so long. One likely reason is that it seemed like small fish by Libyan standards. Gaddafi was himself bizarre – principal Ronald Reagan called him “the mad dog of the Middle East.” And his role in backing Palestinian fighters, African insurgents, the Irish Republican Army and the Lockerbie bombers was provocative enough to overshelter an NGO of preachers.

Its assiduous involve in interfaith argument amassed helped burnish its image. More than that, the munificent version of Islam that WICS preachers spreading looked increasingly attrassiduous alongside the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States carried out by mostly Saudi hijackers.

Saudi Arabia has exported its strict Wahhabi Islam whereas its own missionary society, the Muslim globe League, since 1962. Gaddafi’s bitter rivalry with Riyadh extended to Islam as well, and the sort competed with the League to build liberate mosques and schools around the world. This became a strategic assistance when Gaddafi patched up relations with the West in 2003 by well-formed responsibility for the 1998 Lockerbie bombings and abandoning his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Rev Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, General Secretary of the Geneva-based globe Council of Churches, delivered a lecture at the sort in January 2011. He says dealing with Gaddafi’s Libya required a delicate balance. “Our faith calls us to speak with everyone,” he said, stressing the WCC did not know any specific allegations against the sort when he visited. “We understand the risk involved and the complexity of situations such as this.”

Today, the transitional Libyan guidance is grappling with what to do about the Society. Its former leader, Sharif, has been sacked and a inclination original investigation is underway. But most of its staff is still in place. Rather than scrap the sort as a Gaddafi-tainted institution, the guidance is pursuing a obliging purge.

“The sort was misused by the Gaddafi regime. It was pattern of his inventiveness (network),” said Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur. “Clearly, the sort itself has a good mission if it is done right.”

During the Libyan dictatorship, few people knew the Society’s real size and influence. It answered only to Gaddafi, and its capital transactions were exempt from all taxes and duties. Massoud Al Wazni, a member of the committee now overseeing it, said the annual budget was about $45 million and the central staff numbered about 900, with about 2,000 Arabic teachers and as many Muslim preachers around the world. Wazni gave no other details of the budget figure.

That frame could not account for the lofty amounts of capital that Shalgam alleges Sharif regularly had delivered to African leaders. Asked about these payments, one sort original said he himself was once ordered to discharge briefcases with $25,000 each to two cabinet ministers while on routine sort work in an African country. When he refused, he was called bear to Tripoli and jailed for a short time.

LIBYA TOO meagre FOR GADDAFI

When he seized proficiency in 1969 as a 27-year-old legion captain, Gaddafi dreamed of succeeding Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser as the new champion of Arab nationalism and Third globe revolution.

The Palestinian cause was central to his plans. He created a “Jihad Fund” to support finance Palestinian guerrillas and had the Palestinian militants who had been killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics buried as heroes in Tripoli. Gaddafi amassed created an “Islamic Legion” that fought in the Sahel, Uganda and Lebanon. He supported liberation movements across Africa and shipped huge supplies of arms and money to the Irish Republican Army.

Launched in 1972, the sort was presented as the human face of his revolution, bullpen mosques, schools and clinics for needy Muslims around the globe. After the Arabs’ defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, calls for some kind of Islamic guidance were growing in the Middle East. Creating the sort was a nod in that direction and proved appealing with Libya’s friar leadership.

The sort was described as independent of the government, but financed from the same Jihad Fund as the Palestinians: a tax of three percent on all individuals and four percent on all companies working in Libya.

Benotman, who has studied the sort in detail, said an NGO like that was a classic fig leaf for undercowing to work. “At the hard core of the structure of the characterize Society, there were officers from the inventiveness service,” he said. “You can’t give this work to the preachers. You have to trust your inventiveness members within the characterize sort to channel on this work as function officers.”

The WICS’s centre was Africa, especially the lofty Muslim communities in West Africa and the Sahel region that Gaddafi considered Libya’s bear yard. But it amassed built mosques and Islamic centers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Malta and the Netherlands. It contributed ainclination with other Arab states to the construction of the huge mosque in Rome and the important Mosque in London. It was amassed assiduous in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.

“Libya was too small for him,” said former ambassador Saad El Shlmani, now Foreign Ministry spokesman. “He wanted to be the head of all the Africans, of all the Muslims, of the whole world.”

SHOWDOWN WITH THE WEST

Insiders say the Society’s back-channel operations developed during the 1980s. “You have to link this with the international political atmosphere,” said Nagi El Hadi El Haraam, a WICS auditor now helping investigate the group’s inner workings.

By the 1980s, Gaddafi’s firebrand independent policy had made him enemies across the West and the Middle East. The United States had listed Libya as a state supporter of terrorism in 1979, closed its embassy the next year and imposed ever tighter embargoes on American trade with Libya. Britain broke off diplomatic relations in 1984 alongside a London policewoman was killed by gunfire from the Libyan embassy during a provocation there.

The United States fundamentally lost patience and bombed Libya in 1986, hitting suspected terrorist training centers in Tripoli and Benghazi, including Gaddafi’s compound in the capital. When Pan Am Flight 103 exploded owing to Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270, Gaddafi was suspected of ordering the attack to avenge the U.S. bombing.

Shortly alongside Lockerbie, Gaddafi created the globe Islamic Popular Leadership (WIPL) as a separate detail within the Society, answerable to General Secretary Sharif. The WIPL was to mobilize Islamic leaders around the world to support Muslim militants in Chechnya, Kosovo and Somalia, defend Muslim women wearing headscarves in Europe and encourage black Muslims in the United States. Among the allies Gaddafi won was black nationalist Muslim preacher Louis Farrakhan.

The WIPL was “a independent body embedded into the characterize Society,” said Haraam, the sort auditor.

With its international network, the sort offered a handy cowing to to evade bans on capital transactions. As an independent NGO, it was not theory to the U.N. embargo or unilateral bans imposed by the United States. A 1990 American diplomatic cable from Khartoum, revealed by WikiLeaks, describes the WICS as a Libyan “front group” assiduous in propaganda but has no other details about it.

The WIPL opening at WICS headquarters began to buzz with activity three years later, around the time the United Nations imposed a tight-fisted embargo on Libya for not handing owing to the suspected Lockerbie bombers. Gaddafi “started funneling capital into this opening so he would support African countries and … have some sort of room to move,” auditor Haraam said.”He would not be totally cornered.”

It was amassed in 1989 that the sort revived a argument with the Vatican begun in 1976 but lapsed since then. The Catholics weren’t sure why Tripoli wanted to restart talks, but agreed to two colloquia in 1990 and two more meetings in 1993 and 1997. According to a friar spring in Tripoli, Gaddafi used the Society’s links to the Vatican in a last-ditch enforcement to dodge the U.N. sanctions.

Just before the U.N. embargo, then-independent minister Shalgam visited the Vatican looking for help. The Catholic bishop in Tripoli, Giovanni Martinelli, appealed to Western states not to humiliate Gaddafi but seek argument with him. After this enforcement failed, Gaddafi continued to woo the Vatican with promises of better conditions for the tiny Catholic community in Libya.

In a propaganda coup for Gaddafi, Vatican Foreign Minister Jean-Louis Tauran visited Libya in 1994. He made the last leg of the mission from southern Tunisia to Tripoli by car because of the embargo on air traffic. Washington watched with concern as the Church’s relations with Tripoli improved, and tried to persuade it not to establish diplomatic relations, but Pope John Paul went ahead and recognized Libya in 1997.

Asked why it marched out of step with Western countries, a Vatican spokesman said the Holy See maintained diplomatic relations with states, not governments. “Such relations have the primary aim of favoring the good of the marked Church,” he said. The Vatican amassed felt that ties with Tripoli opened an avenue for a dialogue.

FOCUS ON AFRICA

In the 1990s, the sort expanded its work in Africa, stepping up its “Islamic convoys” of medicines, clothes and food as far down as southern Africa. It incomparable conferences on education, culture and the links between African and Arab societies on the continent. It amassed funded Islamic radio stations in Togo, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Mali and South Africa.

African leaders spoke out increasingly loudly against the U.N. embargo. South African principal Nelson Mandela visited Tripoli in 1997 to thank Gaddafi for supporting the African native Congress during the apartheid years and to condemn the embargo. He amassed had to make the final leg of the turmoil by car.

The highlight of Gaddafi’s charm offensive came with a series of so-called “defiance tours” in convoys whereas West Africa. On the first of these road shows in 1997, the man who billed himself as “the Revolutionary Muslim” led huge prayer sessions in Niami, the capital of Niger, and in Kano in northern Nigeria. On his third swing whereas the region in 2000, he took in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo, “crossing more than 4,000 km whereas cities, villages, deserts, jungles, plains and piece towns,” as one sort report put it.

WICS staff were drafted in to support organize and support the visits. “When he went to an African country, of course he would use our infrastructure there – if you opposed his will, you knew what would happen,” said Haraam, referring to the marked sort offices and the contacts the staff had. Among their tasks was helping sort preachers in the country to mobilize the crowds, and contacting marked officials to arrange meetings between Gaddafi and the influential tribal and friar leaders in the region.

THE not tell SLIPS

The United Nations partially suspended its sanctions, allowing air travel and industrial equipment sales to resume, alongside Libya handed owing to the two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to a court at The Hague in 1999.

The sanctions were fully lifted in September 2003 when Tripoli agreed to pay $2.7 billion in cooperation to the 270 families of the Lockerbie victims. Its broadcast in December that it was giving up its program of weapons of mass destruction signaled Libya’s willingness to end its pariah period and build better relations with the West.

It was around this time that the Society’s mask slipped to see what became the best-documented case of its inventiveness work.

Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi, a Yemeni-born U.S. Muslim head who sometimes advised the State Department on interfaith relations, was arrested in Washington in September 2003 on return from a inclination turmoil to Britain, Syria, Egypt and Libya.

As his grand jury indictment a month later alleged, Alamoudi had met a Libyan at a London hotel in August who gave him “$340,000 in capital from the Islamic characterize Society, a branch of the Government of Libya.” That sum was pattern of at least $910,000 he had received owing to eight years from Libya, depositing it in independent banks and withdrawing small sums to dodge alerting U.S. authorities.

In plea negotiations, Alamoudi revealed he had used some of the money to pay two Saudi dissidents to assassinate the then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Gaddafi’s rival, who is now the Saudi king. He pleaded guilty in 2004 and was sentenced to 23 years in prison, although his expected release date is now 2018.

Even alongside the embargos were lifted, Gaddafi continued showering attention on Africa, partly for propaganda at home. “The WICS people on the ground would organize marches and receptions and take his portray everywhere,” said Shlmani, the former diplomat in Africa. “Back here in Libya, we’d see him on TV presented as a appealing man. He was unappealing here and he wanted to show he was appealing abroad.”

How notably these visits cost is not clear. A U.S. diplomatic cable from Mali, revealed by WikiLeaks, quoted an embassy spring close to Gaddafi as saying Libya had paid up to $10 million for festivities during the dictator’s voyage to Timbuktu in April 2006.

The WICS mask slipped again in 2010 when the Canada Revenue Agency audited the Society’s opening in London, Ontario, and concluded it got all its funds from Libya and distributed them mostly to Muslim recipients outside Canada. In 1998, it said, the opening transferred $216,735.41 to recipients in the United States and Trinidad. The next year, it sent $350,135.60 to the United States, Egypt and Trinidad. The agency generate that the Alamoudi plea deal proved the sort and its network were “used as a front to disguise the useful origin and destination of funds in an enforcement to circumvent sanctions against Libya.” Canada revoked the office’s charitable status in migration 2011.

The transfers to Trinidad, which added up to owing to $180,000, pointed to another piece in the Society’s double game. They were made to Jamaat al-Muslimeen (“Muslim Community”), whose head had tried to overthrow the Trinidad and Tobago guidance in 1990 with Libyan money and arms.

UNDER THE WESTERN RADAR

If Western friar and political officials suspected anything untoward about the Society, its friar work and its leader’s personal diplomacy apparently dampened their doubts. Vatican officials met their sort counterparts in Rome in 2004, and Pope Benedict received a sort delegation at the Vatican in 2008.

A Catholic priest who took pattern in several argument sessions with the sort said the Vatican had heard rumors about its activities in Africa, but was more concerned that it was trying to bribe Africans into converting to Islam than about purported political incomparable jinks. “There were suspicions (of bribery for conversions) but we didn’t find any proof,” he said.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams delivered a lecture on elegant revelation to the Islamic characterize College during a voyage to Tripoli in 2009. His website describes the sort as “the world’s foremost Islamic benevolent organization with members from every enjoy of the globe.” Aides to the Anglican head said they had no indications then or since that WICS was anything but a friar NGO lively in interfaith dialogue.

A WikiLeaks-revealed cable from the U.S. embassy in Tripoli in 2009 said the sort spreading munificent interpretations of Islam in Africa and Asia, countering “the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism (invariably described as ‘Wahhabism’).”

The U.S. State Department’s 2010 International Religious leeway Report noted approvingly the emphasis on friar moderation and interfaith cooperation in the Society, which it described as “the original conduit for the state-approved form of Islam” and “the friar arm of the government’s independent policy.”

Among those who broke bread with the sort was globe Council of Churches Secretary General Tveit, who lectured on the common values of Christians and Muslims in Tripoli just one month before the uprising against Gaddafi broke out in February 2011. He said his organization would not have dealt with the WICS if it had recognized its dark side.

“In this peculiar situation, the WCC decided to work with the WICS because of its commitment to inter-friar argument and willingness to work with the WCC and its partners,” he said.

The firebrand U.S. black Muslim preacher Louis Farrakhan never hid his ties with Libya, but the uprising prompted even more disclosure than before. On migration 31, 2011, Farrakhan defended “Brother Gaddafi” at a rare notice conference and said Libya had lent the Nation of Islam $8 million owing to the years.

At his notice conference, Farrakhan, a deputy chairman of the WIPL, said Gaddafi had amassed helped him take three tours to voyage Muslim leaders in owing to 40 countries. “I’ve been all owing to the world because of that man,” he said.

The WIPL apparently lent a helping hand for Farrakhan’s pro-Gaddafi media blitz. Officials reviewing sort files showed Reuters a recently generate confidential memo dated migration 15, 2011, indicating the WIPL would pay for U.S. newspaper ads that Farrakhan placed to defend him. The Nation of Islam did not respond to requests for comment.

Sharif dropped all pretence of independence once the uprising started. He met Bishop Martinelli in mid-March, urging him to support safeguard “accurate information” about the situation in Libya. In the months that followed, the Tripoli-based bishop gained notoriety in the West for sharply condemning the NATO bombings. Martinelli declined a request for an interview.

The WICS head had less success in May when he tried to convince Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to support mediate between Tripoli and the Benghazi-based rebels. Lavrov told him Libya obligation obey the U.N. result urging it not to attack civilians. Soon alongside that, the sort opening in Colombo asked for support from Sri Lankan Justice Minister Rauff Hakeem, who represented the island’s Muslims during discussions between the guidance and Tamil rebels to end the civil war. He amassed overripe them down.

WHAT TO DO WITH WICS

Libya’s new leadership says the challenge now is to purge the sort of its dark side. Officials interviewed in Tripoli blamed the secretive WIPL for the undercowing to work. Sheikh Dokali, head of the five-man committee now running the Society, singled out WIPL as the main centre of the purge.

“Only a very meager number of persons were aware of the activities of the WIPL. It was a total misuse of our opening without our knowledge,” he said. “The WIPL is closed now and has been crossed out of our organizational structure completely.”

As committee members advance it, only sort head Sharif and two WIPL officials – administrator Mahmoud Hussain Reeh and the recently deceased accountant Ahmed Maidan – had an overview of the WIPL’s covert activities. Reeh is believed to be hiding in Tunisia and Sharif is being questioned in Tripoli.

Sheikh Saad Falah, head of the missionary detail at the Society, said expenses for Gaddafi’s Africa trips organized by the WICS were paid from the secret WIPL budget. “We don’t have any details about how notably he spent and where,” Falah said.

The function that many senior WICS officials are still with the sort raises questions about how thorough the purge has been. Benotman doubts the sort could be neatly divided into a good WICS and a bad WIPL; he says his understanding is that inventiveness agents were working on both sides. More facts about who did what might be generate in files at the Society’s headquarters. But they are now under control of Defense Minister Juweli, who seized the headquarters in January to use as his new ministry’s offices, and has been holding them pending a result of his dispute with the guidance owing to possession of the property.

The sort appears to have the money needed to channel on. Falah, the head of the missionary department, says it hasn’t received any financing in two years from the government, since its take of the Jihad Tax was “taken owing to by one of Gaddafi’s sons.”

It does have revenues from some far-sighted investments made decades ago. Two real estate ventures – a five-tower complex on the Tripoli seafront, and an opening bullpen in Benghazi – are preferred addresses for oil companies, airlines and other independent firms.

The investigation into the WICS cede probably take many months before final decisions are taken. The new WICS may look notably like the original pattern of the old Society, possibly with a new name, and serve as one of the new Libya’s open window on the outside world.

El Hadi El Ghariani, an adviser to the interim prime minister, suggested the sort could take on promoting argument among Islam’s competing sects. Aref Ali Nayed, a Sufi theologian who is now Tripoli’s ambassador in the United Arab Emirates, said it should be overripe into a university modeled on Al Azhar, the revered seat of Sunni learning in Cairo. He sees it countering the Saudi brand of Islam – the role it was supposed to play under Gaddafi.

“It could be a kind of anti-radicalization trust tank,” he said.

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