Politics of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi

As a consequence, although Gaddafi held no governmental post after 1980, he maintained absolute control over the country until the collapse of his regime during the Libyan Civil War.

For the first seven years following the 1969 revolution, Colonel Gaddafi and 12 fellow army officers, the Revolutionary Command Council, began a complete overhaul of Libya's political system, society, and economy.

He continued to control all aspects of the Libyan government through direct appeals to the masses, a pervasive security apparatus, and powerful revolutionary committees.

Although he held no formal office, Gaddafi exercised absolute power with the assistance of a small group of trusted advisers, who included relatives from his home base in the Sirte region, which lies between the rival provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

An abortive coup attempt in May 1984 apparently mounted by Libyan exiles with internal support, led to a short-lived reign of terror in which thousands were imprisoned and interrogated.

Gaddafi used the revolutionary committees to search out alleged internal opponents following the coup attempt, thereby accelerating the rise of more radical elements inside the Libyan power hierarchy.

In 1988, faced with rising public dissatisfaction with shortages in consumer goods and setbacks in Libya's war with Chad, Gaddafi began to curb the power of the revolutionary committees and to institute some domestic reforms.

Around the same time, Gaddafi began to pursue an anti-fundamentalist Islamic policy domestically, viewing fundamentalism as a potential rallying point for opponents of the regime.

Ministerial positions and military commanders are frequently shuffled or placed under temporary house arrest to diffuse potential threats to Gaddafi's authority.

Gaddafi's security forces launched a preemptive strike at alleged coup plotters in the military and among the Warfalla tribe in October 1993.

Widespread arrests and government reshufflings followed, accompanied by public "confessions" from regime opponents and allegations of torture and executions.

Reportedly 10 to 20 percent of Libyans worked in surveillance for these committees, a proportion of informants on par with Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong Il's North Korea.

[3] On 1 March 2011, Quryna reported Gaddafi sacked his right-hand man, information chief Abdullah Senussi, who was responsible for the brutality against the protestors.

The warning lists Gaddafi himself and 15 key members of his regime:[5] The term Jamahiriya (Arabic: جماهيرية jamāhīriyyah) is generally translated as "state of the masses".

[citation needed] The government controlled both state-run and semi-autonomous media, and any articles critical of current policies were requested and intentionally placed by the revolutionary leadership itself, for example, as a means of initiating reforms.