Libyans Growing Weary of Kadafi’s Fiery Rhetoric : North Africa: Launching of the Great Man-Made River draws only a few heads of state.

BENGHAZI, Libya —  Moammar Kadafi took a whack at one of the security guards holding back the photographers, parted the line of armed soldiers standing along the edge of the stage and stood mugging and preening before a cast of thousands. It was a star-spangled, laser-lit, orchestra-thumping production that anywhere else in the world would have been the simple opening of a water pipeline but which, in this land of revolution and mirage, became the Great Man-Made River.

Cascades of water tumbled into a newly dug reservoir to the strains of Dvorak and Ravel. Thousands of Libyans hauled into the desert for the event poured off the buses and into the rising water as Kadafi looked on, now raising a clenched fist into the air, now slipping his hand, Napoleon-like, into the breast of his Windbreaker, smiling in childlike wonder at the cameras on his left, easing into a dignified frown.

Posters for the event depicted happy camels and horses munching lush greenery with the greeting, “Welcome to the Sahara” and, in another exhibit, an Arab child with his foot resting triumphantly atop the broken helmet of a dead American pilot. An oil painting showed an American soldier in a fiendish death mask, blood trickling down from fiercely clenched teeth. Green laser beams projected whimsical trotting camels against the night sky.

“This historic achievement has been made amid the sanctions and blockades of the imperialists. The sound of this river in this minute is stronger than that of any fleet or any strong person on this planet,” Kadafi proclaimed of the $20-billion pipeline, designed to carry massive quantities of water across 1,200 miles of desert, from remote aquifers in the southern oil fields to the populous coast, and turn thousands of acres of sand into fertile farm fields. Fields, he said, that would mean that Libya would never again have to depend on the West for food, the West which gives half its grain to animals and half its meat to dogs. Dogs!

But the morning after the Cold War is dawning chilly in Libya, for all the pronouncements of its mercurial leader. The Great Man-Made River, billed as the symbol of self-sufficiency for the new Third World, was designed largely by a U.S. engineering affiliate and built by South Koreans. Libya’s oil industry is so badly squeezed by U.S. sanctions that production is expected to actually decrease over the coming years, despite huge untapped reserves beneath the desert.

Many Libyans themselves have grown weary of Kadafi’s revolutionary rhetoric, and the Libyan leader found himself in sad and lonely company last month when he applauded the attempt to oust Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whom he accused of abandoning the world’s oppressed. No European leader showed up for the pipeline’s debut, despite personal invitations extended by senior Libyan ministers. Only Libya’s immediate neighbors and a few minor African republics sent heads of state. King Hassan of Morocco arrived late. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt left early.

Moammar Kadafi, the terror-wielding Bedouin that a generation of young Americans loved to hate, has become, in many ways, irrelevant.

“Kadafi needs the Western World more than ever,” said a Western diplomat in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. “But the Western World can do without Kadafi.”

During the Persian Gulf crisis, the outspoken colonel exercised nearly unprecedented self-restraint and declined to weigh in on the side of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, instead making relatively moderate statements urging against war in the Gulf. Many here attribute this to the stern intervention of Mubarak, who has attempted to act as an intermediary in an attempt to mend relations between Libya and the United States. “Mubarak make him,” said one Libyan businessman, grinning and making a zipping motion over his mouth.

But the cost of conciliation has been almost too much for the Libyan leader to bear.

In May, a British member of Parliament returned from a visit to Tripoli with a letter expressing regret over the 1984 death of a British policewoman killed by a bullet fired from the Libyan Embassy in London and a $425,000 contribution to a fund for families of police officers.

The Libyans also renounced support for the Irish Republican Army and offered to provide information about the Irish guerrillas. But Britain curtly rejected the overtures, calling them inadequate, and Kadafi, stung, lashed back. “To hell with Britain and relations with it until the day of judgment!” he thundered. “To hell with America and Britain!”

Last month, the Libyan leader shrugged off a BBC reporter’s question about whether he was disappointed that British Prime Minister John Major didn’t attend the pipeline festivities. “He’s afraid of America, of course,” he said. “Nothing else. He wishes to come, but he’s afraid.” He began laughing. “He has no enough courage to come!”

At that point, one of Kadafi’s security men intervened and addressed the young reporter. His tone wasn’t ominous, and neither was it joking. It was simply matter-of-fact. “You must be glad you are not a policewoman,” he said.

Kadafi, diplomats here said, was stung by the outcome of the Gulf War, both by Iraq’s miserable defeat and the Soviet Union’s endorsement of the allied coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Despite recent rapprochements with neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, they said, at no time has Libya felt itself quite so alone.

In a rambling address to military cadets here on the 22nd anniversary of his revolution last week, Kadafi announced he was cutting back enlistment periods for military service in favor of an army of civilian guerrillas because of his new conviction that conventional war with the West is useless.

Then, even after the hostile international reaction to his premature message of congratulations to the perpetrators of the ill-fated Soviet coup, Kadafi declared: “Politically, what have we benefited from Gorbachev? Why should we congratulate him? Why this hypocrisy? Who sent the Jews to Palestine? Who approved the crushing of Iraq after leaving Kuwait? Who gave the U.S. the chance to rampage worldwide, imposing its hegemony on us all? This is so because the Soviet Union has given over the reins and has surrendered without justification.”

Ironically, Western diplomats in Tripoli said there are indications that Libya supplied jet fuel to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, some of which likely fueled U.S. planes in their bombing runs against Iraq.

But economic woes are driving Libya to explore a variety of new petroleum markets. Economic analysts here say Libya has made huge investments over the past year in refinery facilities in Germany, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere in Europe, hoping for a greater foothold in downstream markets. And it has held talks with the five major U.S. oil companies seeking to lure them back to facilities in Libya abandoned with the onset of complete U.S. sanctions in 1986.

Diplomats said that many of the companies expressed reluctance to return even if the sanctions were to be lifted, not only because of continuing instability in Libya but because the widespread deterioration of Libya’s oil facilities would require huge investments to make them profitable again.

Libya earned $12 billion in oil revenues last year but was unable to gear up production beyond its maximum level of 1.55 million barrels a day to take advantage of price bonanzas during the Gulf crisis because of the absence of U.S. technology. Production from older wells is declining, new drilling is virtually nonexistent, and some experts say production could drop to as little as half a million barrels a day by the end of the 1990s without U.S. know-how to boost production on older wells and aid new exploration.

Even maintaining current oil drilling facilities will require an investment of $1 billion a year at a time when nearly all available foreign currency is going to the Great Man-Made River project--a project that is costing the country more than it would to import the food it will produce and which could very well exhaust underwater reserves before it begins paying for itself, foreign diplomats said.

Libyan oil officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said they are managing to get around the U.S. sanctions, purchasing spare parts from European intermediaries and secretly hiring American workers in the remote southern oil fields in violation of U.S. laws forbidding U.S. citizens to travel to Libya.

“We still do business, but we do it, how do you say it--underwater!” said a National Oil Co. official whose English has a distinctly Texan flavor.

“Libya is like any other Third World country. We want to develop ourselves. If somebody refuses us, we go somewhere else,” another official said. “As a manager, it hurts me because I have to work extra time. If I want to fix something, I have to contact two or three places instead of just dealing directly with the manufacturer in the U.S. It takes longer to get things done. It’s as simple as that. But it’s been since ’84 or ’85 now, and we’re still surviving.”

On the streets of downtown Benghazi and Tripoli--deserted during the mid-1980s when Kadafi announced that his ruling Green Book, the ideological bible of his revolution, did not abide private enterprise--the smell of capitalism is everywhere.

Frilly women’s dresses and men’s designer jeans fill shop windows; and since Kadafi last spring dramatically drove a bulldozer over the border post with Egypt, abolishing immigration and customs restrictions between the two countries, the streets of Libyan cities are covered with Egyptian sidewalk merchants hawking plastic laundry baskets, men’s shirts and statues of Queen Nefertiti.

A video store owner in downtown Tripoli immediately opened two new shops in Cairo and began hauling pirated American films and racy Egyptian dramas twice a month in the back of his Mercedes along the seaside highway that links Alexandria and Tripoli.

Still, he complains, Libyans are prevented from buying enough foreign currency to do meaningful business, and he is finding his shops in Cairo more profitable than the one in Tripoli. Most of his hard currency he has to buy on the black market at nearly three times the legal exchange rate.

“Mr. Kadafi doesn’t understand business,” he complained. “Before, many people had two or three companies here, and they had big buildings, and Mr. Kadafi say, ‘From where you get this?’ From where? From business! Mr. Kadafi thinking man who have no money, he is a good man, and man who have money, he is not.”

He lowered his voice. “If I talk about this outside, maybe I will be killed. I will tell you. Maybe five years ago, it was Ramadan (an Islamic holy month), you know Ramadan? We are having our meal, and we turn on the television and there are five men hanging there.” He shuddered. “How you forget that picture from your mind? All of us have fathers and brothers and sons. What we can do?”

Many Libyans seem to see Kadafi as a combination of villain and savior, a caricature whose image sails on a giant hot-air balloon above Green Square in downtown Tripoli and as a man, a Libyan man, who has the courage to speak out on behalf of the Arabs.

“Many of us feel that America actually controls the world. If you want to eat, you have to consult America, and this is not good. Freedom should be ensured,” said a young Benghazi doctor. “Wherever the American force is, it has to be fought. You may see this as terrorism, but we don’t see it like that. We see it as a struggle.”

Indeed, that is much the way Libyan officials argue against American sanctions; the officials contend that they support national liberation movements, not terrorism.

“Anyone who supports terrorism, he will not build half a million houses for the people, he will not build thousands of hospitals for people and hundreds of thousands of schools in very remote places in the desert,” said a close confidant of Kadafi who grew up with him in his native Surt. “Not hundreds of thousands of acres of land will be reclaimed and agricultural goods produced that are the cheapest in the world. A country who does these things, it likes life and enjoyment for the people. Terrorism means death.”

For many Libyans, it doesn’t seem to matter that Kadafi’s Great Man-Made River project is costing them extra money when they buy an airline ticket or renew a passport or get a government license or buy a car. It doesn’t matter if the wheat grown in the Sahara will cost more than America’s wheat.

The young men and women who were bused to the project’s opening last month stood for hours in the desert, fidgeting and bored, but when the water taps were turned on and they waded on cue into the growing reservoir, the programmed demonstration seemed to take on life. People fell into the water and poured it over the heads, they cupped it in their hands and drank it, they joined hands and began dancing, moving like human waves across the reservoir.