Libya lives on the coast and is desert on the map

On the map Libya is a vast piece of Sahara with a narrow opening onto the Mediterranean. The state lives in that opening. Tripoli, Benghazi and the towns on the Gulf of Sidra carry political life, while the area behind them is mostly sand, border and petroleum.

1,759,540 square kilometres and 7,458,555 people do not make an even settlement. People and offices sit on the coast. In the west is Tripolitania, with the capital Tripoli facing Tunisia. In the east is Cyrenaica, with Benghazi as the other pole. Between them lies the Gulf of Sidra, and south of everything the Fezzan, a desert that looks toward Niger, Chad and Sudan rather than toward the sea. Arabic is the official language, the Libyan dinar the currency. Both apply to a country that is geographically three landscapes and often behaves that way in politics.

Two coasts, one capital

Tripoli is the capital because the west is the denser coastal country and because the modern state settled there. Benghazi is not a province in the ordinary sense for that reason. Cyrenaica has its own notables, its own harbours, its own memory of a time when the east was not imagined from Tripoli. The Gulf of Sidra does not only separate the two shores as landscape. It lays a distance between the two places where Libya wants to be governed.

Since the uprising, power no longer sits as a matter of course in Tripoli alone. In the east there are separate institutions, and the United Nations describe a state whose authorities do not agree on one address. This is not a passing mood in the capital. It repeats the old split of the coast. Whoever controls a ministry in Tripoli does not thereby hold the east. Whoever holds an army in Benghazi does not thereby hold the capital. The map remains one. The government does not.

The desert pays for the coast

The petroleum is not in the old cities. It lies inland and on the gulf, and it finances a state spent on the coast. The National Oil Corporation is the treasury without which Tripoli and Benghazi cannot carry their offices. Whoever holds the fields holds the ability to pay salaries. The struggle over harbours and terminals on the gulf is therefore not a side conflict. There the desert meets the sea, and oil becomes a budget.

Even the water follows that direction. Under the Sahara lies fossil water, and a state project, the Great Man-Made River, carries it north into the coastal cities. The coast is political Libya, but it is not self-sufficient. It drinks from the sand and it collects revenue from the sand. The Fezzan is rarely a subject in this account. It is a passage toward Niger and Chad, a store of water and oil, and a border that Tripoli barely feels in daily life.

The map shows sand. The state lives on the sea and off the country behind it.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Six neighbours, an empty middle

Libya borders Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt. That is a foreign policy of the compass. To the north, the Mediterranean and, beyond it, Europe. To the west, the Maghreb. To the east, the Nile valley. To the south, the Sahara, across which people, goods and weapons move without a dense administration waiting for them. The empty middle is not a no-man's-land in law. It is Libyan territory. It is simply not the place where the state meets itself.

A capital on the western shore cannot face every direction at once. Tripoli speaks to Tunis and the sea, the east to Egypt, the south to oases and desert borders. Arabic holds this as one language. The dinar holds it as one treasury, as long as the oil flows and someone spends it for the whole country. The desert is the body. The coast is the will. They do not fit into one capital.

Libya is vast where the cities thin out, and contested where they stand. Take the Sahara for the country and you miss the coast. Count only Tripoli and you miss the east and the treasury in the desert.