Word: tripoli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...textbook coup. At 3 a.m., shortly before the most faithful Moslems would answer the call to early morning prayers, columns of trucks loaded with troops rolled through Tripoli, spearheaded by British-made Centurion tanks. Swiftly, soldiers surrounded army headquarters, the security police building, the Royal Palace and the national radio station. Teleprinters in the national news agency fell silent. The borders were sealed tight, and at the airports, controllers got orders to suspend all air traffic indefinitely...
There were other puzzling aspects. While Radio Tripoli proclaimed "a revolutionary Libya, a socialist Libya," representatives of the 40-odd foreign oil companies (38 of them American) were assured on two separate occasions that their investments were safe. U.S., British and French diplomats heard promises of friendship and good faith. At the British airbase at El Adem, near Tobruk, and at the huge, $100 million Wheelus airbase, manned by some 3,000 Americans, the commanders tactfully suspended training flights, and the new regime requested that the flights remain suspended "temporarily." In every case, the spokesmen for the new regime were...
...foreigners. Only 2% of the land is under cultivation, and even workable farm land has been ignored as inflation, and the illusory promise of jobs spurred an exodus from the countryside. Even the nomad Bedouins have left the desert to live in the filth-ridden shantytowns that now encircle Tripoli and Benghazi. What little industry or trade exists, besides the oil business, is mainly controlled by Italians...
...When new schools were built, there were not enough competent Libyan teachers to staff them. The shortage was eased by importing Egyptians, many of whom were aflame with Nasserite notions of Arab unity and socialism. During the brief periods when the curfew was lifted last week, young men in Tripoli swarmed out to cheer the revolution, and schoolgirls built triumphal arches of branches and flowers on scores of streets. Libyan embassies in Damascus, Rome and Athens were seized by young Libyan students and officers studying abroad...
...like it had happened since 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, when a British man o' war overtook the U.S.S. Chesapeake, searched her for deserters and shanghaied four seamen. An even more dramatic depredation occurred in 1804, four months after Barbary pirates captured the grounded U.S. frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor and clapped her crewmen into prison. Lieut. Stephen ("Our country, right or wrong") Decatur sailed into the port aboard a vessel disguised as a blockade-runner from Malta, boarded Philadelphia and, with a crew of 84, routed the 200 Tripolitan crewmen who had been put aboard. Decatur set Philadelphia...