Meet Libya’s New—Well, Newish—Ambassador

This week, a truck will pull up to the Libyan Embassy in Washington’s Watergate office building and haul away 200,000 copies of Muammar Qaddafi’s The Green Book, the deposed dictator’s rambling political manifesto that was required reading in Libya for nearly four decades. Qaddafi shipped the volumes to the U.S. a year ago with orders for his then-ambassador, Ali Aujali, to hand them out everywhere he went. Aujali didn’t bother to do that, and the thousands of unopened boxes crowded the embassy’s closets. The newly appointed ambassador from post-Qaddafi Libya couldn’t wait to be rid of them and called a disposal company as one of his first official acts. The new ambassador’s name: Ali Aujali.

As the Libyan embassy reopens its doors under new management, Aujali—who represented Qaddafi’s regime for nearly seven years before defecting to the rebel side in February—will once again represent his country in Washington, this time as ambassador for Libya’s provisional government. It’s an oddity of the Libyan revolution that several leaders of the rebellion that ousted Qaddafi were longtime loyalists who must now dismantle the regime they helped prop up. Like Aujali, the most prominent figures in Libya’s new National Transitional Council—Chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was Qaddafi’s Justice Minister, and Mahmoud Jibril, a former economic adviser and now transitional Prime Minister—rose against the dictator only after the rebellion began.