Libya

• 1. Introduction

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  Libya, now a country in North Africa, first appears in the record as a name carved into Egyptian stone. The Great Karnak Inscription describes a war fought in year 5 of the pharaoh Merneptah, in 1208 BC. King Meryey led a confederacy called the Great Chiefs of the Libu, with an army of 40,000 men. He lost. His allies included the Meshwesh, the Lukka and the Sea Peoples known as the Ekwesh, Teresh, Shekelesh and Sherden. The Egyptian text mocks him. It reads: 'The wretched, fallen chief of Libya, Meryey, son of Ded, has fallen upon the country of Tehenu with his bowmen.' The inscription adds that he brought his wife and his children with him, and reached the western boundary in the fields of Perire. The same word now names an entire nation. How did an outsider's label for a defeated chieftain's people become the name of a modern state? Who ruled this long Mediterranean coast, and the vast desert behind it, in the centuries between? And why has a land with so much oil wealth struggled to settle on a single government?

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• 2. A Name Revived

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  In 1903 the Italian geographer Federico Minutilli brought the name Libya back into use. He meant it to replace the terms then applied to Tripolitania, the coastal region under Ottoman rule. The older Egyptian word had described a loose confederacy of Berber and other North African tribes living around the lush regions of Cyrenaica and Marmarica. Minutilli's revival gave it a second and much larger life.

  Independence in 1951 produced the United Libyan Kingdom, renamed the Kingdom of Libya in 1963. In 1969 the name changed to the Libyan Arab Republic. From 1977 to 1986 the official name was the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. From 1986 to 2011 it was the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which simply added the word Great.

  The flag changed with the politics. On the 19th of November 1977 Libya adopted a plain green flag. Until 2011 it was the only plain-coloured national flag in the world.

  Then came a reset. The National Transitional Council, established in 2011, called the state simply Libya. The United Nations formally recognised that name in September 2011, answering a request from Libya's Permanent Mission that cited the interim Constitutional Declaration of the 3rd of August 2011. In November 2011 the international country-code standard ISO 3166-1 was altered to read Libya in English and Libye in French. One more change followed in December 2017, when the Permanent Mission told the United Nations that the official name was henceforth the State of Libya. Libya remained the short form, and the country kept its place under L in alphabetical lists.

  Beneath all this renaming sits a coastal plain that Neolithic peoples had inhabited since as early as 8000 BC.

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• 3. Greeks and Romans

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  The Garamantes, based in the town of Germa, are the earliest named tribe in the region's long record. The Afroasiatic ancestors of the Berber people are assumed to have spread into the area by the Late Bronze Age. The first outsiders to set up trading posts in Libya were the Phoenicians. By the 5th century BC their greatest colony, Carthage, held sway across much of North Africa and had produced a distinct civilisation known as Punic.

  In 630 BC Greek settlers colonised the area around Barca in the east and founded the city of Cyrene. Within 200 years four more important Greek cities stood nearby, in a region that came to be called Cyrenaica. It was also home to the Cyrenaics, a renowned school of philosophy.

  In 525 BC the Persian army of Cambyses II overran Cyrenaica. For the next two centuries it stayed under Persian or Egyptian rule. Alexander the Great ended Persian rule in 331 BC and received tribute from the region. Eastern Libya then returned to Greek control as part of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

  Rome arrived by different roads in east and west. Ptolemy Apion, the last Greek ruler, left Cyrenaica to Rome in his will. Rome formally annexed it in 74 BC and joined it to Crete as a province. After Carthage fell, the Romans did not at once occupy Tripolitania, the region around Tripoli. They left it under the kings of Numidia until the coastal cities asked for Roman protection and received it.

  As part of the province of Africa Nova, Tripolitania prospered. It reached a golden age in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, when Leptis Magna, home to the Severan dynasty, stood at its height.

  Cyrenaica's first Christian communities existed by the time of the Emperor Claudius. The Kitos War later devastated the region, leaving it almost emptied of Greeks and Jews. Trajan resettled it with military colonies, but decline had begun. Libya was early to convert to Nicene Christianity and was the home of Pope Victor I. It also sheltered other early forms of the faith, among them Arianism and Donatism.

  After the Western Roman Empire fell, the Vandals mostly occupied the area, until invasions in the 7th century brought a new religion.

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• 4. Caliphs and Pashas

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  In 647 an army led by Abdullah ibn Saad took Tripoli from the Byzantines for good. The Rashidun army under Amr ibn al-As had already conquered Cyrenaica, and Uqba ibn Nafi took the southern region of Fezzan in 663. The Berber tribes of the hinterland accepted Islam, yet they resisted Arab political rule.

  Authority then travelled a long way. Libya answered first to the Umayyad Caliph in Damascus. When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750, it came under Baghdad. In 800 Caliph Harun al-Rashid appointed Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as governor of Ifriqiya. Under his Aghlabid dynasty Libya enjoyed considerable local autonomy.

  The Shiite Fatimids controlled western Libya by the 10th century. In 972 they ruled the whole region and appointed Bologhine ibn Ziri as governor. His Berber Zirid dynasty later broke away and recognised the Sunni Abbasids of Baghdad as the rightful caliphs. The Fatimids answered by sending thousands of people from two Arab tribes, the Banu Sulaym and the Banu Hilal, into North Africa. That migration drastically altered the Libyan countryside and drove its cultural and linguistic Arabisation.

  Control kept changing hands. The Berbers of the Banu Khazrun broke away in 1001 and held Tripolitania until 1146, when the Normans of Sicily overtook it. For the next 50 years Ayyubids, Almohad rulers and the insurgent Banu Ghaniya fought over the region. An Almohad general, Muhammad ibn Abu Hafs, ruled Libya from 1207 to 1221 before the Hafsid Kingdom of Tunisia arose independent of the Almohads. Cyrenaica, meanwhile, answered to Egypt-based states until the Ottoman conquest of 1517.

  In 1510 Habsburg Spain invaded Tripoli and handed it to the Knights Hospitaller. In 1551 the Ottoman admiral Sinan Pasha took control of Libya. His successor Turgut Reis was named Bey of Tripoli and later, in 1556, Pasha of Tripoli. That same year of 1551, Turgut Reis enslaved almost the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, some 5,000 people, and sent them to Libya. European slaves and large numbers of enslaved Black people brought from Sudan became part of everyday life in Tripoli.

  Real power drifted to the janissaries, the pasha's military corps. In 1611 the deys staged a coup against the pasha, and Dey Sulayman Safar became head of government. For the next hundred years a series of deys effectively ruled Tripolitania. The two most important were Mehmed Saqizli, who ruled from 1631 to 1649, and Osman Saqizli, from 1649 to 1672. Osman also conquered Cyrenaica. Without direction from the Ottoman government, Tripoli lapsed into military anarchy, and few deys survived in office more than a year.

  One coup was led by the Turkish officer Ahmed Karamanli. His Karamanli dynasty ruled from 1711 until 1835, mainly in Tripolitania, and by the mid-18th century it had influence in Cyrenaica and Fezzan too. A civil war in 1793-95 saw the Turkish officer Ali Pasha depose Hamet Karamanli and briefly restore Ottoman rule. Hamet's brother Yusuf, who reigned from 1795 to 1832, re-established Tripolitania's independence. In 1816 he ordered the massacre of the al-Jawazi tribe.

  In the early 19th century war broke out between the United States and Tripolitania, in what came to be called the First and Second Barbary Wars. By 1819 the treaties of the Napoleonic Wars had forced the Barbary states to give up piracy almost entirely, and Tripolitania's economy began to crumble. As Yusuf weakened, factions formed around his three sons, and civil war followed. Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II sent in troops, ostensibly to restore order. That ended both the Karamanli dynasty and an independent Tripolitania. A revolt under Abd-El-Gelil and Gûma ben Khalifa lasted until Gûma's death in 1858.

  The Ottomans also reasserted their rule in Fezzan between 1850 and 1875, hoping to earn income from Saharan commerce.

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• 5. Colony to Kingdom

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  When the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912 ended, Italy turned the three regions of Libya into colonies. From 1912 to 1927 the territory was known as Italian North Africa. From 1927 to 1934 it was split into Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania, each run by an Italian governor. Some 150,000 Italians settled there, roughly 20% of the total population.

  Omar Mukhtar became the best-known face of resistance. He was captured and executed on the 16th of September 1931, yet he is remembered as a national hero, and his face appears on the Libyan ten dinar note. Idris al-Mahdi as-Senussi, Emir of Cyrenaica and later King Idris I, kept leading the resistance until the Second World War began.

  The Italian campaign called the pacification of Libya killed approximately one quarter of Cyrenaica's population of 225,000. Ilan Pappé estimates that between 1928 and 1932 the Italian military 'killed half the Bedouin population (directly or through disease and starvation in Italian concentration camps in Libya).'

  In 1934 Italy combined Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan into a single colony with Tripoli as its capital. It chose the name Libya, which the ancient Greeks had used for all of North Africa except Egypt. From 1934 to 1940 the Italians greatly expanded the road and railway networks, building hundreds of kilometres of new routes. They also encouraged new industries and dozens of new agricultural villages.

  In June 1940 Italy entered the Second World War, and Libya became the setting for the hard-fought North African Campaign. It ended in defeat for Italy and its German ally in 1943. From 1943 to 1951 Libya was under Allied occupation, with the British administering Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and the French administering Fezzan. Idris returned from exile in Cairo in 1944 but declined to live permanently in Cyrenaica until some foreign control was removed in 1947. Under the peace treaty of 1947, Italy gave up all claims to Libya.

  Sayyid Idris was born in 1890 in an oasis in Cyrenaica and took charge of the Senussi at a young age. His grandfather had founded this religious brotherhood in the previous century as a response to Western influence in the Arab world. It drew strong support from the desert Bedouin. In the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, it effectively governed the Libyan interior. A national assembly wrote a constitution that established a monarchy and offered the throne to Idris.

  On the 21st of November 1949 the UN General Assembly resolved that Libya should become independent before the 1st of January 1952. Idris represented Libya in the negotiations that followed. On the 24th of December 1951, as King Idris I, he addressed the nation by radio from Benghazi.

  The new kingdom faced grim prospects. It had little industry and few agricultural resources. Its main exports were hides, wool, horses and ostrich feathers. It had one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world and one of the highest illiteracy rates. Idris was already in his sixties and had no direct heir. He had married his cousin in 1932, and she reportedly suffered numerous miscarriages. Their son, born in 1953, died shortly after birth. His brother, Crown Prince Rida, was named heir, but the royal family was riddled with disputes.

  The king's devout piety secured Bedouin support but clashed with modernising, urban intellectuals. To ease rivalry between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, Benghazi and Tripoli alternated as the capital every two years. A swift rise in the number of bureaucrats made the royal government costly. In foreign affairs the kingdom stayed close to the West. It joined the Arab League in 1953 and established full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1955.

  The discovery of major oil reserves at the end of the 1950s changed everything. Income from petroleum let one of the world's poorest nations build an extremely wealthy state. But resentment grew as the new wealth gathered in the hands of the king and the national elite, and the rise of Nasserism and Arab nationalism added to the discontent. Libya joined OPEC in 1962.

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• 6. The Brother Leader

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  On the 1st of September 1969 a group of rebel military officers led by Muammar Gaddafi launched a coup d'état against King Idris. It became known as the Al Fateh Revolution. Government statements and the official press called Gaddafi the 'Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution'. Critics often described him as a dictator. He ruled for 42 years, which made him one of the world's longest serving non-royal leaders.

  In October 1970 all Italian-owned assets were expropriated. The 12,000-strong Italian community was expelled, along with the smaller community of Italian Libyan Jews. The day became a national holiday called the Day of Revenge. It was later renamed the Day of Friendship after relations between Italy and Libya improved.

  Prosperity came with repression. Law 75 of 1973 made political dissent illegal, and Gaddafi's Revolutionary Committees carried out widespread surveillance of the population.

  Gaddafi also wanted to ease the strict social limits that the previous regime had placed on women. A law of 1970 affirmed equality of the sexes and wage parity. In 1971 he sponsored the creation of a Libyan General Women's Federation. A law of 1972 criminalised the marriage of girls under sixteen and made a woman's consent a necessary condition for marriage.

  On the 25th of October 1975 a group of 20 military officers, mostly from the city of Misrata, attempted a coup. The plotters were arrested and executed. That same year Gaddafi published The Green Book, a short work that mixed utopian socialism and Arab nationalism with a streak of Bedouin supremacy.

  In 1977 Libya became a jamahiriya, a word the source translates as republic. Gaddafi officially passed power to the General People's Committees and claimed to be no more than a symbolic figurehead. The system was officially described as direct democracy.

  In February 1977 Libya began delivering military supplies to Goukouni Oueddei and the People's Armed Forces in Chad. Support for rebel forces in northern Chad grew into an invasion, the Chadian-Libyan War. Later that year Libya and Egypt fought a four-day border war. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire mediated by the Algerian president Houari Boumédiène. Hundreds of Libyans died supporting Idi Amin's Uganda in its war against Tanzania. Gaddafi also financed groups as varied as anti-nuclear movements and Australian trade unions.

  From 1977 onward, per capita income rose to more than US$11,000, the fifth-highest in Africa. The Human Development Index became the highest in Africa, and greater than that of Saudi Arabia. This was done without foreign loans, which left Libya debt-free. Money also went to university scholarships and employment programs. Yet much of the oil income, which soared in the 1970s, was spent on arms and on sponsoring dozens of paramilitary and terrorist groups around the world.

  Relations with the West were strained for most of Gaddafi's rule. Incidents included the killing of the London policewoman Yvonne Fletcher and the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by US servicemen. An American airstrike in 1986, led by President Ronald Reagan and intended to kill Gaddafi, failed. After the bombing of a commercial flight at Lockerbie in 1988 killed 270 people, the United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya. Gaddafi had also backed leaders viewed as hostile to Westernisation and political liberalism, including Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Haile Mariam Mengistu, Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milošević.

  In the 1990s militant Islamism and an unsuccessful assassination attempt threatened the government. It responded with repressive measures, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps crushed riots and Islamic activism. Between 1995 and 1998 Cyrenaica was politically unstable because of the tribal allegiances of local troops.

  In 2003 Gaddafi announced that all of his regime's weapons of mass destruction had been disassembled and that Libya was moving toward nuclear power. UN sanctions were lifted in September 2003. Gaddafi's decision to abandon such weapons came after the Iraq War saw Saddam Hussein overthrown and put on trial. Libya was then hailed as a success for Western soft power in the war on terror, and by the late 2000s the United States and other Western powers had normalised relations.

  In October 2010 Gaddafi apologised to African leaders, on behalf of Arab nations, for their involvement in the trans-Saharan slave trade. It came only months before the uprising that would end his rule.

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• 7. Revolt and Rival Governments

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  Protests against Gaddafi began on the 15th of February 2011, and a full-scale revolt followed on the 17th. It was part of the Arab Spring, which had already overturned the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt. Those regimes fell quickly. Gaddafi's resisted far harder and stalled the uprising.

  A rival authority, the Interim Transitional National Council, was first announced online. One of Gaddafi's senior advisors then resigned, defected and urged him to flee. By the 20th of February unrest had reached Tripoli. On the 27th of February the National Transitional Council was established to run the areas under rebel control. On the 10th of March the United States and many other nations recognised the council, headed by Mahmoud Jibril as acting prime minister, as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people.

  Pro-Gaddafi forces pushed back along the coast toward Benghazi, the de facto centre of the uprising. The town of Zawiya, 48 km from Tripoli, was bombarded by air force planes and army tanks and seized, 'exercising a level of brutality not yet seen in the conflict.' The United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the crackdown and expelled Libya outright in an unprecedented action.

  On the 17th of March 2011 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 by 10 votes to none, with five abstentions including Russia, China, India, Brazil and Germany. It sanctioned a no-fly zone and the use of 'all means necessary' to protect civilians. On the 19th of March French military jets entered Libyan airspace, heralding attacks on Libyan targets. In the weeks that followed, American forces were in the forefront of NATO operations, with more than 8,000 US personnel in warships and aircraft. They struck at least 3,000 targets in 14,202 strike sorties, 716 of them in Tripoli and 492 in Brega. B-2 stealth bombers, each armed with sixteen 2000-pound bombs, flew from and returned to a base in Missouri.

  By the 22nd of August 2011 rebel fighters had entered Tripoli and occupied Green Square, which they renamed Martyrs' Square. On the 20th of October the last heavy fighting ended in Sirte, Gaddafi's birthplace and the last loyalist stronghold. Gaddafi was captured and killed there by NATO-backed forces. At least 30,000 Libyans died in the war, and the National Transitional Council estimated 50,000 wounded.

  Afterwards Libya was torn among rival armed militias tied to particular regions, cities and tribes, while the central government stayed weak. On the 7th of July 2012 Libyans held their first parliamentary elections since the old regime ended, and around thirty women won seats. The National Forces Alliance, led by Mahmoud Jibril, was the early front runner. The Justice and Construction Party, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, won 17 of the 80 seats contested by parties. On the 8th of August the National Transitional Council handed power to the elected General National Congress.

  Violence soon marred the transition. On the 25th of August 2012 unnamed assailants bulldozed a Sufi mosque with graves in the centre of Tripoli. Reuters called it the most blatant sectarian attack since the civil war ended. On the 11th of September 2012 Islamist militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, killing the US ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others. The prime minister-elect Mustafa A.G. Abushagur was ousted in October 2012 after failing twice to win approval for a cabinet. Ali Zeidan, a human rights lawyer, took the post, but stepped down on the 11th of March 2014 after failing to halt a rogue oil shipment. Abdullah al-Thani replaced him.

  The second civil war began in May 2014 as rival parliaments, tribal militias and jihadist groups exploited the power vacuum. Elections to a new House of Representatives in June 2014 were marred by violence and low turnout. Armed supporters of the General National Congress occupied Tripoli, forcing the new parliament to flee to Tobruk. Radical Islamist fighters seized Derna in 2014 and Sirte in 2015 in the name of the Islamic State. In February 2015 neighbouring Egypt launched airstrikes against the Islamic State in support of the Tobruk government.

  United Nations diplomacy ran through 2015 under the Spanish diplomat Bernardino León, with talks culminating at Skhirat in Morocco in early September. An agreement signed on the 17th of December 2015 created a nine-member Presidency Council and a seventeen-member interim Government of National Accord. Meanwhile chaos made Libya a major transit point for people trying to reach Europe. Between 2013 and 2018 nearly 700,000 migrants reached Italy by boat, many of them from Libya.

  In April 2019 Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army launched Operation Flood of Dignity to seize western territories from the Government of National Accord. In March 2020 its prime minister, Fayez Al-Sarraj, answered with Operation Peace Storm. The BBC reported in August 2020 that a drone operated by the United Arab Emirates had killed 26 young cadets at a military academy in Tripoli on the 4th of January. Most were teenagers, and none was armed. The Guardian reported that the United Arab Emirates and Turkey violated the UN arms embargo by flying military cargo planes into Libya. On the 23rd of October 2020 a permanent ceasefire was signed.

  A unity government followed, announced on the 5th of February 2021 after 74 members of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum voted. Mohamed al-Menfi became head of the Presidential Council, and the businessman Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh became transitional prime minister. The first presidential election, scheduled for the 24th of December 2021, was postponed indefinitely. An appeals court had reinstated Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of the former dictator, as a candidate. In February 2022 parliament appointed Fathi Bashagha prime minister, but Dbeibeh refused to hand over power. In March 2022 the House of Representatives proclaimed the Government of National Stability. Both governments have operated side by side since, a situation of dual power, though the international community still recognises the unity government.

  On the 18th of April 2022 tribal leaders from Ubari shut down the El Sharara oil field, Libya's largest, in protest at the Dbeibeh government. On the 2nd of July protesters stormed the parliament building in Tobruk and lit fires. On the 10th of September 2023 dam failures during Storm Daniel devastated the port city of Derna. The floods killed more than 5,900 people and possibly as many as 24,000, the worst natural disaster in Libya's modern history.

  In November 2024 the Government of National Unity announced a morality police to crack down on 'weird haircuts', enforce 'modest' clothing and require male guardians for women.

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• 8. Desert, Water and Oil

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  At Uweinat, in the Libyan Desert, the last recorded rainfall came in September 1998. The desert covers most of the country and is one of the most arid and sun-baked places on Earth. In places decades pass without rain, and even the highlands see it only once every 5-10 years. On the 13th of September 1922 the town of 'Aziziya, southwest of Tripoli, recorded an air temperature of 58 degrees Celsius, long treated as a world record. In September 2012 the World Meteorological Organization ruled that figure invalid.

  The flat horizon is broken by plateaus and massifs near where the Egyptian, Sudanese and Libyan borders meet. Arkenu, Uweinat and Kissu are granite mountains formed long before the sandstones around them. Eastern Uweinat, a raised sandstone plateau, is the highest point in the Libyan Desert. Ghadames and Kufra are the most important of the oases scattered across the country. In spring and autumn a hot, dust-laden southern wind called the gibli, a kind of sirocco, blows for one to four days at a time.

  Libya covers 1,759,540 square kilometres, which makes it the 16th-largest country in the world. Its 1,770 kilometres of Mediterranean coastline is the longest of any African country on that sea. Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt lie along its other borders. The north enjoys a milder Mediterranean climate than the desert interior.

  The search for oil in the 1950s turned up a second prize. Beneath much of Libya lies the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose water predates the last ice ages and the Sahara Desert itself. The Great Man-Made River, the world's largest irrigation project, pumps this fossil water by pipeline from the south to northern coastal cities including Tripoli and Benghazi. It supplies 70% of all the freshwater used in Libya. During the second civil war the system suffered neglect and occasional breakdowns.

  Oil dominates the economy. It accounts for over half of GDP and 97% of exports. Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa and the 10th-largest in the world. In 2010, with oil averaging $80 a barrel, petroleum made up 54% of GDP. Production exceeded 1.6 million barrels per day before the 2011 war, and after four years of conflict it had fallen to 900,000.

  Before oil, agriculture was the main source of revenue and made up about 30% of GDP. By 2005 it was under 5%. Libya now imports up to 90% of its cereal needs. In the mid-2000s the government employed about 70% of all national employees. Unemployment rose from 8% in 2008 to 21% in 2009. After 2003 the authorities privatised more than 100 government-owned companies, of which 29 were fully foreign owned.

  About 90% of Libyans live along the coast, on less than 10% of the land, and roughly 88% of the population is urban. Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata are the largest cities, and Tripoli alone holds over a million of the country's seven million people. Elsewhere the density falls below 1 person per square kilometre. Arabs make up 92% of the population and Berbers 5%, though other estimates put the Berber share nearer 10%, about 600,000 people. The Tuareg and Toubou live in the south. Libya is one of the world's most tribal countries, with about 140 tribes and clans. About 750,000 Egyptian workers live there, down from more than 2 million before Gaddafi fell. Some 96.6% of the population is Sunni Muslim.

  In 1975 Libya created the El Kouf protected area, a pioneering step in species protection in North Africa. The zoologist Khaled Ettaieb says poaching surged after 2011. He describes militiamen hunting with weapons of war from vehicles carrying up to 200 gazelle heads, and says more than 500,000 birds are killed each year.

  Climate change adds pressure. At just over 13 tonnes per person, Libya has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per person in Africa and the 21st highest in the world. It signed the UN climate convention in 2016 and the Paris Agreement in 2021, but as of 2024 it has not ratified the Paris Agreement. Storm Daniel also destroyed agricultural infrastructure and contaminated productive farmland with debris and pollutants, harm that will affect farming for years.

  As of March 2024 Libya was promoting business development and encouraging domestic and foreign investment. The plan points toward renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture and eco-tourism, in the hope of creating jobs for the young people hit hardest by unemployment.

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