Looking both ways while holding contradictory views made the Libyan leader a foolish and formidable adversary. But he was not always the foppish monster he became, writes SIMON TISDALL
MUAMMAR GADAFY, who seized power in Libya in a 1969 coup and whose Tripoli stronghold was violently seized on Tuesday evening, was a leader with many guises. He was a Bedouin tribesman, a colonel and a self-styled revolutionary. He was an Arab and an African, a nationalist and a socialist, a Muslim, a poet and a would-be “philosopher king”.
For the Libyan “masses”, he was, in his own words, their Brother Leader, Supreme Guide, mentor, patriarch and uncle. But for his domestic opponents and for much of the western world, Gadafy was something else entirely: a hubristic oil sheikh, a buffoon, a braggart and a heartless killer.
With his overthrow as Libya’s paramount chief, the international stage has lost one of its most colourful and disturbing personalities. Gadafy had the ability to amaze and appal, to shock and amuse, simultaneously and in equal measure. This Janus-like quality, of looking both ways while maintaining contradictory views, made him both a foolish and a formidable adversary.
The Bedouin tent he insisted on pitching when visiting foreign capitals, his infamous entourage of heavily armed female bodyguards, grandiose projects (such as his $20 billion Great Man-Made River through the Libyan desert) and his absurdist, finger-wagging homilies to world leaders often rendered him a figure of fun and derision.
But the darker side of his character and leadership also made him, at various times during his 42-year reign, an object of fear and hatred – a vicious, duplicitous and pitiless enemy who would seemingly stop at nothing to maintain his dominance at home and advance his eccentric, bizarrely warped view of the world.
Writing in 2009, author Amir Taheri described Gadafy as “a caricature of the Renaissance man – a pseudo-poet, pseudo-philosopher and pseudo-soldier. Without having seen a single battle he has collected more medals than generals in an operetta. He has published verse that would make a 12-year-old blush . . . [His] Green Book, echoing Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, [is] full of gems that would make even the Chinese Communist despot sound profound.”
A Gadafy visit to Paris in 2007 proved that, if anything, his eccentricities had deepened with age. He toured Paris in a white stretch limousine and delivered a deeply insensitive lecture in the wake of the 2005 banlieu riots, admonishing an affronted audience about France’s mistreatment of North African immigrants: “They brought us here like cattle to do hard and dirty work, and then they throw us to live on the outskirts of towns, and when we claim our rights, the police beat us.” As if for good measure, Gadafy insulted Christians – “the cross that you wear has no sense, just like your prayers have no sense” – and condemned “the tragic conditions of the European woman, who is forced sometimes into a job that she does not want”. His assumed support for women’s rights was intended, as ever, to disguise an almost pathological, life-long misogyny. But few, apart perhaps from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, a one-time ally and fellow philanderer, were fooled.
Gadafy's other side – murderous, blood-chilling and arrogant – was on ugly display in an interview he gave to the Washington Postin 2003. He was asked about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people. A Libyan national, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, had been found guilty of the crime and Libya had offered to pay $2.7 billion in compensation – convincing many that Gadafy himself was personally complicit in the plot.
When pressed, Gadafy turned the tables, claiming Libya should be compensated too. Why would the US contribute, he was asked. “To compensate for the Libyans who were killed in the 1986 [US] bombing [of Gadafy’s compound in Tripoli] – as well as for the victims of Lockerbie. How much do you think the compensation should be for Gadafy’s daughter [who was one of the victims]? If a normal American needs $10 million, then a daughter of Gadafy should be worth billions.”
Gadafy was not always the foppish monster he subsequently became. Born in 1942 in the desert near Sirte to an illiterate Bedouin family, his outlook seems to have been crucially shaped during his schooldays by revolutionary upheavals in the Arab world, principally in Nasser’s Egypt, and by the 1948 Arab defeat in Palestine. At the Libyan military academy, he fell in with a group of radicals influenced by their study of Greek democracy and Islamic egalitarianism.
As a handsome junior officer – a far cry from the bloated, Botox-scarred dictator he became – he helped lead a coup against the pro-western King Idris in September 1969 and so launched Libya into a new age of supposedly perpetual revolution. In time he proclaimed the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – literally, “the state of the masses” – and organised a system of revolutionary or people’s committees in every town, village, factory and farm that became the de facto enforcers of the new regime’s diktat.
Setting out his ideas in the Green Book, the essential literary companion to his so-called Green Revolution, Gadafy abolished formal government structures or, rather, created a more important, parallel power base that he, his relatives and favoured tribal allies controlled. While professing his faith, he kept Islam and Islamists on a tight leash.
Relinquishing the post of prime minister in 1979, Gadafy assumed no new formal title, preferring terms such as Brother Leader and Supreme Guide. All military ranks above that of colonel had been abolished. Despite all his talk of rule by the people for the people, it soon became clear there was only one colonel in Libya – and only one voice, among seven million, that really mattered.
Gadafy was fortunate in the 1970s, in two respects. Firstly, the great powers did not consider Libya important enough – strategically, geographically or militarily speaking – to worry too much about its zany leader’s ideas, at least at first.
Secondly, Libya had oil – before the war it was earning about $1.6 billion a year from exports – and Gadafy used the wealth and influence it brought to keep potential enemies at bay and the country under firm control.
Under his unlikely tutelage, Libya’s population, small in comparison to countries such as Egypt, enjoyed relatively high living standards. Of course, much of the oil wealth – worth an estimated $1 trillion over the first 40 years of his rule – was squandered, stolen or embezzled. Gadafy and his six sons, increasingly important props for his one-man regime, became immensely rich. Most non-oil industries and the agricultural sector wilted from neglect, lack of investment and corruption. And the Libyan people’s state became one of the world’s most repressive.
Gadafy’s revolution left the rails almost as soon as he began to dabble in foreign affairs. It was as though Libya was not a big enough stage. His ego demanded a larger audience. In time, he certainly obtained one.
His ideas about mergers with other Arab countries, replicated in his later enthusiasm for a “United States of Africa” – with him as president – were mostly harmless. But his ill-concealed backing for anti-western terrorist groups, part of his revolutionary mission to change the world, made him multiple enemies.
Libya’s support was as indiscriminate as it was lavish. From the IRA in Ireland, the Red Brigades in Italy and Eta in Spain to Shining Path in Peru and the Sword of Islam in the Philippines, terror groups everywhere benefited from his largesse.
Infamous individuals such as Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal were given shelter. A French aircraft, UTA Flight 772, was blown up over Niger in 1989, killing 171 people including the wife of the American ambassador to Chad. European capitals were bombed. Assassination squads were sent around the world, targeting Libyan dissidents who Gadafy labelled “stray dogs”. Amnesty International listed 25 such killings in the 1980s.
But when Gadafy turned his murderous attentions directly on the US, sending agents to bomb a nightclub in Berlin packed with American servicemen, Washington and its allies drew the line. In 1986, denouncing Gadafy as “the mad dog of the Middle East”, Ronald Reagan sent cruise missiles slamming into his compound in Tripoli. It was, the US later admitted, an attempt to kill him, echoing an alleged attempt by Britain. Two years later came Lockerbie. Ever tougher UN, US and EU sanctions and deepening international ostracism ensued. By the 1990s Libya had become a pariah state and Gadafy its pariah-in-chief.
Isolation did not suit his self-aggrandising, showman side. But then came the 9/11 attacks and with them, an opportunity. The US was suddenly badly in need of allies. The Americans’ subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 seriously spooked Gadafy. In a spectacular volte-face, the Libyan leader came over to the west. But his 2003-04 rehabilitation now looks, with hindsight, like an embarrassing blip – a sort of strategic con trick that only the colonel could pull off.
European leaders and diplomats, dutifully grinning for the cameras with the Arab world’s prodigal son, tacitly agreed to turn a blind eye to the past. Oil companies returned to the Libyan desert. Gadafy’s comeback was crowned in 2009 by his first address to the UN general assembly.
But Gadafy was still, at bottom, the same man. There was no true change of heart, only cynical political calculation in the cause of self-preservation. He admitted no fault for the terrors of the past, and his sinister menace continued to hover oppressively over his native land. Even if naive western politicians and businesses could not or would not see it, the Libyan people did. As the Brother Leader aged, as younger generations rose in search of their rights, as his rival sons fought to secure their undeserved inheritance, as tribal loyalties frayed and as the Arab world exploded in tumult, his weakness, his cruelty and his moral bankruptcy were plainly exposed for all to see.
Libya's Supreme Guide had lost his way. His slogan of 40 years: "God, Muammar, Libya: Enough!" had lost its power. And in the end he is being blown away as surely and as brutally as an unsuspecting airliner climbing gracefully through Scottish skies. – ( Guardianservice)