OBITUARY:His legacy amounts to a fragmented society lacking political culture or civil infrastructure
THE END, when it came was bloody and ignominious.
While the manner of Muammar Gadafy’s death remains unclear, the grainy images showing his partially clothed body lying face-down on a street in his hometown of Sirte were, for Libyans, incontrovertible proof that the man who had ruled their country with an iron grip for more than four decades was no more.
February 15th, 2011, will go down in history as the day that marked the beginning of the end for Gadafy. Inspired by protests that had toppled dictators in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt, Libyans in Benghazi took to the streets. Hundreds were killed in the days that followed.
As the demonstrations against him spread across the country, Gadafy delivered a fiery televised speech in which he vowed to snuff out what he called “rats” and “devils”, saying they would be hunted down “home by home, alley by alley”. He would repeat that chilling threat weeks later as his forces advanced on Benghazi, and warned that there would be “no mercy, no pity” for those who continued to defy him in what had, by then, turned into an armed revolt. Those words now appear to have been Gadafy’s undoing. Days later the UN passed a resolution that paved the way for a Nato air campaign that weakened the regime’s military strength and helped prepare the ground for the fall of Tripoli to rebel forces on August 21st.
Gadafy’s passing comes 42 years, one month, and 20 days after he came to power at the age of 27 following a bloodless military coup against King Idris. He was born in 1942 to Bedouin parents in the coastal area of Sirte and had briefly studied geography at university before dropping out to join the army.
After his coup came an experiment in tyranny. The mercurial young army officer, an admirer of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab socialist and nationalist ideas, strove to shape Libya in his own image.
In the 1970s Gadafy outlined the ideology underpinning his regime in his Green Book, a rambling collection of his idiosyncratic thoughts on politics, economics and society that melded pan-African, pan-Arab and anti-imperialist ideals.
In 1986 he told a French journalist that he wished “in this century . . . [that] the Green Book become the bible of the modern world.” One writer summed up its content, which ranges from musings on the slavery of wages to black power and the failings of parliamentary democracy, as “Marx meets Malcolm X”.
In 1977 Gadafy changed Libya’s name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (a neologism that translates loosely as “state of the masses”) and declared its peculiar political system an alternative to capitalism and communism. He had no official government role and was instead known as the “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution”.
Gadafy oversaw Libya’s development from a desert monarchy to a state which could boast some of the highest living standards in Africa. But he proved ruthless when it came to crushing dissent. Political parties were banned, civil society was non-existent and opposition figures were rounded up, jailed or, in the early decades of his rule, hanged publicly.
Thousands vanished into Libya’s prisons. In 1996, more than 1,200 political prisoners were massacred in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail.
The arrest of a lawyer who represented the families of those killed in Abu Salim was the spark that ignited the spring protests.
Many dissidents who escaped overseas were pursued and killed by Libyan agents.
Gadafy played a major role in summoning Arab opposition to the 1978 Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and for a time his bombastic, confrontational style was admired by Arabs frustrated with their leaders. He later turned his attention towards Africa, despite his previous meddling in countries including Chad, arguing for the establishment of a “United States of Africa” in which the continent would boast “a single African military force, a single currency and a single passport for Africans to move freely around the continent”. The idea never amounted to much although it did influence what eventually became the African Union, founded in 2002. Gadafy served as its chairman from 2009 to 2010 and used Libya’s vast oil wealth to lavish largesse on several of its members as a way of buying influence. This was the main reason why the African Union’s offer to broker an agreement during this year’s war was treated with suspicion by Libya’s rebels.
His relationship with the rest of the world ebbed and flowed over his 42 years in power. In the 1980s the Libyan leader’s support for militant movements across the world made him a pariah. He was branded “mad dog” by then US president Ronald Reagan following the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub, allegedly by Libyan agents. The blast, which claimed the lives of two American soldiers, prompted US air raids on Libya.
Earlier this year he used the building bombed in that attack, which had been left untouched for 25 years, as a backdrop for one of his first defiant rants against the rebels, standing next to a memorial in the shape of a giant golden fist crushing a US warplane. This week, Libya’s interim authorities began demolishing the compound.
The most notorious chapter in Gadafy’s relationship with the west opened in 1988 with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in which 270 people died. For years he denied involvement, which resulted in UN sanctions and international pariah status. Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was convicted of planting the bomb. In 2003, Gadafy’s regime accepted responsibility for the attack and paid compensation to relatives of those who had perished. His rehabilitation was all but complete when in the same year he acknowledged that Libya had been developing weapons of mass destruction and offered to give them up.
He was later lauded by leaders including Britain’s then prime minister Tony Blair who applauded the newly respectable Gadafy as a trusted partner in the “war on terror”. In 2004, George W Bush ended a US trade embargo.
Libya’s economy was to flourish but Gadafy had not lost his capacity to outrage. Al-Megrahi was given a hero’s welcome on his return to Tripoli in 2009 following his release from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds. The same year, Gadafy made his first appearance at the UN General Assembly, in which he tore up a copy of the UN charter and compared the Security Council to al-Qaeda.
Libyans often complain that Gadafy was treated as something close to a figure of fun by those unfamiliar with his regime’s cruelties.
His flamboyant dress, provocative statements, and eccentric behaviour obscured the brutality of life under his rule.
Libyans like Mohammed Busidra, who spent 21 years in Abu Salim prison, are happy he is gone: “It is time to rebuild Libya and transform it into the country we deserve.”