Titans of History

KADAFFI

1942–2011

It is the Libyan people’s responsibility to liquidate such scum who are distorting Libya’s image

Colonel Kadaffi

Colonel Muammar Kadaffi was the long-serving Libyan dictator who combined reckless terror with flamboyant buffoonery, until his pitiless repression of a popular revolution united the Western powers, led by Britain and France, against him in an armed intervention that ultimately led to his own lynching and death. Throughout his career, his colorful follies and brutal killings won him a prominence beyond his own meager talents and the power of his small country, Libya. Like Saddam Hussein, it was his downfall as much as his misrule that made him important.

Born in a Bedouin family in Sirte, he trained as an army officer, spending time in Britain, where he recalled playing football in Hyde Park. On his return to Libya, then a kingdom under King Idris, he admired the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser in neighboring Egypt and formed his own camarilla of radical free officers who seized power in September 1969. Kadaffi was then only a lieutenant at age twenty-seven, but he became president of Libya, leading a tiny junta of fellow officers such as Major Jalloud. However his deputy Jalloud was soon marginalized as Kadaffi himself assumed autocratic powers.

Promoting himself as a radical Arab socialist-nationalist, he dreamed of assuming leadership of the entire Arab world, particularly after the death in 1970 of his hero, Nasser. Throughout his career, he tried to increase his own importance (and copy Nasser’s short-lived union with Syria) by offering to merge with other countries: in the early 1970s, he tried to merge with Egypt. When President Sadat resisted and then made peace with Israel in 1977, Kadaffi ordered the invasion of Egypt—a brief war that ended in total defeat. In the 1980s, he interfered in Chad, tried to force a merger between the two countries, then sent his troops to fight there and ended up being humiliatingly defeated in the so-called Toyota War.

At home, he tolerated little opposition and ruled by playing off the army and the tribes and by organizing a brutal secret police, who terrorized political opponents and Islamists alike, while assassinating any opposition in exile.

In 1977, he formally stepped down as head of state to become “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution” without any official position in his Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which was meant to be run by people’s committees. In fact he remained dictator but he spent much time communing with the people in his ornate Bedouin tents (which were often pitched amidst fortified army camps to avoid assassination). Kadaffi wrote his Green Book, a tract in the vein of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which laid out his own special brand of popular rule, Arab nationalism, socialism, rabid anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism and was obligatory reading in all Libyan schools.

A rampant exhibitionist as well as a shrewdly pitiless tyrant, he used Libyan oil revenues to fund foreign terrorists across the world. The Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany and the IRA in Britain as well as radical Palestinian terror groups all received money from Kadaffi’s generous purse. In 1984, Libyan diplomats fired on dissidents protesting outside their London embassy, killing policewoman Yvonne Fletcher. In 1986, Libyan intelligence bombed a Berlin nightclub frequented by American troops, killing three and wounding 229. President Ronald Reagan called him a “mad dog” and US planes attacked Libya, almost assassinating Kadaffi. Kadaffi sought revenge by organizing in December 1988 the destruction of an American civilian airliner which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland killing 270 innocents. Faced with American hostility, he moved closer to the Soviet Union, but Libya had become a pariah state for much of rest of the world.

He pursued his own arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons and was an ally of Saddam Hussein, but when the latter was defeated and overthrown, Kadaffi performed a diplomatic somersault. He allowed one of his own intelligence agents—Abdul Baset Megrahi—to be tried for the Lockerbie crime, paid compensation to the families and in 2003/4 he began secret negotiations with the Americans and British to return to respectability. He also admitted to the existence of and gave up his nuclear/chemical programs. Megrahi was released from Scottish prison for health reasons soon afterward, a travesty of justice that looks very like a fulfillment of one of Kadaffi’s demands. British prime minister Tony Blair flew to Libya to establish a new era in relations in a famous meeting in Kadaffi’s desert tent. As Western oil companies rushed to win new Libyan business, Kadaffi enjoyed his return to the world stage, happily giving long orations to the UN or pitching his tent in a Paris park, showing off in a variety of costumes—sometimes military uniforms with dark glasses and gold braid, sometimes Bedouin robes—accompanied by his special female bodyguards and always by his Ukrainian nurse. He had been celebrated for his radical glamour in his younger days—indeed there were recurrent stories of Western female journalists succumbing to his seductive tyrannical chic—but by the 21st century, he was clearly an unbalanced, demented and deluded dictator with blood on his hands and an unfortunate taste for facial cosmetic surgery. Like Idi Amin, he would have been funny had he not been so homicidal.

After forty years in power, Kadaffi ruled like a desert emperor, even calling himself the King of Kings, or the King of Africa. He clearly planned a dynastic succession for his sons in the tradition of the Assads of Syria. Kadaffi ruled increasingly through his sons, who served variously as military commanders, football bosses, diplomatic envoys, international playboys—and political henchmen. He played off his more conservative sons against his high-profile international envoy, Saif al-Islam, who promoted himself as the liberal reforming heir to the throne. Saif Kadaffi mixed with British bankers, tycoons and academics, corrupting and deceiving them with his promises of reform. When the convicted terrorist Megrahi was released, it was Saif who flew him back to a triumphant welcome in Tripoli.

Just as the West reconciled itself to the monstrous Kadaffi, his own people could take no more. In the spring of 2011, huge popular protests started against the dictator across Libya, but especially in the eastern city of Benghazi. Kadaffi and his sons tried to repress the revolution but when the dictator threatened to annihilate the rebels of Benghazi and dispatched an army to do so, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, backed by US President Obama, quickly put together an armed response. Eschewing any troops on the ground, the British and French bombed Libyan forces in a sustained but brave intervention that ultimately brought down the dictator. Tripoli fell to the National Transitional Council (NTC) militias on September 16, 2011. Kadaffi himself vanished but reappeared in his home city of Sirte, which held out for another month. When it fell, he tried to escape in a convoy that was hit by Western planes and then attacked by NTC fighters: Kadaffi was captured, and, begging for forgiveness, was brutally lynched, spattered in blood and then shot on camera, a scene then played across the world on twenty-four-hour news. Along with the fall of Egyptian President Mubarak, this was the most dramatic revolution of the so-called Arab Spring and the successful template for David Cameron’s new doctrine of limited intervention.