EVEN IN recent weeks in his infrequent public forays Muammar Gadafy insisted that “All my people love me”. Part fantasist, part megalomaniac to the end – self-styled “brother leader”, “king of kings of Africa”, and his preferred, “leader of the revolution” – his death, which few will mourn, closes the last chapter of a brutal dictatorship by the longest-serving Arab or African leader, and on a man who, after 42 years at Libya’s helm, criminally dragged his people into bloody war rather than accept his time was up.
His death is an important turning point for the country, a symbolic point of closure, the end of the war. It should both lead to an end to hostilities and the possibility of early exit of Nato forces, and sharply reduces the likelihood of an insurrection by his few remaining loyalists against the new government. The challenge now for the new National Transition Council will be to seize the moment to accelerate disarmament and to put in place the institutions that will allow a new democratic Libya to emerge.
Gadafy’s death will unfortunately deprive its people of the opportunity to see him held to account at trial for both his recent war crimes and for his decades of brutal rule. From the early 1970s on he presided over a regime that routinely tortured and executed political opponents, often in public open air trials in which the victims were forced to beg for their lives in front of crowds baying for their blood. In the 1990s he bombed his own towns to suppress growing Islamist opposition, and his henchmen opened fire on prisoners in Tripolis Abu Salim prison killing some 1,200 people.
Internationally he used the country’s oil wealth, also plundered by his family for personal ends, and a pseudo-anti-imperialist rhetoric to curry favour with dictators around the world. And he financed and armed a wide range of terror groups’s campaigns, including the IRA, Abu Nidal, the radical Palestinian organisation, and the Red Army Faction in Germany. At least a dozen coups or coup attempts in Africa were traced to his backing. He became an international pariah after his government was linked to a series of terrorist attacks, and notably the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie in Scotland, which killed 270 people, and of a French passenger jet over Niger in 1989, killing 170 people.
Gadafy effected a reconciliation with the West in the wake of 9/11 and his renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. But in the end its verdict on the man was not the one that mattered.