Ruling with an iron fist, Gadafy channelled Libyan wealth into projects such as the attempted unification of the Arab world, writes MICHAEL JANSEN
Muammar Gadafy’s ambition was to be beloved as well as admired and powerful. But he will go down in history as a brutal eccentric rejected by his fellow countrymen weary of his 42-year reign, and ridiculed by the Arabs and Africans he sought to lead.
His hero was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who staged the 1952 coup against Egypt’s British-backed King Farouk and led a pan-Arab “revolution” which transformed the Arab world. When Nasser died in 1970, he was mourned by Egyptians and Arabs everywhere. When Gadafy goes, he will be missed only by despised confederates and mourned by no one.
Gadafy was born in 1942 into a Bedouin family settled near Sirt on Libya’s coast, midway between Tripoli and Benghazi. As a youth he was a keen admirer of Nasser and an adherent of his pan-Arab, socialist ideology. Aged 14, he took part in demonstrations against the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
Nasser became the leader of a whole generation of idealistic young Arabs. He inspired Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, Ahmad Ben Bella of Algeria, slain Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and progressive members of the Saudi and Kuwaiti ruling families.
But Nasser was not the only influence on the impressionable youth. Gadafy began his higher education at university in Benghazi, the heartland of the Libyan revolt led by Omar Mukhtar against Italy’s cruel colonial rule. The anti-colonial struggle became an obsession for Gadafy. He quit university to join the army and began plotting the overthrow of the monarchy while at the military academy.
Gadafy did not want to emulate Nasser; he wanted to be Nasser. On September 1st, 1969, he mounted a bloodless coup against Libya’s elderly King Idris while he was having medical treatment in Istanbul. The officers abolished the monarchy and proclaimed Libya a republic.
Gadafy formed a Revolutionary Command Council to rule the country. He assumed the post of chairman and promoted himself to colonel, the rank Nasser held when he seized power in Egypt. Thereafter, he did not upgrade his rank although he served as commander-in-chief of his country’s armed forces.
His domestic policies followed Nasser’s by adopting “socialism” as Libya’s economic system. This involved nationalisation of larger firms as well as the country’s oil resources. Gadafy established governance based on what he called “direct popular democracy” married to Muslim morality. He laid down his political philosophy in his Green Book, and in 1977 proclaimed Libya a jamahiriya, a state ruled by the masses through popular councils. At the apex of this structure was the General People’s Congress led by himself.
He crushed all opposition, particularly risings mounted by rebellious tribes, and ruled with the iron fist provided by army units commanded by his sons, militias and hit squads.
Gadafy neglected education and health but, in keeping with his grandiose vision for his country and his place on the global stage, constructed the Great Manmade River, the world’s largest water project, consisting of a network of pipes carrying fossil water from an aquifer under the Sahara desert to the cities in northern Libya.
Oil revenues gave him the funds to carry out an ambitious foreign policy agenda. He adhered to Arab nationalism, advocated the union of Arab states in a single Arab nation and broadly pursued the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle by backing liberation movements and intervening in the affairs of other countries.
After Nasser’s death, Gadafy sought to carry on with his project of unifying the Arab world in spite of the failure of the Egyptian leader’s efforts to form unions between Egypt and Syria, on the one hand, and Egypt and Yemen on the other. In 1972, Gadafy pro- claimed a “Federation of Arab Republics” – combining Libya, Egypt and Syria. But this was aborted when their three rulers did not agree on terms. A 1974 attempt to merge with neighbouring Tunisia collapsed in acrimony.
Gadafy cultivated relations with the Soviet Union but was never regarded as a reliable ally. Defeated in his efforts to forge unity among Arab states, he focused his energies on trying to unify Muslim and African states. His proposal for unification in a Saharan Islamic state did not come to fruition but led to the establishment in 2002 of the 53-member African Union.
In 2008, he invited 200 African kings and tribal chieftains to celebrations marking his crowning as the continent’s “king of kings”. When elected chairman of the union in 2009, he continued to press for a “United States of Africa”, making it clear that he remained a visionary even if his vision was not accepted by other African leaders.
Again following in Nasser’s footsteps, Gadafy became an ardent ally of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Arafat, Gadafy, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and Kuwait’s Emir Jaber al- Ahmad al-Sabah led the campaign against Egypt when president Anwar Sadat signed a separate peace treaty with Israel in 1979. At an Arab summit in Baghdad, Egypt’s membership in the Arab League was suspended and the organisation’s headquarters was transferred to Tunis.
Gadafy joined other wealthy Arab rulers in funding the PLO, Jordan and Syria in their confrontation with Israel. He armed and financed the Provisional IRA, Farc rebels in Colombia, and the Polisario Front fighting Spanish and Moroccan colonialism as well as a host of small dissident groups in Africa. Between 1980 and 1988, Libya joined Syria in backing revolutionary Iran in its war with Iraq.
In 1986, Washington accused Gadafy of involvement in the bombing of a Berlin nightclub in which two US soldiers were killed and staged retaliatory air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 60 Libyans, including Gadafy’s adopted daughter. He was blamed for the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland that killed 270 people. Although there had been doubts about his responsibility for this atrocity, his defecting justice minister Mustafa Abul Jalil claimed this past week that Gadafy ordered the operation. Gadafy was implicated in the 1989 bombing of a French civilian airliner over Chad that killed 170.
During the 1990s, Libya suffered economic sanctions and diplomatic ostracism because Gadafy refused to permit the extradition to the US of the two Libyans accused of planting the bomb on the airliner. After prolonged negotiations, he agreed that the men could be put on trial at a specially constituted court in the Netherlands. One, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted and imprisoned in Scotland. Gadafy paid $2.7 billion in compensation to victims’ families.
Following the 2003 US conquest of Iraq, Gadafy relinquished chemical and biological weapons he had in his arsenal and dismantled his nuclear programme.
His departure as the brutal, dictatorial “leader and guide of the Libyan revolution” would be warmly welcomed by both his people and the international community. But his flamboyant outfits, the nomad tents he pitched in parks and gardens in countries he visited, his amazon guard, and his often mad speeches could very well be missed by some in a world increasingly afflicted by cultural conformity.