AMERICA:"KHADAFY KILLED BY YANKEE FAN" said the front page of the tabloid New York Postnewspaper yesterday. A photograph of a Libyan teenager wearing a Yankees baseball cap and holding Gadafy's famous golden pistol was superimposed over a close-up of the dictator's contorted, bloodied face, as Libyan rebels tore at him.
No one cheered or chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A” outside the White House, as they did on the night of May 1st, when Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. So many Arab leaders have died or been unseated in the past decade. Gadafy’s death seemed almost anti-climactic; his last-minute refuge in a drain pipe reminiscent of Saddam Hussein being dragged from a hole in Tikrit. In life, Gadafy was our pantomime dictator, a joke that amused us at the expense of millions of Libyans and the families of the Pan Am and UTA victims. It was only natural that we should treat his death as a joke too.
Without the military support of Britain, France and the US, the Libyans could not have overthrown Gadafy. But can that absolve western and Arab leaders who long allowed him to stay in power?
I shrank from every possibility of interviewing Gadafy in the 1980s and 1990s, because his habit of propositioning women journalists was infamous. In her book God Has Ninety-nine Names, the US journalist Judith Miller recounts how Gadafy greeted her colleague Marie Colvin. He was seated on a sofa, clad in a gold cape, red silk shirt, white pyjama bottoms and lizard skin slippers. A white Libyan wedding dress was spread beside him, for Colvin. She pleaded a headache and departed.
On a subsequent visit to Libya, Colvin was woken in her hotel room by a Gadafy aide and a nurse demanding to take a blood sample because the “Brother Leader” wanted to be certain she didn’t carry Aids. When Colvin did not succumb to his advances, Gadafy asked her to convey a message of love to then State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler: “If she loves me, she should wear something green at her next press conference.”
I saw Gadafy three times. In June 1996, he waved from his chauffeur-driven white Cadillac stretch limo as it brought him to the entrance of the Arab summit in Cairo. Gadafy’s shapely Amazon bodyguards, dressed in military fatigues and toting assault rifles, ran behind the car. The Arab dignitaries seemed acutely embarrassed. Gadafy was the mad relative one tries to keep locked in the attic.
It was surreal to watch Gadafy inspect the Republican Guard in the courtyard of the Élysée Palace, when President Nicolas Sarkozy invited him to Paris for five days in December 2007. The French obligingly allowed Gadafy to pitch his heated Bedouin tent in the garden of the Marigny guest palace across the street.
Eighty people were arrested for demonstrating against the visit, during which Sarkozy announced €10 billion in contracts. In all of French officialdom, an African-born junior minister, Rama Yade, was the only person who dared protest that France was “not a doormat on which a leader, whether terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood of his crimes”.
I witnessed Gadafy’s 96-minute rant at the UN General Assembly on September 23rd, 2009, when he tore up the UN Charter and threw it at the officials seated behind him, rambled on about the assassination of JFK, Somali pirates and his belief that swine flu was biological warfare. One half expected men in white coats to hustle him away, but again, still, as ever, the response was embarrassed silence.
US commentators now stress the responsibility that befalls the Libyan people, and the prospects of a bright future for them. Vice-president Joe Biden got it right on Thursday when he quoted Yeats. In just 10 years, the Middle East has utterly changed.
Let’s hope that our leaders have changed too, that unlike George W Bush, Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, the new generation of western leaders – Barack Obama and David Cameron – will not prove as erratic as their predecessors in dealing with tyrants.
Did Bush think it through when he held up Gadafy as an example for others, after Gadafy gave up his WMD programme?
Will the US ask Sarkozy – who in 2007 sold Gadafy €168 million worth of Milan anti-tank weapons – to help pay for the weapons clean-up? And will someone ask the former British prime minister Tony Blair to explain why he visited Gadafy six times between June 2007, when Blair left Downing Street, and June 2010 – twice in private aircraft hired by Gadafy?
Blair is a senior adviser to JP Morgan investment bank, which is believed to have managed half a billion dollars for Libya.
"When [Blair] had tea in the desert with the 'Brother Leader', did he ever ask him who killed my father?" Hoda Abuzeid, a British Libyan whose dissident father was murdered in London by Libyan agents, asked the Daily Telegraph. Good question.
