Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the former Libyan dictator who has been killed aged 69, liked to promote himself as an instigator of global revolution; for the four decades of his rule, however, this was carried out through the subjugation of his people at home, and the sponsorship of terrorism abroad.
His grip on power always looked solid. But in February 2011 the uprisings in North Africa, which had already seen the fall of the governments of Libya’s neighbours, Egypt and Tunisia, suddenly put his regime in jeopardy.
There were demonstrations in all Libya’s principal cities — including the capital, Tripoli. The east of the country, where Gaddafi’s power had always been weakest, saw an enthusiastic, if chaotic, revolt, and the port city of Benghazi fell to the rebels. Gaddafi loyalists were widely accused of slaughtering civilians as he attempted to reimpose his authority, and with the backing of a UN Security Council resolution, an Allied force which included the Americans, the British and the French imposed a no-fly zone.
Allied aircraft neutralised Libya’s air force and prevented Gaddafi’s troops from advancing into Benghazi. Air strikes then began targeting Gaddafi forces all over Libya, as well as the regime’s command and control structures.
Critics argued that by effectively acting as the rebel air force, the Allies were grossly overstepping their mandate. But the pattern of the conflict was duly established: Nato aircraft cleared the way for rebels to advance westwards along the coast, Gaddafi loyalists then beat them back. The stop-go nature of the fighting endured for six months, but in August the rebels finally encircled Tripoli, and when they successfully captured the town of Zawiya, with its crucial oil refinery, just 30 miles west of the capital, the resistance of Gaddafi’s forces crumbled. On August 21 the rebels entered Tripoli and battle was soon under way at Gaddafi’s own compound.
Gaddafi, however, was not to be found, and mystery surrounded his whereabouts for a further two months. Some suggested he had fled abroad, perhaps to Niger, but the authorities there denied the rumours. Finally rebels ringed his birthplace of Sirte, on the coast midway between Tripoli and Benghazi. Despite the hopelessness of their position, forces loyal to Gaddafi waged a bitter last stand.
When rebels finally captured Sirte on October 20, leaked reports of his capture began to circulate. He had been seized while trying to flee, some rebels said, and had been wounded in both legs. Others said he had been found hiding, like the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before him, in a hole. NATO confirmed that it had targeted several vehicles, one possibly containing Gaddafi, in an airstrike at 8.30 that morning. Mobile telephone pictures of a bloodied figure resembling the dictator began to circulate on the internet. Finally, reports came through that he was dead.
It was a suitably chaotic end for a man who could never be easily pigeonholed. Erratic, vain and utterly unpredictable, he always seemed to be enjoying a private joke which no one else could see. His image, plastered on walls all over Libya, seemed a parody of Sixties radical chic — the craggy features, longish hair, the eyes half-hidden behind retro blue-tone shades.
Gaddafi would arrive at summits of Arab leaders in a white limousine surrounded by a bodyguard of nubile Kalashnikov-toting brunettes. At one non-aligned summit in Belgrade, he turned up with two horses and six camels; the Yugoslavs allowed him to graze the camels in front of his hotel – where he pitched his tent and drank fresh camel milk – but refused to allow him to arrive at the conference on one of his white chargers. Several of the camels ended up in Belgrade zoo.
At an African Union summit in Durban in 2002, his entourage consisted of a personal jet, two Antonov transport aircraft, a container ship loaded with buses, goat carcases and prayer mats, a mobile hospital, jamming equipment that disrupted local networks, $6 million in petty cash, and 400 security guards with associated rocket launchers, armoured cars and other hardware, who nearly provoked a shoot-out with South Africa’s security forces.
On his return motorcade through Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, Gaddafi tossed fistfuls of dollars from his car to appreciative crowds, remarking that this way he could be sure they went to the poor.
Gaddafi’s political pronouncements were equally outlandish. He told the Algerian regime that it had wasted the one and a half million martyrs who had died in the war against France because it had not continued across North Africa to “liberate” Jerusalem. He once suggested a binational state for Palestinians and Israelis called Isratine.
Under the banner of pan-Arabism, he offered political unity (under his leadership, inevitably) to Syria, Egypt and Sudan (none of which wanted it), then changed tack to pan-Africanism, calling for a united continent (also to be ruled from Tripoli). As a first step, he threw open Libya’s frontiers to all African citizens; the result was that four million, mainly Muslim, Libyans became resentful hosts to at least one and a half million impoverished sub-Saharan migrants.
Yet the self-styled “Universal Theorist” and “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahiriya” was no joke. In the 1970s and 1980s, while other tyrants were content to repress their own people, Gaddafi seemed hell-bent on bringing murder and mayhem to the whole world.
After Pam Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in 1988, leaving 270 dead — the biggest mass murder in British history – a court found two Libyans guilty of planting the bomb on board. In 1984, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in London with a machine gun fired from inside the Libyan embassy. Then there was the bombing of a Berlin discotheque, explosions at Rome and Vienna airports and the bombing of a French airliner over Chad.
In addition, Gaddafi sent arms shipments to the IRA, Abu Nidal, and numerous other terrorist organisations and set out to export revolution to his neighbours, perpetuating regional conflicts in Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Chad and Liberia. Domestic opponents — the “running dogs” who opposed his dictatorship — were ruthlessly liquidated. In 1984 bomb attacks on seven Libyan exiles living in Britain left 24 people injured; one Libyan journalist opposed to Gaddafi’s regime was assassinated as he walked past London’s Regent’s Park mosque.
In the mid-1980s “taking out Gaddafi” became an American obsession. In 1986, for example, he survived missile attacks ordered by President Reagan – attacks which he claimed had killed his adopted daughter (in fact evidence later emerged to suggest that she remains alive and well).
Indeed, for all his madcap behaviour, Gaddafi was no fool. He survived at least a dozen attempts on his life and remained the longest ruling revolutionary from the Nasserite Sixties. In the 1970s and 1980s he could defy the might of the United States and laugh off UN resolutions, confident that the Arab world, the Third World and the Soviet bloc would back him. But times changed. By the 1990s the Soviet Union was no more, and Arab leaders had had enough of Gaddafi’s troublemaking.
As a result, in the late 1990s he made his most audacious move since coming to power: the reinvention of himself as a peace-loving international statesman. In 1999 Libya finally apologised for the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher, and handed over the men suspected of masterminding the Lockerbie bombing for trial. Gaddafi admitted that some of the “liberation” movements he had assisted were not really “liberation” movements at all; it had all been a terrible mistake. In 2004, following a British diplomatic initiative, he publicly renounced Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programme.
With Libya’s proven reserves of 30 billion barrels of oil as bait, it did not take long for Western leaders to bury the past and beat a path to his tent. The British public was treated to the spectacle of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw praising the colonel’s “statesmanlike and courageous” strategy and Prime Minister Tony Blair offering the “hand of partnership” over a glass of camel’s milk.
The reasons for Gaddafi’s change of heart aroused much speculation. He had certainly been anxious to end the UN sanctions imposed in 1992, which had crippled his country’s economy. But it was the September 11 attacks that appear to have been the catalyst.
Gaddafi was the first Arab leader to condemn the attacks (helpfully suggesting that the United States bomb the safe havens of Islamist militants in London); and the most instantly alert to the implications for his own survival.
For Gaddafi came from a generation of revolutionaries that was motivated by Arab nationalism and the “anti-imperialist struggle”, not by religious extremism. Suddenly he found himself threatened not only by America’s assault on the “Axis of Evil”, but also by the underground religious revolutionaries of al-Qaeda. And it was the latter which he saw as the most potent threat.
Muammar Gaddafi was born in a tent near Sirte, Libya, in 1942 (some sources record June 7 as the precise date). He was the youngest child and only son of a nomadic and illiterate Bedouin family of the Gadadfa tribe. It seems to have been the tribal culture and unstructured democracy of Bedouin life that inspired his revolutionary political ideas.
He was sent away to school at nine years old and then went to secondary school at Sebha, where – like many other Arab students at the time — he was inspired by Nasser’s call to Arab resurgence through socialism and revolution. Early in his teens he seems to have formed a revolutionary cadre with a group of friends.
Imbibing Greek notions of democracy and Islamic notions of equality while studying History at Tripoli University, he went on to the Benghazi Military Academy. In 1966, having reached the rank of colonel, he did signals training with the British Army at Beaconsfield.
In September 1969 he led a bloodless coup that overthrew the royal regime of the charming but weak British-backed King Idris. Libyans were taught that he led the charge not from the turret of a tank, but at the wheel of a blue Volkswagen Beetle. The battered Revolutionary Vehicle came to occupy pride of place in Tripoli’s national museum.
Gaddafi was lucky in his timing. Where Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria had to struggle against internal opposition and foreign intervention, Gaddafi was able to remove American and British bases and Italian civilians (who were forced to dig up their dead and take them with them) almost without a murmur. World oil supplies were tightening, and he was able to divide the oil companies and enforce nationalisation and higher prices. Henry Kissinger, eager to see a firm anti-communist in position, actually welcomed his arrival.
Gaddafi established a Revolutionary Command Council with himself as leader and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Two years later he formed the Arab Socialist Union as the only political party in Libya, though it was not until 1976 that the true nature of his “revolution” became clear.
Changing the country’s name to “Popular Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, he implemented his Third Universal Theory of governing laid out in his Green Book (1976), an indigestible jumble of economic and political theories which became the official law of the land.
Conventional political institutions, including the government and head of state, were abolished (Gaddafi had no official title), to be replaced by a “direct democracy” of popular congresses served by people’s committees. The result was a system of administrative chaos counterbalanced by a centralised regime of terror and absolute political control.
Opportunistic, idealistic and mercurial, Gaddafi launched a series of attempts to take his revolution forward at home and abroad. While his economic policies — banning wages and private ownership — had disastrous results, he remained genuinely popular because oil revenues enabled him to supply even the poorest peasants with education, health care and imported food.
Meanwhile, state-controlled media elevated him to the status of demi-God. “His teeth are naturally immune to stain, so that when he releases a full-blown smile, the naturally white teeth discharge a radiation pregnant with sweet joy and real happiness for those lucky ones who are fortunate to be around him,” fawned the Al Zahf Al Akhdar newspaper.
Abroad, though, his campaigns ended in failure. For the first decade he spent most of his time trying to achieve union with Egypt, Tunisia and the Sudan, followed by Morocco, Tunisia, Niger and Chad. All came to nought, as did his failed invasion of Chad in 1972. It may possibly have been in frustration that, in the 1980s, he became such a ready sponsor of anti-Western terrorism.
In Libya much was made of Gaddafi’s many cultural achievements. He was the author of a book of allegorical short stories, and the inventor of a car, the Saroukh el-Jamahiriya (Libyan rocket), launched in 1999 on the 30th anniversary of the Libyan revolution. When Tony Blair paid his visit in 2004, the two leaders apparently swapped ideas about their own versions of the “third way”. Gaddafi illustrated his version by drawing a circle with a dot in the middle, the dot being himself.
Libya’s new status in the world was graphically illustrated in August 2009, when the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Al Megrahi, who had been serving life in a Scottish prison and been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, was released from prison by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, ostensibly on “compassionate grounds”.
Megrahi returned to Libya to be greeted by scenes of jubilation, with some of the crowd waving the Scottish Saltire. Gaddafi, apparently oblivious of the huge embarrassment he was causing in Scotland, publicly embraced the bomber.
In 2000 or thereabouts, Gaddafi himself was said to have contracted cancer. In Libya the question of who would succeed was taboo, but still the subject of intense behind-the-scenes debate, some suggesting that he would hand power to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, his son, who had been groomed to present a moderate image to the West — an image that was swiftly dispelled when his father’s regime came under threat in early 2011.
Muammar Gaddafi had two wives, Fatiha, whom he married in 1968, and Safiya, whom he married in 1969 and with whom he had a daughter and six sons.
