GADDAFI: ODE TO AN AFRICAN ENIGMA

If it is true as reported that Gaddafi was killed by French aircraft as his convoy of several dozens of cars made to leave Sirte, then Arabs can never learn. For a very long time, most of the leaders of Hamas were killed by Israel when they were driving or riding in cars. Yet they […]

If it is true as reported that Gaddafi was killed by French aircraft as his convoy of several dozens of cars made to leave Sirte, then Arabs can never learn. For a very long time, most of the leaders of Hamas were killed by Israel when they were driving or riding in cars. Yet they continued to ride in them. The recent purported killing of Shaikh al Awlaki by a United States’ drone in Yemen was said to have been an attack on a car he was riding in. And cars are made by the West. And don’t creatures obey their creator? If he had really wanted to leave, Gaddafi should have left earlier, and on a camel, through the desert, due South of the Sahara where he is much loved. A camel would never have betrayed its rider.

If anyone is in any doubt as to why NATO, the United States, France, Britain and all Western powers wanted Gaddafi out, what CNN Money said on its Twitter feed Thursday, a few minutes after it was announced that Gaddafi was dead, is enough: “Even with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi dead, analysts say it will likely take years for the country’s oil production to return to full capacity. It’s thought that Libya is producing about 350,000 barrels of oil per day, up from near zero during the depths of the conflict earlier this year…” So there you have it: it has been a war for Libya’s oil and Gaddafi is the collateral damage.

But Gaddafi could have survived, had he not played the fool, which Iran refuses to play: like Saddam before him, Gaddafi had succumbed to so-called ‘international community’ pressure to destroy what could have ultimately saved him, his reported pile of so-called weapons of mass destruction. Had he had them and used them on a nearby European target when NATO started its bombardment (a hypothesis really, for everyone knows NATO or America would not have attacked Libya or Iraq, had the two countries had their weapons), the story would have been very different today in Libya, as it would have been different in Iraq eight years ago. Alas!

To underline the enigma that Gaddafi was, Al Jazeera, in its tribute to him, Thursday, reminds us of Gaddafi’s 2009 visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly. “His speech,” says Al Jazeera, “which could only be described as erratic, was marked by a tearing of the UN Charter. He also wondered aloud whether swine flu was manufactured as a weapon, said that the Security Council should be renamed the ‘terror council’ and demanded investigations into the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King…”

Gaddafi was a good friend of Africa. But he started out as an Arab leader who wanted to unite all Arabs. Perhaps, he had forgotten that only one person had ever succeeded in that feat; Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. From the time the Prophet departed this world in 632 AD/13AH, the Arabs had never seen any unity, their Arab League and other tea-drinking fora notwithstanding. Had they been united, Israel could not have done what it did to them in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and continues to do today. Yet, Gaddafi wasted his precious time trying; complete with a map of ‘Greater Arabia’ always adorning wherever he sat. The Arabs rebuffed him.

When the same Western powers that killed Gaddafi Thursday, imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992 and 1993 through so-called UN Security Council Resolutions (which also exist, against Israel but are never implemented or even talked about), Arabs were the first to enthusiastically implement them. Seeing the Arabs as no better than the West, Gaddafi turned to Africa. In an Al Jazeera interview in March, 2007, Gaddafi had famously said: “Libya is an African country. May Allah help the Arabs and keep them away from us. We don’t want anything to do with them. They did not fight with us against the Italians, and they did not fight with us against the Americans. They did not lift the sanctions and siege from us. On the contrary, they gloated at us and benefited from our hardship…”

To drive home his disdain for fellow Arabs, he had said at an Arab Summit in March, 2009, “I am an international leader, the Dean of the Arab rulers, the King of Kings of Africa and the Imam of Muslims, and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level [referring to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia].”

Libya had assisted freedom fighters across Africa with arms, funds, training and logistics. One of the first African leaders to break the UN sanctions was Nelson Mandela of South Africa. When the Americans sought to reprimand him for flying to Libya in the face of ‘sanctions’, Mandela gave his famous rebuff to the West: “No one can decide who our friends should be!” As Gaddafi himself shredded the UN Charter in 2009 in New York, African leaders shredded to pieces the UN sanctions by flying to Tripoli (which no Arab leader dared do).

For these parts, the climax of Gaddafi’s Africa adventure came in early May, 1997, when he flew first to Niamey in Niger Republic, in a fleet of aircraft, and then the following day flew to Kano, where he led the Friday prayers at the Kano Eid Ground attended by two million people including Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha and Niger Republic’s Mahamane Ousmane. It was the Islamic New Year and Gaddafi had delivered, as Friday Khutbah, one of the longest speeches ever delivered in Kano: to wit, Jumu’ah was prayed around 3.30pm, next door to Asr. That was Gaddafi!

No history of Libya is complete without the history of Islam and its role in the struggle of Libyans against Italian colonial occupiers. Mujahid and Martyr Umar Mukhtar (‘Lion of the Desert’) defined Libya during that era and, despite his unorthodoxy when it came to Islam (and his demonisation of Islam when he deemed fit), Gaddafi defined Libya during this era. And Islam is coming back to redefine Libya, wa lau karihal anybody (whether anybody likes it or not).

Simply translated, ‘Muammar’ is Arabic for ‘Long Sojourner’ or ‘Long Stayer’. Indeed Gaddafi had stayed long at Libya’s helm; all of forty two years (or ten and a half terms in America and Nigeria). In August he had said: “We will fight until the last man and last woman to defend Libya from east to west, north to south.” Yes, Gaddafi fought. And died fighting. And yes, death may be a good thing for Gaddafi, as it has saved him ‘the humiliation of Saddam’.

The last page of ‘The Green Book’ has been closed. May Allah have mercy on Gaddafi’s soul.