Gaddafi’s brutal end –its aftermath

Since January’s dislodgement of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, the Maghreb world has been infested by a positive revolutionary contagion. Veteran dictator, Hosni Mubarak, is now history after three decades of unrelieved dictatorship. The Arab world is on the march towards democracy. Mass protests have dominated the key countries of Arab—Djibouti, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The course, […]

Since January’s dislodgement of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, the Maghreb world has been infested by a positive revolutionary contagion. Veteran dictator, Hosni Mubarak, is now history after three decades of unrelieved dictatorship. The Arab world is on the march towards democracy. Mass protests have dominated the key countries of Arab—Djibouti, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The course, in spite of governments’ unleash-ment of violent repressive methods, appears, for all practical purposes, irreversible. The immediate cause of the revolution—in all cases, is economic hardship as the critical lots of the masses of these countries  in the midst of elite opulence. All other reasons are tangential and latent.

It is in Libya that the repression of both the will and actions of the masses have received the most violent suppression, and it is therefore expected, given the history and personality of the dictator who has reigned on the land for forty-two years, since a military putsch in 1969 brought Muammar Gaddafi, a signals officer with large ambitions, queer visions and ‘split personality,’ which Numeiri of Sudan once contemptuously described as ‘both evil’. The history, development and character of Gaddafi makes interesting reading, just as his regime which tottered and now crumbled, fatally, turned out to be the bloodiest in the raging revolution in the Arab world, on account of who he was and what he represented.

Gaddafi started out with a singular vision anchored on numerous projects—all of which came to nought—leaving him a wreck that hung onto power through sponsoring and supporting insurgencies and dislodgement bids of dissidents in and around the Arab world, to settle scores with his colleague Arab leaders who ditched him long before the fulfilment of his queer and eccentric dreams. For five years after gaining power through an army putsch, Gaddafi erected a catalogue of proposals for forging a Pan-Arab unity and ridding the Arab world of Western imperialism—especially by Britain and the United States. His take-off point was as an uncritical votive of Egypt’s Nasser. He crammed all Nasser’s revolutionary speeches on the need to forge Arab unity and scorn Western imperialism and values. He coined an acerbic variant of Arab socialism which threw out legal codes and replaced it with sharia laws. He banned alcoholism, prostitution, night clubs and Christianity from Libya. In the manner of other noted African leaders like Nkrumah, Nyerere and Kaunda, he etched a leadership vision to which he devoted extended periods of his early rule. This book of ideology, founded on Islam came out in three volumes – a ‘Green Book’ on the implementation strategy of his vision under the title, the Third Universal Theory, which proposed an alternative to outmoded capitalism as well as the inherently atheistic communism. His projects of a Pan-Arab Unity—all of which collapsed included the linkage of Libya to key and all Arab countries—the Tripoli Charter, the first of his proposals, was meant to link  the fate of Libya to Egypt under Abdel Nasser and Sudan under Numeiri. The death of Nasser and the rise of his successor, Sadat wrecked the charter as Sadat contemned Gaddafi’s dream of Pan-Arabism. It ended in an Egyptian-Libyan war in which Gaddafi was roundly and disastrously routed.

Numeiri’s vision of accommodating the southern Sudan could not be contained in a Pan-Arab project. He fell out with Gaddafi—sealing the coffin of the Tripoli Charter. Gaddafi’s second proposal went the way of the first.  The Benghazi Treaty of 1971 was meant to link Libya, Syria and Egypt. It failed. The third diplomatic project, the Hassi Messaoud Accords of 1973, aimed at linking Libya and Algeria under President Boumedienne also collapsed like a pack of cards. His fourth diplomatic motion was the Djerba Treaty of 1974 which proposed to link Libya with Tunisia under Bourguiba. Thus, Gaddafi’s  pan-Arab political consciousness, woven around Libya failed woefully and left him a desperate loner in the Arab world. Gaddaffi thus transformed into a desperado willing to utilize his immense wealth to aid subversions, coups and insurgencies in Arab countries and elsewhere—including Palestine, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Thailand, in the Phiplipines, the Polisario guerrillas, South Africa liberation struggles and so on, —a preoccupation which left him a legacy of loathe and fear—both in the Maghreb and in the Western world. The rest of his political careerism revolved in lesser and greater details around this failed principle—of an unaccomplished centralization of Arab (later he toyed with the pan-African version) nationalism around Libya, which is more or less his person. He backed Idi Amin’s dictatorship in Uganda as well as opposition groups in Mali and Niger. He meddled, frighteningly, in Chad, until he finally pronounced a merger ( a take-over, as it were) between Chad and Libya—an action which boomeranged and led to a number of diplomatic actions, including Nigeria’s closure of Libya’s embassy  as well as campaigning for sanctions against Libya’s expansionist obsession. Chad became a mere wreck even after Libya had withdrawn, seeking for OAU presidency in 1982, and a bid which he lost.

At home, Gaddafi had held his authority together through repression, which helped him survive series of insurrections, including the attempt by Libyans who trained in the Sudan to assassinate him in 1993. They also embarked on a series of attacks inside Libya in 1995. He also suffered unrelenting international isolation which he sought to ameliorate using the platform of the OAU to refurbish his image and to create for himself a leadership niche in Africa. He orchestrated a vision of a United States of Africa during the summit in Sierra Leone, which he sponsored. This dream state will have a continental presidency (himself of course as President) a single military force (under his command and a common African currency.) The outcome was the African Union which replaced the OAU but the power-hunt of Gaddafi, insatiable as it is, remains a pipe-dream. Africa is too complex for a despot, under the dubious guise of a fervent pan-Africanism, to have his way in subjugating the entire continent to his jejune whims and caprices.

The end result of Gaddafi’s unending but futile search for political relevance is recourse to internal repression and greater tyranny. Even though, as many have remarked, he may have deployed the huge petro-dollar of his country to the greater benefit of Libyans than the Nigerian ruling elite has done hitherto, recent revelations of his swindling Libya to the tune of over 250 billion dollars neutralize  this kudos of his welfarist vision. Indeed, there is no question than  his blind despotism alienated the popular masses and made the revolt that brought his brutal end inevitable.

What emerges, in the end, is that the massive wealth of Libya, accruing from her huge oil wealth has been converted, not to the welfare and social advantage of his subdued citizens, but to instruments of bloody tyranny, continental macabre dance and international buffoonery. This is why the on-going revolution in the Arab world, has witnessed its bloodiest resistance from Libya’s Gaddafi whose body chemistry is anathema to both democracy and to freedom.

Gaddaffi has completed his inimitable race on earth, but where does his death leave the country? NATO has said it is quitting Libya in a month hence, after another regime change. How will popular democracy be built in the country after decades of dictatorship? Yes, liberation has been declared and democracy plans afoot to be completed in eight months. Good intentions. But will the West allow internal democracy emerge without external meddling and imposition? These and many are the critical questions, after Gaddaffi has gone the way of the world.