Libya’s bizarre leader Gadhafi defiant to end

Libyan leader Moam­mar Gad­hafi ges­tures to his sup­port­ers in Tripoli, Libya. As rebels swarmed into Tripoli late Sun­day, Gadhafi’s son and one-time heir appar­ent Seif al-Islam was arrested and Gadhafi’s rule was all but over, even though some loy­al­ists con­tin­ued to resist.

BEN HUBBARD

KARIN LAUB

Asso­ci­ated Press

TRIPOLI, Libya — In flow­ing brown Bedouin robes and black beret, hailed as the “king of kings of Africa,” the aging dic­ta­tor swept up onto the global stage, cen­ter front at the United Nations, and deliv­ered an angry, wan­der­ing, at times inco­her­ent dia­tribe against all he detested in the world.

In that first and only appear­ance before the U.N. Gen­eral Assem­bly, in 2009, Moam­mar Gad­hafi ram­bled on about jet lag and swine flu, about the John F. Kennedy assas­si­na­tion and about mov­ing the U.N. to Libya, the vast desert nation he had ruled for four decades with an iron hand.

As dis­mayed U.N. del­e­gates streamed out of the great domed hall that autumn day, a fum­ing Gad­hafi declared their Secu­rity Coun­cil “should be called the ‘Ter­ror Coun­cil,’” and tore up a copy of the U.N. charter.

The bizarre, 96-minute rant by Libya’s “Brother Leader and Guide of the Rev­o­lu­tion” may now stand as a fit­ting denoue­ment to a bizarre life, com­ing less than two years before Gadhafi’s peo­ple rose up against him, before some in that U.N. audi­ence turned their war­planes on him, before lieu­tenants aban­doned him one by one, includ­ing the very Gen­eral Assem­bly pres­i­dent, fel­low Libyan Ali Treki, who in 2009 glow­ingly wel­comed his “king” to the New York podium.

As rebels swarmed into Tripoli late Sun­day and his son and one-time heir appar­ent Seif al-Islam was arrested, Gadhafi’s rule was all but over, even though some loy­al­ists con­tin­ued to resist.

More than any of the region’s auto­cratic lead­ers, per­haps, Gad­hafi was a man of contrasts.

He was a spon­sor of ter­ror­ism who con­demned the Sept. 11 attacks. He was a bru­tal dic­ta­tor who bull­dozed a jail wall to free polit­i­cal pris­on­ers. He was an Arab nation­al­ist who derided the Arab League. And in the crown­ing para­dox, he preached peo­ple power, only to have his peo­ple take to the streets and take up arms in rebellion.

For much of a life marked by tumult, eccen­tric­i­ties and spasms of vio­lence, the only con­stants were his grip on power — never openly chal­lenged until the last months of his rule — and the hos­til­ity of the West, which branded him a ter­ror­ist long before Osama bin Laden emerged.

The secret of his suc­cess and longevity lay in the vast oil reserves under his North African desert repub­lic, and in his capac­ity for dras­tic changes of course when necessary.

One spec­tac­u­lar series of U-turns came in late 2003. After years of denial, Gadhafi’s Libya acknowl­edged respon­si­bil­ity for the 1988 bomb­ing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Locker­bie, Scot­land, that killed 270 peo­ple. Libya agreed to pay up to $10 mil­lion to rel­a­tives of each of the vic­tims, and declared it would dis­man­tle all of its weapons of mass destruction.

The rewards came fast. Within months, the U.S. lifted eco­nomic sanc­tions and resumed low-level diplo­matic ties. The Euro­pean Union hosted Gad­hafi in Brus­sels. Tony Blair, as British prime min­is­ter, vis­ited him in Tripoli, even though Britain had more rea­son than most to detest and fear him.

Then, in Feb­ru­ary, amid a series of anti-government upris­ings that swept the Arab world, Gad­hafi unleashed a vicious crack­down on Libyans who rose up against him. Libyan rebels defied with­er­ing fire from gov­ern­ment troops and pro-Gadhafi mili­tia to quickly turn a protest move­ment into a rebellion.

Just days after the upris­ing against him began, Gad­hafi deliv­ered one of his trade­mark rants on Feb. 22 from his Tripoli com­pound, which was bombed by U.S. airstrikes in the 1980s and was left unre­paired as an anti-American display.

Pound­ing a lectern near a sculp­ture of a golden fist crush­ing a U.S. war­plane, he vowed to hunt down pro­test­ers “inch by inch, room by room, home by home, alley­way by alley­way.” The tele­vised speech caused a furor that helped fuel the armed rebel­lion against him and it has been since mocked in pop­u­lar songs and spoofs across the Arab world.

In March, the U.N. autho­rized a no-fly zone for Libya and “all nec­es­sary mea­sures” to pre­vent Gad­hafi from attack­ing his own protest­ing peo­ple. NATO airstrikes fol­lowed against Libyan mil­i­tary tar­gets and included one attack that killed Gadhafi’s youngest son on April 30.

Gad­hafi was born in 1942 in the cen­tral Libyan desert, the son of a Bedouin father who was once jailed for oppos­ing Libya’s Ital­ian colo­nial­ists. The young Gad­hafi seemed to inherit that rebel­lious nature, being expelled from high school for lead­ing a demon­stra­tion, and dis­ci­plined while in the army for orga­niz­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cells.

In 1969, as a mere 27-year-old cap­tain, he emerged as leader of a group of offi­cers who over­threw King Idris’ monar­chy. A hand­some, dash­ing fig­ure in uni­form and sun­glasses, he took undis­puted power and became a sym­bol of anti-Western defi­ance in a Third World recently lib­er­ated from its Euro­pean colo­nial rulers.

Dur­ing the 1970s, Gad­hafi embarked on far-reaching reforms.

A U.S. air base was closed. Some 20,000 Ital­ians were expelled in retal­i­a­tion for the 1911–41 occu­pa­tion. Busi­nesses were nation­al­ized. Gad­hafi pro­claimed a “pop­u­lar rev­o­lu­tion” and began impos­ing “peo­ples’ com­mit­tees” as local lev­els of gov­ern­ment, topped by a “Peo­ples’ Con­gress,” a kind of par­lia­ment. He declared Libya to be a “Jamahiriya” — a word con­not­ing “repub­lic of the masses.”

He led a state with­out a con­sti­tu­tion, instead using his own idio­syn­cratic book of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy — the “Green Book.” He took the military’s high­est rank, colonel, when he came to power and called him­self the “Brother Leader” of the revolution.

“He aspired to cre­ate an ideal state,” said North African ana­lyst Saad Djeb­bar of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity. “He ended up with­out any com­po­nents of a nor­mal state. The ‘people’s power’ was the most use­less sys­tem in the world, turn­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies into a force of wealth-accumulators.”

Like many dic­ta­tors intent on ensur­ing they have no rivals, Gad­hafi had no clear sys­tem of suc­ces­sion. But he was believed to be groom­ing his British-educated son, Seif al-Islam, to suc­ceed him. Now that son is under arrest and, like his father, wanted by the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court in the Nether­lands for crimes against human­ity dur­ing the bloody crack­down on dissenters.

Gad­hafi took plea­sure in say­ing out loud what other lead­ers would only think, fre­quently berat­ing the Arab League for its inabil­ity to act in the Israeli-Palestinian and Iraqi conflicts.

But while he enjoyed speak­ing out on the world stage, he did not tol­er­ate peo­ple speak­ing out in Libya. His gov­ern­ment allowed no orga­nized opposition.

In 1988, he declared he was releas­ing polit­i­cal detainees and drove a bull­dozer through the wall of a Tripoli prison. But in real­ity his regime remained totalitarian.

Gad­hafi did spend oil rev­enue on build­ing schools, hos­pi­tals, irri­ga­tion sys­tems and hous­ing on a scale his Mediter­ranean nation had never seen.

“He did really bring Libya from being one of the most back­ward and poor­est coun­tries in Africa to becom­ing an oil-rich state with an elab­o­rate infra­struc­ture and with rea­son­able access by the Libyan pop­u­la­tion to the essen­tial ser­vices they required,” said George Joffe of Cam­bridge University.

But although Libya was pro­duc­ing almost 1.6 mil­lion bar­rels of crude per day before the civil war, about a third of its roughly 6 mil­lion peo­ple remain in poverty. Gad­hafi show­ered ben­e­fits on parts of the coun­try, such as the cap­i­tal Tripoli. Mean­while, east­ern Libya, ulti­mately the source of February’s rebel­lion, was allowed to atrophy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Gad­hafi increas­ingly sup­ported groups deemed ter­ror­ist in the West — from the Irish Repub­li­can Army to rad­i­cal Pales­tini­ans and mil­i­tant groups in the Philippines.

A 1984 inci­dent at the Libyan Embassy in Lon­don entrenched his regime’s image as a law­less one. A gun­man inside the embassy opened fire on a demon­stra­tion by anti-Gadhafi demon­stra­tors out­side, killing a British policewoman.

The heat had been ris­ing, mean­while, between the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion and Gad­hafi over ter­ror­ism. In 1986, Libya was found respon­si­ble for a bomb­ing at a Berlin dis­cotheque fre­quented by U.S. troops in which three peo­ple died. Amer­ica struck back by send­ing war­planes to bomb Libya. About 40 Libyans were killed, includ­ing Gadhafi’s adopted baby daughter.

In 1988, a Libyan agent planted the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Locker­bie. The next year, another Libyan set a bomb that blew up a French air­liner over Niger in west Africa.

The West was out­raged, and years of sanc­tions followed.

Joffe said Gadhafi’s involve­ment in ter­ror­ism was the “major mis­take” of his career.

“Who­ever was directly respon­si­ble for (the 1988 and 1989 attacks), the con­se­quence was that Libya found itself iso­lated in the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity for almost a decade and, in that iso­la­tion, it suf­fered con­sid­er­able eco­nomic loss.”

Dur­ing the same period, Gad­hafi embarked on a series of mil­i­tary adven­tures in Africa, invad­ing Chad in 1980–89, and sup­ply­ing arms, train­ing and finance to rebels in Liberia, Uganda and Burk­ina Faso.

In 2002, Gad­hafi looked back on his actions and told a crowd of Libyans in the south­ern city of Sibha: “In the old days, they called us a rogue state. They were right in accus­ing us of that. In the old days, we had a rev­o­lu­tion­ary behavior.”

His first out­ward sig­nal of change came in 1999, when his gov­ern­ment handed over for trial two Libyans charged with the Locker­bie bomb­ing. In 2001, a Scot­tish court con­victed one, an intel­li­gence agent, and sen­tenced him to life impris­on­ment. The other was acquitted.

Libyan offi­cials denied the gov­ern­ment was involved. But in August 2003, 20 months later, Libya accepted state respon­si­bil­ity in a let­ter to the U.N. It had also apol­o­gized for the Lon­don policewoman’s mur­der, allow­ing it and Britain to renew diplo­matic ties, and the Secu­rity Coun­cil lifted its sanctions.

A big­ger sur­prise came in Decem­ber 2003 when Britain’s Blair announced that Gad­hafi had acknowl­edged try­ing to develop weapons of mass destruc­tion but had decided to dis­man­tle the pro­grams under inter­na­tional inspection.

What caused Gadhafi’s turn­around is debat­able. Some main­tained he was afraid his regime would be top­pled like the Tal­iban in Afghanistan and Sad­dam Hus­sein in Iraq. But Djeb­bar and Joffe both say nego­ti­a­tions on weapons of mass destruc­tion had begun even before 9/11.

Gad­hafi wanted sanc­tions lifted and an end to Amer­i­can hos­til­ity to ensure his regime’s sur­vival, Joffe said. In 2006 the Bush admin­is­tra­tion rescinded its des­ig­na­tion of Libya as a state spon­sor of terrorism.

By early 2011, how­ever, as Tripoli responded vio­lently to anti-government protests, U.S. and other sanc­tions were being reim­posed on Libya’s lead­ers and Gad­hafi fam­ily mem­bers, among them his wife, Safia, and sev­eral of their eight chil­dren, includ­ing sons Han­ni­bal, head of Libya’s mar­itime trans­port com­pany; Saadi, spe­cial forces com­man­der and Libya’s soc­cer fed­er­a­tion head, and Mohammed, Libya’s Olympic chief.

Gad­hafi said he met Safia, then a teenage nurs­ing stu­dent, while recu­per­at­ing from an appen­dec­tomy after tak­ing power in 1969. He soon divorced his first wife and remar­ried. Their only daugh­ter, Aisha, became a lawyer and helped in the defense of Sad­dam Hus­sein, Iraq’s top­pled dic­ta­tor, in the trial that led to his hanging.

Gadhafi’s flam­boy­ance and eccen­tric lifestyle were always the sub­ject of lam­poon­ing in Amer­ica and elsewhere.

He had a per­sonal escort known as the Ama­zon­ian guard — young women said to be martial-arts experts who often car­ried machine guns and wore military-style uni­forms with match­ing cam­ou­flaged headscarves.

A 2009 U.S. diplo­matic cable released by the web­site Wik­iLeaks cited Gadhafi’s heavy reliance on a Ukrain­ian nurse — described as a “volup­tuous blonde” — and his intense dis­like of stay­ing on upper floors of build­ings, aver­sion to fly­ing over water, and taste for horse rac­ing and fla­menco dancing.

He donned gar­ish mil­i­tary uni­forms with braids and huge, fringed epaulettes, or col­or­ful Bedouin robes and African-patterned cloth­ing, along with sun­glasses and fly whisks. His hair grew scruffy and he sported a goa­tee and scrag­gly mustache.

In his first tele­vised appear­ance after protests broke out in Libya, he appeared with an umbrella and a cap with earflaps. Four months later, dodg­ing NATO bombs in Tripoli, address­ing loy­al­ists by tele­phone from a hid­den loca­tion on June 17, Gad­hafi sounded defi­ant still, the old “Brother Leader,” but hoarse, agi­tated, embat­tled — and per­haps see­ing the end.

“We don’t care much for life,” he declared. “We will not betray the past and the sac­ri­fices, or the future. We will carry out our duty until the end.”

Posted by AP News on Aug 22 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.