DAMASCUS - Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi was new to the scene when he marched into
the Arab summit in Cairo in September 1970,
exactly one year after he had staged a successful
coup in Libya, at the young age of 27, ousting his
predecessor, the ailing King Idriss, aged 80.
Dressed in military uniform with a
revolver strapped around his belt, the flamboyant
young man wanted to come across as an "Arab Che
Guevara". The Arabs assembled in Egypt were busily
trying to hammer out a solution to a bloody
showdown in Amman between King Hussein and the
Palestinians, known as Black September.
Gaddafi, a protege of Egyptian president
Gamal Abdul Nasser
who was ostensibly committed
to Arab nationalism, was furious with Hussein. In
words that seem strangely appropriate today,
Gaddafi barked, "We are faced with a madman like
Hussein who wants to kill his own people. We must
send someone to seize him, handcuff him, stop him
from doing what he is doing, and take him off to a
mental asylum!"
King Faisal of Saudi
Arabia, a wise old man, gently said, "I don't
think you should call an Arab king a madman who
should be taken to an asylum." Gaddafi snapped
back: "But he is mad! All his family is mad! It's
a matter of record!" Gaddafi was making reference
to Hussein's father King Talal who abdicated in
1951 because he was mentally unfit to rule Jordan.
The wise Faisal remarked: "Well, perhaps
all of us are mad." Nasser intervened, "Sometimes
when you see what is going on in the Arab world,
your majesty, I think this may be so. I suggest we
appoint a psychiatrist to examine us regularly and
find one which ones are crazy."
Days
later, Nasser was dead - but apparently Gaddafi
dodged the mental check-ups. Had a psychiatrist
examined him in 1970, he probably would have
declared him mentally unfit to rule Libya. Young
and still very insecure, Gaddafi resorted to
outrageous behavior and loud publicity stunts,
probably to cover for his tremendous internal
weakness and complexities, especially when
compared to older, wiser and better established
Arab leaders.
He lacked the charm of
Nasser, the nationalistic credentials of Tunisia's
Habib Bourgeiba, the brains of Syria's Hafez
al-Assad, or the wisdom of Saudi Arabia's King
Faisal. Eager to prove himself equal to all the
rest, he entered an ill-fated union with Egypt and
Syria in 1972, which never saw light, followed by
another failed attempt at union with Tunisia in
1974, which quickly turned into animosity.
When both attempts failed, Gaddafi took
off his military uniform and began to dress in
outrageous Peacock colors, certain that if his
policies failed to attract world media, then his
colorful costumes, and assortment of 40 women
bodyguards (ostensibly all virgins) certainly
would.
He then opened his country to every
resistance movement across the planet, provided it
was seriously involved "in fighting Western
imperialism". In 1975, he authored his ridiculous
philosophical work, The Green Book, copying
from Nasser's own book, The Philosophy of
Revolution and the works of other
revolutionaries like Mao Zedong's Little Red
Book. Chairman Mao's book came out over the
years 1964-1976, while Gaddafi's was released in
three volumes between 1975 and 1979.
When
it was clear that his people were not going to
take The Green Book seriously, seeing it as
a compilation of rubbish, he imposed the book on
schools, universities, bookstores, TV, radio, and
every foreign visitor coming to see him in
Tripoli, translating it into several languages. He
did not stop there, taking up green as the
official color of Libya.
Gaddafi then
decided to "adopt" the Palestinian cause, lavishly
dishing out money to then-Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat. When Arafat refused to track down
and assassinate Gaddafi's opponents outside of
Libya, Gaddafi immediately turned against him,
expelling the Palestinians from Libya, closing
down their offices, and halting his subsidies.
Another forced exodus of 30,000 followed
in 1995, and he threatened to extradite "up to one
million" Palestinians, regardless of what their
fate would be, to punish Arafat for signing Oslo
with the Israelis. The fact that he was
persecuting the Palestinians - the sacred cow of
Arab nationalism - did not really matter to
Gaddafi; and nor did the fact that he was
repeating what King Hussein had done to them in
1970. He continued to insist that his welfare
state was committed, in rank-and-file, to the
Palestinians.
For the past 41 years,
Gaddafi has tried to fill the oversized shoes of
Nasser, who died one year after the Libyan colonel
came to power. He saw Anwar al-Sadat's 1979 peace
with Israel as a god-sent opportunity to become
godfather of Arab nationalism, but was outsmarted
by Syria's Assad, who picked up the mantle after
Nasser.
Realizing that the Arab
neighborhood was not his cup of tea, he began
supporting liberation movements and rebels in West
Africa, notably Sierra Leone and Liberia,
declaring that Libya was more African than it was
Arab. In the 1980s, Gaddafi graced the world stage
as a firm opponent of US president Ronald Reagan,
who personally dubbed him the "mad dog of the
Middle East".
By March 1982, the US had
declared a ban on import of Libyan oil, and the
export of US technology to Libya. In April 1986,
the US intercepted messages from the Libyan
Embassy in East Berlin suggesting Libyan
involvement in bombing of La Belle, a now famous
Berlin discotheque.
Reagan ordered a
massive bombing of Libyan cities in response,
which led to the killing of hundreds of civilians,
including Gaddafi's adopted daughter Hanna.
Gaddafi fired two Scud missiles at the US Coast
Guard stationed next to an Italian island, both of
which landed in the sea, with no casualties.
His relations with Britain also suffered
when a British policewoman was shot outside the
Libyan Embassy in London while monitoring
anti-Gaddafi demonstrations. As a result,
Gaddafi's relations with London were suspended for
an entire decade, and restored after Tony Blair
visited him in Tripoli in 2004. Probably
Gaddafi's most infamous act was the Lockerbie
Bombing of 1988, bringing down Pan Am Flight 103
over Scotland, killing 270 innocent passengers.
International sanctions were imposed over Libya
throughout the 1990s, and were only lifted when
Gaddafi decided to come clean, shortly after the
toppling of his friend and comrade, Saddam
Hussein.
In August, 2003 Gaddafi wrote to
the United Nations formally accepting
responsibility for Lockerbie, paying compensation
of up to US$2.7 billion for the families of
victims. World leaders flocked to Libya in reward,
with French President Nicolas Sarkozy paying him a
visit in July 2007, followed by Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi in August 2008, and UN
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in September.
For four decades, ordinary Arabs dealt
with Gaddafi as a sad reality that they just had
to live with - given that they could not change.
Gaddafi has worked with four Saudi kings, three
Syrian and three Egyptian presidents, and five
Arab League secretary generals. He has survived
eight US presidents, several of whom served for
two terms, and five French ones.
He would
often gloat that he is the "king of kings in North
Africa" and "dean of Arab kings and presidents".
Arab leaders were never too fond of him, because
of his eccentric behavior, humoring him early into
his regime, because he was a protege of Nasser.
Gaddafi learned, at the young age of 27,
that he could do just about anything he pleased in
the Arab world - and get away with it. Nothing
stuck to Gaddafi, no scandal from eccentric
behavior, no guilt because of bloodshed, and
embarrassment because of poor leadership.
That all explains why the "king of kings"
did not even blink when mowing down protesters in
Benghazi and Tripoli over the past week, whipping
up a death toll of nearly 300 Libyan citizens. He
hired African tribes to kill his own countrymen,
fired at the unarmed demonstrators from airplanes,
contaminated the waters of Benghazi, and cut off
fuel to prevent opponents from commuting between
Libyan cities. It was Gaddafi being Gaddafi, right
until the apparent end.
The outrageous
Gaddafi, who likes to be called "Brother Muammar",
has made it clear, through his son Seif al-Islam,
that he will not step down, because if he does,
"Western imperialism" will return to Libya. He
will fight until the last man, and woman, and
insists on staying in power until curtain fall.
Seif al-Islam's speech was one ripped
right out of his father's dictionary, reeking of
violence, brute force, and dictatorship. Probably
learning from the Tunisia and Egypt scenarios, he
will refuse to flee like Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali or resign like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.
"Big Brother Muammar" will either be
toppled when and if the angry Libyan street storms
his palaces in Tripoli, or if he is arrested by a
military coup. Suicide perhaps, would be easier
for him, than surrender.
Sami
Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward
Magazine in Syria.
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