The quintessential Colonel Gaddafi
In August 2010, 40 years into his reign as Libya’s dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi travelled to Rome. He disembarked the plane flanked by his team of female bodyguards, all dressed in camouflage uniforms. Also travelling with him were 30 Berber horses, which he hoped would take part in an Italian equestrian show, and the Bedouin tent he intended to pitch in a Roman park. He was in town to commemorate the second anniversary of an Italian-Libyan “friendship” treaty. But, while in Rome, he staged a lecture on the virtues of Islam to a crowd of more than 500 Italian models who were paid to attend the talk. As copies of the Koran and Gaddafi’s political philosophy were passed out, the Libyan dictator urged them to convert to Islam. The Italians were not pleased.
The fact that, after decades in power, Gaddafi could still spark outrage with his stunts was a testament to his ability to command attention long after many had concluded he had gone mad; that three of the models present at his lecture actually did convert on the spot was proof as to how persuasive he could still be. But as the historian Ronald Bruce St John argues in his new biography Qaddafi: Beyond the Myth, eccentric spectacle not only characterised the Gaddafi regime, it also masked its cruelty. Those female bodyguards, for example? Many later testified that the dictator and other members of his inner circle routinely raped them.
Just 14 months after the ostentatious display in Rome, it was brutality that led to Gaddafi’s violent end. In 2011 he went from “the longest serving head of state in the world, excluding monarchies”, to another casualty of the Arab Spring, “a dishevelled figure dead in a drainage ditch”. Gaddafi had been a nationalist revolutionary, a funder of international terrorism, a partner of the West and a figure of global scandal, famous for his egoism and cruelty. What was his regime, which ruled for so long only to expire with a gutter execution?
Born in the early 1940s in a village called Jahannam – which translates from Arabic as “hell”, “an apt name for a village where summer temperatures reach extremes” – Gaddafi was the only surviving son in a tribal family. He enjoyed a prized position within his household and received a full education. He was taught by Egyptians – very few Libyans had been trained before independence from Italy in 1951 – and his schooling was steeped in the glorification of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers movement and their 1952 revolution. As a teenager, he would listen to Cairo Radio’s “Voice of Arabs” and memorise Nasser’s speeches. Nasser later became a mentor, serving as best man at Gaddafi’s first wedding; Gaddafi was so distraught at Nasser’s funeral, he reportedly fainted several times.
By 27, he had risen up the ranks of the military, and in 1969 he and his own Free Officers led a bloodless coup against the Libyan monarchy. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was formed to run the country with Gaddafi as its leader. He nationalised Libya’s oil industry and funnelled money into public education and housing. The impact was dramatic: in 1951, the country’s per capita income was $35; within a decade of Gaddafi seizing power it was $10,000. Literacy rates, meanwhile, surged from 25 per cent to around 89 per cent.
Gaddafi was intent on remaking Libya in other ways too. In 1975 he published The Green Book, a deliberation on politics, economics and society, which championed socialism, Arab nationalism and direct democracy as a correction for the failures of Western democracy and communism. The Green Book was taught in all of Libya’s schools. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, his regime focused on crushing opposition, and intimidating, arresting or disappearing anyone they perceived to be a threat. Disappearances could happen in daylight, and St John recounts times he witnessed people being abducted off the street.
Internationally, Gaddafi faced more resistance. The pro-Arab, anti-imperialist ideology set out in his Green Book shaped his foreign policy and he lent his support – strategic, diplomatic and financial – to an array of “liberation movements”. These included Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, the IRA and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But there was no anti-colonial autocrat too beastly for Gaddafi: Uganda’s Idi Amin was a close ally and the Libyan regime supported the training of Liberia’s Charles Taylor.
St John’s account is broad rather than deep – he explains in the preface it is “targeted at the general reader, businessman, diplomat, casual traveller and university student interested in Libya” – and, occasionally, oddly paced. The narrative can get bogged down in the whistle-stop summaries of complex geopolitical shifts. The descriptions of Gaddafi’s personal and political life, meanwhile, are vivid, and St John is often liberal with humorous asides (in 1978, he writes, Gaddafi “threatened to join the Warsaw Pact, an empty threat that few observers took seriously, especially members of the Warsaw Pact”). Despite the book’s subtitle, Beyond the Myth, the sheer facts of Gaddafi’s persona – he travelled with a teddy bear; he liked to wear women’s clothes – unfortunately have the effect of rendering him into the “cartoon character” villain that you sense St John wanted to avoid.
A through-line of St John’s book is how the US handled the increasingly erratic “mad dog of the Middle East”, as Ronald Reagan branded Gaddafi in 1986. Days after that statement, Reagan ordered a bombing raid on five targets across Benghazi and Tripoli, including a tent and a residence that Gaddafi often slept in. The strike wasn’t a success. Despite official talk of a “precision bombing raid”, none of the bombs landed a hit on his tent nor his home; instead, they hit neighbourhoods, damaged the French embassy and struck a “chicken farm”. The strike did injure and traumatise Gaddafi’s wife and eight children, all of whom were hospitalised, and for years Gaddafi claimed that the bomb had killed his adopted infant daughter Hana (decades later evidence surfaced that suggested Hana was alive and well in Libya).
The strike received “broad condemnation” from the international community, suggesting “the Reagan administration had vastly underestimated the global reaction to its attack”. More acute still was its misreading of how the raid would impact Libyan politics: instead of sparking an uprising against the brutal regime, the raid triggered a rally around the flag among the more revolutionary factions in the country, while also demoralising the armed forces that Reagan had hoped would step up and oust Gaddafi.
Yet, while Reagan failed to achieve regime change, St John writes that he did “highlight a major irony in the US-Libya relationship”. By focusing so thoroughly on Gaddafi, Reagan managed to elevate the rogue dictator “to celebrity status in the world of super-terrorists”. Gaddafi had been an odd, if brutal, rogue actor; Reagan, through his rhetoric and his retaliation, positioned him as the “maddest” of the “mad men”.
Gaddafi was emboldened by the failed raid. Over the next few years, terrorists connected to his regime launched a number of attacks across Europe, most notoriously the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Gaddafi first denied that his regime was responsible, but after years of sanctions he handed over the intelligence agent accused of orchestrating the bombing and agreed to compensate the families of the victims. Relations with the US steadily improved.
Following 9/11, Gaddafi pivoted, speaking out against the evils of terrorism. In 2003 he dismantled Libya’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programme. By 2006, diplomatic relations were restored with the US and in 2008, Condoleezza Rice visited Libya, the first US secretary of state to do so in more than 50 years. Their relationship was warm, at least from Gaddafi’s perspective: he became obsessed with Rice, commissioning a song about her called “Black Flower in the White House” (“You’re just a girl from Birmingham/I’m just a boy from Sirte/Why don’t you pull down my pants/And check out my Libyan girth”).
And yet when the Arab Spring swept the region three years later, a US-led Nato operation was quick to back the Libyan uprising. As rebels struggled to gain traction against Gaddafi’s forces, Nato enforced a no-fly zone over the country in March 2011. This gave the rebels an advantage, and it wasn’t long before Nato shifted its mission to start targeting Gaddafi. On 20 October 2011, rebels captured him after a Nato airstrike hit his convoy. Gaddafi’s last words before the rebels executed him were: “What did I do to you?”
Regime change had been achieved. Yet a power vacuum opened and the country quickly descended into a bloody, decade-long civil war. To this day Libya is riven by volatile political factions and deadly militias; one of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam, was assassinated earlier this year when four men stormed his home. St John presses the point that it was Gaddafi’s rule that left the country so rife for instability; he had failed “to prepare the citizenry for a role in political participation”. This is undoubtedly true, yet the West knew this before it intervened. Gaddafi was the scaffolding around which modern Libya was built. It is not a surprise that his violent removal left the country’s foundations crumbling. The US-led Nato operation is now regarded as “the death knell of humanitarian interventionism”.
Gaddafi’s Libya was a brutal place – somersaulting through the guises of rogue state and compliant nation, all to keep its leader powerful and entertained. Yet if Gaddafi was in many ways the quintessential dictator – corrupt, licentious and unhinged – post-Gaddafi Libya has followed the all too predictable path of countries whose autocracies fall: it’s an even worse place than it was before.
Qaddafi: Beyond the Myth
Ronald Bruce St John
Reaktion Books, 288pp, £20
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[Further reading: Whose liberty and how much equality?]
