When Tunisia’s Ben Ali failed to control the protests in the streets and fled the country, the world looked on in amazement. It was then surprising all the more when the riots began in Egypt and when mighty President Mubarak failed to quell the disturbances. And then, as the world looked on, Mubarak too cut and ran.

Next came the riots in Libya and we know what has happened so far.

Days and weeks after the initial riots, we now know not only that Gaddafi has not fallen, nor cut and ran, but also that the Gaddafi regime is proving to be a very tough nut to crack.

Those who initially were very optimistic that the Gaddafi regime would follow the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes just like the old Communist and tired regimes of East Europe collapsed like dominos in 1989, now have to revisit their earlier optimism.

There is, of course, one basic reason for this and it is staring us in the eyes: The rebellion in Tunisia and in Egypt could succeed because they were built on an established middle class, a mostly educated youth, and a population in general tuned in to the power of the social media such as Facebook and Twitter. All this is rather absent in Libya.

That, of course, is a reflection of the Gaddafi regime which, for all the oil, kept the revenues in tight hands of persons trusted by the regime, and which studiously kept the youth away from such dangerous toys as education – unless, that is, those who were fortunate enough (or belonged to the inner circles) and could be sent to Malta or elsewhere in the West.

So in Libya, the opposition did not find the humus it found in Egypt or Tunisia.

There are further differences. The opposition in Libya, as against that in Tunisia or in Egypt, chose to wage war with arms and weapons to combat the arms and weapons of the regime. The many deaths of the past days show how unequal the conflict is – the opposition is a gaggle of untrained volunteers with more zeal than ability, while the regime possesses an enormous amount of high-tech weaponry of which it has so far, thankfully, only used a fraction.

We may admire the sheer courage of those who bared their chests to be killed as they took part in suicidal mass protests after the Friday prayers. They have also shown up for what it is the fact that the Gaddafi regime, for all its posturing over the past years as becoming ‘softer’ (for which thank people like Tony Blair or Peter Mandelson), is still the cruel dictatorial tyrant it always was.

The situation in Libya has now gone beyond the pale of what happened in Tunis and Cairo. Nor can it by any means be defined, as KMB and John Dalli would have us believe, as a civil war. There cannot be a civil war when the sides are so unequally balanced. It is massive, ferocious, cold-bloodied repression – and in any country in the world such repression must not go unpunished, least of all in a country such as Libya, that borders on the Mediterranean Sea and that has all the history it has.

It would seem that the Great Powers are at last moving: The pieces being moved on the chessboard that is the sea south of Malta seem to be preparatory to actual action. To be really cynical, as someone was these past days, is for Gaddafi to commit some more war crimes, just like happened in Kosovo, in Bosnia and in Africa in previous years. People who were against the no-fly zone solution now seem to be considering it and preparing to impose it. NATO has ordered the AWACS, that take off from nearby Sigonella, to fly around the clock over Libya so that all movement is monitored and messages intercepted.

The sanctions are not really biting yet, but they are being sharpened and focused more. While the US interpretation of the sanctions includes people and entities, the EU interpretation, at least until yesterday, focused only on people. If the EU now changes over to wider sanctions, that may be announced tomorrow, that could be because the last resistance by EU member states (according to European media, Malta and Italy) have been overcome. The sanctions, if thus widened, could affect names we well know, starting with investments by Lafico.

There is absolutely no way that Gaddafi can get away after so many murders. Sooner or later, international justice will get him.

But even if not, in the highly unlikely event Gaddafi manages to resist all international pressure, there is still another way at least for half the country. As a letter to the Financial Times said in the past days, Libya was moving towards partition already in 1969: It was getting split up into Tripolitania (around Tripoli) and Cyrenaica (around Benghazi). King Idris, himself a Cyrenaican, was moving in this direction and had already built the new capital in the hills beyond Benghazi on the Brasilia style.

Then Gaddafi led the coup, Libya remained whole and the result was the subjugation of the entire country for 42 years. If the worst comes to the worst, that old Cyrenaican dream can be resurrected.