During nearly 42 years in power, Muammar Gaddafi ruled with an eccentric brutality. He was so mercurial he turned Libya into an isolated pariah, then an oil power courted by the West, then back again. At home, his whims became law and his visions became a warped dictatorship, until he was finally toppled by his own people.
The modern Middle East’s longest-reigning figure, Libya’s 69-year-old ‘Brother Leader’ became the first ruler killed in the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region this year.
After rebels overwhelmed the capital Tripoli and drove him into hiding in late August, Gaddafi vowed in messages to fight on until “martyrdom or victory” and to “burn Libya under the feet” of his enemies. And indeed, he met his end on Thursday alongside his last heavily armed supporters, cornered by revolutionary fighters in Sirte, the fishing village where he was born and which he transformed during his rule into a virtual second capital city.
In the last images of him alive, a wounded Gaddafi staggered and shouted at fighters dragging him away after pulling him out of a drainage tunnel where he took refuge trying to flee Sirte with loyalists. His goateed face was bloodied, his head balding after the loss of the hairpiece that filled out his trademark bush of curly hair.
“What do you want? Don’t kill me, my sons,” Gaddafi said to the fighters as they grabbed him, one commander said.
Gaddafi leaves behind an oil-rich nation of six million traumatised by a rule that drained it of institutions after four decades when all issues came down to one man and his family. Notorious for his extravagant outfits – ranging from white suits and sunglasses to military uniforms with frilled epaulets to brilliantly coloured robes decorated with the map of Africa – he styled himself as a combination Bedouin chief and philosopher king, with titles from ‘leader of the revolution’ to ‘king of the kings of Africa’.
He ruled by mad lurches. He was a sponsor of terrorism whose regime was blamed for blowing up two passenger jets and who then helped the US in the war on terror. He was an Arab nationalist who mocked Arab rulers. He seemed to revel in infuriating leaders, whether in the West or the Middle East.
US President Ronald Reagan branded him a “mad dog” after a 1986 bombing that killed US servicemen in Berlin was blamed on Libya. Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who fought a border war with Libya in the 1970s, wrote in his diary that Gaddafi was “mentally sick” and “needs treatment”.
Behind the flamboyance and showmanship, associates say Gaddafi was meticulous in managing the levers of power. He intervened in decisions large and small and constantly met personally with tribal leaders and military officers whose support he maintained through lucrative posts.
The sole constant was his grip on the country. Numerous coup and assassination attempts against him over the years mostly ended with public executions of the plotters, hanged in city squares.
The ultimate secret of his longevity lay in the vast oil reserves under his North African desert nation and in his capacity for drastic changes of course when necessary.
The most spectacular U-turn came in late 2003. After years of denial, Libya acknowledged responsibility – though in a Gaddafi-esque twist of logic, not guilt – for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. He agreed to pay up to $10 million to relatives of each victim.
He also announced that Libya would dismantle its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes under international supervision.
The rewards came fast. Within months, the US lifted economic sanctions and resumed diplomatic ties. The European Union hosted Gaddafi in Brussels. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 became the highest-ranking US official to visit the country in more than 50 years. Rice had a special place in the heart for Gaddafi, who in an interview once called her “my darling black African woman... I love her very much... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza.” Tony Blair, as British prime minister, also visited him in Tripoli.
International oil companies rushed to invest in Libya’s fields. Documents uncovered after Gaddafi’s fall revealed close cooperation between his intelligence services and the CIA in pursuing terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks, even before the US lifted its designation of Libya as a sponsor of terror in 2006.
But Gaddafi became an instant pariah once more when he began a brutal crackdown on the February uprising in his country that grew out of the Arab Spring of popular revolts across the region. The UN authorised a no-fly zone over Libya in March, and Nato launched a campaign of airstrikes against his military forces.
“I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents. ... I will die as a martyr at the end,” he proclaimed in one of his last televised speeches during the uprising, pounding the lectern near a sculpture of a golden fist crushing a US warplane.
Gaddafi was born in 1942 in the central Libyan desert near Sirte, the son of a Bedouin father who was once jailed for opposing Libya’s Italian colonialists. In 1969, as a mere 27-year-old captain, he emerged as leader of a group of officers who overthrew the monarchy of King Idris. A handsome, dashing figure in uniform and sunglasses, Gaddafi 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, Gaddafi proceeded to transform the nation.
A US air base was closed. Some 20,000 Italians were expelled in retaliation for the 1911-41 occupation. Businesses were nationalised.
In 1975 he published the ‘Green Book’, his political manifesto that laid out what he called the ‘Third International Theory’ of government and society. He declared Libya to be a ‘Jamahiriya’ – an Arabic neologism he created meaning roughly “republic of the masses.”
Everyone rules, it declared, calling representative democracy a form of tyranny, and Libyans were organised into “people’s committees” that went all the way up to a ‘People’s Congress’, a sort of parliament.
In the end, rule by all meant rule by none except Gaddafi, who elevated himself to colonel and declared himself ‘Brother Leader’.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Gaddafi supported groups deemed by the West to be terrorists – from the Irish Republican Army through various radical Palestinian units to militant groups in the Philippines. He 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.
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 Gaddafi opponents outside, killing a British policewoman.
The heat was rising, meanwhile, between the Reagan administration and Gaddafi over terrorism. In 1986, Libya was found responsible for a bombing at a Berlin discotheque frequented by US troops in which three people died. America struck back by sending warplanes to bomb Libya. About 40 Libyans died.
The Lockerbie bombing followed in 1988, followed a year later by a bombing that downed a French airliner over the West African nation of Niger. The West was outraged, and years of sanctions followed.
Libya’s road back from pariah status began in 1999, when Gaddafi’s government handed over two Libyans for trial in the Lockerbie bombing. In 2001, a Scottish court convicted one, an intelligence agent, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The other was acquitted.
In 2002, Gaddafi looked back on his actions and told a crowd of Libyans in the southern city of Sabha: “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 behaviour.”
Throughout his rule, he was a showman who would stop at nothing to make his point.
A 2009 US diplomatic cable released by the website WikiLeaks spoke of Gaddafi’s intense dislike of staying on upper floors of buildings, aversion to flying over water, and a taste for horse racing and flamenco dancing.
Other authoritarians
• Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who survived CIA assassination plots, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the US economic embargo to excoriate and antagonise the United States for more than half a century. Castro, 85, formally resigned as president in February 2008 due to illness but handed the reins to his brother, Raul, and the revolutionary regime survives. Cuban-US trade is minimal and there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries. The US accuses the Cuban government of trampling on human rights and silencing dissent, while Havana portrays itself as a victim of US bullying.
• Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a left-wing activist and former military officer who came to power in 1999 and instituted radical changes in economic and social policy, including nationalisation of the oil industry. Chavez has accused Washington of plotting to invade Venezuela, called for containment of the US, aligned himself with Cuba and signed major arms deals with Russia to build Venezuela into a regional power. The US likes to portray Venezuela as more of an irritant than an adversary, but that could change if Chavez adopts more aggressive policies.
• Kim Jong Il of North Korea, a Stalinist-style nation with a one million-man army that has been a thorn in the side of the US since the Korean War. In recent years the US has sought to persuade Kim to give up his small nuclear weapons programme, offering economic aid and diplomatic favours as a bargaining chip. But the US accuses Kim of repeatedly reneging on promises to disarm while selling weapons expertise abroad. The US and other nations accused Pyongyang last year of torpedoing a South Korean navy ship and shelling a South Korean island. With the North Korean leader believed to be gravely ill, the key to Washington’s future relations with Pyongyang may be Kim’s son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Un.
• Iran clerical leadership. The theocratic regime in Tehran has demonstrated little tolerance for dissent and a deep and abiding hostility to Washington since the overthrow of the US-backed regime of the shah of Iran in 1979. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s broadsides against the US and Israel are a regular feature of UN General Assembly meetings, but his is just one voice among many in the Iranian government, which Western analysts say consists of a jigsaw puzzle of anti-Western factions. The present conflict with Washington grows out of concerns about Iran’s support for terror groups in the Middle East and attacks against US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but mainly focuses on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The US says Iran is laying the groundwork for a nuclear weapons programme that could threaten the Middle East, US and Europe. Iran says it is interested only in peaceful nuclear technology.
• Not all dictators are regarded as enemies of the West. During the Cold War and beyond, many have been treated as stalwart allies. Today, a number of autocrats endure criticism from the US but are thought to represent little threat to Washington’s strategic interests, including President Aleksander Lukashenko of Belarus, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.