Muammar al-Gaddafi: A Political Obituary
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya was beaten up and then murdered by a single gunshot to his head, on the road between his native Sirte and his nemesis Misrata. He lived his life mostly by the sword and died too by the sword. The cannibalistic display of Gaddafi’s dead body, his unmarked grave in an open desert, summary executions of his 53 loyalists and scrubbing of that crime scene, legalizing polygamy and pronouncing their version of shariah as the new law by the fundamentalist-dominated National Transitional Council (NTC) are, at a minimum, a very sordid dawn of democracy.
There has been some talk, predominantly among the nouveaux democrats, about renaming Lahore’s Gaddafi Cricket Stadium. But Gaddafi was not always the pariah that he eventually became and certainly not in Pakistan. He was a darling of the Pakistanis with hotels, bakeries and transport ventures named after him. On the world scene he supported and received support from people like Nelson Mandela and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. I remember having stood in a reception line as a child when Gaddafi arrived in Peshawar on a side-excursion in 1974 with the then Prime Minister Z A Bhutto. I recall both of them standing in the aircraft door with Gaddafi’s hands held together and high in a solidarity gesture.
After consolidating power at home, Z A Bhutto, along with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, tried to configure some form of a Muslim world order. Bhutto had explored alternatives to becoming a US or a Soviet client and with the now defunct Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) under Indian influence back then, he leaned towards the Muslim countries. While pan-Islamism was the obvious theme of the 1974 Lahore Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a strong subtext was ‘Islamic Socialism’, with Bhutto, Gaddafi, Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and PLO’s Yasser Arafat leading that pack.
These leaders gravitated towards each other perhaps due to their secular persona, populist appeal, a nationalist outlook rooted in what they perceived as anti-imperialism and varying levels of drift towards socialism — none of which was an anathema then. In fact, quite the opposite was true and while the Arab monarchs abhorred these Nasserite traits, the masses embraced them. The OIC meeting in Pakistan came on the heels of the 1973 oil embargo imposed by the Arab caucus of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the foundations of which in many ways had been laid by Colonel Gaddafi.
When Gaddafi, an army colonel then, overthrew the Western-installed and staunchly pro-American King Idris al-Senussi in a bloodless coup, he wasted no time in booting out the Western forces from Libya. In one face-off he personally negotiated the evacuation of the Richard Wheelus US Air Force (USAF) base, an operational and intelligence hub, seven miles east of Tripoli. According to USAF’s Colonel Walter Boyne, the US negotiator Colonel “Chappie” James and Gaddafi nearly pulled guns on each other. Gaddafi was wearing one in a leg holster. The base was subsequently renamed Mitiga Airport and remained functional but the mistrust between the US and Gaddafi was to last forever. The real hardball, however, was played between Gaddafi and the Western oil companies that had a chokehold on the Libyan oil fields.
Among many companies that Gaddafi chastised, the California-based Occidental Petroleum was the first to cower. He negotiated higher prices and got greater revenue shares for the newly-formed Libyan National Oil Corporation. The rest of OPEC followed suit, benefited from high prices and eventually geared up for the 1973 oil embargo. By 1972 the US had withdrawn its ambassador from Libya and by 1979 had declared Libya a state sponsor of terror. The oil embargo was the declaration of a virtual war on the US for supporting Israel, and combined with the bear market of 1973-74, was responsible for a recession in the western hemisphere matched only by the Great Depression and the market plunge of 2008.
Gaddafi did work on a primitive pre-industrial socialist state of sorts, termed the ‘jamahariyah’ or people’s state in his Green Book. With oil money and based on proto-socialist economics, he curtailed private and rental property, wage labor and even retail businesses while pledging to provide free healthcare, housing and a vehicle per family. But in essence this was a primitive rentier economy that started showing strains when international sanctions, applied by the US in 1981, coupled with political isolation in the post-USSR era, started to take their toll.
The Western economic sanctions had little to do with Gaddafi’s human rights record at home or support of groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) abroad. The oil companies like Occidental continued to operate in Libya till 1986 and were the first ones to return after the sanctions eased in 2003. Not surprising that thirst for the highly desirable Libyan sweet crude is widely perceived as the Western motive to jump on the rebel bandwagon, only after stocks tumbled and the US crude price soared above $ 93.57 a barrel on February 22, 2011. The fear of skyrocketing oil prices bringing the already screeching world economy to a grinding halt appeared to be the trigger for the West to arm, finance and train the anti-Gaddafi elements with utter disregard for their jihadist orientation.
Gaddafi was one of the first leaders who issued Interpol warnings regarding al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in 1998. The Ben Ghazi-based al Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) — now part of the NTC — fought against Gaddafi in the 1990s. LFIG was eventually declared a terrorist entity by the US with help from Gaddafi. The post-2003 thaw in Gaddafi’s relations with the West was too little, too late. Dismantling his nuclear program and ditching his erstwhile comrades a la IRA were not enough appeasement for the West. However, like the French Revolution, too little internal reform — not its absence — actually triggered the revolt against Gaddafi. He missed out on the great Confucian principle of statecraft that a happy and prosperous populace is the best security against foreign interventions.
Colonel Gaddafi had been referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mob justice meted out to the prisoner of war (PoW) Gaddafi by the NTC, supported by the UN, US and NATO — those who referred him to the ICC — vitiates and violates the law of war as well as religious conventions. The blood-tainted countercoup was a wrong message for both the autocrats and the democrats and has the potential to start another cycle of life and death by the sword.
( The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki)
