Gaddafi why colonel

Born to nomadic Bedouin parents in , Muammar Gaddafi was certainly an intelligent, resourceful man, but he did not receive a thorough education, apart from learning to read the Koran and his military training.

Nevertheless, in the early s he set out to prove himself a leading political philosopher, developing something called the third universal theory, outlined in his famous Green Book. The theory claims to solve the contradictions inherent in capitalism and communism the first and second theories , in order to put the world on a path of political, economic and social revolution and set oppressed peoples free everywhere. In fact, it is little more than a series of fatuous diatribes, and it is bitterly ironic that a text whose professed objective is to break the shackles imposed by the vested interests dominating political systems was used instead to subjugate an entire population.

The result of Gaddafi's theory, underlined with absolute intolerance of dissent or alternative voices, was the hollowing out of Libyan society, with all vestiges of constitutionality, civil society and authentic political participation eradicated.

The solution to society's woes, the book maintains, is not electoral representation - described by Gaddafi as "dictatorship" by the biggest party - or any other existing political system, but the establishment of people's committees to run all aspects of existence.

This new system is presented diagrammatically in the Green Book as an elegant wagon wheel, with basic popular congresses around the rim electing people's committees that send influence along the spokes to a responsive and truly democratic people's general secretariat at the centre.

The model that was created in reality was an ultra-hierarchical pyramid - with the Gaddafi family and close allies at the top wielding power unchecked, protected by a brutal security apparatus. In the parallel world of the Green Book, the system is called a Jamahiriyya - a neologism that plays on the Arabic word for a republic, Jumhuriyya, implying "rule by the masses". So the long-suffering Libyan masses were dragooned into attending popular congresses vested with no power, authority or budgets, with the knowledge that anyone who spoke out of turn and criticised the regime could be carted off to prison.

A set of draconian laws was enacted in the name of upholding security, further undermining the colonel's claim to a champion of freedom from oppression and dictatorship. Legal penalties included collective punishment, death for anyone who spread theories aiming to change the constitution and life imprisonment for disseminating information that tarnished the country's reputation.

Tales abounded of torture, lengthy jail terms without a fair trial, executions and disappearances. Many of Libya's most educated and qualified citizens chose exile, rather than pay lip service to the lunacy. Unchecked by any of the normal restraints of governance, Gaddafi was able to take his anti-imperialist campaign around the world, funding and supporting militant groups and resistance movements wherever he found them.

He also targeted Libyan exiles, dozens of whom were killed by assassins believed to belong to a global Libyan intelligence network. If governments were prepared to shrug off Gaddafi's human rights violations in Libya, and persecution of dissidents abroad, it was a different matter when it came to him supporting groups that used terrorism on their own patches.

A bombing of a nightclub used by US soldiers in Berlin in , blamed on Libyan agents, proved a decisive moment. US President Ronald Reagan ordered air strikes against Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the two soldiers and one civilian killed and the dozens of wounded, although there was no conclusive proof beyond intelligence "chatter" that Libya had ordered the attack.

The US retaliation was intended to kill the "mad dog of the Middle East", as Mr Reagan branded him, but although there was extensive damage and an unknown number of Libyan fatalities - including, it was claimed, Gaddafi's adopted daughter - the colonel emerged unscathed. His reputation may even have been enhanced among opponents of Washington's heavy-handed foreign policy. The bombing of Pan-Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in was the next significant escalation, causing the deaths of people in the air and on the ground, the worst single act of terrorism ever witnessed in the UK.

Gaddafi's initial refusal to hand over the two Libyan suspects to Scottish jurisdiction resulted in a protracted period of negotiations and UN sanctions, finally ending in with their surrender and trial. One of the men, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, was jailed for life, but the other was found not guilty. The resolution of the Lockerbie case, along with Gaddafi's subsequent admission and renunciation of a covert nuclear and chemical weapons programme, paved the way for a significant warming of relations between Tripoli and western powers in the 21st century.

The domestication of the erstwhile "mad dog" was held up as one of the few positive results of US President George W Bush's military invasion of Iraq in The argument went that Gaddafi had watched the fate of fellow miscreant Saddam Hussein, hanged by Iraqis after a US-instigated legal process, and had learnt a sobering lesson. But within a year of Gaddafi's revolution, Nasser had died after a heart attack, and the disciple appointed himself as "leader", "teacher" and "custodian of Arabism" in his place.

The existing Arab order, he preached, was replete with hypocrisy and two-faced policies, with feeble and shameful regimes who worked against, not for, Arab unity and the Palestinian cause in which they claimed to believe. But he would surely succeed where his master had failed. And already he was hinting at yet larger, visionary ambitions than that. In this narcissism and self-aggrandisement, he was at least in some measure the child not so much of his Arab times as of the narrow Libyan sphere which he was trying to transcend.

In part, at least, they were an outgrowth of something in the Libyans' psyche, a sense of inferiority and an aggrieved conviction that their brother Arabs had never appreciated the immense scale, heroism and sacrifice of their struggle against the Italians before the colonists were driven out by the allies in , in which one-third of the population had died, including many members of Gaddafi's own family. No one believed in his own high destiny like Gaddafi himself. When the Prophet Muhammad was given his Islamic mission, he called on the Persian and Roman kings to convert to Islam.

Could a bedouin shepherd stand in the face of the Roman and Persian kings? His first quest was to unite Libya and Egypt, combining the newfound oil wealth of the former with the large population, skills and education of the latter to make a great state to which other states would rally.

In July thousands of boisterous Gaddafist youths, in buses and cars, streamed across the Egyptian frontier demanding instant merger in petitions signed in blood.

It was one of at least half a dozen such unionist experiments, with a variety of partners, which foundered on the rocks of the would-be partners' infirmity of purpose, fear, suspicion and disdain of this bizarre, arrogant, impetuous upstart. Gaddafi's pan-Arab ambitions were always closest to his visionary's heart.

But, frustrated on every front, he began to look inwards, confining himself to the only arena, Libya itself, where his absolute writ ran incontestably. The long-suffering Libyan people became the only possible laboratory for his weird, utopian conceits.

In he turned Libya into the Great Jamahiriyah. In line with his Third Universal Theory, his answer to the discredited systems of capitalism and communism, the Jamahiriyah, or State of the Masses, supplanted the Jumhuriyah, or Republic, as the most advanced form of government ever known to mankind. In one volume of his famous Green Book, outlining his solution to the "political problem", he revealed how, through committees everywhere, his new system ended all conventional forms of government — "authoritarian, family, tribal, factional, class, parliamentary, partisan or party coalition" — replacing them with "direct democracy" and "people's power".

Society's vanguard, the revolutionary committees, or "those who have been convinced, through the Green Book, of the fraudulence of contemporary democracy", were to incite the masses in their conquest of all bastions of "conventional" authority. In a second volume, his solution to the "economic problem", he envisaged a society that would banish the profit motive, and ultimately money itself, and where no one would work for anyone else.

The spread of the new gospel was a historic necessity. Just as the European despots ganged together to crush the new republican order to which the French revolution gave birth, so the Arab kings and presidents would round on the Jamahiriyah to preserve their "crumbling power and apostate policies". But this was to amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy. From being an aspirant for union, President Anwar Sadat's Egypt quickly became a mortal enemy, and waged a vicious border war against its neighbour.

Libya came under such assaults not because of the power of a new idea — Burkina Faso was the only other country to declare itself a Jamahiriyah. For in practice, Gaddafi remained a very conventional ruler of a developing country.

Behind the pretentious facade, his power rested on a very down-to-earth mixture of totalitarian method and tribal loyalty, with his revolutionary committees as the instrument of policies that came from the top, almost never, as under the "people's power" they should have, from below. If he achieved anything, it was mainly because of oil — which yielded ever-increasing billions a year for a people of 2 to 3 million — and his freedom to impose his peculiar brand of Arab socialism without regard for true cost.

Yet even so, he could not avert the chaos, the grim fiasco of his grandiose supermarkets' empty shelves, of stampedes — in which people were trampled to death — for basic commodities when they did arrive.

He also spent huge sums on a Soviet-supplied arsenal. But neither the money nor the 8, Soviet technicians could hide the fact that much of it was rotting away in the desert. No, the foreign desire to stamp out the Jamahiriyah was a self-fulfilling prophecy because, in his pan-Arab frustrations, Gaddafi turned more and more to propaganda, subversion and the patronage of every conceivable "liberation" movement, from semi-respectable Palestinian organisations to outright terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal.

He openly espoused revolutionary violence, and sent hit teams to assassinate Libyan "stray dogs" who opposed him from exile. In , shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London killed PC Yvonne Fletcher while she was policing a demonstration, and Britain broke off diplomatic ties.

Gaddafi declared war on the American-sponsored peace process and became the US's public enemy number one. In the Sixth Fleet shot down two Libyan fighters over the Gulf of Sirte in the first military collision, in modern times, between the US and an Arab country. Then, in , President Ronald Reagan sent waves of warplanes to bombard targets in Tripoli and Benghazi.

One was the Aziziyah barracks where Gaddafi lived, but instead of the man Reagan called "the mad dog of the Middle East", they apparently — according to state media — killed his adopted daughter, Hanna, instead. It took some time to appear, but this raid, and above all the attempt to kill him, had a sobering effect. Emulating President Mikhail Gorbachev, in Gaddafi began a characteristically flamboyant perestroika of his own.

The revisionism was implicit recognition that the Libyan people would have been quite unmoved had Reagan's Fs got him, that he had reached a nadir of unpopularity, the cumulative consequence of American hostility, foreign misadventures, domestic repression and the havoc wrought by his puerile Green Book socio-economic theories.

He mounted a bulldozer and rammed the walls of a well-known Tripoli jail. Political prisoners clambered free from there and other places where they had been incarcerated for years, often without knowing why. Private retail trade trickled back to the long-shuttered Italianate arcades of central Tripoli, bringing with it wonderful things such as soap, razor blades and batteries, which had all but vanished in the era of "supermarket socialism".

The perestroika pleased Libyans so far as it went, yearning as they did for the day when, like any conventional leader, theirs would turn his attention to the ordinary problems of a small and rather ordinary country.

It also impressed western diplomats as a possible portent of a radically new Gaddafi, one readying himself to renounce his fierce and flamboyant anti-imperialism and his sponsorship of international terrorism. Yet if, at last, this really did signify the mellowing, on all fronts, of the enfant terrible of the Arab world, it was a process that was suddenly thrown into reverse by a single horrific legacy of the terrorist past which he was apparently trying to put behind him.

That was the bombing, in , of Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, with the loss of all passengers and crew aboard, along with 11 people on the ground. After a huge international investigation, in Britain and America accused Libya of responsibility, and demanded that it hand over the two chief suspects, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, members of Gaddafi's intelligence services, for trial.

His first instinct was to rail and abuse. Muammar Gaddafi met his end after being cornered in a Sirte drainage pipe, having fled from a NATO air-strike on his convoy.

Questions about exactly how he died - whether caught in crossfire or summarily executed by his captors - have yet to be answered.

Others were less enthusiastic. Many believe that democratic values require us to follow a proper legal process. On a rather separate note, it is also likely that Gaddafi possessed information that might have resolved questions about the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight With his death, the likelihood of ever gaining this information has diminished dramatically.

It hovers between a claim about what Gaddafi morally deserved, and a suggestion that after living in a reckless and self-serving way, one must expect some sort of violent come-uppance.