Happy anniversary, brother Colonel
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): "The Libyans are as nothing without Qaddafi," rhapsodized his second-in-command, Major Abdelsalam Jalloud, back in 1969. "He is neither his own, the Libyans', or even the Arabs' property, but the property of free men everywhere..." Not only that, but he looked a bit like Mick Jagger.
Thirty years later, he still does. Every line in Qaddafi's face tells a story too (though relatively few of them are stories of sex, substance abuse, and rock'n'roll), and his thrice-daily changes of costume put him right up with Mick in the narcissism stakes. Even his body language is that of a rock star. It's a great pity that he went into government instead -- and nobody regrets it more than the Libyans.
On the first of September, Col. Moammar Qaddafi celebrates thirty years in power in Libya, and wise Libyans will enthusiastically join in the celebrations. His fellow Arab leaders will be less enthusiastic, however -- he has tried to kill or overthrow most of them at one point or another in his long career -- and he is virtually a pariah in the rest of the world.
He has supplied arms to practically every terrorist group in the world from the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines (and money in the 1970s) to the Irish Republican Army (15 tones of weapons, including heavy machine-guns and hand-held anti-aircraft missiles, smuggled into Ireland in 1985-1986).
Last March six Libyan officials including Qaddafi's brother-in-law were convicted in absentia in Paris of blowing up a French airliner over the Sahara in 1989, killing 170 people. And later this year the trial will begin in the Netherlands of two alleged Libyan intelligence agents accused of blowing up Pan Am 103 and killing 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. No wonder that Qaddafi is the Arab leader the West most loves to hate -- but the reality, inevitably, is somewhat more complicated.
The Lockerbie trial may well conclude that Qaddafi did not commission the Lockerbie bombing (though he certainly did order many others). Even the big U.S. air attack on Libya in 1986 (which killed Qaddafi's adopted infant daughter) was probably "retaliating" for a bomb that was actually planted by Syrian, not Libyan intelligence. Qaddafi is a self-obsessed, naive poseur, but he is not really responsible for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East.
Moammar Qaddafi grew up literally in a black tent, a member of the Gaddafa tribe that roams the deserts of eastern Libya. Most Libyans live in cities, but their leader is a Bedouin whose historical memory starts with his people's astonishingly brave resistance to Italian colonization, for which they paid with hundreds of thousands of lives -- Libyan Arabs were the first people in the world to be bombed, by the Italian air force in 1911 -- and effectively ends with decolonization in the 1960s.
Nothing that has happened since has had much impact on Qaddafi's black-and-white view of the world, where the gallant colonial peoples struggle forever against the machinations of wicked imperialists: Israel and America bad, Arabs and Africans good. He goes almost nowhere outside Libya, and for the past three decades almost nobody has argued with him.
Nor has anything that has happened in the past 30 years moved Qaddafi's thought processes beyond the simplistic nonsense of his multi-volume Green Book, in which he sets out a "third universal theory" that allegedly avoids the pitfalls of both capitalism and Communism. But he is just a pain in the posterior, not the "mad dog of the Middle East" (as Ronald Reagan called him). And after several serious scares, he is actually trying to ingratiate himself with his own people and the world -- to little avail.
The problem at home can be summed up as ten years in which Qaddafi tried to unite with any and every other Arab country, another decade during which he pursued an "Arab socialist" experiment featuring huge supermarkets that didn't even stock soap and razor blades, and a final decade spent under United Nations sanctions because of the Lockerbie bombing. After all that, most of Libya's five million people would welcome a leader who just paid attention to the needs of their own small country.
In a way, Qaddafi is belatedly trying to become that leader. The "socialist" experiments are finished, he no longer tries to couple indiscriminately with other Arab regimes, and he has even handed over the men accused of the Lockerbie bombing in order to get sanctions lifted. At the age of 57, he may finally have understood that his job is running Libya. But it is too late.
Behind the ideological mumbo-jumbo of the jamahiriyah (state of the masses), Qaddafi has run Libya for 30 years by the usual combination of tribal favoritism and savage repression. After thirty years of that, your enemies know exactly who they are -- and they greatly outnumber your friends. Qaddafi cannot dismount the tiger he rides without dying.
It's the same story abroad. Even if he wasn't responsible for Lockerbie, he has crossed the invisible line that constrains even heads of state too many times. Nobody trusts him, least of all his Arab and African neighbors. He is classed as a rogue, and though some of them take his money, if anyone gets a clear shot at him they will bring him down.
So is he doomed? Not necessarily. This is the Arab world, where thirty years in power is regarded as a good start. But it will never be glad, confident morning in Qaddafi's Libya again.