asianaffairs

Libya's far from fairytale ending

The death of Muammar Gaddafi may have brought closure for many but his removal has cost the people of Libya dear, and the West seems to have learned little from the Libyan story, warns David Watts.

Editorial

Morality in the dock

Disturbing pictures of a wounded, dying and, finally, dead Muammar Gaddafi amount to a tragic commentary on the absence of those values that underpin a civilised society in the 21st century.

Gaddafi was no angel, as many of the families of his victims in Libya and abroad are all too ready to testify. But the manner in which he was dispatched, with the back-up assistance of the US, France and Britain, points to a moral decline and several steps backwards into the real and metaphorical jungle from which human beings emerged many thousands of years ago.

True, no Western government was involved in the capture, presumed interrogation and execution of the former Libyan leader. That dubious honour belongs to the angry young men — so-called freedom fighters — who found him hiding in a drainage pipe close to the city of Sirte.

His last moments of life captured on video show him pleading, 'Don't shoot, don't shoot' and 'What did I ever do to you?' before he was thrown into a truck, off-loaded and dragged in agony through suburban streets, then finally dispatched with a bullet through his head.

One freedom fighter has already given his version of how he grabbed Gaddafi's personal pistol, a gold revolver, which he subsequently brandished in the air as his personal trophy. Another man, identified as Adel Busamir, has been quoted as saying, 'We catch him and we shot him…somebody shot him by gun — 9mm.'

Gaddafi was a young, 27-year-old army officer when he launched a successful military coup that toppled Libya's King Idris. The regime that he established and ran for the next 42 years started off by genuflecting to Gaddafi's hero and next door neighbour, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Nasser died a year later, Gaddafi saw his chance to establish himself as a world leader in the same mould and as the Egyptian leader's natural successor. The problem for Gaddafi was that he lacked Nasser's charisma, as well as his mass following and credible ideology.

To begin with, Gaddafi tried to copy Nasser's strategy of positioning his country between the then Soviet Union and the Western powers. Yet a few years later he seemed to embrace the Islamic cause. At the Islamic summit in Lahore in 1972, he drove himself to the Pakistan-India border, where he was pictured shouting 'kaffir, kaffir' in the direction of New Delhi.

These were the sorts of antics that provoked laughter and occasional contempt in world capitals. But Gaddafi's failure to be accepted as a world leader of standing contributed a more deadly edge to his tactics. These included funding Pakistan's clandestine nuclear programme, shovelling money and guns into the welcoming arms of the IRA, the blowing up of a Pan Am Jumbo jet over Lockerbie in 1988 and another bombing of a French plane over Chad in 1989. In Britain, national feelings still rankle at the memory of how an innocent policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, was killed in 1984 by a gun fired from a window of the Libyan embassy in London.

As Gaddafi's crimes multiplied, so did the number of his enemies at home and abroad seeking to even the balance by somehow having this North African dictator removed from power.

Sadly, those campaigning for his ouster did not include the likes of ex British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who made nine trips to Libya and was pictured smiling and shaking Gaddafi's hand. Others in Britain were all too ready to welcome to London his favourite son, Saif, who subsequently obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics.
Today Gaddafi is dead and many of his immediate family are also either seriously wounded or dead as well. Libyans may have every reason to celebrate a new beginning for their country. But there can be no justification for torturing Gaddafi, dragging his wounded body through the streets and finally killing him with a bullet through his head. Nor is there any justification for newspapers in the West to describe him as a 'mad dog' and publish pictures of his battered body on their front pages.

At the very least Gaddafi was entitled to a fair trial and — provided that was the verdict — a death sentence implemented in as orderly and dignified a way as possible. Anything less is a slap in the face of justice and a setback to the hopes of those who believe that human society has moved on from the Dark Ages.

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