Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, 1942-2011
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who ruled Libya for 42 years, died Thursday as his last stronghold fell to the Libyan forces who drove him from power, officials of Libya’s transitional government said. There were conflicting initial reports of the specific circumstances of his death: some said he was killed in Surt, his hometown; others said he died while fleeing it.
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Colonel Qaddafi, 69, was an erratic, provocative dictator with the wardrobe and looks befitting an aging rock star. To thwart potential rivals at home, he sanctioned spasms of grisly violence and frequent bedlam, while on the world stage he sought to leverage his nation’s immense oil wealth into an outsized personal role.
He anointed himself with a string of titles over the years: “the brother leader,” “the guide to the era of the masses,” “the king of kings of Africa” and — his most preferred — “the leader of the revolution.”
But the labels pinned on him by others tended to stick the most. President Ronald Reagan called him “the mad dog of the Middle East.” President Anwar el-Sadat of neighboring Egypt pronounced him “the crazy Libyan.”
Even in the last months, he refused to countenance the fact that the country he had ruled as a dictator had turned against him, telling interviewers, “All my people love me.”
He appeared to maintain that attitude to the end. In one of his last messages, issued as a fugitive in the months after Tripoli fell and broadcast on Syrian television (he had lost control of the Libyan airwaves), he said his downfall was a Western conspiracy that could be reversed by his Libyan supporters. “The people of Libya, the true Libyans, will never accept invasion and colonization,” he said. “We will fight for our freedom and we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.”
Colonel Qaddafi was a 27-year-old junior officer when he led the bloodless coup that deposed Libya’s monarch in 1969. Soon afterward, he began styling himself a desert nomad philosopher. He received dignitaries in his signature sprawling white tent, which he erected wherever he went: Rome, Paris and, after much controversy, New York, on a Westchester estate in 2009. Inside, its quilted walls might be printed with traditional motifs like palm trees and camels or embroidered with his own sayings.
Colonel Qaddafi declared that his political system of permanent revolution would sweep away capitalism and socialism. But he hedged his bets by financing and arming a cornucopia of violent organizations, including the Irish Republican Army and African guerrilla groups, and he became an international pariah after his government was linked to deadly terrorist attacks, particularly the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.
After the American-led invasion of Iraq, Colonel Qaddafi announced that Libya was abandoning its efforts to acquire unconventional weapons, including a covert nascent nuclear program, ushering in a new era of relations with the West. But in Libya, he ruled through an ever smaller circle of advisers, including his sons, and continued to destroy any institution that might challenge him.
By the time he was done, Libya had no parliament, no unified military command, no political parties, no unions, no civil society and no nongovernmental organizations. His ministries were hollow, with the notable exception of the state oil company.
Tight Grip on Power
Eight years into his rule, he renamed the country the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Jamahiriya. (Jamahiriya was his Arabic translation for a state of the masses.) “In the era of the masses, power is in the hands of the people themselves and leaders disappear forever,” he wrote in The Green Book, a three-volume political tract that was required reading in every school.
For decades, Libyans noted dryly that he did not seem to be disappearing any time soon; he became the longest-serving Arab or African leader. Yet he always presented himself as beloved guide and chief clairvoyant, rather than ruler. Indeed, he seethed when a popular uprising inspired by similar revolutions next door in Tunisia and Egypt first sought to drive him from power.
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