The murder of Gaddafi by lynch mob and a dark start to “new” Libya
The killing of Muammar Gaddafi on October 20, by an armed lynch mob and the victory of the rebel forces were quickly celebrated by the United States President Barack Obama and other leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries, whose warplanes bombed the cities of Libya over the past eight months – under the guise of “protecting civilians”. The manner in which Colonel Gaddafi was killed has, though, been considered by many in Africa to be a return to what they called the dark days of colonialism and slavery – where captured victims were treated with disrespect in a dehumanising manner. (1) A video circulating widely across the internet shows a bloodied and somewhat disoriented Gaddafi being pulled and pushed about while still alive by a large and cacophonous rebel contingency. And a still image from the disorderly scene captures the grimace on his face and the handgun that would put a bullet through his temple. Despite the near-universal jubilation and an orgy of self-congratulation in the western media, the anarchic bloodshed that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq left many fearing for what happens next.

Most of the mainstream corporate media in the west provided voluminous coverage of the savage murder of former Libyan leader, presenting this gruesome incident as a big victory for Libyan people and the triumph of democracy over tyranny. (2) The brutal killing is the culmination of a criminal military campaign, which caused the death of untold numbers of Libyans and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. The war against Gaddafi also led to the spread of economic suffering throughout the region as hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers were forced to flee to neighbouring countries. The former Libyan leader was long demonised and isolated by western leaders and media. He was presented as the evil monster that everyone should run away from. Some of the criticisms against him are not without merit – especially, those from the Libyan people who endured his leadership for the last 42 years.

Having the same leader in power for such a long time is a legitimate source of some internal opposition and, therefore, there are legitimate activists and revolutionaries in the country – who wanted major changes and felt strongly that the removal of Gaddafi was necessary for this. He had come to power as the last revolutionary leader of the pan-Arab nationalist Nasser generation. For most of his 42-year rule, Gaddafi remained a very conventional ruler of a developing African country. His absolute power rested on a predictable mixture of totalitarian control and tribal loyalty. He harnessed oil revenues to restructure society and build up a strong power base with a large security and military apparatus. Gaddafi ruled Libya for a long time, over 4 decades, and saw many ups and downs. Few leaders in the world have the same complex personality. Robert Fisk, one of the few journalists with the integrity to report the truth, impartially captured the approach of the western world in the aftermath of the killing of Gaddafi. In British newspaper The Independent, he wrote on October 21: “We loved him. We hated him. Then we loved him again. Blair slobbered over him. Then we hated him again. Then Clinton slobbered over her BlackBerry and we really hated him even more again.”(3)

There are a number of significant positive aspects of Gaddafi regime, both for Libyan people and the rest of Africa. Gaddafi is no saint but he played a key role in eliminating poverty and developing the country’s health and educational infrastructure during his 42 year old rule. He was not perceived as a western lackey as other Arab leaders, accused of putting outside interests before the interests of their own people. He was viewed by many inside and outside Libya as someone standing up for the genuine national interests of Libyan people, and as someone who stood against Western attempts to de-colonise his country. He criticized conservative Arab regimes in the Middle East and presented himself as the real champion of the African peoples’ rights and independence. This was the main essence of his international popularity.

He came to power in 1969 as a result of a coup organized by a group of young army officers influenced by the pan-Arab and reformist ideas of Nasser. He, then just a 27-years-old junior officer in the Libyan army, promised to develop agriculture and industry, and to distribute oil wealth fairly for the needs of Libyan people. (4) He took extensive measures to ensure that Libya’s oil wealth was used for the benefit of the Libyan people and created a genuine welfare state, with state-of the-art medical facilities and an education system accessible to all. A number of developmental projects and high oil revenues have enabled the government of Libya to elevate its people’s living standards. The economy of the country thrived under his rule; among other ambitious projects, the Libyan state invested a large amount of money to bring aquifer freshwater from southern Libya’s desert to the coastal regions where the populations are concentrated. The cost of all these projects had been exclusively financed by Libya’s Central/Reserve Bank, without borrowing a cent from abroad. The social and economic status of women and children has particularly improved. The World Bank estimates that Libya has no external debt and its reserves amount to $160 billion – now frozen globally. Unlike other oil producing countries such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, Libya utilized the revenue from its oil to develop its country. The standard of living of the people of Libya was the highest in Africa, falling in the category of countries with a GNP per capita of between USD 2,200 and 6,000. (6)

While the ruling elite enjoyed higher living standards compared to average Libyans, and some corruption existed within its ranks, Libya was never a highly polarized society under Gaddafi divided between extremes of wealth and poverty.

The cost of living in Libya was for most the time very cheap. Most of the essential items’ prices were heavily subsidized, like electricity and water. A large section of the Libyan population never paid for electricity and water charges as it was declared their constitutional right. There was no interest on loans – banks in Libya are state-owned. Loans are given to all its citizens at a 0 per cent interest rate, by law. Housing was considered a human right and Gaddafi vowed that his own parents would not get a house until everyone in Libya had a home – and, it is said, that his own father died while Gaddafi and his wife were still living in a tent. All newly-weds received $50,000 from the government to buy their first apartment and start up a family. Every woman who gave birth was provided by the state with $5,000. All education and medical treatment were free under Kaddafi. Under 5 mortality rate per 1000 live births declined from 71 in 1991 to 14 in 2009.(5)

Life expectancy has risen from 61 to 77.6 years of age from 1980 to 2009. Should Libyans want to take up farming – the state would provide them with land, house, all necessary equipment, seed and livestock: all free. The price of petrol was 14 cents per litre while 40 loaves of bread went for 15 cents. Less than 7 million of Libyan citizens owns 14 million registered cars. Other benefits were also introduced in the areas of university education. And according to an oil-profit sharing scheme, every Libyan got $500 in their account every year – from the national income.(7,8)

In 2010, the United Nations Development Programme rated Libya 53rd, as being the highest ranking in its Human Development Index (the Real Wealth of Nations) for Africa. In terms of the world, the UNDP HDI statistics considered Libya better than countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and China and better than the EU member state of Bulgaria. Before Gaddafi, less than one-fifth of Libyans were literate. After gaddafi’s policies were implemented, the adult literacy rate was of the order of 89%, (2009), (94% for males and 83% for females). 99.9% of youth are literate. Gross primary school enrolment ratio was 97% for boys and 97% for girls (2009). (9)

With regard to Women’s Rights, World Bank data point to significant achievements. “In a relative short period of time, Libya achieved universal access for primary education, with 98% gross enrollment for secondary, and 46% for tertiary education. In the past decade, girls’ enrollment increased by 12% in all levels of education. In secondary and tertiary education, girls outnumbered boys by 10%.” (10, 11, 12)

The late former Libyan leader also carried out, among other things, the world’s largest irrigation project – known as the great man-made river – to make water available throughout its desert country. Being a product of post-Second World War and post- independent Africa, Libya assisted freedom movements in other countries of Africa. Many countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola greatly benefited from Gaddafi’s moral and financial support during their long campaigns for their independence. His economic support for countries like Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso has long been acknowledged by many in Africa and in the rest of the world as a great contribution in easing the suffering of their people. He also enjoyed very close relations with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, popular liberal prime minister of Pakistan in the 1970s. A grandson of Nelson Mandela is named Gaddafi – a clear sign of how popular the late Libyan leader once was in South Africa and many other African countries. When Bill Clinton visited newly independent South Africa and criticised Libya under Gaddafi, Nelson Mandela rebuked him saying that “we cannot join you in criticising the people, who helped us in our darkest hour”.

Gaddafi believed that the Arabs were the descendants of Black Africans and always told his people that they owed special respect to black Africans. During his 42 years as the leader of Libya, non-Libyan black Africans flocked to Libya to seek employment in large numbers. He put in place a policy whereby black Africans were welcomed into Libya as employees and even members of the Libyan army. Black Libyans, together with more than two million migrant workers, made up roughly a third of the population. (13)

Throughout last 42 years, the US carried out many assassination and coup attempts against Gaddafi’s Libya. The American intelligence services financed and trained a number of armed opposition groups. Former MI5 operative, David Shayler, disclosed that in the early 1990s he paid a sum of over one hundred thousand dollars to an Al Qaeda cell in Libya to assassinate Qaddafi. (14) The National Front for the Salvation of Libya, with a military force called the Libyan National Army, was set up in Egypt in 1981 – by way of direct CIA involvement. It has been reported in the international media that the NFSL was involved in the recent conflict in Libya – as the leading player within the so-called “rebel forces”. The Libyan National Council, the leading group for the rebel forces fighting the Gaddafi regime, had in March appointed a long-time CIA collaborator to head its military operations. Khalifa Hifter’s arrival in Benghazi was widely reported in mid-March by international media outlets.(15)

Gaddafi is gone, but there are complex and haunting questions that will stay with us for a long time. During the last eight months, more people have already died in the US/NATO campaign than were ever killed by Gaddafi’s regime itself over the last 42 years. “Nato claimed it would protect civilians in Libya, but delivered far more killing. It’s a warning to the Arab world and Africa” says Seamus Milne of the Guardian. Estimates of those killed – including pro-Gaddafi forces, “rebel” forces and civilians – may be approaching to 50,000, this is the estimate given by the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC), the de-facto authority in Libya. Against the backdrop of war propaganda, Libya’s economic and social achievements over the last thirty years have been brutally erased.(16)

In the 1980s, the then US President Ronald Reagan labeled the Libyan leader as the “mad dog of the Middle East”. If there are any mad dogs in Libya now, it is the US/ NATO –supported “rebel force” – who brutally assaulted, dragged, beaten, tortured, sodomized with a knife and shot Gaddafi amid a jeering crowd, with two bullets to the head and one to the chest. After that, they reportedly splayed his body on the hood of a car – pulling his hair and banging his head before dragging his body into the street, kicking him like a football and displaying his corpse in a shopping centre meat locker, on a washed out mattress and kids are taking photos of it. This is the indelible image of the new “free” Libya under the control of US/NATO-sponsored rebel forces. Lynch mob law can never be excused. Everybody — no matter how evil — deserve dignity and privacy in death. Whether or not Gaddafi deserved to die is debatable, but it is hardly the image of “freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law” that the leaders of the US and NATO countries claimed to be intervening in Libya for.(17)

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NOTES
1 http://www.modernghana.com/news/357114/1/us-troops-in-uganda-social-learning-theory-and-gad.html, http://www.modernghana.com/news/357321/1/executing-a-dictator-does-not-automatically-bring-.html, http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/columnist/23688-shouldn%E2%80%99t-we-have-traded-our-democracy-for-gaddafi%3F.html,

2 Almost every British daily was running with that gruesome picture of Qaddafi’s death. In particular, the Sun’s front page, the Telegraph and the Guardian had also similar commentaries with the same image. The Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror both used different pictures with the same victorious headlines. (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-20/europe/30301290_1_picture-tabloid-front-page) Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-20/europe/30301290_1_picture-tabloid-front-page#ixzz1cT1Oqytg

3 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-you-cant-blame-gaddafi-for-thinking-he-was-one-of-the-good-guys-2373796.html, accessed in October 2011. Wikileaks cables from 2009 highlight the increasingly close US-Libyan military and security cooperation. Some cables from 2008 and 2009 deal with opportunities for US energy and construction firms to reap bonanzas in the North African country. After a US congressional delegation visited Libya in 2009, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, told that Libya was “an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends”. (New York Times, 22 February 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/africa/23cables.html)
4 “Qaddafi, whatever his faults, is a true nationalist…. the independent-minded Qaddafi had some positive contributions to Libya, I believe, as well as Africa and the Third World. Take just one example: At the time we were fighting the criminal dictatorships here in Uganda, we had a problem arising of a complication caused by our failure to capture enough guns at Kabamba on Feb. 6, 1981. Qaddafi gave us a small consignment of 96 rifles, 100 anti-tank mines, etc., that was very useful. He did not consult Washington or Moscow before he did this. This was good for Libya, for Africa, and for the Middle East.” (YOWERI MUSEVENI, “The Qaddafi I Know. The Libyan leader was no saint. But the West was wrong to intervene in African affairs”, Foreign Policy, 24 March 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/24/the_qaddafi_I_know?page=full)

5 “The electricity that powered the country was free. Nobody receives an electricity bill, whether at home or at a business. And whoever have desires to make a business can get all the resources from the state bank and not pay a penny of interest” (Georges Bourdokan, “The Libya I Once Knew”, Global Research, 4 November 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27458); and http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/news/intrnational/2011/11/01/1454.html. WHO Libya Country Brief , http://www.emro.who.int/emrinfo/index.aspx?Ctry=liy, accessed in October 2011; CIA World Factbook 2001. The government always heavily subsidized electricity prices, and as a result prices were kept
artificially low-much below cost, and for most part consumers did not pay anything at all. (Robert Goodland, “How Libya could become environmentally sustainable”, Libyan Studies 39 (2008), pp.145-160, http://www.goodlandrobert.com/libyanstudies08.pdf) http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/africa-mainmenu-27/9644-nato-rebels-investigated-by-icc-for-war-crimes-in-libya

6 It had reached USD 12,000 by 2009, http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/na/FoCM11/GNIPC.pdf and http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/countries-classification.htm, accessed in October 2011; As recently as 9 February 2011, just a week before the uprising against Gaddafi started, the IMF praised his ambitious program to privatize banks and develop the nascent financial sector. It also mentioned that structural reforms in other areas and far-reaching laws passed last year boded well for fostering private sector development and attracting foreign investment. They also “welcomed (Libya’s) strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector,” and “encouraged” the authorities to continue the good work. Anthony Giddens, one of the most respected and prolific academics of his generation, after his two visits to Libya in 2006 and 2007 to meet Gaddafi, he famously wrote that Muammar Gaddafi was the last of the revolutionaries. (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/29/anthony-giddens-on-gaddaf_n_1064953.html)

7 http://www.who.int/countryfocus/ … csbrief_lby_en.pdf. There are a number of good research books on the modern history of Libya, among which are The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932 by Ali Abdullatif Almida, State University of New York Press, 2000; and Libya: Continuity and Change by Ronald Bruce St. John, Routledge, 2011.

8 CIA Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ly.html

9 http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2010_EN_Tables_reprint.pdf. *Human Development Index (HDI) simply means that rather than concentrating on only a few traditional indicators of economic progress (such as gross national product per capita), “human development” accounting proposed a systematic examination of a wealth of information about how human beings in each society live and what substantive freedoms they enjoy. A composite measure of achievements in three basic dimensions of human development—a long and healthy life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living. (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR10%20EN%20summary_without%20table.pdf)

10 UNESCO 2009 figures, See UNESCO, Libya Country Report, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country=4340&BR_Region=40525, accessed in October 2011.

11 See UNESCO tables at http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unes … amp;BR_Region=40525

12 World Bank Libya Country Brief, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/MENAEXT/LIBYAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:22015609~menuPK:410791~pagePK:1497618~piPK:217854~theSitePK:410780,00.html, accessed in October 2011; FAO, Rome, Libya, Country Profile.

13 The Green Book, Part Three/ Chapter Seven, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8744/readgb.htm, accessed in October 2011.
In an article in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Sam Dagher pointed out that the Libyan war was aggravating ethnic tensions in that country. The article mentions about the fate of Tawergha, a small town 25 miles to the south of Misrata, inhabited mostly by black Libyans, a legacy of its 19th-century origins as a transit town in the slave trade: Ibrahim al-Halbous, a rebel commander leading the fight near Tawergha, says all remaining residents should leave once if his fighters capture the town. “They should pack up,” Mr. Halbous said. “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.” (the Wall Street Journal, 21 June 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304887904576395143328336026.html) Since the fall of the Gaddafi government in late August, 2011, local brigades, militias, and other security groups aligned with the NTC have arrested thousands of people and held them without proper legal review, Human Rights Watch said. Many have received some of the worst treatment by arresting forces and prison guards, some of which may amount to savage torture. Many of those arrested are dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans accused of having fought for Gaddafi. In some cases, guards at detention facilities have illegally forced sub-Saharan Africans to perform manual labor. (http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/30/libya-cease-arbitrary-arrests-abuse-detainees)

14 http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/04/04/us-and-british-intelligence-have-repeatedly-tried-to-kill-qaddafi-cia-involved-in-libya%E2%80%99s-civil-war/(accessed in October 2011).

15 http://theweek.com/article/index/213706/are-libyan-rebels-being-led-by-a-cia-plant, accessed in October 2011.

16 “Counting the cost of Nato’s mission in Libya”, BBC News, 31 October 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15528984. NATO forces and Libyan rebels associated with the National Transitional Council are being investigated for alleged war crimes committed during the Western-backed overthrow of strongman Col. Muammar Gadhafi, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court told the United Nations.(http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/africa-mainmenu-27/9644-nato-rebels-investigated-by-icc-for-war-crimes-in-libya). Seamus Milne, “If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure”, Guardian, 26 October 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/libya-war-saving-lives-catastrophic-failure.

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