And Both Of Them Evil

In the Daily Express, the justly ubiquitous Neil Clark writes:

To his followers he was Brotherly Leader and Guide Of The Revolution, a man who transformed Libya into the most prosperous country in Africa and provided free education and health care for his people. To his opponents he was the “mad dog of the Middle East”, a dangerous and unpredictable dictator who supplied weapons to the IRA and other terrorist groups and whose government was behind the horrific bombing of a Pan Am passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. It was said of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who was killed in a gun battle in his home town of Sirte yesterday, that he was a man “with a split personality – and both of them evil”.

He was certainly a world leader whom it was impossible to ignore. He relished his status as an international pariah in the Seventies and Eighties, yet this wiliest of political operators was keen to build bridges with Western powers once he thought it would be to his advantage. Seizing power in a bloodless coup in September 1969 at the age of just 27, Gaddafi was to become the fourth-longest serving non-royal leader of a country since the start of the 20th century. On coming to power the young army captain set out to transform his country. His political ideology was laid down in his famous Green Book – which mixed Islamism with socialism. “I consider it [the Green Book] the guide for all humanity,” he said. “One day the whole world will be a republic of the masses – topple down all governments and parliaments.” People’s committees were set up across Libya. Foreign military bases on Libyan soil were closed.

Islam was declared the state religion. Gaddafi was keen to support groups that he believed shared his revolutionary aims, however violent their methods. He provided explosives to the IRA, then engaged in terror campaigns against British citizens. “The bombs which are convulsing Britain and breaking its spirit are the bombs of Libyan people. We have sent them to the Irish revolutionaries so the British will pay the price for their past deeds,” Gaddafi boasted. Gaddafi’s activities earned him the distrust of other Arab leaders. Anwar Sadat, then leader of Egypt, called him “100 per cent sick and possessed by the devil”. In 1984 Libya gained further notoriety when WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in London during protests outside the Libyan embassy by a gunman inside the building.

Meanwhile at home, Gaddafi and his family were using the country’s oil wealth to build huge personal fortunes. It has been claimed that the family siphoned off several billion dollars a year from Libya’s oil revenues for their private use. He surrounded himself with a team of beautiful female bodyguards, the so-called “Amazonian guards”, all of whom took vows of chastity. Earlier this year five of the guard accused Gaddafi and members of his regime, including his sons, of rape and abuse. It has been claimed that Gaddafi never travelled without his trusted Ukrainian nurse Halyna Koloynystska, who was described as a “voluptuous blonde”.

In the Eighties Libya’s relations with the US reached rock bottom. After US servicemen were killed by a bomb in a disco in Germany, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli and during the raids Gaddafi’s four-year-old adopted daughter Hannah was killed. Two years later came Libya’s retaliation: the Lockerbie bombing – the biggest act of terrorism in Britain – when all 259 people on board Pan Am flight 103 plus 11 people on the ground were killed just four days before Christmas. Earlier this year Libya’s former justice minister claimed that Gaddafi had personally ordered the attack. Given his record of backing international terrorism it would have seemed incredible at the start of the Nineties that Gaddafi would ever be able to shed his pariah tag.

Yet that is exactly what happened. From the late Nineties until earlier this year Gaddafi was the man who came in from the cold. The rapprochement with the West began when Libya agreed to hand over Lockerbie suspects in 1999. After 9/11, Gaddafi signed up to the US’s war on terror and urged Libyans to donate blood for use by American victims. In 2003 Libya agreed to give up its programmes for developing weapons of mass destruction. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was warmly welcomed in Tripoli. And in 2009 in a controversial move, Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was freed from jail in Britain and allowed to fly home after doctors wrongly gave him only three months to live.

This time last year, Gaddafi must have been confident of seeing out his final years in power in the luxury lifestyle to which he was accustomed. But the so-called Arab spring, which began in Tunisia in January and which spread to neighbouring Libya soon afterwards, was to prove his downfall. Although many Libyans stayed loyal to him, Gaddafi could not have expected the scale of popular revolt against his rule or that the Western powers he regarded as his new allies would decide to intervene militarily on the rebels’ behalf.

Throughout this year’s civil war Gaddafi pledged to fight to the very end. That promise is at least one he did keep. Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year reign as leader of Libya shows once again the truth of the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

To which one would add only a few points. First, no serious person, by definition, thinks that Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie, although one appreciates the hoops through which a freelance must jump in order to be published in the Express. Secondly, the Americans were arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi was, and, moreover, they were throwing almost incomparably more political weight behind that organisation, to incomparably more eventual effect. Thirdly, the present Coalition was as bad as Blair for sucking up to Gadaffi.

And fourthly, the synthesis of Islamism and what passes for Socialism in lands unblessed by the synthesis of Radical Liberalism, Tory populism, Christian Socialism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and other such entirely non-Marxist influences, is in fact the position of numerous individual and collective seceders to David Cameron's Conservative Party, one of whom is now a rising star of the 2010 intake to the House of Commons.