Libya: Country's Gaddafi Throws Away His Bad Boy Image in a Clever Gamble
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The Monitor (Kampala)
ANALYSIS
1 October 2008
Posted to the web 1 October 2008
The leader of what is officially known as the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is changing tact after decades of a terror campaign against the West, which now accepts him as he pursues his United States of Africa dream. igerian-based commentator, Okello Oculi traces the political evolution of Muammar Gaddafi
A young man wearing the military shirt of a Colonel in the Libyan army overthrew King Idris's corrupt and hedonistic monarchy in 1969 that was controlled by the British and declared Libya an Arab republic.
Diplomatic offensive: Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi. NET PHOTO
Muammar Gaddafi's nationalism had been fired by the exploits and bravado of another "Colonel" next door in Egypt. That was Gamal Abdel Nasser the founding father of modern Egypt.
Nasser was against European control of Africa, the Arab patch of Western Asia, including Persia (now Iran) and Indonesia. In Gaddafi's war, Libyan agents would plant bombs inside nightclubs frequented by American soldiers in Germany.
His operatives would steal tapes in which a famous journalist Oranta Fallaci had recorded her long interviews with Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir.
The tapes vanished a few minutes after Fallaci had stepped out of her Paris hotel room to buy a snack across the street. In those days, Libyan security agents would track down and assassinate Libyans living in Europe who were working against Gaddafi's "Green Revolution".
In 1988, the agents planted a bomb in a Pan-Am Boeing 747 carrying Americans as it roared over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members.
Gaddafi had announced the arrival of a "Little Country Power" that was determined to show the fangs of a "Big Mind Power." (Now things have changed. Wikipedia reports that in an interview shown in BBC2 titled The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie on August 31, 2008, Saif al-Gaddafi said that Libya had admitted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing simply to get trade sanctions removed.
He went on to describe the families of the Lockerbie victims as very greedy: "They were asking for more money and more money and more money").
Back to history, Gaddafi would have the Americans screaming with rage that he was arming insurgents in the swamps and jungles of the Philippines and Indonesia, and poverty-infested Palestinian refugee camps around Israel's borders.
In West Africa, he would have President Shehu Shagari beating angry drums of rage and panic against Libya's diplomats who were inciting Muslim youths across the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) countries and the sahelian states.
Gaddafi, like his mentor Gamal Nasser, knew of the angered pride in millions of men and women to whom recent "World History" was murder, rape, humiliation, plunder and ruthless application of the power of science by Europe and America who were crouched, waiting to strike back if only they would have brave leaders. Gaddafi was their kind of leader.
The power of that pool of injured pride was enormous but lay wasted, fermenting yet not rocking the direction of history in the service of justice and human dignity for them.
While Uganda's Idi Amin expressed the injured pride verbally, Gaddafi combined rhetoric and bombs. Where Idi Amin would broadcast around the world photographs of the British Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, kneeling before him and frightened white businessmen carrying him seated above their heads, in 1986, Libya had a bomb planted in Berlin's La Belle discotheque. Two people died and more than 40 were injured, most of them Americans.
Where Idi Amin offered the British Queen surplus bile-coated potatoes grown by Uganda's farmers for famine relief in Britain, Gaddafi exported weapons to the Moro Liberation Movement militants in the Philippines.
Where Nasser's army attacked Israel, Gaddafi went for the soft vulnerability of the citizens of Israel's Big Brother, America, in the Lockerbie affair and the French when, in 1989, a Paris-bound UTA flight exploded as it over flew Niger killing 170 people. Gadafi's rough edges have won him a legion of admirers.
I remember a young American diplomat of Berber origin asserting his African nationalism to me as we sat in Abuja by associating it with Gaddafi's show of international "rudeness"
Rastafarians in Jamaica call themselves "Rude Boys" to show their rejection of what they see as slavish adoption of Euro-American codes of "civilised behaviour" by their leaders and elites. Gaddafi, my Berber-American friend insisted, was a Berber-Tuareg and therefore a native of Africa.
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