12 – Muammar Gaddafi
When thinking of dictators who got what was coming to them, then the most obvious recent candidate must be Muammar Gaddafi. The long-time leader of Libya was a tyrant for over 40 years, inflicting huge internal repression on his own people but also funding terrorism around the world and causing untold death and destruction in the Middle East.
He came to power along the same lines as Saddam Hussein, albeit around a decade earlier. He was part of the Arab nationalist movement in the late 1960s that initially came to prominence in Egypt but later spread to Syria, Iraq and, through Gaddafi, Libya. Born into poverty and then trained in the military, the young Gaddafi was an officer in the army when the revolution that deposed the King of Libya occurred. He played a leading role in enacting a bloodless coup and found himself, in his mid-20s, as the de facto leader of his country.
He swiftly became autocratic and dominated politics in Libya. Economically, he set about trying to make Libya self-sufficient by extending agriculture and capitalizing on the huge oil wealth that was available. Gaddafi endeared himself to the population through doubling the minimum wage and promoting gender equality – which won him some friends on the left in Europe – while funding literacy and health care expansions via oil profits. In the early years of his reign, at least, Gaddafi was often feted for his reforms.
On the world stage, however, he would soon make himself into the West’s stock villain. After his ideas of pan-Arab solidarity began to founder, Gaddafi began funding groups that antagonized the Americans and British, leading to several high-profile terrorist attacks that bore his fingerprints. The Munich Massacre, in which Israeli athletes were killed at the 1972 Olympics, was notably funded by the Libyan regime, while all sorts of radical groups – terrorist and otherwise – received funds.
In the meantime, his internal crackdown continued. Gaddafi dissolved all laws in 1973, replacing them with a succession of diktats, and brought about a cultural revolution that sought to banish foreign influences from Libya. His security services grew in stature and his ideology, which he called Third International Theory, became the dominant theme of the nation. The power of the state was total, and Gaddafi’s power within that was unassailable. Within Libya, he ruled supreme, but beyond its borders, Gaddafi was a pariah. It was also known that, at this time, Gaddafi was looting from the national wealth, with his personal fortune thought to be in the billions. The West isolated Libya yet further when they began to develop chemical weapons and, in 1988, sanctions were imposed on the regime. They were maintained until 2003, when Gaddafi allowed UN inspectors to see that he had destroyed the country’s chemical capacities. In the meantime, thousands of Libyans had died.
When the Arab Spring began in 2011, few expected Libya to become embroiled in it, as the might of Gaddafi was considered far too strong. Protests did spring up and the police were unable to deal with them, which saw the unrest quickly spiral into a full-blown civil war. NATO intervened on behalf of the rebels and Gaddafi was defeated, fleeing to one of the small villages that still remained loyal. He was tracked down by rebels and forced to hide within a drainage pipe. He was found by local militia, injured and dying. They paraded him through the streets, sodomized him with a bayonet, shot him in the head and left the once all-powerful leader to die on the ground.
It was an ignoble an end as they come, but fittingly contemptuous for a man who showed little compassion to anyone who opposed him. Gaddafi was power-hungry, blood-thirsty, indiscriminate and obsessed with his own survival. That it was taken from him by his own people, in such a brutal way, makes a fitting end to our story.
Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources
Wikipedia, The Assassination of Julius Caesar.
BBC History, Caligula with Mary Beard, 2018
Revolutions Podcast “English Civil War”, Mike Duncan, 2013
Revolutions Podcast, “French Revolution” Mike Duncan, 2014
Lieven, Dominic, Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias. London, 1993
“The Dead Duce” History Today, 1999
Wiener, Jan G.. The Assassination of Heydrich. New York, 2012
