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Former US president Ronald Reagan once described him as the "mad dog of Tripoli", but since his spectacular decision last December to give up all his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, Muammar Gaddafi has become something of a prize pet for the West. That development takes some getting used to.
Arab Super-Champion
A military coup in September 1969
brought Mr Gaddafi, then a radical young army officer of just 27
years, to power in the sparsely populated but oil rich country that
is Libya. His hero and great example was Egypt's president at the
time, Gamal Abdu al-Nasser: the champion of Arab unity. But if
President Nasser was its champion, then Mr Gaddafi was to be its
super-champion. This was immediately echoed in his steering a
sharply anti-Western and anti-Israeli course.
As Mr Gaddafi saw it, the artificial division of the Arab world into nation states by former colonial powers Britain and France, the creation of the state of Israel and the West's unconditional support for that nation - with the United States leading the way - were all the result of a deliberate divide-and-rule policy on the part of the West. In Mr Gaddafi's eyes, the underlying objective of this policy was to keep the Arab world weak and divided so as to better exploit its immense oil resources.
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His militant anti-imperialistic views saw him lending support to almost any radical group that targeted the West or Israel, ranging from Palestinian extremists and Muslim rebels in the Philippines to the IRA in Ireland. And he was in a position to provide such support because of Libya's enormous income from its oil production following the dramatic increases in the price of oil witnessed in 1973 and again in 1979.
That same oil wealth also enabled him to gather sufficient support at home. This provided a base for launching a succession of experiments in political mobilisation, including the creation of revolutionary people's committees, the ‘direct democracy' policy and the move from a people's republic to Jamahiriya – from the Arabic word "jamahir" or masses. None of them proved particularly effective forms of government, but Mr Gaddafi had little to fear as long as the generous subsidies for employment, housing and education continued to flow.
Adventures lead to bombs
His foreign adventures,
however, all failed to produce much in the way of results. In turn,
each of the hastily and badly thought out plans for Arab unity came
to nothing, and his backing for all kinds of anti-Western groups
led to mounting confrontation with their target: the West, more
particularly the United States. At first, Washington reacted by
imposing sanctions on Libya. By 1986 the situation had reached the
point where the US launched an air strike on Tripoli.
But the confrontation did not stop there. It eventually reached a climax with the bomb attack on an American passenger plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, in which 270 people lost their lives. The US and the United Kingdom both accused Libya of being behind the attack. Sanctions against Libya followed, but this time they were imposed by the United Nations, not just the United States.
Sanctions bite hard
Mr Gaddafi soon found himself no
longer able to buy off the opposition at home, and meanwhile his
foreign policy was going nowhere. Disappointed that the Arab world
was not doing enough to support him, he turned his back on his Arab
neighbours to project himself instead as the champion of African
unity. But Africa had little to offer when it came to getting rid
of the continuing international sanctions which, in the longer
term, were to be the factor that finally forced him to change
course entirely.
Coming
back into the fold
Mr Gaddafi secretly put out the first
feelers to the West in 1999, later resulting in Libya's handing
over of the suspects in the Lockerbie case. Following the
conviction of one of the suspects, agreement was reached around the
middle of 2003 on the payment of considerable amounts in
compensation to the relatives of those who died at Lockerbie.
Similar agreements were also concluded for other attacks in which
Libya had played a role. Last December's decision by Libya to
abandon its weapons of mass destruction programmes was the final
and decisive step in the process of normalising relations.
For the West, the desirability of this process has been enhanced
by the attractive prospect of profitable investment opportunities
in Libya's oil industry. It's not the first time – nor is it
likely to be the last time – that oil will have played a
crucial role in smoothing the way towards a spectacular
reconciliation that benefits all the parties concerned.
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Tags: EU, Gaddafi, Lockerbie, Prodi, Verhofstadt, WMD