The New Middle East (54 page)

The last time the GPC would ever meet was exactly thirty-four years later, on 2 March 2011. It held this gathering in a plush conference centre because its own building had been burnt down during the first wave of protests in the capital Tripoli. This gathering would also prove to be the last time Muammar Gaddafi felt safe enough in his own country to turn up for a scheduled event, because, as it turned out, the start of the NATO air campaign against him was just two weeks away.

Waiting patiently among the two thousand other delegates I found Mariam Ibrahim Gurgi. She was one of the people’s representatives for Tripoli. Sitting resplendent in a sparkling green scarf, she told me why everyone in the hall was so excited: ‘Most or all of the people and their children love Muammar Gaddafi from their hearts, from the bottom of their hearts, really. We have no problems. We have our freedoms already. Thanks to God we are living in heaven. Everything is very good.’

Then to Mariam’s and apparently everyone else’s delight, Gaddafi arrived. To my bemusement he arrived driving a brand-new golf buggy, the front seat draped with a white sheepskin rug. He parked up and then struggled his way through a swarm of photographers, his hands pumping the air triumphantly. He climbed onto the podium to a rock-star reception. His burly security team linked arms to hold back the media and some large and persistent female supporters began barrelling into the crowd, pushing and shoving with all their might, trampling through a carefully arranged floral decoration set out on the floor in front of him. Other equally enthusiastic women climbed on their seats and their ululations punctuated his speech. Occasionally he paused to allow a few minutes of chants and cheers, and then he would tap his microphone when he was ready for them to shut up. And, shut up they promptly did. All except one woman who indulged in something my officially provided translator described as ‘freestyle poetry’ in praise of her leader. He’d clearly had enough, because someone turned off her microphone and led her back to her seat so he could continue his unscripted monologue.

Gaddafi talked for nearly three hours. And then he stopped, got up and left, surrounded once again by a scrum of media and security. The people he left behind in the conference centre were supposed to be the real rulers of the country. They were the closest thing the nation had to parliamentarians, but they were a long way from being lawmakers. Their real value to the state became apparent only when I was bussed around by the government to various parts of the capital to attend allegedly spontaneous demonstrations in support of the regime. The delegates of the General People’s Congress were the Colonel’s rent-a-mob. Time and again I saw the same ‘locals’, in particular the ululating ladies, whenever a pro-government rally was held. They were kissing newly printed posters of the ‘Brother Leader’ and chanting ‘Allah, Muammar, Libya, wa bass,’ which translates as: ‘All we need is God, Gaddafi and Libya.’ Everyone present knew it was theatre. But though the system of political representation introduced by Gaddafi may have been a masquerade, the consequences of not playing along with it were deadly serious.

‘Held in this section was the martyr Muhammad Muftah Anis Abu-Ras, an aviation engineer at the Libyan airline company, one of its most competent engineers,’ said the writing in Arabic on the prison wall.

He was arrested in 1989 at four a.m. when he was going to morning prayers at the mosque. He was brought home after forty days in bad shape during a search order. We haven’t seen him since that day. He is one of the best people of [the district of] Maslana. He was one of those people who memorised God’s book [the Koran]. He left his daughter when she was nine months and his son was three years. They had grown up dreaming that one day they might see him. But God had chosen him to be with the martyrs. We pray for them and may God give them his mercy.

These words were scribbled on 29 June 2012 on the wall of the exercise yard of a wing of Abu Salim prison on the outskirts of Tripoli. It was the first opportunity Muhammad’s family would have had to publicly commemorate his death exactly sixteen years earlier. The sun was shining down through the grille that covered the long narrow rectangular exercise area where I was reading the tribute. There were three high walls in front of me. The fourth led back to the cells. There was nothing in the courtyard but a large floor-level basin tucked away in the corner where the men would have been able to wash before they prayed.

Many of the hundreds of men who were all to die alongside Muhammad would no doubt have been doing just that, thanking God for the small victory they thought they had won the previous day to improve their conditions in what was Libya’s most notorious detention centre. As they looked up to the heavens seeking His blessing before they prepared to prostrate themselves, they would have noticed that on this day 29 June 1996 there were more guards standing on top of the walls than normal. This may not have surprised them because the day before there had been protests in the jail in which two guards were captured, one of whom was killed. The guards in return had killed six inmates. The following morning though, Muhammad would have been told by his fellow inmates that the crisis had been resolved because the country’s intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, who was also Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, had agreed to their demands. Then as Muhammad stood in the yard the large steel door through which I had entered was clanged shut. The inmates, who were suddenly penned in, would have heard the weapons now turned towards them from above being cocked. They would have known that at this moment they would need God’s mercy more than at any other time in their lives. Many would have begun to say the Shahadah, the basic statement of Islamic faith. And as they did so the guards opened fire.

In total more than twelve hundred men were massacred over those two days.
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It made al-Senussi one of the most hated and feared men in the country. He was indicted in June 2011 along with Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. If he had been caught during the war he would have been killed like Gaddafi. Instead he fled and was later extradited back to Libya from Mauritania to stand trial for his crimes.

Many of the men who were killed at Abu Salim were rounded up because they were suspected of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group Gaddafi saw rightly as a potential challenge to his rule. That didn’t mean the inmates
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associated with the Brotherhood. They may have just been openly religious, or they may have been privately religious and been snitched on by the country’s army of informers. Perhaps they were secular and unlucky. Gaddafi and his security chief were not inclined to take chances. If there was doubt they would kill just to be on the safe side. That meant very few real Brotherhood activists slipped through the net. The Brotherhood was devastated during the Gaddafi era. That was part of the reason why Libya bucked the regional trend during its first post-revolution elections. Unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, the Islamists had no base at all to build on, and their candidates did badly.

Gaddafi did not just go after the Islamists; his regime routinely jailed, tortured, ‘disappeared’ or had executed anyone who opposed it. And his reach extended well beyond his borders. In the 1980s he sent execution squads abroad to hunt down his opponents, or what he called ‘stray dogs’, and murder them in their European homes. He said in October 1982 of those who had fled from his regime: ‘They should be killed not because they constitute any danger, but because of their high treason. It is the Libyan people’s responsibility to liquidate such scum who are distorting Libya’s image.’
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But Gaddafi went after the religious groups because they did constitute a danger, though he eventually realised that his fear and loathing of them finally gave him something in common with the nations that had denounced him for decades. ‘Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent,’ a secret US embassy diplomatic cable said in 2008.
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This partnership would produce some red faces in Western capitals after he was overthrown, because it also involved doing some of these governments’ dirty work. That led to the torture of people who were the subject of illegal rendition. The details started spilling out after the war once the rebels found all the paperwork in his abandoned intelligence centres. The first government forced into offering up compensation was the UK, which paid out £2.2 million in December 2012 to settle a claim by a Libyan dissident who said Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, was involved in the kidnapping and transportation of him, his wife and four children to Libya, where he was tortured by the regime.
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Even though Gaddafi’s brutality was suddenly useful to Western governments towards the end of his rule, his absolution was not an overnight process, because of all the Arab leaders he had the most to atone for.

Some of Gaddafi’s worst crimes took place on the continent he turned to when he grew frustrated by the lack of respect he won from his Arab compatriots. In 1995 he had even expelled 30,000 Palestinians in protest over the Oslo accords. Three years later, with his ambitions in the Arab world completely foiled and his revolution back home tarnished, Gaddafi looked south. ‘I had been crying slogans of Arab Unity and brandishing the standard of Arab nationalism for 40 years, but it was not realised. That means that I was talking in the desert,’ he said. ‘I have no more time to lose talking with Arabs . . . I now talk about Pan-Africanism and African Unity . . . the Arab world is finished.’
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Gaddafi’s new project wasn’t starting from scratch though. He’d been throwing money around the continent to win friends for decades. He found buying influence in dirt-poor Africa much easier than earning it in the much richer Middle East. For years Gaddafi had been presenting himself as the supporter of worthy struggles for liberation in places like the then Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Some of those he had championed went on to become the leaders of their new nations, most notably Nelson Mandela. So grateful was Mr Mandela that even when the leader of the anti-apartheid struggle became the darling of the West he refused to turn his back on his old ally and rebuked President Bill Clinton, declaring: ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do. Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi. They are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.’
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When Gaddafi’s regime began to crumble in 2011 it was only the African Union that even bothered to push a half-hearted compromise solution that would have kept him in power.

But the Colonel’s influence in Africa had always been far from benign. For years ‘Big Man’ politics dominated Africa, and it bred leaders like Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko, who were so ruthless and demented they rivalled Gaddafi. What they couldn’t match was the oil wealth that he used to bankroll his foreign adventures. These included undermining his nearest African neighbours, but it was through his ‘World Revolutionary Headquarters’ in Benghazi that Gaddafi did most of his damage in the continent and beyond. It was what the historian Stephen Ellis described as ‘the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries’.
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Some of these men would go on to carry out some of the worst atrocities the African continent has ever known. In West Africa Gaddafi’s Libya helped fuel and fund the civil war in Sierra Leone. The country’s rebel Revolutionary United Front leader, Foday Sankoh, whose men butchered their way through the country, met his partner in crime Charles Taylor, from neighbouring Liberia, while they were both in Libya. Gaddafi’s regime directly provided the funds for Foday Sankoh to buy weapons. I saw for myself the consequences of that when I reported from the country in the final years of the civil war. The refugee camps in the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown were full of men, women, children and even babies who had had arms and legs hacked off by Sankoh’s soldiers.

Alongside groups from Africa and Asia, Gaddafi funded and trained gunmen from the likes of the Irish Republican Army, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Spanish Basque separatist group ETA.
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In fact there was barely an armed militant group anywhere in the world during the Seventies and Eighties that Gaddafi wasn’t willing to back. If you were an enemy of Western interests you were a friend of his, and his money flowed instantly towards your cause. It was the bloody trail he left in the Western world that brought him his international infamy and the attention he so craved.

Gaddafi began to consolidate Libya’s rogue-nation status in April 1984 with the murder of a young British policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher. She was shot dead by a gun fired from the Libyan embassy in London at an anti-Gaddafi rally being held outside. Two years later US President Ronald Reagan bombed his Bab al-Aziziya compound after accusing his regime of being behind a bomb attack on US soldiers in a nightclub in Berlin. It was at this time he earned Reagan’s ‘Mad Dog of the Middle East’ label. But it was the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie as it carried its largely American passengers home for Christmas in 1988 that put Gaddafi at the top of the Western world’s most wanted list. It was a spot he would hang on to until Osama bin Laden made his entrance on the world stage.