The New Middle East (56 page)

Gaddafi had already made it clear he would brook no dissent. He promised that during a typically long rambling speech on 22 February in which he warned: ‘I and the millions will march in order to cleanse Libya, inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway, individual by individual, so that the country is purified from the unclean.’ The ‘alleyway by alleyway’ reference, or ‘zenga zenga’ in Arabic, fast became the spoof catchphrase of the war. It was even remixed by an Israeli DJ into a dance track that was watched by millions of people in the region on YouTube.

According to a source who witnessed events first-hand, Gaddafi gathered his family around him in the Bab al-Aziziya compound for regular consultations once the uprising was under way. In the run-up to this he had barely been on speaking terms with Saif al-Islam, but as the family rallied he asked Saif to deal with what one family member described as ‘the mob and the media’. By that he meant the opposition and the first waves of international media, including myself, who were invited into Tripoli.

A witness inside the compound at the time described how the hardliners on one side and Saif on the other each lobbied Gaddafi over the action he should take. Gaddafi at first believed the uprisings in Benghazi would fizzle out once people had burnt a few cars and made some noise. He did not expect the revolution to take hold. The atmosphere inside the compound became increasingly tense as the family realised its grip on the country was slipping away. To stem that, according to the source who witnessed the conversation, Saif al-Islam was told directly by his father to deliver the rant on state TV in which he famously wagged his finger at the nation promising ‘rivers of blood’ and that the regime ‘will keep fighting until the last man standing’. When Saif was finally caught, that finger was missing. The story goes that the rebels who found him cut it off before they handed the rest of him over alive and intact. Saif, like his father’s henchman, Abdullah al-Senussi, was also to be tried and punished in Libya.

Saif al-Islam’s TV appearance on 20 February, three days after the uprising began, was an important moment for the opposition too. That bellicose a speech from the moderate face of the regime shocked those who had placed any faith in him. It prompted the creation of the organisation that would lead the opposition through the civil war and into the post-Gaddafi era.

Watching Saif wag his finger was Mahmoud Jibril, who was at the time in Oman. Until the uprising Jibril had been the head of Libya’s National Economic Development Board, which was created by Saif al-Islam and was part of his reform programme. ‘After the speech by Saif al-Islam when he started threatening a civil war will take place and mass immigration would be flooding Europe and the oil will be cut, I believed that this speech might touch a certain nerve in European countries and the West in general, and so we needed to put down those fears,’ he told me after the war.

I decided that there should be a body talking to the world, a head for this revolution, and especially when you looked at the Egyptian and Tunisian cases. They had floods of people in the streets but they had no leadership. That’s why their revolution was stolen so early. So I consulted with some of [the Libyan] ambassadors and I wrote the proposals for the National Transitional Council [NTC].

Jibril went on to become the opposition’s prime minister and its chief negotiator with the outside world. In response Saif al-Islam declared that Jibril had betrayed him ‘big time’.
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Unfortunately for Gaddafi, it wasn’t only the opposition that was listening to the rhetoric coming out of Tripoli. After years of wanting to be centre stage he now really did have the world’s attention. His threats led to a vote in the United Nations Security Council on 17 March 2011 on UN Resolution 1973, which authorised members ‘to establish a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians’ and to ‘protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi’.

Despite their reservations, both Russia and China decided to abstain rather than veto it, partly because the Arab League supported it and they still hadn’t realised it was now being run by the GCC. The mandate from UN Resolution 1973, which authorised member states ‘to take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilian and civilian populated areas’, was eventually stretched so tight by the Western powers that you could get a tune out of it.

Russia and China both felt completely suckered. ‘The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya,’ said the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov afterwards, ‘and we would never allow the Security Council to authorise anything similar to what happened in Libya.’
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So the following year, when the West tried for a resolution to start taking action against Syria, the Russians and Chinese were having none of it. They both vetoed the resolution. Saving lives in Libya ended up costing thousands more in Syria.

The first airstrikes on Gaddafi’s forces by NATO took place within forty-eight hours. If Benghazi had fallen at the start of the uprising then the country’s revolt would have been over and the streets would have run with blood. A few weeks later, as I drove out of the city towards the eastern front lines, the burned carcasses of tanks and armoured personnel carriers still littered the roads. The NATO intervention was unquestionably the deciding factor in Libya’s civil war. The conflict cost almost ten thousand lives; without foreign intervention it would have cost many more. But for the revolution to be complete, one life in particular had to be taken.

Muammar Gaddafi lay before me on a dirty brown mattress, his body partially covered by a blue and white woollen blanket. A patch of blood had trickled from the bullet wound in his temple. Grainy mobile phone footage shot by his captors had shown his final moments in Sirte where he was slapped and dragged around by the baying mob as he told them: ‘God forbids this, what are you doing?’

His now silent face was turned towards me as I entered the shipping container. Outside, waiting for me to leave, was a long queue of men and teenage boys eager for their turn to see the greatest of war trophies. Held tightly in their hands were cameras and mobile phones. As they emerged they would chant ‘Allahu Akbar’, then pause to look down at their camera to make sure they had the shot. Without fail they looked up and smiled, holding in their hands proof for friends and family alike that their forty-two-year nightmare was over. The man who thought his countrymen would die for him was now slowly rotting before a parade of people he had tormented and abused. There could not be a more ignoble end to a regime that had terrified a nation for generations.

Gaddafi had fled from his compound but he didn’t run far. And he didn’t head for the border or the desert, as much of the world assumed he would. He ran for his home town. It was suicide because it put his back to the coast and his face to the swarming hordes of rebel fighters. The Colonel said he would live or die in Libya and he was true to his word. According to one of his security officials, Mansour Dhao, Gaddafi spent his final days scavenging for food and largely cut off from the world around him. ‘We first stayed in the city center, in apartment buildings, but then the mortars started to reach there and we were forced to leave the apartment blocks and enter smaller neighborhoods in different parts of the city,’ he told the group Human Rights Watch after his capture by rebels.
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We didn’t have a reliable food supply anymore. There was no medicine. We had difficulty getting water. Living was very hard. We just ate pasta and rice, we didn’t even have bread. [Muammar Gaddafi] spent most of his time reading the Koran and praying. We moved places every four or five days, depending on the circumstances. [As time went on] Muammar Gaddafi changed into becoming more and more angry. Mostly he was angry about the lack of electricity, communications, and television, his inability to communicate to the outside world. We would go see him and sit with him for an hour or so to speak with him, and he would ask, ‘Why is there no electricity? Why is there no water?’
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Despite his frustration it was a testament to Gaddafi’s sense of invulnerability that his will was written only three days before he died. On 20 October Gaddafi’s son Mutassim decided they needed to make a break for it, but their fifty-car convoy was hit by two 500-pound bombs dropped by NATO fighter jets.

‘[After the strike] people tried to take shelter in two neighboring buildings,’ said Younis Abu Bakr Younis, one of the sons of Gaddafi’s defence minister. ‘We saw Mutassim injured there, he had been at the front of the convoy when it was hit. At the entry of the villa compound, there was a guard-house, and we found Muammar there, wearing a helmet and a bullet-proof vest. He had a handgun in his pocket and was carrying an automatic weapon.’
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As they tried to escape they were attacked by rebel fighters from Misrata, said Younis. ‘[Gaddafi’s] guards threw grenades up towards the road, but the third grenade hit the concrete wall and bounced back. Muammar Gaddafi was . . . injured by the grenade, on the left side of his head.’
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Moments later the rebels would realise who they had cornered. Muammar Gaddafi was moments away from a brutal and humiliating death.

The parading of the bodies of Muammar Gaddafi, his son and his henchmen was ghoulish, but it removed the possibility of a myth growing that he might still be alive. There was now no one left for his loyalists to be loyal to. That gave the Libyan people a chance at a normal life and stable future. The best hope of that being achieved will come via the generation he didn’t live long enough to damage.

The girls started arriving first. The youngest children were in twos, holding hands. Their black school coats were buttoned up to the neck to keep out the cold winter wind blowing in off the sea. Their heads were covered in long white scarfs. The youngsters had them tucked into their coats. The older girls left them flowing or thrown fashionably across their shoulders. The playground separated naturally with the girls on one side chatting and laughing. The boys sloped in but hung around the main gate, shouting and swinging their bags at each other.

Things had been very different at the Taqadom school in Tripoli under the previous headmistress, because she had been a believer. Her loyalty to the regime was absolute and she ran the school as an extension of the ruthless state she so admired. The morning assembly used to begin with children of various ages being given tracts from the Green Book to read out to their hushed classmates. Disobedience was met with violence, of course. ‘It’s changed a lot from the Green Book and pro-Gaddafi to February seventeenth,’ said twelve-year-old Lateefa Shagan. ‘I had to learn a lot of stuff about Gaddafi, his history and about him, specifically about him.’

‘Did it make sense?’ I asked her.

‘Not at all, [but] our principal, she really cared. She used to make us say pro-Gaddafi stuff, but we didn’t really want to and whoever didn’t want to she’d bring the soldiers to their house. It was really scary.’

I asked her what kinds of things she used to have to say. ‘Things that I’m not allowed to say now,’ she replied. But then she stopped short in mid-sentence. The first few bars of the resurrected national anthem from the king’s era boomed into life over the speakers, and the pupils as one stopped what they were doing and all sang at the top of their voices: ‘Libya, Libya, Libya’. All apart from a five-year-old who was struggling to yank the new flag of the old king to the top of the pole.

The man given the task of stripping out Gaddafi’s insidious influence on the nation’s young minds was Abdulnabi Abughania, the director of the country’s Curriculum and Educational Research Center. After the war schools across the country had to throw out at least half their textbooks. Even the maths books involved counting things like Gaddafi’s green flag. But while Mr Abughania worked on shaping the future he knew that the mindset of the country’s present generation would hold it back.

‘Why was it,’ I asked him as we sat in his small office in Tripoli, ‘that people tell me there were no jobs for them under Gaddafi and yet the country employed around a million migrant workers?’

‘Frankly this is the thinking of the society in Libya,’ he told me.

They don’t want to be an electrician or plumber. Everybody wants to be an engineer or a doctor. The educational system was to blame. Vocational training was a disaster. Vocational training needs to be more than just a certificate, you have to work for it. [Things might have been different] if people had been trained to use their hands instead of just learning to memorise things.

He was echoing the thoughts of another specialist on the development of education in Libya, Professor Roger Le Tourneau from Algiers University. ‘Libyan education is, on the whole, too academic, which is not at all what the country requires, handicrafts are very little developed, and specialised training is practically non-existent.’
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These two academics were united in identifying a fundamental problem in Libya’s education system. What divides them is more than sixty years, because Professor Le Tourneau was writing in 1952, the year the nation was born.