Muammar Gaddafi
We are now starting to get to the nitty-gritty. Enough is known about the notorious Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi that we need not waste much time detailing who he was, and what he did. The simple facts are that Colonel Gaddafi, or Muammar al-Qaddafi, seized power in a 1969 military coup, and ruled Libya as a dictator for more than forty years before his violent overthrowal in 2011.
In between, despite being an absolute, card-carrying member of the African club of dictators, his influence on African political affairs was not always negative. South African icon Nelson Mandela, for example, retained cordial relations with Gaddafi, despite criticism from Western governments. Mandela reasoned that Gaddafi aided and advanced the South African revolution, which he did, and so therefore, Gaddafi was a friend of South Africa.
However, Colonel Gaddafi was also deeply implicated in other highly questionable actions in the wider region. One such was his material and political support for Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, setting motion the horrific events of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars. Gaddafi operated a revolutionary academy just outside Benghazi, the World Revolutionary Center, described by author Stephen Ellis as the ‘Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries.’ It was here that Taylor trained, Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday Sankoh, and a great many others, including South African anti-apartheid fighters. He also supported groups as diverse as Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Republican paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. His signature act of international terror, however, was the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, claiming the lives of 243 passengers.
Ironically, for many years, Gaddafi, while internationally despised, was domestically popular, and certainly, under his rule conditions in Libya were better than they are today. Education and health care were universally free, electricity too, and fuel very cheap. The fact remains, however, that his methods were brutal and dictatorial, his personal style both eccentric and erratic. In the end, the degree to which his population hated him can be no better illustrated than the manner in which he died.
But did he ruin his country? Insofar as he centralized power and ruled as a king, he certainly left his country vulnerable to implosion once the pressure of his leadership had been released. He utilized Libya as a private fiefdom and came in the end to regard himself as immortal, and his rule as perpetual. The answer to that question, therefore, must surely be yes.