Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  Qaddafi's confidence was not entirely misplaced. While NATO intervention tipped the balance back in the rebels' favour, it was not immediately sufficient to enable them to achieve victory. They were still lacking in weapons and experience, making the possibility of a march on Tripoli still little more than a distant dream. What followed NATO's entry to the Arab Spring was a bloody stalemate, in which a vicious cat-and-mouse game was played out between opposing sides. Towns were taken and then lost and then retaken again, with countless lives sacrificed on both sides. Perhaps the most dramatic battle was for the strategically important coastal city of Misarata in the west. At the start of the uprising, rebels succeeded in taking the city – the third largest in the country and its main commercial port. However, regime forces made a bid to retake it in March, putting the city under siege in their attempt to make it submit. Troops loyal to Qaddafi pulverized whole neighbourhoods, launching mortar attacks on residential areas and sending tanks into the city centre. Snipers were also posted on rooftops along the city's main thoroughfare, Tripoli Street. The residents' only link with the outside world was through the port, and supplies became increasingly hard to come by. People were queuing for hours just to get bread, and fresh food became a rarity. The regime even went so far as to cut off the town's water supplies. The battle for Misarata lasted until the middle of May, when, with the assistance of NATO air strikes, rebel forces were finally able to retake the city.

  Losing Misarata was a serious blow to Qaddafi. It also made holding onto Tripoli all the more essential. The capital and its suburbs became a city suspended in time and paralysed by fear. Although some young activists continued to engage in highly risky acts, such as hanging pro-revolutionary banners from public buildings, and while rebel forces periodically launched ambushes on government checkpoints, ‘people power’ was nowhere to be seen. This is hardly surprising, as snipers were placed all around the city to intimidate anyone from even thinking about taking action. Young men were taken away in the middle of the night and were never seen again. Regime forces regularly came out at night to daub marks on the houses of those they suspected of supporting the opposition. Local residents cleaned these marks off in the morning, but they would generally reappear the following night. The city's streets also rang with the shouts of regime supporters, who were paid around ten dinars a day to go around the city brandishing weapons and declaring their undying loyalty to the Jamahiriyah. Added to this there was the ominous sound of NATO night-time air attacks. These attacks did not always hit their intended targets: in June a bomb went astray, hitting a residential building and killing nine people.

  Terrified residents were left sitting it out at home, only venturing beyond the confines of their buildings to get essential supplies. All they could do was to try to follow events as best they could on the satellite television channels, although many feared that tuning into such channels could be used as evidence against them. To make matters worse, food supplies were getting low and the banks were running out of cash. There were fuel shortages, too, as well as regular power cuts. Life was getting tougher by the day. Yet even these strains were not sufficient for Tripolitanians to lose the fear that had bound them for decades and to rise up against the regime.

  But, deep in his heart, Qaddafi knew that repression would not be enough to save the day, especially as his forces were slowly but surely being degraded by NATO strikes. He began frantically reaching out to different constituencies, in the hope of bolstering his support base. The regime made a number of unsuccessful appeals to influential Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia, for instance. These included Sheikh Salman Al-Awda and Sheikh Aaidh Ibn Abdullah Al-Qarni, who were asked to use their religious authority to impress upon the Libyans that it was Islamically unacceptable to rise up against their rulers. For a man who had spent a lifetime shunning the Saudi religious establishment, this was a desperate move indeed.* The regime also played the tribal card, organizing a major gathering of some 2,000 tribal leaders in Tripoli to get them to call for national unity and for the rebels to disarm.

  Yet the greatest sign of Qaddafi's desperation were the overtures that the regime began making to the West. At the end of March, Saif Al-Islam sent one of his closest aides, Mohamed Ismail, to London to put a plan to the British authorities in which the Leader's son would oversee Libya's transformation into a democratic state, while his father and the rest of his family would be granted immunity from prosecution. The following month, former Foreign Affairs Secretary Abdel Ati Al-Obeidi told the international media that, if the rebels agreed to a ceasefire, Libya would hold free elections within a six-month transition period. Al-Obeidi went so far as to state that discussions about reform could include ‘whether the Leader should stay and in what role, and whether he should retire … Everything will be on the table.’30 Such gestures were clearly major concessions on Qaddafi's part. Yet Libyans were used to the Colonel's endless promises and tricks. Given that he had based his entire rule on the false premise that, with no official position, he had nothing to do with running the country, Libyans were hardly going to accept any solution that involved him or his family. Moreover, the opposition had not risked everything and sacrificed so many lives only to end up with some sort of continuation of the Qaddafi dynasty.

  There was little appetite in the West either for the regime's proposals. For all that Qaddafi had accepted rehabilitation, he was still viewed as an unpredictable irritant who would be best out of the way. That is not to say that there were not serious concerns about the number of Islamist militants and former militants who were swelling the opposition's ranks, some of whom had fought against US personnel in Iraq. Who or what might succeed the man from the desert was certainly unclear and not without its anxieties. Yet getting rid of Qaddafi had become the clear policy objective for almost all involved, and Western leaders stated in no uncertain terms that Qaddafi had to go.

  Moreover, for all the concerns about what might come next, the NTC was proving a credible bunch. Its members were, for the most part, liberal technocrats who spoke a language that was comforting to the West. In March, they published a kind of manifesto – ‘A Vision of a Democratic Libya’ – an inclusive and sophisticated document that evoked a modern liberal democracy. Although the NTC's repeated calls for weapons fell on deaf ears, its members skilfully lobbied the international community and began to make serious headway. The council was coming to be recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people. France was the first to grant it such recognition, in March. Other countries soon followed suit: Italy recognized the council in April, while a host of other countries, including Canada and Germany, did so in June.31 Most importantly, however, in July 2011 the Libya Contact Group, a body set up by the international community to support the rebels, announced its participants' agreement to deal with the NTC as the sole legitimate governing authority in Libya. At the same time, the US also moved to recognize the council – something that opened up the possibility of the NTC getting its hands on the millions of dollars of Libyan assets that had been frozen in the US.

  With all this international recognition, the NTC was looking increasingly like a government in waiting. There was little that Qaddafi could do, other than lash out at the council and portray it as the lackey of the colonialist powers. In an audio speech on 7 June, the Colonel declared ‘I will choose death before surrender’, referred to the NTC as the ‘tail of the colonisers’ and instructed the citizens of Benghazi to ‘explode against those bisexuals who are fighting under the cross and under the American, French and British flags. Libyans will defeat them and the traitors will retreat.’32 Showing that he had lost none of his flair for the absurd, Qaddafi also announced that Spain's recognition of the NTC gave Libyans the right to support the Basque separatist movement, as well as other independence movements around the world.33 Indeed, as things were falling apart around his ears, the Leader proved bizarre until the end. In what surely must go down as one of the more surreal moments of the conflict, in June t
he Colonel had himself filmed calmly playing a game of chess against the World Chess Federation president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, in the lobby of a Tripoli hotel.

  However, it was not long before the Colonel was to find himself facing another form of checkmate. By August, rebel forces had captured a number of key strategic towns in the west of the country, including Zawiya, Sabratha, Tarhouna and Gharyan. They had done so thanks to greatly improved coordination with NATO and noticeably better organization. The capture of these towns left Tripoli effectively encircled, enabling rebel forces to carry out their plan, which had been refined with the help of British MI6 officers based in Benghazi. As part of this plan, the rebels had been smuggling weapons, communication equipment and fighters into Tripoli over the past few months. So once the city was encircled, those rebels inside Tripoli were ready to rise up. Meanwhile, as NATO forces carried out heavy bombing raids on key strategic targets, including Qaddafi's Bab Al-Aziziya compound, rebel forces from outside the city began advancing on the capital. Fighters swept into Tripoli from Zawiya in the west and, meeting with almost no resistance, were easily able to take the headquarters of Khamis Qaddafi's feared 32 Brigade. Another group entered from Gharyan in the south, and a third came from Tajoura in the east. Meanwhile, two hundred fighters from Misarata who had come by boat disembarked at Tripoli's port. Rebels who had seized control of the Ben Nabi mosque in Sarim Street, near the city centre, used the mosque's loudspeaker system to begin anti-Qaddafi chants and to bring people out into the street.

  The rebels had been expecting heavy fighting. However, at the crucial moment Qaddafi's forces simply melted away. Some, knowing they were beaten, dumped their uniforms and fled; others defected. Crucially this latter group included Brigadier Barani Ishkal, Qaddafi's cousin and head of the powerful Mohamed Al-Magarief brigade, which was responsible for Qaddafi's security and for the protection of Tripoli. Ishkal, who had been in secret contact with the NTC, agreed that when the uprising began, his brigade would join the revolution. It was this that opened the way for Tripoli's fall.

  At last, six months after the fall of Benghazi, Tripolitanians began to come out into the streets. Tears of joy, of sadness and of pain streamed down their incredulous faces as the ‘Bride of the Mediterranean’ was finally liberated from the tyrant who had held it in his iron grip for so long. Thousands gathered in the public squares, discharging their guns into the hot night air in celebration. Prisons were unlocked and prisoners freed. Libyans tore down the meaningless revolutionary banners and the enormous pictures of Qaddafi, and proceeded to punch, kick and stamp on them with jubilant abandon. Rebel fighters broke into the Colonel's Bab Al-Aziziya compound, a place that had always been full of forbidding mystery. They set fire to his famous tent, tore the golden face off a statue he had had made of himself, and pulled down the symbols of his rule. Some even got their hands on his now famous white golf buggy, and they drove it through the streets of the capital to the sound of car horns. It was not just the Colonel's residence that was raided: the plush villas and homes of his family were also ransacked. Libyans streamed into the residence of Qaddafi's daughter, Aisha. Among her possessions they found an enormous, mermaid-shaped sofa made of gold and bearing her own likeness.

  Yet for all the jubilation that Libya was finally free, the struggle was not over. The big question preoccupying Libyans was what had become of Qaddafi. Although the fall of Tripoli marked the end of the struggle, for as long as the Leader was still at large, an enormous cloud hung over the country. Having been such an overwhelming figure for the past four decades, Qaddafi had to be caught for Libyans to feel that their revolution was complete. Moreover, all the time the Colonel was still out there, there was a danger that he could regroup his loyalists and become a vicious irritant to the new Libya.

  Speculation grew that the Leader was hiding out in the southern deserts; but all the while the Colonel was, in fact, holed up in his hometown. When rebel forces entered Tripoli, he, along with his son Moatassim and other trusted members of his regime, had travelled in a small convoy across the unforgiving deserts until they reached Sirte. It had been Moatassim's idea. The young Qaddafi believed that his father's hometown was such an obvious destination that it would be the last place anyone would think to look.34 Meanwhile, Saif Al-Islam fled to Bani Walid, the home of the Werfella tribe, which was happy to provide him with protection; Saadi escaped to Niger, where he was granted political asylum; and a heavily pregnant Aisha fled with her mother and her brothers Mohamed and Hannibal to Algeria.35

  As if seeking out Qaddafi was not enough, the rebels were also faced with capturing the two regime strongholds of Sirte and Bani Walid, which continued to put up fierce resistance to the rebel forces. The fight was a brutal one – not least because, in an ominous sign of things to come, rebel forces unleashed their full revenge against these bastions of Qaddafi loyalism. Both cities were completely ransacked by revolutionary fighters, who went on the rampage, looting and destroying whatever was in their way and committing gross human rights abuses against local residents as they went. When Bani Walid finally fell on 17 October and revolutionary forces entered the city, they destroyed everything in sight. One inhabitant described what happened:

  When the thwar (revolutionary fighters) failed to find the Kadhafi [Qaddafi] brigades they had been expecting, they were furious. They shot at dogs, at houses, they looted and burned apartments and public buildings … Now the whole town is angry. The thwar punished everyone, by destroying their homes, stealing their cars and killing their relatives.36

  The battle for Sirte was no less pitiless. As revolutionary troops encircled the city, those regime loyalists who were still fighting it out were pushed into a tiny neighbourhood of less than one square kilometre. The rebels pounded this area with rockets, forcing its residents to flee in terror. Yet still the city held out. The rebels knew that the reason for this fierce resistance was that there were a number of senior figures from the regime in the neighbourhood. Having tied themselves so tightly to Qaddafi and his regime, the members of this group knew that, if they were caught, the rebels would show them no mercy; they therefore had nothing to lose by fighting it out to the death.

  But what the rebels did not know was that one of the senior figures hiding out in Sirte was Qaddafi himself. The Leader was living out his last days hiding in an ever decreasing area, surviving on a diet of rice and pasta that had been scavenged from the deserted flats of those who had fled the city. The life of a fugitive did not suit him. According to his aide, Mansour Dhaw, who was with him at the time, the Leader spent his time reading the Qu'ran and making desperate phone calls on his satellite telephone. As the city's resistance crumbled around him, he nevertheless refused to surrender, insisting: ‘This is my country. I handed over power [to the people] in 1977.’37 In fact, the Colonel seemed to be out of touch with reality and kept asking: ‘Why is there no electricity? Why is there no water?’38

  When they could hold on no longer, the group decided to leave the city and flee to a house near the village where Qaddafi was born. On 20 October, at 8 a.m., some five hours after they had intended to leave, the party set off in a convoy of about forty cars. Qaddafi, who was travelling with his chief of security, a relative and Mansour Dhaw in a Toyota Land Cruiser, said little during the drive. It was not long before disaster struck. NATO had spotted the convoy outside the city and launched two strikes, shattering the windscreen of the Leader's vehicle and injuring him in both legs. Qaddafi and a small group of loyalists then made their way through trees and tried to hide in two concrete sewage pipes that ran beneath a major road. What bitter irony that a man who had referred to those who had started the uprising as ‘rats’, should have spent his last moments crouched in a filthy sewage pipe.

  Qaddafi and his bodyguards were soon spotted by rebel forces, who dragged the beleaguered Colonel from his hiding place out onto the litter-strewn sand. The terrified Qaddafi remained deluded until the end, asking ‘What did I do to you?’ as his captors dragged him
to the bonnet of a car, where they rained blows on him. The excited group of fighters shouted, ‘Allah u'akhbar’ (‘God is great’) and fired their weapons into the air as the petrified dictator begged for mercy, his face covered with blood and his hair caked with dust. However, his pleas fell on deaf ears. Although a couple of the rebels shouted that the Colonel was needed alive, the crowd was baying for his blood. One young fighter delivered a final blow and then shot the Colonel at close range. According to his teenage killer: ‘We grabbed him … I hit him in the face. Some fighters wanted to take him away and that's when I shot him – twice – in the face and in the chest.’39 For all the self-imagined glories of his forty-year reign, this was the most ignominious and ignoble of deaths.

  Qaddafi's battered body was dragged through the streets of Sirte and then bundled into an ambulance and taken to Misarata. It was rebels from Misarata who had finished him off, and they were not going to let an opportunity like this slip by. They wanted Qaddafi's head and, like victors in an age-old tribal conflict, they wanted to take the spoils of war back home. Despite the NTC's pleas for the body to be handed over for burial, the Misaratans insisted on wrapping the rotting and bloodied corpse in an old blanket and putting it on display in a local meat freezer, like a war trophy. Next to it they put their other big prize catch – Moatassim, who had also been captured in Sirte and who was now laid alongside his father. He, too, had had the most inglorious ending. Videos appeared on the internet of Moatassim's last moments: the skinny, agile son with his long hair and unkempt beard, smoking his last cigarette in a dismal room furnished only with a plastic chair and a mattress on the floor, as his captors repeatedly called him a dog. Like his father, Moatassim was summarily executed by a bullet fired at close range.