Libya's dictator, still around 40 years on

There were no heads of major Western states present at Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s typically extravagant celebrations of his coming to power 40 years ago on September 1. But Libya’s dictator will not care: He adores the maverick role he has enjoyed on the world stage since being relieved of the pariah status in the West through the 2003 deal in which he agreed to give up putative plans to gain a nuclear capability in return for investment in his country’s vast hydrocarbon reserves. 

Gadhafi can now berate the European Parliament, entertain Tony Blairs and Silvio Berlusconis in his tent and hold forth in the glare of the world’s media on anything from women’s rights to the ills of capitalism. The showboating aside, the fact that most of the world’s major oil companies are now again operating in Libya means he can also do real diplomatic business, such as wringing money out of Italy in the form of “reparations” for colonial-era injury, being represented on the UN Security Council and, most recently, securing the release from a Scottish jail of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted in the 1988 Pan-Am bombing over Lockerbie. 

If the outpourings of outrage over the Libyan celebration of Megrahi’s return are to be believed, politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom misled their populations over his release, though no one doubts he has terminal cancer. It emerges that the UK repeatedly dealt with Libya over the issue of a prisoner transfer accord for Megrahi. Ultimately, this was not invoked in the case as the decision on the prisoner’s fate fell to the Scottish justice secretary in the devolved government. 

Whatever the ins and outs of this administrative decision, the outcome was surely never in doubt, given the distance traveled by Libya in recent years. A few years ago, the American and British governments were desperate to highlight a diplomatic triumph in holding up Gadhafi’s surrender of his nuclear and chemical weapons programs when Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction remained stubbornly invisible and Iran began to show its nuclear hand. In the same way, Libya now hails – whatever the level of state organization in Megrahi’s reception – a rare victory in terms of cross-border justice. Not so long ago it was Libya bowing under European pressure to return Bulgarian nurses to their home country in the face of public outrage in Benghazi, after the medical staff had, justly or unjustly, been found guilty of deliberately spreading the HIV-AIDS virus at a children’s hospital. 

Up to now, the West has been content to display proudly the diplomatic package that Gadhafi concocted with his off-the-peg nuclear plans and huge compensation payments for terrorist attacks, including Lockerbie, without wanting to take on board that Libya is a real place with a leader who needs to stay popular at home. Libyans do not believe that Megrahi was guilty of the Pan Am bombing, and while Gadhafi paid up the $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the 270 people killed, Tripoli does not regard this as an admission of guilt. Quite apart from the doubts cast on Megrahi’s conviction by judicial review, it is undesirable for the British government to allow its foreign policy to be dictated by media hysteria surrounding the murky terrorist attack. 

Gadhafi is as secure as ever in power after four decades of perfecting a non-system of governance that has been disastrous in terms of spreading the benefits of oil wealth, but seemingly a winner in ensuring that no one else gains a power base from which to practice opposition. Libya’s leader was not banished to the fringes; his compensation packages have become honey traps to make companies’ involvement in his oil fields and Western leaders’ meetings with him easier to sell to Western voters. 

When the present rumpus is over and done with (and US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown clearly feel under pressure to look tough while Tripoli is generally unhappy with the slow pace of normalization in diplomatic and trade relations), it will surely be time to get interested in the future of Libya. Gadhafi is settled but like Spain’s Francisco Franco, to name one example, the thing he cannot control is his own succession. One of the leader’s sons, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, engineered the rapprochement with the West, but it appears that he has since seen his star wane in Libya, losing control of his television channel, suggesting his political future could be in doubt. 

Then again maybe not. Despite the summer storm playing through Western media over Megrahi’s return, Seif’s presence alongside the former security chief for Libyan Arab Airlines as the crowds cheered at Tripoli airport perhaps meant he is throwing his hat back in the ring as a successor to his father, and is prepared to strike a more populist pose in order to achieve this end. If so, that is something we need to know. 

 

James Badcock is deputy editor of the English-language edition of El-Pais in Madrid. He writes frequently on Spanish and North African affairs for THE DAILY STAR.