21 October 2011

CAIRO: The bloodied corpse of deposed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will send a clear message to other Arab leaders who are battling to stay in power against the will of their people, some Arabs said Thursday.

“This is the fate of a leader who destroyed the lives of his people for decades and opened fire on them before his demise,” said Mohammad Baltagy, senior member of Egypt’s influential Muslim Brotherhood.

“Gadhafi’s fate should be a lesson for Syrian leader Bashar Assad and Yemen’s [Ali Abdullah] Saleh,” he said, referring to two Arab heads of state who have sought to quash unrest with their armies.

The presidents of Tunisia and then Egypt were the first to be ousted in the ‘Arab Spring” that has brought ordinary people onto the streets to demand political change where many kings and presidents have ruled for decades.

But Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were driven out by protests with relatively little violence.

Gadhafi, whose bloodied body was shown in footage carried by Arabic television channels, was ousted after months of fighting during which he turned the full might of his army against rebels, firing missiles, artillery and other heavy weapons at them.

“Hell awaits Gadhafi. I hate to rejoice in his death, but what he did to his people was atrocious,” said Nancy al-Kassab, an Egyptian TV producer.

“Gadhafi’s death will scare Arab dictators like Assad and Saleh, and make other Arab leaders more careful with their people after they recover from the shock of the news,” said Alia Askalany, 27, an Egyptian marketing manager.

In Jordan former U.N. special envoy to Libya and one-time Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdullah al-Khatib said:

“Other somehow similar systems in the region should draw their conclusions and listen to the voice of the people and should create the conditions whereby people of the region can freely and openly determine their future.”

Activists in Syria’s city of Homs told Avaaz, a campaigning rights organization, that people celebrated Gadhafi’s death in the streets. Some held placards saying: “The rat of Libya has been caught, next is the germ of Syria.”

But some questioned how much of a domino effect Gadhafi’s demise might have elsewhere in a region, including Yemen where President Saleh has clung on to power in a nation riven by tribal conflicts even after he was wounded in an attack that prompted him to seek treatment in neighboring Saudi Arabia.

“[Gadhafi] deserves it, he killed a lot of people. I don’t believe this will happen in Yemen because there are a lot of divisions there,” said Omran Ahmad, a Yemeni living in Egypt.

Saleh already has backed down three times from signing a Gulf initiative for a transfer of power, saying he would only hand over power to “safe hands.”

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.