Col Muammar Gaddafi was renowned not just for his
cruelty, but also his theatricality. A tyrant in the mould of Mussolini, Idi
Amin and Omar Bongo, could he be the last of the line? (Khmer people may beg to differ!)
“Gaddafi made you wonder if dictatorship attracts the mad, or maddens those attracted to it”
I cannot honestly claim to be among the hundreds of writers
in a position to talk about the Col Gaddafi I once knew, although the truth is
that if he had been going around claiming to have met me, I could not entirely
deny it.
We sort of brushed into each other in the lobby of an
expensive hotel in Tripoli back in the 1980s as Libya waited angrily and
apprehensively for American air strikes.
I was among hundreds of Western journalists invited to
witness the devastation Gaddafi assumed was about to rain down on his capital.
I do not think the phrase "human shield" had been
coined at the time, but if it had been, it would have described our position
nicely.
We were kept in gilded confinement, unable to so much as
open the heavy glass front doors of the hotel without permission.
Enormous buffet meals were served every few hours. Trousers
began to tighten, tempers to shorten.
Tight pants
News that the colonel was to pay a visit lightened the mood
considerably.
Even then, he changed personas as other men change their
socks.
One day he was a Motown backing vocalist with wet-look
permed hair and tight pants. The next, a white-suited comic-operetta Latin
American admiral, dripping with braid.
When I saw him, he had chosen the robes of a Berber
tribesman, and what he presumably imagined to be the inscrutable gaze of a
desert mystic.
He affected not to notice the crowd of journalists and
strode about the lobby, pausing occasionally to gaze into the middle of
whatever distance he happened to be facing.
It was utterly ludicrous of course, but somehow we did not
say so. Journalism was a more formal business then than it is now, and we were
much given to discussions of where the initiative lay, between the colonel on
the one hand and the United States on the other.
The fact that he was a howling buffoon did not form part of
the reporting of foreign news in those days, but of course it turned out to be
the most important thing of all.
Bombastic ravings
Gaddafi made you wonder if dictatorship attracts the mad, or
maddens those attracted to it.
He was an old-fashioned, theatrical sort of tyrant, whose
lineage you can trace from the bombastic ravings of Mussolini, through the
kilted debauchery of Idi Amin, to the platform-heeled kleptocracy of Omar Bongo
of Gabon.
He recruited a corps of Amazonian female bodyguards, drove a
golf buggy and permanently closed every cinema in the country - apparently in
case movie-goers plotted against him.
With Gaddafi, though, with all of them, the darkness was
always there. He sponsored terrorism overseas and in Libya, at his behest,
fingernails were ripped out and eyes were gouged; homes and hearts were broken.
He corrupted the soul of the nation. Everyone wondered if
everyone else was an informer.
One middle-aged woman told me, at the beginning of this last
revolution in the battered centre of the city of Benghazi, that she thought the
worst thing about living under a dictatorship was that it made you ashamed that
you did not resist, that you were not a hero.
"You pass the habit of fear on to your children,"
she said.
She could remember the leaders of a previous student rising
in Benghazi being hanged from lamp-posts in the city centre.
Hands behind their backs, their bodies dangled on long
stretches of electrical cable with their feet just a metre or so off the
ground.
Life choked out of them slowly and agonisingly. And when
they were close to death, a well-known sidekick of Gaddafi's finished them off
by hugging them around the knees and tugging down on their helpless bodies.
Palace to sewer
This had all happened a few years before I saw Gaddafi
posturing and posing, with his look of affected inscrutability, in the lobby of
that luxury hotel.
Colonel Gaddafi with his body guards Col Gaddafi
surrounded himself with female guards
Years of ham-fisted plastic surgery deepened the look into
expressionless detachment, and there was nothing to be read in his face about
all that killing, all that destruction.
Now there will be no reckoning for Muammar Gaddafi beyond
the last great reckoning that faces us all.
There will be no questions from the bereaved to help us
understand why he did it, and no confessions from his henchmen to tell us how.
Perhaps after all, he will be the last of the grotesque,
theatrical, blood-stained buffoon dictators.
It would be nice to think that a certain type of tyranny
died alongside the man who spent his life in a palace and his last moments in a
sewer-pipe.
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