You guys can probably fill people in on all the bad things he did from the time he took power (better than me.) But just from the point of view of a Filipino, he helped broker peace talks between the Philippine Government and the rebel Islamic faction MNLF in the 1970s so we Filipinos owe him something. He became a pariah during the 80s because of all those terrorist groups Reagan was after. But slowly in the 1990s, beginning with the gulf war, he became something of a moderate (at least in the eyes of the western media.) By 2003, economic sanctions on Libya were being lifted, his terrorist cells were supposedly being called back in exchange for supplying oil to the UK and other countries, he’s been given a seat in the UN security council, also in the mini-UN covering north Africa.
And then he suddenly got beaten up and killed. My reaction was “What???”
Say what you want, the man had style. He was unlike most Middle East/North African dictators, and was pretty much a James Bond villain.
In the several years before he died, he was making more overtures towards semi-peace with the west than Saddam or the Ayatollahs. But that doesn’t mean that the earlier period was forgotten. I think practically though, you’ve got to forgive the past in some cases (Northern Ireland, South Africa), but I’m not sure it was genuine so much as finding which way the wind blows.
As a Libyan, I think he should have been given the death penalty for his crimes, but not in the way that it happened. I think he should have been arrested, tried for crimes against humanity in The Hague, then executed. In short, he deserved to die, but not at the hands of furious revolutionaries. As a nation, we should have taken the moral high ground, as hard as that may have been considering the depth of feeling, and allowed justice to be *seen *to be done.
I’d *like *to see them receive a proper trial and then serve out the appropriate punishment for their crimes, but in all honestly, I’ll be surprised if that happens. Given the state of the country at the moment and the fact that even the *President *was kidnapped last October, Saif and Saadi may simply be killed in captivity or rescued by forces still loyal to the old regime.
It’s genuinely painful to see how the country is going.
It’s hard for me to say that his fate was unjust, given his own brutal history.
I do think it was probably unwise for the West to assist in his overthrow. He was doing what we had asked of Libya, by ceasing support for international terrorism. For the western countries then to break the deal and help lead him to an early grave can only discourage future pariah states from international cooperation.
That, and we left anarchy behind, both in Libya and in surrounding states like Mali.
I think the West did the right thing. If they hadn’t agreed to enforce a no-fly zone, Gadhaffi would have won and would have made good on his threat to cleanse Benghazi “house by house”. Considering that I have family there, I’m glad it didn’t happen that way.
As far as other Pariah states are concerned, I hope the “Arab Spring” spreads and that other tin-pot dictators are quaking in their boots.
And as for Gadhaffi, the man was a brutal, delusional, insane, disgusting piece of human trash who treated an entire nation as his personal plaything and treated the people of that nation as less than vermin. He created a country steeped in terror, suspicion, torture, corruption and anguish, and the world is better off without him. Good riddance to him.
I doubt that the eople of Sirte are as pleased. Or, for that matter, the black people ethnically cleansed by the fundamentalist rabble that overthrew him.
Qaddafi, which my browser tells me is the correct spelling, was a run of the mill petty despot, not in the top rank of crazed killers. No Kim Jong Un. Five out of ten chainsaws. Less blood on his hands than the average American president.
Personally, I don’t think anyone should be anally raped to death with a knife by a crazed armed mob. But if anyone did, there are plenty of other dictators more deserving. For that matter, Barack Obama is just as deserving.
Good for the people of Sirte. You’ll excuse me if I don’t think that the brutal murder of civilians is a good thing.
And yes, a lot of black people had to flee the country because of fears that they were part of the force of sub-Saharan mercenaries that Gadhaffi hired to kill his own people. Much of that was down to fear, prejudice and sometimes outright racism. My FIL had a black employee in Libya who decided to leave after he was threatened in a shop, even though the Libyan shopkeeper personally vouched for him, so y’know the racism and fear wasn’t entirely unilateral.
I also witnessed first-hand entire families of black people stuck at the borders with Egypt but unable to go anywhere because they had to flee without any papers. All of that was damned ugly, and I’m not excusing it for a moment.
But “ethnically cleansed”? That’s a very loaded term that implies deliberate, sustained genocide - a concerted effort to murder every last member of a particular ethnicity, and that’s not what I saw.
And for the record - again - I don’t think Gadhaffi deserved the death he got, but I do think he should have been properly tried and executed under International Law for crimes against humanity.
As for “fundamentalist rabble”…I’m not going to dignify that with a response.
I believe in forgiveness up to a point, but asking an entire nation to forgive a man that brutalised them for over forty years is, I think, asking too much.
Well maybe not totally forgiving but like at least putting him in jail instead of raping and killing him. I just don’t understand revenge but then again I don’t really feel emotionally close to most humans.
Again, I don’t think he should have been killed the way he was, but I do think he should have faced trial at an international court for his crimes against humanity, and executed. Keeping him alive in jail would have just encouraged his loyalists to try and re-take the country and re-install him. And frankly, I just don’t think he deserved to live any more.
And I take your point about revenge. Revenge is seldom the same thing as justice, but if you had an inkling of the horrors he inflicted on people for so long, you might understand at least some of the rage and anguish. Again, I’m not condoning it, but I understand why it happened that way.