For these reasons the feelings of many of us towards him are nowhere near as strong as those people in the West have been encouraged to develop by their media. Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints.
The division and the chaos didn't come directly after the death of Gaddafi or the success of the revolution Imbued by what he described as a feeling of patriotism and a yearning to return to his homeland a free man, he joined the rebel cause shortly after the uprising began. Unlike Ballali, however, Mukhtar was certain a struggle to overthrow Gaddafi would eventually happen long before the revolution. I would tell those who think it was better under Gaddafi that if they were to taste one month under the Gaddafi regime, I'm percent sure they would review that claim and take the side of the revolution.
Nevertheless, he insisted those who said Libya was better under Gaddafi had no appreciation of the scale of repression under his rule. The convoy was engaged by a Nato aircraft to reduce the threat. It was that air attack — which destroyed around a dozen cars — that dispersed the convoy into several groups, the largest numbering about As NTC fighters descended on the fleeing groups of cars, some individuals jumped from their vehicles to escape on foot, among them Gaddafi and a group of guards.
Finding a trail of blood, NTC fighters followed it to a sandy culvert with two storm drains. In one of these Gaddafi was hiding. Accounts here differ. According to some fighters quoted after the event, he begged his captors not to shoot. What is certain from several of the clips of video footage — most telling that shot by Ali Algadi — is that Gaddafi was dazed but still alive, although possibly already fatally wounded.
The question is what happens between this and later images of a lifeless Gaddafi lying on the ground having his shirt stripped off and propped in the back of a pickup truck and the next sequence which shows him dead. Here the accounts differ wildly.
According to one fighter, caught on camera, he was shot in the stomach with a 9mm pistol. According to doctors not present at his capture and ambulance staff, Gaddafi was shot in the head. He was filmed alive but wounded smoking a cigarette and drinking from a bottle of water, before the announcement that he also had died. There is hatred inside. We want to see him. And in confirming that Gaddafi is no more, the Libyan people want to bring the final curtain down on his tyranny.
This article is more than 10 years old. He had redistributed wealth - although the enrichment of his own family from oil revenues and other deals was hard to ignore and redistribution was undertaken more in the spirit of buying loyalty than promoting equality.
He sponsored grand public works, such as the improbable Great Man-Made River project , a massive endeavour inspired, perhaps, by ancient Bedouin water procurement techniques, that brought sweet, fresh water from aquifers in the south to the arid north of his country.
There was even something of a Tripoli Spring, with long-term exiles given to understand that they could return without facing persecution or jail. When the first calls for a Libyan "day of rage" were circulated, Gaddafi pledged - apparently in all seriousness - to protest with the people, in keeping with his myth of being the "brother leader of the revolution" who had long ago relinquished power to the people.
As it turned out, the scent of freedom and the draw of possibly toppling the colonel, just as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali had been toppled, was too strong to resist among parts of the Libyan population, especially in the east. Some of the first footage of rebellion to come out of Benghazi showed incensed young Libyans outside an official building smashing up a green monolith representing the spurious liberation doctrine that had kept them enslaved since the s - the Green Book.
As the uprising spread, and the seriousness of the threat to his rule became apparent, Gaddafi showed he had lost none of the ruthlessness directed against dissidents and exiles in the s and s. This time it was turned on whole towns and cities where people had dared to tear down his posters and call for his downfall. Regular troops and mercenaries nearly overwhelmed the rag-tag rebels, consisting of military deserters and ill-trained militiamen brought together under the banner of the National Transitional Council NTC.
The colonel could afford to dismiss them as wayward year-olds, "given pills at night, hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, their coffee, their Nescafe".
The intervention of Nato on the rebels' side in March, authorised by a UN resolution calling for the protection of civilians, prevented their seemingly imminent annihilation - but it was months before they could turn the situation to their advantage. Then came the fall of Tripoli and Gaddafi went into hiding, still claiming his people were behind him and promising success against the "occupiers" and "collaborators".
His dictatorial regime had finally crumbled, but many feared that he might remain at large to orchestrate an insurgency. He met his ignominious and grisly end, when NTC forces found him hiding in a tunnel following a Nato air strike on his convoy as he tried to make a break from his last stronghold, the city of Sirte, where it had all begun.
The exact circumstances of his death remain in dispute, either "killed in crossfire", summarily executed, or lynched and dragged through the streets by jubilant, battle-hardened fighters. Though it meant the Libyan people - and other victims around the world - were robbed of proper justice, the news sparked wild celebrations across his former domain that nearly 42 years of rule and misrule had truly come to a close.
Early promise. Political theorist. Gaddafi's 'system' as envisaged in the Green Book. Adventures abroad.
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