Gaddafi's Last Stand
Leave it to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi to show the world how a tyrant goes down: with bluster, belligerence and blood. Not for him, the quiet escape of Tunisia's Zine el Abidine Ben Ali or the noisy — but broadly peaceful — exit of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. When the Arab youth uprising that has toppled despots on either side of his North African nation arrived on his doorstep, Gaddafi gave notice that the region's longest-surviving dictatorship would not succumb to revolutionary rap songs, Facebook pages and nonviolent demonstrations; he dispatched tanks and jet fighters to pound and strafe protesters. Hundreds were killed — the exact toll is impossible to know, since the regime shut out the world's media and shut down most communications.
Neither the King of Bahrain nor the President of Yemen, both of whom have used violence against popular revolt in recent days, would dare such a slaughter. But Gaddafi, rich in oil and poor in friends, has rarely conformed to the rules by which other autocrats govern. Whether backing terrorist groups in the 1970s and '80s, funding civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s or hectoring world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in 2009, Libya's so-called Brother Leader — he wields absolute power with no formal title — has always done what he pleased and mostly gotten away with it.
This time he may have gone too far. Gaddafi's cruelty against his own people disgusted even longtime cronies and set off a wave of defections that, within a week of the first demonstrations on Feb. 15, left the regime deeply — perhaps fatally — wounded. Several military units mutinied and joined forces with protesters; two jet pilots flew to Malta rather than obey orders; a string of top officials, especially diplomats, quit their jobs and added to a chorus of voices calling for the dictator's end. Soon much of eastern Libya, including cities like Benghazi and Tobruk, had declared itself liberated from the regime.
Some have taken to calling the eastern provinces Free Libya. Walls of houses and shops in Tobruk have been sprayed with signs saying FALL GADDAFI. On Feb. 22, when the first foreign journalists arrived in Midan al-Melek, a square in the center of town, men were still joyous, chanting, milling about and firing off celebratory gunshots. "The protesters finished a few days ago, and now we are just celebrating," said one man in the crowd. "From Tobruk to Benghazi, it is all out of Gaddafi's control."
Gaddafi didn't seem to have gotten the message. That evening he delivered one of his characteristic televised rants, this one aimed at his countrymen. He accused Libyans of lacking gratitude for all he had done for them and blamed the protests on terrorists, foreigners and young people on drugs. He managed to work in references to a range of violent crackdowns, from Tiananmen Square to Waco, Texas, to Fallujah. Bizarre as it was, the speech left no doubt as to the dictator's intentions: "I am a warrior," he said. "I am not going to leave this land, and I will die here as a martyr."
One of his sons, Saif al-Islam, had delivered a similar diatribe 48 hours before, promising the regime would fight to the last man. But coming from Gaddafi himself, the threat carried much more menace. "I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired," he said, with typical disregard for facts. "When I do, everything will burn."
New Call, Old Response
So Libya threatens to be different. in Gaddafi, the Arab youth revolution faces a foe unafraid to push back brutally — and the watching world sees a ruler immune to reproach or reason. The U.S., having only recently begun to normalize relations with Libya after shunning it for nearly three decades, has little sway over the regime; the same is true for other Western democracies. (Outside the Arab world, Libya is closest to its former colonial master, Italy — which dreads the possibility of a wave of refugees fleeing the violence.) Unlike in Egypt and Bahrain, for instance, the Obama Administration has no leverage with the military in Libya: Gaddafi's generals will not be getting calls from fellow West Pointers at the Pentagon urging them to hold their fire. Nor will the threat of sanctions — President Obama said the U.S. and its allies were considering "the full range of options" — hold much terror for a regime that has endured long periods as an international pariah.
So what began with the hope of regime change in the new, nonviolent way is now devolving into an old-fashioned African civil war, complete with shifting tribal allegiances and foreign mercenaries. Libyans' chances of being rid of their ruler of 42 years lie in their ability to endure his jet fighters; many hope more of his soldiers will mutiny. Gaddafi's survival may depend on whether he can rally support among his own and other tribes and bolster his forces with hired guns. (Reports from Tripoli say protesters have been fired upon by foreign gunmen.)
For the rest of the world, a Libyan civil war would mean a humanitarian disaster — Egypt and Tunisia, like Italy, are bracing for refugees from the fighting. There seems likely to be a global economic impact too: Libya is a major oil exporter, and several oil companies have halted production, accelerating a rise in crude prices — which rose 2% the day after Gaddafi's speech. But unlike the revolutions roiling other Arab nations, Libyan chaos does not immediately threaten the regional order or global security. There's no domino effect to worry about: Libya's neighbors have already had their regimes changed. Nor is there a serious threat of Islamic extremists' rushing into any leadership vacuum in Tripoli. And instability in Libya doesn't directly threaten the interests of an important U.S. ally, as the prospect of instability in Egypt did those of Israel. Even so, the Obama Administration is wary of "the [possibility that] you have more than one entity that controls territory in Libya," says a senior Administration official. Especially if one of those entities is Gaddafi: although he's been relatively well behaved in recent years, the official points out, "go back 20 years or so, and he was a significant sponsor of terrorist acts who had a nuclear program."
Mad Dog of the Middle East
By the time Gaddafi had that dubious title bestowed on him by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the eccentric Libyan colonel turned dictator had been in power for nearly 17 years and had proved a nuisance to Arabs and Westerners alike. His nation's oil riches and tiny population — Libya has the world's ninth largest known deposits and just 6.5 million people — allowed him to spend money freely on pet causes, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and a number of Islamic groups. Relatively little was spent on his people: a Gallup poll released last year showed that 29% of young Libyans were unemployed and 93% described their condition as "struggling" or "suffering."
Gaddafi bankrolled scores of rebel movements across Africa, particularly in Chad, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and, during the years of apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the armed wing of the African National Congress. Gaddafi also financed the Black September movement, the Palestinian terrorist group blamed for the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich. In 1986, Libyan agents bombed a Berlin disco popular with U.S. servicemen, killing two sergeants and a Turkish woman. Reagan retaliated by having Tripoli and Benghazi bombed, killing 60, including Gaddafi's adopted daughter. Two years later, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (in which 270 were killed), was blamed on Libyan agents, and the country was slapped with economic sanctions.
This didn't prevent Libya from exporting oil, however. Nor did it curb Gaddafi's eccentricities: when his efforts to play a bigger role in Arab affairs were rebuffed, he began to push for the unification of African nations into a single political entity. Many African leaders were happy to take his money but indulged his fantasies only so far as to make him president of the African Union for a year. "He was able to buy influence, but there's not many African countries that actively support him," says Adekeye Adebajo, director of the Center for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. "Even though Gaddafi has long portrayed himself as an African, the support was always opportunistic and never that deep."
Opportunism nicely defines Gaddafi in recent years. Beneath the bluster and buffoonery, he has shrewdly assessed where his best interests lie. In mid-2003, Libya finally accepted responsibility for the Pan Am bombing and agreed to pay up to $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the victims. Gaddafi also admitted to having a nuclear-weapons program, which he then dismantled under international supervision. (The Bush Administration claimed he had been spooked by the invasion of Iraq.) In the years that followed, as Western nations — including the U.S. — normalized relations with Tripoli, foreign investment flooded into the country.
But much of the new bounty was confined to a small circle, which included Gaddafi's children. Most of his seven sons had acquired reputations for high living in Europe's playgrounds for the rich, but two of them stood out as possible successors: Saif al-Islam, the second son, and Mutassim, the fourth. Western-educated Saif courted foreign investors and quickly came to be seen as a force for economic and political reform; Mutassim, who spent millions on lavish birthday parties, became Gaddafi's national-security adviser. It was well known in Tripoli's diplomatic and political circles, however, that the two brothers detested each other. A classified November 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy to the State Department, disclosed by WikiLeaks, reported that Gaddafi had "placed his sons on a succession high wire act, perpetually thrown off balance, in what might be a calculated effort ... to prevent any one of them from authoritatively gaining the prize." (Another brother, Khamis, leads a crack military unit.)
However ambitious and extravagant they may have been, his children were all dwarfed by Gaddafi's outsize personality. His eccentricities grew more pronounced with age: on his foreign travels, he usually lived in a luxury tent — he has a phobia about multistory buildings — and his bodyguards are all women. Other cables released by WikiLeaks described him as a hypochondriac who insisted on being accompanied everywhere by a buxom Ukrainian nurse.
Yet for all his odd behavior, Gaddafi continued to exercise authority in Libya. He personally supervised major government contracts, distributing favorable deals among his cronies and influential tribal chieftains. One vivid diplomatic cable used a Libyan fable to describe his handling of the country's complex tribal politics. The fable tells "of a race in which participants have to carry a sack of rats a certain distance before they chew through the bag. [Gaddafi] wins because he figures out that by constantly shaking the bag, the rats are too disoriented to make their way out."
After the Brother Leader
Now the Gaddafis want the world to believe that without them, Libya's rats will run free. In his Feb. 20 speech, Saif al-Islam warned that the country would regress into tribal wars and turn into a place where "everyone wants to become a sheik or an emir." Dire prophecies are typical of flailing regimes, but the Gaddafis aren't alone in predicting trouble in their wake. Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Tripoli, says tribalism won't necessarily lead to conflict but notes that the country faces a larger problem: a scarcity of durable institutions. He points out that unlike in Egypt and Tunisia, in Libya the army doesn't enjoy widespread respect. "Maybe these ambassadors who have been resigning can play a role," Miles says. "But you have to make sure that they aren't just rats leaving a sinking ship."
A rosier view comes from Libyans who hold that their nation is more than a confederation of tribes. "We're not the medieval society Saif described," says Abdelnabi Yasin, an exiled writer and political activist based in Athens, Ga. The young people who led protests, he argues, "see themselves as Libyans first. Their tribal identities are not as important as it was to their parents."
Yasin believes that any post-Gaddafi government will include the officials and generals who split with the dictator. Hisham Matar, a Libyan novelist based in London, says new leaders are emerging from the youth movement. Liberated cities like Benghazi are already being run by committees, each with a specific task: sanitation, food delivery and so on. The committees are led by engineers, doctors and other educated people — the kind who can form the next government. "The ingredients for the future have to come from the movement itself," Matar says. "And the movement is civil and inclusive and calling for universal human rights and justice."
That accurately describes political-science professor Fathi Baja, who joined the protests in Benghazi with his daughter Hamida. Now he and several other leading activists in Benghazi are preparing a manifesto for the revolution — the draft, he says, for a future Libya. "It will clarify the nature of this revolution," he says. "[This] revolution is going towards the creation of modern Libya, freedom and democracy based on a pluralistic society, based on human rights, participation of all parts of Libya in creating their government and their institutions."
If that sounds like the impossibly optimistic vision of youth, consider this: at 58, Fathi Baja is old enough to remember when he joined his first political demonstration. It was on Sept. 1, 1969, when excited crowds poured into the streets of Benghazi to chant their support for the dashing 27-year-old junior officer who had just ousted Libya's King. Muammar Gaddafi has long outstayed that welcome.
— with reporting by Vivienne Walt / Paris, Abigail Hauslohner / Tobruk, Eben Harrell / London, Alex Perry / Cape Town and Michael Scherer and Massimo Calabresi / Washington
This article originally appeared in the March 7, 2011 issue of TIME Asia.