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To understand Gaddafi is to understand his heritage. Son of a nomadic livestock trader, he was born in a tent in the desert near the Libyan town of Sirte in 1942 Libya was then occupied by the forces of Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini, and its people were treated, at best, as fifth-class citizens. That bitter memory, as much as his tribal upbringing and education in Muslim schools, shaped Gaddafi.
By 1956, he was organizing student groups in support of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser after the Suez crisis and the Israeli invasion of the Sinai. Expelled for starting a student strike, he finished secondary school with a tutor. He was devout, austere, puritanical and, from years of listening to Radio Cairo, a true believer in Arab nationalism. After graduating from Libya's military academy, he spent several months at Britain's Army Signal School; he would stride through the streets of London in flowing robes and headgear—at that time an act of prideful defiance for an Arab.
Gaddafi came to power in 1969. Then a captain in the Libyan army, he staged a bloodless coup against the country's effete, Westward-leaning monarch, King Idris. Shortly after the coup, Gaddafi proclaimed the principles of his governmental policy, which included the elimination of all foreign bases (including the American-run Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli), neutrality in foreign policy and national unity in a country that until then had been sharply divided along provincial and tribal lines. A year later, Gaddafi announced that not only had these objectives been met but that the minimum wage had been doubled, huge development projects had been started and oil prices had been raised. Libya today ranks among the more prosperous of Arab states with an average per capita income of $7,000.
Still, Gaddafi has failed to realize his real ambitions. He believes that he is Nasser's true heir in the Middle East and nurtures a dream of establishing an Islamic sub-Saharan republic stretching from Senegal to the Sudan. "My problem is I have no country to lead, though I am a great leader," he has complained. "He has a very clear idea of what he wants," says a U S Government official. "But as leader of only 3 million people, he has very unrealistic hopes of putting together a pan-Arab vision based on Nasser's dreams. He has enormous interest in power, but he can't project it in any meaningful sense.
Not that Gaddafi has not tried. "Show me one country which is stricken by the terror disease, and I will show you the Libyan connection," says Yehudit Ronen, a scholar of Libyan affairs from the Tel Aviv-based Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. "Gaddafi has his arm everywhere." Revolutionary movements backed by Gaddafi have ranged from the Palestine Liberation 0rganization to the Irish Republican Army, from Basque and Corsican separatists to the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines. He runs a dozen or more training camps for guerrilla warfare, with advisers supplied by East Germany and Cuba, and is reported to have a slush fund of $1 billion a year for terrorist activities alone. He allegedly tried four times to have Sadat killed, and the Presidents of Niger, the Sudan and Tunisia have all accused Gaddafi of trying to oust them.