When I Met Qadhafi...

I suggested to Muamar Qadhafi that Libya wouldn’t be able for long to support a range of revolutionary movements around the world and simultaneously expect to trade in oil on world markets.

We were talking over kebabs in his tent in the desert near his home town of Sirte in 1987. A translator was the only other person present. There’s no precedent for what you are trying, I said, except, perhaps, and then only slightly, Russia in the years immediately following 1917. That had ended in tears and Stalin.
There was a pause, and then he asked whether I had any books on this subject. Matter of fact, more than a few. Would I send him some when I reached home? I did. I have no idea whether he received or read any of them. His subsequent trajectory suggests not, or that he found nothing in them that he thought useful or relevant.
I had first met Qadhafi the previous year along with a couple of other journalists while making a documentary for Channel 4. I’d asked him about the shooting dead of Metropolitan policewoman Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 from inside the Libyan embassy in St. James’ Park while policing an opposition demonstration. He flatly denied any involvement.
But he made no secret that he was supporting armed groups abroad which he perceived as national liberation movements, I persisted. He must know that that would enrage Western opinion. He launched into a history lesson.
Libya had been occupied for hundreds of years by the Ottoman Empire. Then came Italian and later German fascism, resisted by the national movement led by Omar Muktar, which had given Libyans their first sense of pride in themselves. Libya had lost more people per head than any other country on earth in the anti-fascist struggle. Then the British and Americans occupied the country. The second biggest U.S. base in the world, Wheelus Field – the biggest was in the Philippines – was just outside Tripoli when a group of young officers led by 29-year-old Qadhafi overthrew the tribal sheik, Idris, who had been appointed King by the British, when the U.N. recognised Libyan independence in 1951.
Don’t talk to Libyans about violent intervention in foreign countries, was the message. It seemed at the time and still does an entirely reasonable reply.
Qadhafi, despite the frantic recent re-writing of history, was an attractive figure for many radicals in those days. He had come to power in 1969 in a period of global youthful revolutionism. He had rejected the Stalinist model as well as the structures of the West. He had instituted free housing and education, banned the imams from politics and promoted the role of women. The students at a medical school where I spent a day were around 65% female.
His foreign policies were rooted in the interests of Libya as he saw them. He gave practical support to struggles in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere: Castro’s Cuba, the Moros in the Philippines, the Provisional IRA. As a country which had overthrown imperialism, Libya had a duty to support others still fighting, he told me. But not every Irish radical shared his perspective on the IRA, I countered. Well, he explained, the IRA was inflicting punishment on the British, who had oppressed and humiliated Libyans.
First and foremost, Qadhafi was a Libyan and an Arab Nationalist. Western media commentators seem as incapable of grasping this as they are ignorant of Libyan history. Maybe they don’t know because they don’t have to know.
Before I left, we went walking a stretch in the desert. In the manner of Arab men, he held my hand as we dandered across the dunes, talking of the vast irrigation scheme which he hoped would make the Sahara bloom.
A guard leaning on a casual rifle whispered as we passed: “How is Leeson Street?” Once a student in Dublin, I suppose.
Politically and personally, Qadhafi seems to have deteriorated since. His country embattled, its economy faltering from sanctions and chronic mismanagement, facing regular attempts at assassination (including at least one by MI6), surrounded by cronyism and corruption, isolated from the mass of the people, increasingly dependent on a conspiratorial cabal of his relatives, army officers and bureaucrats shading into business bosses, he has developed the manner of a delusional autocrat.
Libya never had a revolution in the proper sense of the mass of the people rising up to free themselves. The fact that Qadhafi’s group had deposed King Idris was made known to Libyans in a radio broadcast after the fact.
Like all who hold power in the name of their nation, Gadhafi and those closely around him came to believe themselves the personification of the people and the only legitimate expression of nationhood, no longer working to win the support of the people but entitled to claim their allegiance. Opponents are seen automatically as traitors deserving of death.
Much that has been said of Qadhafi and Libya in the past month is true. But it is far from the whole truth. The narrative is more complex and contradictory than the propaganda news broadcasts have urged us to believe.
I liked Qadhafi when I met him. I don’t suppose I’d like him now. But his story is less a tale of horror than a tragedy unfolding, as I write towards a terrible finale.