So the long-suffering Libyan masses were dragooned into attending popular congresses vested with no power, authority or budgets, with the knowledge that anyone who spoke out of turn and criticised the regime could be carted off to prison. A set of draconian laws was enacted in the name of upholding security, further undermining the colonel's claim to a champion of freedom from oppression and dictatorship. Legal penalties included collective punishment, death for anyone who spread theories aiming to change the constitution and life imprisonment for disseminating information that tarnished the country's reputation.
Tales abounded of torture, lengthy jail terms without a fair trial, executions and disappearances. Many of Libya's most educated and qualified citizens chose exile, rather than pay lip service to the lunacy. Unchecked by any of the normal restraints of governance, Gaddafi was able to take his anti-imperialist campaign around the world, funding and supporting militant groups and resistance movements wherever he found them.
He also targeted Libyan exiles, dozens of whom were killed by assassins believed to belong to a global Libyan intelligence network. If governments were prepared to shrug off Gaddafi's human rights violations in Libya, and persecution of dissidents abroad, it was a different matter when it came to him supporting groups that used terrorism on their own patches. A bombing of a nightclub used by US soldiers in Berlin in , blamed on Libyan agents, proved a decisive moment.
US President Ronald Reagan ordered air strikes against Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the two soldiers and one civilian killed and the dozens of wounded, although there was no conclusive proof beyond intelligence "chatter" that Libya had ordered the attack.
The US retaliation was intended to kill the "mad dog of the Middle East", as Mr Reagan branded him, but although there was extensive damage and an unknown number of Libyan fatalities - including, it was claimed, Gaddafi's adopted daughter - the colonel emerged unscathed. His reputation may even have been enhanced among opponents of Washington's heavy-handed foreign policy. The bombing of Pan-Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in was the next significant escalation, causing the deaths of people in the air and on the ground, the worst single act of terrorism ever witnessed in the UK.
Gaddafi's initial refusal to hand over the two Libyan suspects to Scottish jurisdiction resulted in a protracted period of negotiations and UN sanctions, finally ending in with their surrender and trial. One of the men, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, was jailed for life, but the other was found not guilty. The resolution of the Lockerbie case, along with Gaddafi's subsequent admission and renunciation of a covert nuclear and chemical weapons programme, paved the way for a significant warming of relations between Tripoli and western powers in the 21st century.
The domestication of the erstwhile "mad dog" was held up as one of the few positive results of US President George W Bush's military invasion of Iraq in The argument went that Gaddafi had watched the fate of fellow miscreant Saddam Hussein, hanged by Iraqis after a US-instigated legal process, and had learnt a sobering lesson. It is perhaps more plausible to argue that the Libyan leader played his WMD card when he saw the benefits of forging strategic partnerships with the US and European powers.
He certainly paid little heed to Mr Bush's so-called "freedom agenda", which held that the US no longer held common cause with dictators and despots and that democracy and human rights were just around the corner. In , Libyan terrorists were thought to be behind the bombing of a West Berlin dance club that killed three and injured scores of people.
The United States in turn, under President Ronald Reagan's administration, bombed specific targets in Libya that included Qaddafi's residence in Tripoli. In the most famous instance of the country's connection to terrorism, Libya was implicated in the Lockerbie bombing.
A plane carrying people blew up near Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all on board, with falling debris killing 11 civilians on the ground. Libyan terrorists, including an in-law of Qaddafi's, were also believed to be behind the destruction of a French passenger jet in , killing all on board. In s, the relationship between Qaddafi and the West began to thaw. As Qaddafi faced a growing threat from Islamists who opposed his rule, he began to share information with the British and American intelligence services.
In , Nelson Mandela persuaded the Libyan leader to hand over the suspects from the Lockerbie bombing. It wasn't long before Qaddafi had mended relations with the West on many fronts. Qaddafi was welcomed in Western capitals, and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi counted him among his close friends.
Qaddafi's son and heir apparent, Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, mixed with London's high society for several years. Many critics of the newfound friendship of Qaddafi and the West believed it was based on business and access to oil. In , the United Nations eased sanctions on Libya, and foreign oil companies worked out lucrative new contracts to operate in the country. The influx of money to Libya made Qaddafi, his family and his associates even wealthier.
The disparity between the ruling family and the masses became ever more apparent. After more than four decades in power, Qaddafi's downfall happened in less than a year. The next month, Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak was forced out, providing a morale boost to protesters in several Arab capitals. Despite the atmosphere of severe repression, demonstrations broke out in the city of Benghazi and spread throughout Libya.
Qaddafi used aggressive force to try to suppress the protests, and the violence quickly escalated. Police and foreign mercenaries were brought in to shoot at protesters, and helicopters were sent to bombard citizens from the air. As casualties mounted, Libyans grew more determined to see Qaddafi's ouster. As violence spread through the country, Qaddafi made several rambling speeches on state television, claiming the demonstrators were traitors, foreigners, al-Qaeda and drug addicts.
He urged his supporters to continue the fight, and small groups of heavily armed loyalists battled against the rebels. By the end of February , the opposition had gained control over much of the country, and the rebels formed a governing body called the National Transitional Council. After seizing power, he laid out a pan-Arab, anti-imperialist philosophy, blended with aspects of Islam.
While he permitted private control over small companies, the government controlled the larger ones. He was an admirer of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab socialist and nationalist ideology.
He tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony. However, critics dismissed his leadership as a military dictatorship, accusing him of repressing civil society and ruthlessly crushing dissident. The regime has imprisoned hundreds of people for violating the law and sentenced some to death, according to Human Rights Watch. Gaddafi played a prominent role in organising Arab opposition to the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.
Among his many eccentricities, Gaddafi is known to sleep in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of female bodyguards on trips abroad. For, when it came to the crunch, Gaddafi Sr was not ready to let junior do more than tinker with the whole, bizarre edifice of power which he had created, and reminded him that the direct democracy that it embodied was the best in the world. When it came to the economy, Saif al-Islam could not stray far from the Green Book either.
Yes, his father conceded, his economic theory had meant the nationalisation of just about everything. But that, he now said, had been merely transitional. All the theory needed was elaboration and refinement for the benefit of the ordinary mortals who had to make it work, and who, in their obtuseness, opportunism or sheer malevolence, had misinterpreted or abused it.
Gaddafi had come to power as the last revolutionary of the pan-Arab nationalist Nasser generation. He eventually became the doyen of them all. None was to enjoy such absolute power for so long as he, and none had had such an opportunity to shape their systems and societies with quite such untrammelled ease. Consequently, in none had the failure of a whole generation's revolutionary expectations been more blatant than it had been in him.
The "messenger of the desert" reduced his country to a far worse condition than he found it in. Survival, for the 42 years that made him longest-serving non-royal ruler in the world, was about the only thing he could boast of.
And till he was challenged both internally and by international forces, there was little to suggest that he could not have survived for many more years, and eventually — like just about every other leader of once-revolutionary Arab republics had already done or planned to do — perpetuate himself and his Jamahariyah in the person of his son.
That son would not have been his eldest, Muhammad, from a first, short-lived marriage to Fatiha al-Nuri, but Saif al-Islam, his eldest by his second wife, Safiya Farkash. He is survived by those three and by other children from his second marriage; his sons, Saadi, Mutassim, Hannibal and Khamis; a daughter, Aisha; and Milad Abuztaia, an adopted nephew. His son Saif al-Arab from his second marriage was killed in a Nato air strike.
Gaddafi's powers of survival notwithstanding, once the hurricane of the Arab democratic revolution began to blow, nothing seemed more obvious — or fitting — than that he, cruellest, most capricious and ruinous of Arab dictators, should be among the first three to be swept away. It even looked as though he might go as swiftly as the neighbouring presidents Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Mubarak in Tunisia and Egypt. Within days he had lost control of Benghazi, a traditionally self-willed city, as well as vast swaths of eastern Libya.
The contagion spread to the west, where important towns and tribal districts fell to local rebellions. Waves of protesters were in the streets of Tripoli itself. And with panic and confusion taking hold in high places, with long-serving officials and military commanders rushing to defect, his power seemed close to crumbling before this tidal wave of pure, unbridled "people's power".
But that was not to be. Turning tanks, artillery and warplanes on civilians, Gaddafi killed and injured thousands. And then, recovering from the initial shock, he rallied what was left of his loyalist apparatus and launched a systematic, multipronged counter-offensive to reimpose his sway over the capital and retake areas lost in the east.
Now, it was no longer, as in days gone by, just occasional plotters and renegades who had betrayed him. It was an entire people, "stray dogs" all, "rats, traitors, hypocrites, drug addicts — and agents of al-Qaida".
Now, he and Saif al-Islam vied with one another in warning of the "rivers of blood" to come if this aberrant people failed to make the only sensible choice available to it, between "submission — or liquidation and war until the last man and the last bullet". As the resurgent military reappeared at the gates of Benghazi — now the rebel headquarters and seat of a rival administration — a massacre loomed.
And that prospect triggered a reaction that was probably decisive to Gaddafi's ultimate undoing. With broad Arab backing, Nato forces imposed a no-fly zone over the country. Their mandate was to protect civilians only, but in due course they became a de facto instrument of regime change, in conjunction with the rebel forces on the ground. Western aircraft steadily eroded the Gaddafi military's ability to exploit its vastly superior, and professionally delivered, firepower, targeting concentrations of artillery and armour as they lay siege to rebel-held cities.
Chaotic at first, without training or any but the most rudimentary equipment, and fired only by enthusiasm and reckless courage, the disconnected groups of volunteer fighters gradually acquired sufficient military skills and improved, makeshift weaponry first to hold their own, and then to achieve minor gains here and there.
After six months of stalemate, they surprised the world, and perhaps themselves, with their lightning descent on the capital and their conquest of the Bab al-Aziziya barracks — that vast, forbidding high-walled fortress, home, seat of power, and above all, crass, iconic, absurdist symbol of Gaddafi and all his works.
It was only a matter of time before National Transitional Council forces took control of the rest of the country, and even Sirte finally provided no refuge. Muammar al-Gaddafi, politician and soldier, born ; died 20 October Colonel Muammar Gaddafi obituary.
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