Few countries have undergone such an extraordinary transformation in recent years as Libya. It is a transformation made even more remarkable by the fact that Libya has been presided over by one man—Colonel Mu’ammar Gaddafi—for almost 37 years. No other country—with the exception of Cuba and Gabon—has lived for so long under the rule of a single leader. And rarely has a country been so overshadowed by the overbearing presence of one man.
What is known about Libya is often little more than the eccentricities of Colonel Gaddafi—known simply as ‘the man’ by the trendy young on the streets of Libya—who has for almost four decades borne his country along on a tide of international unpredictability.
From the early days of his 1969 revolution, Colonel Gaddafi—then just 27 years old—rallied the Libyan people to his side with an anti-imperialist message, catching the popular mood of the times with the possibilities of pan-Arab nationalism as preached by the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Colonel Gaddafi’s first moves were to close all British and American military bases on Libyan soil, nationalise Libya’s lucrative oil industry and expel 30,000 Italian settlers.
As was often the case with revolutionary Arab and African governments in the 1970s, the international hostility generated by Colonel Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist policies obscured the finer points of a country seeking to follow its own path.
Within Libya itself, Colonel Gaddafi championed the fight against inequality and attempted to steer a middle path between communism and capitalism—Colonel Gaddafi humbly called his philosophy the Third Universal Theory. He also took on what he described as ‘the problem with democracy’, his slogan of ‘committees everywhere’ promising political participation by all Libyans rather than a representative system.
Perhaps the experiment would have been allowed to continue were it not for Colonel Gaddafi’s insistence that Libya’s struggle be exported beyond Libya’s borders. Assassinations of political opponents took place across Europe and, most notoriously, revolutionary agents took over the Libyan Peoples’ Bureau in London in April 1984, prompting a ten-day siege and the shooting of police officer Yvonne Fletcher. Libya’s descent into international opprobrium and isolation dates from this event, with the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the bombing of a French airliner over the Sahara the following year and alleged involvement in a string of terrorist attacks merely confirming Libya’s status as an international pariah.
In the midst of these events, the United States launched air strikes