You have to hand it to Muammar Qaddafi: he said he would fight to the death, and fight to the death he did.

Tweet

Email

Print

On Thursday, rebel forces in Qaddafi’s hometown of Surt found the Libyan dictator hiding in a drainage pipe. According to conflicting reports, Qaddafi either died of wounds sustained during a firefight, was summarily executed, was killed by the blast from a NATO bomb, or bled to death in an ambulance.

But how he left this earth is far less important than the fact that he left. As President Obama said soon after Qaddafi’s death was announced, the notion of a “free Libya seemed impossible” just a year ago. Now it’s reality.

Yet that reality was hard-won—tens of thousands are believed to have died in a civil war that began in February and took far longer than most expected it would. Political leaders in Britain, France, and the United States, the three NATO states that took the lead in assisting anti-Qaddafi rebels, assumed that the operation would be quick.

That the fighting took so long shows just how determined Qaddafi was to stay in power, and how ruthless he has always been. Despite countless offers of an easy way out—namely, exile to some friendly dictatorship—Qaddafi repeatedly refused to do anything but continue murdering his way back into power.  

The least that can be said of the other Arab autocrats who have been ousted over the past year—Tunisia’s Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—is that neither man waged war on his own people. Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia and took his wretched family with him, allowing Tunisians the space to build a democratic society. Mubarak stepped down and is now facing a (farcical) trial.

Qaddafi, on the other hand, swore to fight to the death and threatened to take his entire country down with him. He used the sort of rhetoric—calling his people “cockroaches,” “rats,” and “dogs”—that has historically been the rhetorical pretext to genocide.

Unsurprisingly, however, some are saying that Qaddafi’s death is unjustified. Amnesty International—which last week called upon Canada to arrest former President George W. Bush during a visit to British Columbia for authorizing “torture”—immediately issued a press release insisting that the Libyan government “conduct a full, independent and impartial inquiry to establish whether Colonel al-Gaddafi was killed during combat or after he was captured.” Self-styled civil libertarians contend that Qaddafi’s “rights” were violated.

When I reported from Libya in August, just after Tripoli had fallen to anti-Qaddafi forces, most of the people I met said that they wanted Qaddafi to be caught and put on trial. “We’re not like him,” one man told me. The National Transitional Council—which several months ago became the internationally recognized government of Libya—has always stated that it wanted Qaddafi to be captured and tried rather than killed in action.

But such a scenario was always unlikely, given the chaotic nature of the war and Qaddafi’s own sense of invincibility.

It’s also unclear if such a noble ending would have been preferable to what actually transpired. For 42 years, Qaddafi, who has the blood of countless Libyans and, as the paymaster of the Pan Am 103 bombing, many Americans, on his hands, was an omnipotent figure. Even after Saddam Hussein’s regime decisively fell, many Iraqis feared that the dictator would return—that was, until he was hanged. Now, finally, the Libyan people can breathe freely.

Moreover, Qaddafi’s death demoralizes his supporters. Had Qaddafi been apprehended, his ongoing ordeal at the hands of the Libyan authorities would have become a galvanizing cause for his supporters, much like Osama bin Laden’s imprisonment would have been for al-Qaeada were he captured rather than assassinated. 

But all this debate over how Qaddafi should have been treated leaves out the view of the late dictator himself. In February, soon after protests against his rule broke out, Qaddafi said he wanted to die as “a martyr.” Surely, those who say the tyrant of Tripoli should have been treated more “humanely” should consider that, this week, he was given precisely what he wanted.