The end of Gaddafi in Libya, but what made him so bad?

After roughly eight months of civil war, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s 42 year rule over Libya came to a bloody end on October 20 this year. Why did this happen?

His regime faced tough criticism from the West in particular, where he was considered an autocratic brute, while at the same time there are allegations that among many other African leaders he was considered a hero and even a close friend of figures such as Nelson Mandela.

What, then, made Gaddafi so bad? Under his rule the Libyan economy grew fantastically through the export of oil and Libya achieved the highest living standards in Africa. Literacy rates increased from roughly 10% to almost 90%, and the average life expectancy has increased from 51 to 74.5 years.

Gaddafi’s Libya also funded welfare systems such as free healthcare, free education and the construction of the ‘Great Manmade River’ project, the largest irrigation project in the world, which now supplies vast quantities of fresh water to all of Libya’s key cities without racking up high levels of national debt.

He was also a supporter and contributor towards Nelson Mandela’s election campaign in South Africa. Indeed, Gaddafi’s political ideology, outlined in his ‘The Green Book’, focuses on direct democracy (as opposed to the representative democracy that we experience in the UK) with power in the hands of small popular committees rather than powerful political parties. In the same book, Gaddafi promised equality for women and black people.

On face value, it might be said that Gaddafi’s extended rule over Libya (which in fact he denied, claiming no official role in government) was quite successful, and far from the demonic tyrant as he is presented in Western media.

But it isn’t that simple.

For all the promises that Gaddafi made and all of the improvements to living standards that took place over his rule, politically the man ruled with brute force, which ultimately led to his downfall. Gaddafi’s Libya may have, on paper, been one of the most democratic states on earth, but that was never put into practice. By decentralising power into small local committees Gaddafi was provided with virtually unlimited power.

He was never held to account in the way we recognise in representative democracies in the west, and election results were never published. Not only this, but Gaddafi may well be called a master of strategically placing favoured individuals in powerful positions around the country. His regime was corrupt.

Anyone who disagreed with it suffered. Political opposition in the country was fiercely crushed. There was no freedom to express any discontentment with the system. The penalty for arguing for a change in the structure of government, for example, from direct democracy to a representative democracy was all too often capital punishment, which was broadcast and re-broadcast on state television.

Soon after taking control of the country, Gaddafi began to establish a highly intrusive and extensive surveillance network which sought to find and murder all dissidents. We saw this perhaps most clearly when he began to murder protesting civilians which led to the warrant for his arrest for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

It seems, therefore, that what made Gaddafi so bad was his seemingly insatiable appetite for power over his Libya; a certain element of “my way or the highway”. Gaddafi and his regime may well have ushered in changes that improved living standards in Libya, but his disregard for political freedom, and anyone else’s point of view, strangled a new generation of Libya gasping for political freedom, fuelled by the Arab Spring, and so he and his regime paid the ultimate price.

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