During his tenure as Libya’s ‘King of Kings,’ Muammar forcefully uprooted entire communities of indigenous Berber people and forced them to move from their ancestral villages into modern, urban high-rise buildings. These nomadic people were denied their livelihoods, livestock, personal property, freedom, traditions and had their language outlawed. But, he gave them air conditioning and satellite TV.
Muammar abolished the tiresomely liberal Libyan Constitution in favor of a Shariah-based policy which he described as “Islamic Socialism.” He modified the country back to the Islamic calendar by making it now the glorious year of 1431 and even re-named several months of the year after people he admired. However, he refused to let his country fall into the hands of another religious fundamentalist movement and in fact executed Muslim extremists, along with those who tried to form an opposing political party, expressed a dissident view, wrote a disparaging article, rebelled against any injustice, talked to foreigners about anything more serious than the weather and random civilians on alternate Tuesdays, just to keep the rest of the populace on their toes.
Over the last 20 years, many North Africans have looked to their right-hand neighbors to quell misgivings about the quality of life they were living. Algerians recovering from civil war and economic strife under Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s worrisome “Complementary Plan for Economic Growth Support” were soothed by the fact that they weren’t as dependent on foreign concerns as Tunisia had become. Tunisians, who used to be socially and economically oppressed by former President–for-life Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, looked to the right and comforted themselves by thinking, “well, at least we aren’t under Qaddafi anymore.”
Libyans probably did the same thing while looking toward Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who cheerfully jailed thousands and let even more starve, and Egyptians probably looked toward Syria and considered them lucky to not have been shot for the crime of walking down the wrong street.
Being supportive of Qaddafi, it is said that Muammar Qaddafi managed to get better off and rule an entire country through intimidation, bafflingly contradictory laws and associations of the worst kind for more than forty years. He lied, stole, raped, assassinated, imprisoned, censored, threatened global peace and security, warred with his neighbors and still made time to hang out with Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Old Qaddafi can’t have been that bad if an entire country, or dare I say the entire planet, tolerated him in power for that long.
It took a young Tunisian man named Mohamad Bouazizi setting himself and Tunisia on fire with revolutionary unrest to awaken the populace of Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Syria and many other countries to a lesson we should have learned from France during the late 18 century. The people ALWAYS have the power to change the political climate and power structure of their own country, if they’re willing to fight for it.