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A comedy actor who
had turned to serious tragedy in his last days
Robert Fisk on Muammar Gaddafi, tyrant of Tripoli
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
A comedy actor who had turned to serious tragedy in his last
days, desperate for the last make-up lady, the final knock on
the theatre door.
So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid,
infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own
female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book,
who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement
summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or
gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades
ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as
they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green
Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military
parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the
dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.
The YouTube and Facebook pictures told the story with a grainy,
fuzzed reality, fantasy turned to fire and burning police
stations in Benghazi and Tripoli, to corpses and angry, armed
men, of a woman with a pistol leaning from a car door, of a
crowd of students – were they readers of his literature? –
breaking down a concrete replica of his ghastly book. Gunfire
and flames and cellphone screams; quite an epitaph for a regime
we all, from time to time, supported.
And here, just to lock our minds on to the brain of truly
eccentric desire, is a true story. Only a few days ago, as
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi faced the wrath of his own people, he
met with an old Arab acquaintance and spent 20 minutes out of
four hours asking him if he knew of a good surgeon to lift his
face. This is – need I say it about this man? – a true story.
The old boy looked bad, sagging face, bloated, simply “magnoon”
(mad), a comedy actor who had turned to serious tragedy in his
last days, desperate for the last make-up lady, the final knock
on the theatre door.
In the event, Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, faithful understudy for
his father, had to stand in for him on stage as Benghazi and
Tripoli burned, threatening “chaos and civil war” if Libyans did
not come to heel. “Forget oil, forget gas,” this wealthy
nincompoop announced. “There will be civil war.”
Above the beloved son’s head on state television, a green
Mediterranean appeared to ooze from his brain. Quite an
obituary, when you come to think of it, of nearly 42 years of
Gaddafi rule.
Not exactly King Lear, who would “do such things – what they
are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the
earth”; more like another dictator in a different bunker,
summoning up non-existent armies to save him in his capital,
ultimately blaming his own people for his calamity. But forget
Hitler. Gaddafi was in a class of his own, Mickey Mouse and
Prophet, Batman and Clark Gable and Anthony Quinn playing Omar
Mukhtar in Lion of the Desert, Nero and Mussolini (the 1920s
version) and, inevitably – the greatest actor of them all –
Muammar Gaddafi. He wrote a book – appropriately titled in his
present unfortunate circumstances – called Escape to Hell and
Other Stories and demanded a one state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict which would be called “Israeltine”.
Shortly thereafter, he threw half the Palestinian residents of
Libya out of his country and told them to walk home to their
lost land. He stormed out of the Arab League because he deemed
it irrelevant – a brief moment of sanity there, one has to admit
– and arrived in Cairo for a summit, deliberately confusing a
lavatory door with that of the conference chamber until led
aside by the Caliph Mubarak who had a thin, suffering smile on
his face.
And if what we are witnessing is a true revolution in Libya,
then we shall soon be able – unless the Western embassy flunkies
get there first for a spot of serious, desperate looting – to
rifle through the Tripoli files and read the Libyan version of
Lockerbie and the 1989 UTA Flight 722 plane bombing; and of the
Berlin disco bombings, for which a host of Arab civilians and
Gaddafi’s own adopted daughter were killed in America’s 1986
revenge raids; and of his IRA arms supplies and of his
assassination of opponents at home and abroad, and of the murder
of a British policewoman, and of his invasion of Chad and the
deals with British oil magnates; and (woe betide us all at this
point) of the truth behind the grotesque deportation of the
soon-to-expire al-Megrahi, the supposed Lockerbie bomber too ill
to die, who may, even now, reveal some secrets which the Fox of
Libya – along with Gordon Brown and the Attorney General for
Scotland, for all are equal on the Gaddafi world stage – would
rather we didn’t know about.
And who knows what the Green Book Archives – and please, O
insurgents of Libya, do NOT in thy righteous anger burn these
priceless documents – will tell us about Lord Blair’s supine
visit to this hideous old man; an addled figure whose
“statesmanlike” gesture (the words, of course, come from that
old Marxist fraud Jack Straw, when the author of Escape to Hell
promised to hand over the nuclear nick-nacks which his
scientists had signally failed to turn into a bomb) allowed our
own faith-based Leader to claim that, had we not smitten the
Saddamites with our justified anger because of their own
non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Libya, too, would have
joined the Axis of Evil.
Alas, Lord Blair paid no heed to the Gaddafi “whoops” factor, a
unique ability to pose as a sane man while secretly believing
oneself – like miss-a-heart-beat Omar Suleiman in Cairo – to be
a light bulb. Only days after the Blair handshake, the Saudis
accused Gaddafi of plotting – and the details, by the way, were
horribly convincing – to murder Britain’s ally, King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia. But why be surprised when the man most feared and
now most mocked and hated by his own vengeful people wrote, in
the aforesaid Escape to Hell that Christ’s crucifixion was a
historical falsehood and that – as here I say again, a faint
ghost of truth does very occasionally adhere to Gaddafi’s
ravings – a German “Fourth Reich” was lording it over Britain
and America? Reflecting on death in this thespian work, he asks
if the Grim Reaper is male or female. The leader of the Great
Libyan Arab People’s Popular Masses, needless to say, seemed to
favour the latter.
As with all Middle East stories, a historical narrative precedes
the dramatic pageant of Gaddafi’s fall. For decades, his
opponents tried to kill him; they rose up as nationalists, as
prisoners in his torture chambers, as Islamists on the streets
of – yes! – Benghazi. And he smote them all down. Indeed, this
venerable city had already achieved its martyrdom status in 1979
when Gaddafi publicly hanged dissident students in Benghazi’s
main square. I am not even mentioning the 1993 disappearance of
Libyan human rights defender Mansour al-Kikhiya while attending
a Cairo conference after complaining about Gaddafi’s execution
of political prisoners. And it is important to remember that, 42
years ago, our own Foreign Office welcomed Gaddafi’s coup
against the effete and corrupt King Idriss because, said our
colonial mandarins, it was better to have a spick-and-span
colonel in charge of an oil state than a relic of imperialism.
Indeed, they showed almost as much enthusiasm as they did for
this decaying despot when Lord Blair arrived in Tripoli decades
later for the laying on of hands.
As a Libyan opposition group told us years ago – we didn’t care
about these folks then, of course – “Gaddafi would have us
believe he is at the vanguard of every human development that
has emerged during his lifetime”.
All true, if now reduced to sub-Shakespearean farce. My kingdom
for a facelift. At that non-aligned summit in Belgrade, Gaddafi
even flew in a planeload of camels to provide him with fresh
milk. But he was not allowed to ride his white charger. Tito saw
to that. Now there was a real dictator.
Robert Fisk, Feb 24, 2011 |
