THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: As Colonel Gaddafi retreats deeper into paranoia, Michael Burleigh assesses the lessons to be learnt from history’s despots.This week, newly released papers from the German government revealed something rather pertinent for those considering what the embattled Col Gaddafi’s next trick would be. The papers declared that on May 27, 1980, Gaddafi handed a written demand to Günter Held, the West German ambassador in Tripoli, for the eyes of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
He insisted that Schmidt expel exiled Libyan opponents of his regime who were living in Germany. If the Chancellor refused, Gaddafi swore he would take “counter-measures” against 2,500 Germans in Libya, including the few being held in jail. The Colonel asked if West Germany wanted “to co-operate with traitors – or the Libyan people”. He even offered to stop subsidising Red Army Faction terrorists, provided, of course, that Schmidt allowed him to liquidate “a relatively small number of people” living on German soil.
This, in a nutshell, is Gaddafi’s modus operandi. He bears grudges heavily, is never shy of wreaking blood-soaked havoc or proffering deadly threats – and has next to no sense of reality outside his own paranoid bunker.
Now Libya’s fate, and the credibility of the coalition’s governments, hinges on what this devious and ruthless man is thinking inside his Tripoli military-cum-residential compound. In power for 41 years, Gaddafi is not what his son Saif’s friend, Peter Mandelson, calls “a quitter”. » | Michael Burleigh | Friday, March 25, 2011
