Muammar Gaddafi, who seized power in Libya in a 1969 coup and whose Tripoli stronghold has been violently seized , was a leader with many guises. He was a Bedouin tribesman, a colonel and a self-styled revolutionary. He was an Arab and an African, a nationalist and a socialist, a Muslim, a poet and a would-be "philosopher king".
For the Libyan "masses", he was, in his own words, their Brother Leader, Supreme Guide, mentor, patriarch and uncle. But for his domestic opponents and for much of the western world, Gaddafi was something else entirely: a hubristic oil sheikh, a buffoon, a braggart, and a heartless killer.
With his overthrow as Libya's paramount chief, the international stage has lost one of its most colourful and disturbing personalities. Gaddafi had the ability to amaze and appal, to shock and amuse, simultaneously and in equal measure. This Janus-like quality, of looking both ways while maintaining contradictory views, made him both a foolish and a formidable adversary.
The Bedouin tent he insisted on pitching when visiting foreign capitals, his infamous entourage of heavily armed female bodyguards, grandiose projects (such as his $20bn Great Man-Made River through the Libyan desert) and his absurdist, finger-wagging homilies to world leaders often rendered him a figure of fun and derision.
But the darker side of his character and leadership also made him, at various times during his 42-year reign, an object of fear and hatred – a vicious, duplicitous and pitiless enemy who would seemingly stop at nothing to maintain his dominance at home and advance his eccentric, bizarrely warped view of the world.
Writing in the Times in 2009, author Amir Taheri recounted how he first met Gaddafi in 1970 during the funeral of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abel Nasser – and how, typically, all was not how it seemed. "In a room in the Qubbah palace in Cairo I found Gaddafi squatting on the floor with a number of other Libyan officers, beating their chests and weeping uncontrollably while the television cameras rolled. Once the cameras stopped, however, it became clear that there had been no tears. The colonel and his entourage rose to shake our hands, all smiles." » | Simon Tisdall | Tuesday, August 23, 2011
