Breaking newsQaddafi killed – 42-year rule over

There reports from Libya, supported by reports across the broadcast spectrum, among them CNN,  that Col. Muamar Qaddafi was killed while trying to escape his besieged hometown of Sirte.

NATO says that a convoy of several vehicles was attacked as it was trying to make its way out of the city, and that when rebel forces approached to destroyed cars, they found Col Qaddafi in one of the vehicles. There are conflicting reports about whether he was killed by NATO airstrike on the convoy, or killed by rebel forces which pulled him out of his car.

TV news broadcasts show a chaotic scene of rebel soldiers surrounding a body of a man who looks like Qaddafi lying on the ground with the front of his shirt soaked in  blood.

The French news agency quotes rebel forces to say that they had captured Qaddafi alive, although he was already in serious injured as a result of the attack on the convoy.

Al Jazeera TV aired a video taken at the scene of the attack, showing the body of Aby Bakher Yunis, the defense minister in Qaddafi’s government.

History

On 1 September Qaddafi would have been in power for forty-two years. Here is a brief history:

Qaddafi was born in 1942. In 1969, when he was 27 and a captain in the army, he led a coup which toppled King Idris, then Libya’s ruler.

Immediately after declaring himself ruler, he promoted himself to the rank of a Colonel.

It is not clear whether he was driven, initially, by a coherent philosophy or ideology – or whether he was motivated by a more general frustrated which gripped many in the Arab world following the defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by Israel in the 1967 war. Only months earlier, Muhammad Jaffer Numeiri toppled the old regime in neighboring Sudan.

In the early 1970s, after a couple of years in power, Qaddafi launched an ambitious program of turning Libya into a socialist country. In 1976 he published his famous Green Book in which he outlined his preferred form of government. The book outlines a system which may be described as a combination of Islamic and socialist elements. The government heavily subsidized housing, education, health care, and public transportation for the citizens – but prohibited gambling and the sale of alcoholic drinks. Trade unions are strikes were outlawed.

The late 1970s and 1980s saw Qaddafi publicly supporting various terrorist groups in the West – Brigate Rosse in Italy, Baader-Meinhof in Germany, and the IRA in the United Kingdom. In 1986 Libyan agents detonated a bomb in a night club in Germany frequented by American soldiers, and in 1988 Libyan agents placed a bomb on PanAm flight, bringing the plane down over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, most of them Americans. Libyan agents also placed explosives on a French airliner which exploded over the Sahara desert, killing 170.

In addition to financing and helping train terrorist organizations in the West, Qaddafi was also active in African affairs. He supported Charles Taylor in the Liberian civil war that was responsible for more than 200,000 deaths. He supported the insurgency by Fodeh Sanko in Sierra Leon — Sanko’s followers chopped off the arms and legs of more than 82,000 men, women, and children in villages loyal to the government, but left them alive so the government would go bankrupt trying to take care of them. Qaddafi was also a staunch supporter of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who brought hunger and devastation to that once relatively prosperous country.

In 1996 Qaddafi ordered to shooting of more than 1,000 prisoners – most of them political prisoners – in one of Libya’s central jails.

Toward the end of the 1990s, Qaddafi appeared to moderate his policies in an effort to end Libya’s isolation. In 1999 he turned two Libyan intelligence operatives to Scotland to stand trial for the 1988 PanAm bombing, and in 2003 he accepts responsibility for the attack, paying millions of dollars to the families of the victims.

In 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Qaddafi reveals the details of his secret nuclear weapons program, and dismantle it under UN supervision. In addition, he agrees with the United States on steps to dismantle Libya’s biological and chemical weapons program, and on the removal of large biological and chemical weapons stockpiles.

The chemical and biological weapons removal project has not yet been completed, and one of the major worries of NATO is the fate of those stockpiles – estimated to be the range of a few thousands shells and warheads.

These steps toward moderating his international image and some steps toward opening up the Libyan domestic political system notwithstanding, it all began to unravel on 17 February 2011, when, following events in Tunisia and Egypt, the anti-Gaddafi rebellion in Libya begins.