His brutalities put him beyond the pale
When Qaddafi carried out the military putsch in 1969 I happened to be in Al Beida, attending an institute of Islamic study that belonged to the Islamic University there. I was among the students picked at random to welcome him in a football stadium. We listened to him explaining why change was necessary. I remember him saying, among other things, that he had been dismayed to see Gamal Abdul Nasser standing alone in the face of imperialism and Zionism.
Qaddafi came to power in a bloodless coup helped by low ranking military officers. In its first years the revolution did achieve a lot by way of benefiting ordinary people: combating illiteracy, insuring free medical care and education, better living condition to say nothing of the emancipation of women to unprecedented degree. He wanted to emulate President Nasser but had neither his patience nor imagination to influence the Arab public opinion.
He dabbled in pan-Islamic tendencies and ended up as a champion of African unity. He squandered lot of oil money on corrupt African leaders who went to Tripoli on pilgrimages during the days of the boycott and thereafter. I do not know how much they are of hep to him today.
It must be mentioned here that Qddafi did, however, support some of outstanding African liberation movements, showing a degree of consistency in refusing to bow down completely to the dominant western circles.. He thus kept fostering his image and his personality cult at home and abroad.
By the 1980s he extensively concentrated all power in his own hands and became more arrogant and repressive, undermining the very institutions that he himself had encouraged earlier such as the so-called Civic association for which Libya became famous, with the semblance of popular democracy, and many other organs of the state. Like all dictators, he failed to tolerate any constructive internal criticism.
The ongoing brutality now has put him beyond the pale. Would he opt finally after all the blood shed for a peaceful exit or something like that? No one can tell at this point. Does the Syrian regime go to the extreme in the same way? Syria is not Libya. If the party loyalists among the lower ranks of the armed forces could come to terms with the protesters the die-hards could be isolated and eventually overthrown. They are a tiny minority. That way the Ba’th party may survive in some form opting for some kind of democracy and pluralism. That way the Alawites can also spare themselves the wrath of the majority.
Dictators have enormous ego and are mostly unpredictable even though in the end if the worst comes to the worst, they give up all their pretensions to whatever the phoney ideals they uphold to save their skins and to live in peace on the illegitimate wealth they accumulated while in power. Just think of Haile Sellassie and Mengistu Haile Mariam in our case. All this is not lost on Meles Zennawi. Yet he seems defiant as ever. Hence the war cry and the Nile dam issue to divert attention. More than ever these days he counts a lot on old fashioned Abyssinian Tigray and Amhara Chauvinism. But he counts more on his military and foreign backing, especially the British establishment. All these are most certainly of use to him but can they really save him entirely? Most people are fed up with woyane gimmicks and repression. Besides, the political awareness of a genuine protest movement develops dynamically in ways the ego centred dictators cannot foresee. The Ethiopian empire is rotten to the core. No amount of Chauvinism and foreign backing will stop the internal contradictions of this empire from exploding it ultimately. No cosmetic changes. Let us hope the Arab spring will not be manipulated to be nipped in the bud by the powerful global forces which are not interested in world peace and democracy for the poor and the down trodden also in black Africa.