Qaddafi, Muammar el(1942–)

Muammar el Qaddafi has been the leader of Libya since 1969. He has often used his position to support insurgencies and terrorist groups throughout the world.

Qaddafi's exact birth date is unknown. A Bedouin, he was born in a tent in the Libyan desert near the town of Surt. He grew up in the traditional tribal, nomadic way of his people; throughout his life Qaddafi has extolled and romanticized tribal values and castigated the soullessness of modern industrial cities.

Qaddafi has always been fiercely proud and independent—traits for which the Bedouins are noted. Ambitious and intelligent, Qaddafi, from his earliest youth, abhorred all forms of foreign domination and “imperialism” in Libya. As a teenager, he came to admire Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt from 1956 to 1970, and he was inspired by the 1952 revolution and coup that brought Nasser to power. Qaddafi believed in and endorsed Nasser's pan-Arabist philosophy.

In 1961 Qaddafi enrolled in the Libyan military academy in the city of Benghazi. While there, he helped found the Free Officers Movement, a group of young military men who wanted to overthrow the Western-supported King Idris I. He graduated in 1965 and quickly rose within the military ranks. In September 1969, Qaddafi and the Free Officers participated in a bloodless coup that exiled Idris. Some historians believe Qaddafi was the guiding spirit behind the coup, while others feel that he merely took advantage of it to achieve power. Whatever the case, by 1970 Qaddafi had taken control of the Revolutionary Command Council and become the leader of Libya. (Qaddafi has bestowed on himself and later discarded dozens of honorary titles; most Libyans refer to him as “the leader.”)

Almost immediately after assuming power, Qaddafi banned alcohol and expelled the Italian community (a colonial remnant), and he forced the British, French, and Americans to withdraw from the military bases they had established on Libyan soil. Despite his claims of fealty to Islamic virtues, Qaddafi also cracked down on Sanusi sect, a politically influential system of Islamic schools and monasteries. By the mid-1970s, following the socialist philosophy discussed in his Green Book, Qaddafi had instituted an unusual system of government in Libya. In brief, each town and village formed people's councils to decide local government policy; delegates from these local councils were sent to larger regional bodies, who in turn sent delegates to the national ruling body. Laws were enforced by the Revolutionary Command Council, of which Qaddafi was the head. This system is called the Jamahiriya, or “state of the masses,” but the term has been criticized as merely being a new name for a totalitarian consolidation of power. Supporters, however, describe it as an effective method of involving the Libyan people in the political life of the state, which is important in a country with a tiny educated elite and a short history of political participation, having had no national political bodies until after World War II. [Page 494]Qaddafi's experiences shaped his extreme view of international relations. His beliefs and statements have often appeared inexplicable to outside observers; many have characterized him as eccentric, and some have gone so far as to call him mad. Yet certain predominant themes and motivations can be discerned in even his most seemingly bizarre actions. He has many times described the globe as being divided into “imperialists”—that is, the West, and particularly the United States—and “revolutionaries,” or the struggling nations of the Third World. He believes that the latter need to unite to overthrow the former, as he himself ousted the Libyan monarchy. He has supported the Palestinians in the struggle against Israel and has attempted to develop strategic alliances with other Arab states in line with the concepts of Nasser. In the early twenty-first century, he turned his attention to Africa, extolling similar unification and mutual aid plans to other North and sub-Saharan African nations in his travels around the continent. In February 2009 he was elected chairman of the African Union at a summit in Ethiopia, where he championed the pursuit of a “United States of Africa.”

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