When the people of Tunisia rebelled against Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote in this column that there are two or three more Arab presidents that I wish deposed. Today, I want to specify that at the top of my list of these presidents is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. All the years of his tenure in Libya have been terrible and bleak. They were not only seven years, but 42, or six times as many as those that plagued the ancient people mentioned in Surat Yusuf. I consider Gaddafi's years in office a period that must be dropped from Libya's history. His tenure has been a disaster of biblical proportions. However, I fear that the Libyan people may have to endure their repercussions for years and decades to come, as Gaddafi had almost afflicted the country with intellectual and even human sterility were it not for God's mercy. In recent days, we have seen that there are young people in Libya who can still think, rebel and shed blood to save their country. I remember well the military coup that overthrew the Libyan monarchy. I was in the town of Zadar on the luscious shore of the Adriatic Sea, after having bought a luxury Mercedes car in Frankfurt. It was there that I heard the news about the revolution of the ‘Fateh [First] of September' on Arab news stations, and the ensuing statements by trade unions and commissions in favor of the revolution. I reckoned that the coup had taken place in North Africa since I had not heard of the word ‘Fateh' before, and I was not certain that Libya was the country in question, until I arrived in Skopje the following day. A year later, I saw Colonel Gaddafi in Beirut, and it was the first and last time, even though I spoke to him after that on television. Gaddafi gave a lecture at the Faculty of Law. I had crossed the street from the Union Building in the neighborhood of Sanayeh, where I worked as a shift leader at the Reuters news agency, to see and hear Gaddafi. A group of journalists sat down with him after the lecture, where he was accompanied by his second wife. She was a nurse that he had met at the hospital while his first wife was giving birth, and he fell in love with her and married her. I found her to be a polite lady who had a headscarf covering her head and who did not speak. A Lebanese journalist asked the Colonel why he took a second wife, and he answered (literally): You know, brother, marriage is half of the religion, and I wanted to complete it. We all laughed thinking he was joking. However, he was not, and had instead said that in all seriousness, which means according to Ayatollah Gaddafi, that those who take four wives are following two whole religions. Do I need to go over the history of Gaddafi's rule with the readers? He has engaged in terrorism, against his people inside the country and abroad, from the French UTA plane to the bombing of the American Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, the Berlin La Belle disco bombing, and the support he provided to terrorists from Ireland to Africa and the Arab countries. He had also expelled Palestinians from Libya to get them ‘closer to home', like he claimed, and ordered the assassination attempt against the Crown prince (the current King) Abdullah bin Abdulaziz. In the history of the white man in Africa, two of his wars were lost, that of the Italians in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and that of Muammar Gaddafi's in Chad. While I have never set foot in Libya, the Colonel managed to harm me twice, the first time with the disappearance of Imam Musa al-Sadr in 1978, and the second with the disappearance of Mansour Kikhia in 1993. They both were among the finest of men, and I respected and admired them greatly. I knew Imam Musa al-Sadr when he was the head of the Higher Islamic Shiite Council, and I used to visit the council's headquarters in Hazmieh when invited. Although I was the editor in chief of the Daily Star, an English-language newspaper, we had interviewed Sayed Musa twice. He disappeared with two of his companions during a visit to Libya, and the details are well known. All I want to add is something I heard Imam Musa al-Sadr say as he received journalists in 1975, when we boycotted the courts in protest. He told us, “Saying the truth before an unjust ruler is better than a thousand hours of worship”. I still wonder whether the Imam had told the Colonel the truth and paid for it with his life. With regard to Mansour Kikhia, Libya's former Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United Nations afterwards, I had known him in the United States in the eighties when he dissented from the regime, during which time I was living in Washington. I found him to be a model of the intellectual dissident and the Arab nationalist who is loyal to his country and his nation. He was abducted from a hotel in Cairo during his participation in the annual meeting of Arab human rights organizations, and elements from the Egyptian Intelligence Service had no doubt taken part in his kidnapping and in handing him over to Libya for which they were paid. I have a letter sent to the New York Times in solidarity with Mansour Kikhia, signed by Edward Said, Clovis Maksoud, Rashid Khalidi and Samih Farson, and I invite the reader to compare these honorable names with that of Colonel Gaddafi. I hope that the youths of Libya will avenge all martyrs, and conclude with a salute to sister Bahaa al-Omari Kikhia, the martyr's widow. I had come to know her better in the months that followed the disappearance of her husband, and I hailed in her the fact that she did not renounce her sense of belonging or forsake her Arab identity, despite the Colonel, and remained true to her patriotic clarity throughout the ordeal. May God help her and help the people of Libya. [email protected]
