[…] People are forgetful, and I have indeed forgotten many things. Yet I remember Muammar Gaddafi's visit to Beirut in 1970, which must have taken place before September, because Gamal Abdel Nasser was still alive then. I was a university student and a shift leader at Reuters. On that day, I moved from the Union Building in Al-Sanayeh to the neighboring Faculty of Law building, and I sat and listened to his lecture. Afterwards, I and some colleagues and journalists sat down with him, and one asked him: Brother Colonel, you took a second wife, why? The Colonel said: You know brother, marriage is half of religion, and I wanted to make my religion whole. We thought he was joking so we laughed, but it turned out he was being serious. He was accidentally funny, and had it not been for the blood of the Libyans he had spilled throughout 42 bleak years, we would have laughed with him. But he was a mindless criminal, unlike Saddam Hussein who was an intelligent criminal and knew what he wanted, until his criminal tendencies overcame his intellect. 40 years after that one and only interview in Beirut, I saw him again at the UN General Assembly hall in September of last year. As I entered, he was shouting, raving and tearing papers. Some members from the various delegations then decided to leave in annoyance, and others concluded that they were in a charade and decided to sit and listen to his speech mockingly. The Arab members, however, felt embarrassed that a mentally challenged man was in effect representing an Arab people. Between the two encounters, Muammar Gaddafi managed to perpetrate every possible crime, the worst of which being the ones against his own people. However, many of his other crimes never made sense to me, and were perhaps crimes for crime's sake, like art for art's sake. For one thing, he backed the terrorists from the IRA without being in considerable conflict with Britain, backed terrorists in Africa, and was behind many terrorist attacks, from the La Belle disco bombing in Berlin, to the downing of an American passenger plane over Lockerbie. After seeing Gaddafi and following his actions at the beginning of his reign, I decided that I could not deal with him, and boycotted Libya although I had many Libyan friends abroad, while I am yet to visit Tripoli (This is what I did with Saddam Hussein, and I am still waiting for the chance to visit Baghdad for the first time. In fact, I have an invite from President Jalal Talabani, who refuses that I address him with anything more than Mam Jalal). How did Muammar Gaddafi manage to continue ruling, killing and oppressing the Libyans throughout 42 years? The West sold the Libyans for oil, and some Arab countries share the blame for dealing with and benefiting from Gaddafi. Some of the media is responsible in turn, and I anxiously wait for the revolutionary regime to release the documents of the former regime, so we can read the names of the collaborators and beneficiaries, from politicians to journalists and businessmen, who praised and extoled the Brother Colonel, and of course were paid by him. I want to admit a mistake I too had made. In the eighties, I defended the Gaddafi regime, and condemned the U.S. raid on 15/4/1986 on Tripoli, when it was said that his adopted daughter was killed in the raid, only to be revealed after his ouster that she is still alive. But my defense at any rate was of an Arab country, so I never contacted the regime, nor dealt with it. In the end, it was established that he engaged in terrorism both in Libya and beyond, and this is when I became critical of him, again without any contact, direct or otherwise, with the regime. Muammar Gaddafi's end was as he deserved. He ended up a panicked rat in a sewer, after he called the rebels rats. But they soon proved that they are heroes, and that he is the rat that has infested Libya and the whole nation with it. Today, all I have is some memories that I have not forgotten, such as that Gaddafi had offered unity with Egypt to the latter, and marched there with his men; the regime in Egypt rebuffed him, however. But I believe that unity would have benefited both Egypt and Libya. The two peoples complement one another, and so do the two countries' resources. And if the Libyans had been saved from the Brother Colonel in the seventies or the eighties, we would not have seen the recent bloody conflict there. I also remember my friend Abdul Hamid Baccouche, and I still have with me his phone numbers in the UAE, which I found hard to delete after his death. How happy he would have been, if he had lived to see Gaddafi's end. I wait for the day when I can say about Gaddafi: I am not gloating, God, but I thank you for his death. [email protected] - Ayoon Wa Azan (Gaddafi and I - 1)
