I had not wanted Muammar Gaddafi to die that horrible death, covered in blood and squealing like a rat caught in a trap. He died like the thousands of people who perished in his detention camps and prisons, and he screamed like they screamed: Don't shoot. He got a taste of his own medicine in the end, and he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. I had hoped that he would be arrested, tried and sentenced to life in prison by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ridding the country and the people of him once and for all. However, he chose confrontation, and in the last interview he gave to the press, he insisted that the people loved him and that he had no reason to leave Libya. However, Gaddafi brought all Libyans together in their hate for his regime. We thus slept last night then awoke to find that the Libyans were still celebrating the death of a foolish killer that robbed 42 years from the nation's life. These 42 years were all bleak, albeit I note that in the beginning, he raised the price of a barrel of oil, rejecting the prices set by the oil companies, and then he put an end to oil monopolies. Nevertheless, the people of Libya did not benefit from increased oil revenues. The Colonel chose to walk down the path of military adventures, foreign -after domestic- terror plots, and attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As a result, the Libyans reaped an embargo and international sanctions. If the rebels kept Muammar Gaddafi alive, we would have perhaps heard during his trial the secrets of his agreements with France, Britain and Italy, the countries that chose to deal with a mercurial dictator and placed oil interests above those of the Libyan people. The NATO strikes on Gaddafi's forces would not have taken place, were it not for the fact that the Western countries sought to guarantee the flow of Libyan oil to their markets, after they realized that the Colonel's ouster was inevitable. I dare say that Gaddafi is less culpable in the crimes he committed against the Libyan people than NATO countries are. Gaddafi caught fate unaware when he came to power, and had nothing but a degree from a local high school and a confused understanding of life, so much so that I said time and again that he was insane, but then stopped, because insanity legally absolves him from responsibility for his crimes. By contrast, the Western countries, in the past eight years, had dealt with Gaddafi and reinforced his position in power deliberately and in an aforethought manner, for obvious oil-related calculations. These countries even sent Libyan dissidents over to Gaddafi to be tortured and murdered. Yet we hear the American and French Presidents or the Prime Ministers of Britain and Italy, welcoming the death of Gaddafi while turning a blind eye to their roles in prolonging his tenure in power. They are all guilty like him, and the instigators of a crime are full accomplices in it along with its perpetrator. I thus hope that this fact will not be absent from the minds of the leaders of the new regime in Tripoli. For one thing, the leaders of the West were the most enthusiastic in welcoming the death of Muammar Gaddafi, because if he were to be tried before the ICJ, they would have been on trial too, in a court of world public opinion, along with him. I wish that he had a trial that revealed all secrets, from how he dealt with the West to buying the consciences of Arab politicians, intellectuals and journalists, who would flock to Tripoli to stand at the Colonel's door, to benefit from his largesse. How many Arab leaders trembled at the knees when they saw the Colonel covered in his own blood and screaming: Don't shoot. How many of them will learn their lesson and try to avoid a similar fate for themselves and their families? Perhaps no one will. They are all Muammar Gaddafi, albeit with different names and particulars. They all believe, like the Brother Colonel, that the people love them even as they protest against them and open their chests for bullets out of despair from a life of poverty, humiliation and injustice. We look to the future, and Libya's future is promising if the new regime rises to the level of the people's aspirations. Libya has the ability to repair what Gaddafi ruined in a matter of months, or a year or two at the most. Perhaps the revolutionary government will start by looking for Libya's lost funds, which are as real as the lost Egyptian funds are imaginary or extremely limited. We all knew, before the revolution, that the annual budget in Libya was about ten billion or twenty billion dollars less than the country's oil revenues, which means that the funds involved are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope to visit Libya one day, something that I prohibited myself from doing while Gaddafi was still there. I am optimistic about the future, because any regime that will succeed Gaddafi will be better than his, as nothing could possibly be worse. In the end, the people of Libya deserve to be given the opportunity to live in dignity. [email protected]
