Reuters When Muammar Gaddafi ponders his future from his hideout somewhere in Libya, he will probably recall the fate of another fallen Arab autocrat, Saddam Hussein, pulled bedraggled from a hole in the ground. With that precedent in mind, Gaddafi will be adamant, say people who know him, about two things: he will not give up the fight against Libya's new rulers and, if the end comes, he will not allow himself to be captured alive. “Gaddafi will not stop fighting,” said Fathi Ben Shatwan, who served under the former Libyan leader as minister for energy and industry until five years ago. “He will not stop unless he is stopped.” Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC), almost certainly with help from Western intelligence services, has mounted a manhunt to find Gaddafi that is focusing on the Sahara desert near the borders with Niger and Algeria. The outcome of the hunt for Gaddafi also depends, at least in part, on the state of mind of the prey, and what he chooses to do with the dwindling options. For the moment, all signs suggest that, despite the odds stacked against him, he still believes he can take back power. The last time the outside world heard from him, in a speech broadcast on Sept. 20 on a Syria-based television station, he said his system of rule was based on the will of the people and it was “impossible that this system be removed.” That confidence is unsurprising in a man who ruled Libya for 42 years and crushed several coup attempts and uprisings, though none ever on the scale of this rebellion. “He will not give up and he will not lay down his weapons until the end,” said Al-Baghdadi Ali Al-Mahmoudi, who was Gaddafi's prime minister until a few weeks ago and is now in neighboring Tunisia. That view was echoed by Soad Salem, a Libyan writer. “Gaddafi will continue believing the illusion that he is still in power and can defeat the NTC forces. He will never acknowledge that he lost power,” she said. Salem has an explanation for this. “He is crazy,” she said. For all his eccentricity, Gaddafi is a pragmatist. He may believe he has identified a way back to power: a targeted insurgent campaign that would undermine the new government by hitting it at its weakest spot. Libya depends on crude exports for its survival and this in turn needs foreign oil executives and engineers to operate the oil fields. A few carefully chosen kidnappings or bomb attacks would keep the foreigners away and dent oil production. It is a strategy that does not require control of territory or major military resources, just money — which Gaddafi is thought to have in large quantities — a few weapons and some organisation. “One way for the Gaddafi loyalists to prevent that is to carry out a couple of attacks. It's about the propaganda coup that would give them in terms of preventing foreign companies from coming back in,” he said. __
