From Arab hero to zero
By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - I never got the chance to meet Muammar Gaddafi in person, although I applied for an interview in 2009 when invited to Tripoli to attend the 40th anniversary of the September coup that had catapulted him to power. Gaddafi did not commit to a time schedule, and I ended up not going. I was later told that the colonel had presented all media guests with a golden Rolex embedded with his photograph.

A friend chuckled, "It wasn't a bribe for us to write something good about the man. Rather, it was a bribe for us to say nothing bad about him! Keeping quiet is one thing, but saying good things about Gaddafi is a completely different story." I ended up with no interview, no expensive watch and by all means, nothing good to say about Gaddafi.

I had actually first seen the Libyan leader in person one year

 
earlier when he came to Damascus to attend the annual Arab summit in March 2008. After neatly setting up his tent in the heart of the capital, the Libyan leader took a pedestrian tour through the city, visiting old friends. Smiling, Gaddafi waved to locals on balconies, taking photos of him with their mobile phones.

He was obviously enjoying the scene he was creating with his outrageous purple attire. Gaddafi had dinner at the posh Orient Club behind the Four Seasons Hotel, ate Damascene sugar dumplings in the Shaalan neighborhood, then "dropped in" on Syria's veteran comedian, Duraid Lahham.

During the Arab League meeting, Gaddafi jeered at all of his colleagues, pointing his finger at them and prophetically saying, "It will be your turn, one-by-one, after Saddam Hussein!" referring to the deposed and then hung former Iraqi president.

They all laughed - the colonel always said funny things at Arab summits, and they thought that this was just another one of his comical stunts.

During his tour of the Syrian capital, Gaddafi never imagined that one day only three years later his entire embassy staff in Damascus, along with the Libyan ambassador, would defect from his regime and turn against him. He never imagined that one day angry Libyan students studying in Damascus would try and bring down his green flag and replace it with an old black, green, red one dating back to the Libyan monarchy that he toppled in September 1969.

Gaddafi always looked up to Syria - even before coming to power - given his commitment, at a fairly young age, to Arab nationalism. While at school he was an admirer of former Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli, who stepped down from office in 1958 to create union between his country and Egypt.

Quwatli was a respected nationalist in the Arab world, hailed as hero of his country's liberation from French colonial rule. Gaddafi was reportedly mesmerized by Quwatli's resignation - an Arab leader stepping down in favor of another Arab leader was, and still is - an unheard of act.

The Libyan leader actually tried to copy Quwatli, staging his own coup 11 years later, inviting Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser to take over power in Libya and merge it with Egypt. Nasser gently turned down Gaddafi's offer - perhaps having learned his lesson well from his ill-fated union with the Syrians - which fell apart only three years after its creation.

Gaddafi (middle) with Syria's president Nur al-Din al-Atasi (left) and Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1969.

Nasser remained Gaddafi's life-long role model. The Egyptian president was clearly amused by Gaddafi's enthusiasm during the late 1960s, often telling him, "Muammar; you remind me of my youth!" Gaddafi after all was only 27, whereas Nasser had reached the wise age of 51.

Nasser, Gaddafi and Syria's then-president Nur al-Din al-Atasi worked together to end violence in Jordan when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) clashed with King Hussein's army in September 1970. All three of them stood by Yasser Arafat in face of the pro-Western King of Jordan.

At an Arab summit in Cairo, Gaddafi even proposed to create a volunteer Arab army to invade Jordan, "handcuff the king, put him in a straightjacket, and take him to a mental asylum" because he was killing the Palestinians, who Gaddafi always described as the "sacred cow" of Arab nationalism.

Twenty-five years later, Gaddafi did something just as bad to the Palestinians, expelling approximately 30,000 of them from Libya - sending them into oblivion where no Arab country would take them. Gaddafi made that announcement on September 1, 1995, at a public rally celebrating his 26 years in power, calling on other Arab countries to do the same in order to "punish" Arafat for making peace with Israel.

Gaddafi created a strong friendship with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, who staged a coup and came to power in Syria 13 months after Gaddafi rose to power in Tripoli.

Actually, so interested was he in Syrian affairs and so strong was his appetite for political drama that Gaddafi flew to Damascus on the day of the coup, being November 16, 1970, to "see for himself" what was happening in Syria. He showed up at Damascus airport with nobody to pick him up, walking into the VIP lounge waiting for somebody of suitable rank to welcome him.
In 1971-1972, he became a Damascus regular with Anwar al-Sadat, where along with Assad, the three leaders created the ill-fated Union of Arab Republics. Although they trusted him, Assad and Sadat kept him out of their war plans against Israel in 1973, believing he was both indiscrete and intemperate.


Gaddafi (middle) with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (left) and Syria's Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.

In 1978, Assad and Gaddafi joined ranks, yet again, to stand up to Sadat's peace with Israel, this time co-forming the "Steadfastness Front" between Libya, Syria, South Yemen, Algeria, and the PLO. The relationship continued with Assad well into the 1980s, despite occasional strains over positions vis-a-vis the Lebanese civil war.

After Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, Libya and Syria found plenty to unite them facing US president George W Bush's policies as a result of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Gaddafi's life changed completely, according to those who knew him, when Saddam was captured in December 2003.

He reportedly taped the Saddam arrest and watched it all alone in awe at what had become of his life-long friend, deciding right there and then to avoid such a similar fate by getting rid of his arsenal and ending 33 years of animosity with the Americans.

Now, the uprising against his rule that started in February has seen the rebels take control of most of Tripoli and overrun his Bab al-Aziziya compound. Gaddafi's whereabouts are still unknown and a US$2 million bounty has been placed on his head. Deals involving a negotiated settlement or safe passage appear less likely by the minute.

Gaddafi invests in media and the arts
When carrying out his putsch in September 1969, Gaddafi chose a Syrian journalist, Yasser Abd Rabbo, to write about him. Abd Rabbo was actually the first journalist ever to interview the 27-year-old colonel after he overthrew the aged King Idriss.

After a 10-year friendship, the two men parted ways and Abd Rabbo wrote a sharp critique of the Libyan leader called, "Where have your masses become, O' Brother Muammar?".

In the 1970s, Gaddafi bankrolled the Hollywood-based Syrian director Mustapha al-Akkad, who produced a film about Libya's resistance leader Omar al-Mukhtar called Lion of the Desert, starring Anthony Quinn. The film was a thundering success and an overnight classic, prompting Gaddafi to toy with the idea of financing a new film about the Muslim Sultan Saladin, also directed by Akkad.

It never saw the light, however, because Akkad was killed by an al-Qaeda terrorist attack in Amman back in November 2005.

Gaddafi also developed a passion for the Syrian comedies of Duraid Lahham, inviting him to stage plays in Tripoli and booking the entire theater once to attend an entire show, all by himself. In the pre-satellite era, he would order Libyan TV to air one of Lahham's works, a political satire about corruption called Wadi al-Misk.

Gaddafi would call up Libyan TV to ask them to "omit" an episode he did not like, for example, or repeat a particular one that made him roll over laughing. Whether the millions of other Libyans watching TV that evening wanted to see reruns of Wadi al-Misk was completely beside the point, so long as it made "Brother Muammar" happy.

Sami Moubayed is a university professor, political analyst and Editor-in-Chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.

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