Gaddafi’s death - Now Libya can build a good future

ONCE NATO gave military support to those Libyans who wished to depose Col Muammar Gaddafi, the tyrant who had run that country as a plaything for 42 years, his fate was sealed.

His reign of terror would end and the only thing he might influence was how he would surrender power. He had a chance to shape the terms of his removal, possibly even survive it, but he chose a bloody, reckless and futile rearguard resistance.

That unsurprising denial of reality has cost thousands of lives. It has also cost billions in military funding, almost €365 billion for Britain alone. Not one of those Libyans would have died, the destruction wreaked on towns and cities might have been avoided, had he experienced a fleeting moment of clarity and accepted his position. By this refusal he joined a long list of overwhelmed autocrats disposed of in the most violent and final way by the people they terrorised.

Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and his family assassinated at Yekaterinburg in July, 1918; Benito Mussolini and mistress Claretta Petacci shot and hanged from a gantry in Milan in April, 1945, in Piazzale Loreto, where Italian fascists had displayed the bodies of 15 Milanese after executing them for resistance activity; Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, executed on Christmas Day, 1989; and yesterday, Muammar Gaddafi.

It is hard to believe that their bloody fates do not impinge on other tyrants, unhinged or just evil. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has killed thousands to cling to power. Robert Mugabe has been doing that in Zimbabwe for decades. Kim Jong-il has watched millions of his North Korean countrymen starve to death rather than contemplate reform. Why can they not learn yesterday’s lesson?

Gaddafi ran what may have been North Africa’s most totalitarian, arbitrary and brutal regime. He supported international terrorism, most infamously the Lockerbie bombings. Ireland has bad reason to remember him too as he armed the Provisional IRA and facilitated some of the worst atrocities of our time.

It was little consolation to Libya that the rest of the world recognised that he was barking mad, an assessment confirmed by his eccentric social theories and recidivist support for terrorism.

However, for Libyans Gaddafi’s greatest crime is the squandering of their country’s great wealth on foreign interventions and corruption. With a population of only six million and oil revenues of over €23bn last year alone Libya’s potential is huge but unemployment stands at 30% and private enterprise struggles. Libya could have been a Norway in the desert but the country’s wealth has been frittered away by a madman.

His passing is not to be mourned but should be seen as a belated opportunity for a country to remake itself in a positive, decent, civilised and non-sectarian way. Libya can become a force for good by using their resources to educate and protect their population from the kind of excesses epitomised by the mad colonel. Let us wish them well in what will be a huge task.

Let us celebrate too a victory for a justified international intervention on behalf of a terrorised and suppressed people.