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Turki: Despot's Grasp of Reality is Appalling
When Colonel Muammar Gaddafi spoke before the United Nations General Assembly on September 23 last year, for well over an hour and a half he reflected on swine flu and jet lag, on how the Security Council was a terrorist body and how the US Justice Department should re-open the file on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The startled delegates dismissed the speech as being, like the man himself, erratic and bizarre, warranting chuckles at best.
But the televised speech that the Libyan leader delivered to Libyans last Tuesday was of a different order. It elicited not chuckles but deep concern. He identified anti-government protesters, who he claimed had all “been given drugs and alcohol” before they took to the streets, as cowards, traitors, rats and cockroaches, and called on his supporters to ferret them “out of their dens” and eliminate them one by one.
During his long rule, he said, he had “brought glory to Libya”, and those who dared besmirch that legacy would pay a heavy price for their degenerate ways.
Hundreds of civilians have already done so, killed in the streets by paid thugs and mercenaries, and from the air by warplanes and helicopters.
This is appalling. A head of state who sets the stage for a violent showdown with his own people, his very own citizens, and then orders his military and security forces to gun them down indiscriminately is not just a leader guilty of horrendous massacres but, yes, of war crimes as well.
Leaders of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, toppled recently by popular street uprisings, knew all along that there was a red line they could not cross.
They would deploy security forces armed with rubber bullets, clubs and tear gas, or unleash ‘government supporters’ to terrorise and disperse protesting crowds, but the mass killing of unarmed civilians was never an option. Moreover, these leaders also knew that when it all came, irreversibly, to a critical mass, they bowed out. Under duress, to be sure, but they bowed out.
Not so, evidently, with Gaddafi, who appears to be convinced that he can hold on to power and hold back history, even if he were to do that at the ruinous cost of massacring his people and destroying his country.
Ominous signs
In his speech, he ominously proclaimed that he would “fight to the last drop of blood” in his body, while his son, Saif Al Islam (The Sword of Islam), in an earlier televised speech, had claimed that the regime would “fight to the last bullet” — both men improbably evoking the image of a brave country about to be invaded by foreign enemies ensconced on its border.
An appalling stance indeed. And futile.
There may be in the genocidal reflexes of the Libyan regime a lashing out, a Custer’s-last-stand mentality to hold on to power, come what may, but you can’t fight against history and its implacable laws. Gaddafi’s days are numbered.
No one knows why calls for revolutionary change are sweeping the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, and why now. But these calls — for political reform, for human rights, for decent living standards, for good schools and good public services, for a cut of meat to put on your family’s dining table and a warm coat over your child’s shoulders — speak to some obscure but primal need by Arabs for free space.
And when that moment finally, at last, at long last, arrived in recent weeks, it swept over them with tidal mystery, bringing with it expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement. And these young Arabs seized the moment, and seized it with magnificent dash and spontaneity of tactical resource.
Fascinating trend
It is the wise leader who knows when the jig is up, climbs on deck, lifts anchor and sails away. Why prolong the agony? For to conduct a long, grim, not to mention futile, duel with your people ‘to the last bullet’ in your pistol or the last ‘drop of blood’ in your body, in order to stay in power, is cynical folly.
Additionally, a regime that debases and demeans its own people by vilifying them as cowards and traitors, rats and cockroaches, will retreat before no mendacity to justify its claim that all would be well in Libya were it not for these degenerates demonstrating in the streets.
Like every Arab — in my case an Arab-American whose sensibility in many ways is still anchored in the old country — I have followed these revolutionary upheavals in the region with great fascination, though truth be told I made sure that I had left my reveries about a utopian Arab future at the door.
Yet, who would not have been fascinated by the spectacle. It all seemed like street theatre, staged by street poets — with poetry being, especially in our part of the world, the prime mode by which man identifies with nature, with history, and with his fellow men. And these poets’ new voice, their new vernacular, truly embodies the zeitgeist of a newly emerging Arab world.
At the rhapsodic close to Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky writes that “the poet of the new epoch will re-think in a new way the thoughts of mankind, and re-feel its feelings”.
We’ll see. The Arab revolution is still a work-in-progress — except for the dreadful news of calculated brutality being inflicted on Libyans by a leader whose hold on reality is as questionable as is his hold on power.
Fawaz Turki
GulfNews.com
– Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.