Should Gadhafi Have Been Overthrown?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Of late, there has been a form of “buyer’s remorse” regarding the Western intervention in Libya in 2011 that helped its people overthrow its mad dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

It’s been five years since the “Brother Leader” of his “Libyan Arab People’s Socialist Jamahiriya” met his demise, murdered near his hometown of Sirte by rebel militia from Misrata on Oct. 20 of that year.

At the time few mourned. Yet today, the revisionists are hard at work.

In the United States, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been chided for convincing President Barack Obama to intervene in the civil war.

As for Britain, a report issued by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on Sept. 14 concluded that the NATO action should never have happened, because, it concluded, the result was a power vacuum that led to the current state of anarchy and Islamist fundamentalism that envelops vast stretches of that country.

The country is also now an unregulated launching point for refugees and migrants trying to make their way across the Mediterranean to Europe.

The intervention “was not informed by accurate intelligence” and the initial limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into “an opportunist policy of regime change,” it states.

As well, it concludes, remarkably, that Gadhafi’s bark was worse than his bite, despite the blood-curdling language. “The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence,” the report stated.

Really? Have people forgotten so quickly this regime’s many crimes? If so, they might benefit from reading Hisham Matar’s The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between, an account by one man who, after the country is freed, tries to locate his father, who fell afoul of the dictator’s police years earlier.

Jaballa Matar, an army officer, diplomat and poet, had become a prominent opponent of the regime, and had gone into exile in Egypt in 1979 with his family.

By virtue of his business success in Cairo, Jaballa had come to lead and fund an opposition movement with an annual budget of $15 million and “a small army in Chad” under his command.

But in 1990, he was kidnapped by Gadhafi’s agents, taken back to Tripoli, and thrown in jail. Left to rot in the notorious Abu Salim Prison, he was not to be heard from again.

The Matars were never informed whether Jaballa was among the 1,270 prisoners gunned down on June 29, 1996 in the prison, in one of the most terrible acts perpetrated by the regime.

A combination of rumour and false information fed Hisham’s hope that his father was still alive. But in 2011, when the gates of Abu Salim were broken open and dozens of men were freed, Jaballa was not among them.

So he returned to Libya in 2012 to find out what had happened to his father and other imprisoned family members.

By now a novelist and British citizen, Hisham tried to get to the heart of the mystery, to no avail. In the end, he is pretty sure that his father was killed in the 1996 massacre.

“For a quarter of a century now, hope has been seeping out of me,” he writes. “Now I can say, I am almost free of it.” Not everyone thinks ridding Libya of a tyrant was a bad idea.