Life and death of a mad dog: An in-depth look at Colonel Muammar Gaddafi

Emma Cowing reports on the dashing colonel turned volatile tyrant whose brutality and egomania knew no bounds

IN MUAMMAR Gaddafi’s last brutal moments, as the blood dripped slowly from his temples and his knees buckled beneath him, he looked at his accusers despairingly. “Do you know what is right or wrong?” he pleaded.

Coming from the man who had ruled Libya with an iron fist for more than 40 years, slaughtered thousands of his own people, been held responsible for the Lockerbie bombing and squandered millions of pounds on an eccentric and lavish lifestyle while his countrymen languished in poverty, there could have been no question more ironic.

From the female bodyguards to the plastic surgery, the legendary rages to the gold-plated effigies of himself, by the time Gaddafi reached those final hours last Thursday, his extraordinary life had gone full circle. He may not have learned right from wrong but his ending, dragged from a culvert in the town of Sirte while gunbattles took place around him, was not so different from how he began.

Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi was born into abject poverty in a dusty Bedouin tent near the town of Sirte on 7 June, 1942. The Second World War was raging throughout north Africa. His parents were lowly members of the relatively poor and small Qadhadfa tribe, livestock herders who sustained their tough, primitive life moving around the vast desert to the south of Sirte. At the age of nine he left the family to live with a cousin in Sirte itself, attending a traditional Muslim primary school in an attempt to get an education and throw off his rural roots. It did not come easy. He was slapped in public by one of his teachers – an experience from which many attribute his long hatred of academics and authority in general – and was an unruly pupil, often teased and made fun of for being a Bedouin boy from the sticks.

There have long been rumours, always unsubstantiated, that Gaddafi’s mother was Jewish, and converted to Islam either as a child or, as the story sometimes goes, after an abusive first marriage. An Israeli TV channel even dredged up an alleged distant Jewish cousin earlier this year who claimed to be related to the dictator. For the Israelis it was a tantalising, almost amusing, concept: an Arab dictator who was really a Jew.

Whatever the truth about his religious identity, as a teenager, Gaddafi attended Sebha prep school in the town of Fezzan, and began down the path to becoming a radicalised Muslim. He was enraged by the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948, and the treatment of Arabs in the region. He became fascinated by Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of neighbouring Egypt, who had risen to power on a ticket of Arab unity. He gathered together a group of friends who were politically motivated and took part in the anti-Israeli protests during the Suez crisis. He was eventually expelled from school for his behaviour and finished his education with a private tutor in Misrata.

Young, fit, with dashing good looks and an eye for the ladies, he entered the Libyan military academy in Bengazhi in the early 1960s, desperate to make his mark. Rumours have floated around for years that he spent time at Sandhurst, the famous British officer’s training academy, but in fact, he spent four months on an officer’s training course in England with the Royal Signals. One journalist wrote that he “loved the country, and hated London as any good officer should”.

It is likely that by the time he came to Britain he was already planning to overthrow the Libyan monarchy. The seeds of his coup were planted by the time he was a young cadet, as he and his fellow young officers saw the rise of Arab states in the Middle East and fizzed with resentment that their country was still run by a privileged monarchy.

By the time he and his fellow junior officers staged their bloodless coup against the reigning monarchy on 1 September 1969, Gaddafi had established himself as the man of the moment - not just in Libya, but on the global stage.

WAS Gaddafi an icon of his age? Certainly, there was little sign of the eccentric madman of later years in the good looking young colonel who took control of Libya at the end of the 1960s. In common with other revolutionary leaders in Africa and South America, he claimed to be acting on behalf of the people, and described himself as an Islamic communist who would give Libya its own riches by liberating its oil.

He was fascinated by the troubles in Northern Ireland, and financed the IRA, giving them weapons and describing them as the Irish Liberation Army. He believed passionately in Arab unity, as inspired by his Egyptian role model, and thought himself a man of the people, calling himself the ‘Brother Colonel’. He wrote his Green Book, which he described as “required reading for all Libyans”, a political manifesto which rejects both capitalism and democracy and bans the use of the free press. It was described by one academic as “a text whose professed objective is to break the shackles [but] has been instead used to subjugate an entire population.” Although written early in his career Gaddafi remained proud of it all his days, and in 2007 presented an inscribed copy to his “darling black African woman” – then US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, on whom he had a crush and kept a huge photo collection of her in his private palaces.

When it came to his public image, Gaddafi was often as much about style as substance. One British journalist recalled meeting Gaddafi in the early 1970s and being kept waiting for ten days before Gaddafi finally turned up. During their encounter Gaddafi changed his clothes half a dozen times, from white robes to khakis to an Italian playboy ensemble, right down to a pair of Gucci slip on loafers, worn without socks. At one point he emerged dressed as an Arab prince, leapt on to a grey stallion, and pranced around in front of the bemused hack. The experience, wrote veteran reporter Ronald Payne, made him feel “more like a fashion writer longing to ask for the address of his Roman tailor or his Parisian milliner rather than an old Middle East hand anxious about his relations with the old Soviet Union and his views about Ulster and Nasserism”.

Gaddafi was particularly fond of uniforms, often in white, adorned with all sorts of medals and brocades designed to tell the world just how highly decorated a military man he was. In later years he was often swathed in brown robes, a nod, perhaps, to his Bedouin roots, and was also a fan of animal prints and flamboyant headgear. He once wrote to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to ask if they would be interested in holding a retrospective of his costumes. In order to drive home the point on just how influential he felt his look to be, one of his aides helpfully pointed out: “Many western rock stars and celebrities have also been won over by the Gaddafi look: most notably Michael Jackson in the 1980s copied the signature motif military style of our leader to great chart success on his own terms.”

He was an extraordinarily vain man and – at least when it came to image, determined to stay with the times. In 1995 a Brazilian plastic surgeon named Dr Liacyr Ribeiro was attending a conference on cosmetic breast surgery in Tripoli when he was approached by an official who asked him to come and meet someone. Ribeiro was led deep into a bunker where Gaddafi was waiting for him.

“He told me that he had been in power for 25 years at that time, and that he did not want the young people of his nation to see him as an old man,” Ribeiro recalled many years later. “I recommended a facelift, but he refused.”

In the end, they agreed on a less radical procedure, taking fat from the dictator’s belly and injecting it into his face. Gaddafi, displaying typical recalcitrance, insisted on a local anaesthetic for the four-hour operation so that he could remain alert throughout. Halfway through, he broke off to eat a hamburger.

The work was not entirely successful. A short-term procedure that should have been maintained every five years, Gaddafi’s face, by the beginning of the 21 century, had started to look decidedly puffy and peculiar.

“I warned Gaddafi that the effects of the operation I performed would last for about five years, that it had an expiration date after which the skin would sag and the wrinkles would reappear,” Ribeiro said in an interview earlier this year. Five years ago Ribeiro was asked to go back to do some more work, but declined, citing a family obligation. “They never called me again,” he said. Gaddafi could be charming – when he wanted to be – and took his ladies man reputation to bizarre extremes. As late as 2009, he was holding parties for 200 young Italian “hostesses” at a villa in Rome, during a visit to the country. Apparently, he informed them he wanted to see the whole of Europe converted to Islam.

He was married twice. His first wife, Fathia Khaled, was a schoolteacher. It had been an arranged marriage and the union lasted just six months and produced one son, Muhammad al-Gaddafi.

He met his second wife, Safiya, while recovering from a car accident in hospital in Tripoli. A tall and beautiful woman originally from Benghazi, they were married by 1970. Safiya appears to have taken to her life as the first lady of Libya with gusto. Having produced seven children, she lapsed into a role as a shopaholic who revelled in the riches of her position. She often travelled to European capitals such as Vienna and Paris with two dozen bodyguards in tow and a motorcade of Mercedes cars waiting at the airport ready to take her and, quite often, her daughter Aisha off to their glamorous destination.

But perhaps the most prominent women in Gaddafi’s life were his bodyguards. Beautiful women, handpicked by Gaddafi himself, and known as the Amazonian Guard. They had to give oaths of virginity, and dressed in camouflage and heels and wore lipstick and jewellery. He felt it was glamorous to turn up on foreign diplomatic missions with a coterie of stunning young women around him, whose sole purpose in life was to protect him. The foreign press, who photographed the women endlessly, did not disagree.

The women underwent extensive firearms and martial arts training, and one, rumoured to be his favourite, supposedly lost her life when she threw herself in front of the dictator during a public appearance in Tripoli, taking a bullet for him. After Gaddafi went into hiding earlier this year several women who had worked in the guard came forward to say he had raped them repeatedly, before passing them on to his sons and finally “discarding” them when he was bored.

In later life he came to rely on his long-time Ukranian nurse, 38-year-old Galyna Kolotnystska, a woman often described as a “voluptuous blonde” and whom, a WikiLeaks cable revealed last year, travelled everywhere with Gaddafi because “she alone knows his routine”.

Such eccentricity became legendary, an essential part of the Gaddafi package. But was the reality of Gaddafi’s flamboyancy that he suffered from a mental illness? In the 1980s, he was singled out by MI5 as the greatest state-sponsored terror threat of the age. He was unstable, volatile and unpredictable. Certainly, psychiatrists over the years have described him as paranoid and delusional, unable to comprehend the world from anything other than his own blinkered viewpoint and forever convinced that people were out to get him – a legacy, perhaps, from his early years as the teased and taunted country boy.

His rages were legendary and his aides were terrified of him. One beleaguered member of staff was witnessed being slapped on both cheeks by the dictator during a trip to Kenya last year after having erroneously brought him to the wrong conference centre. Some disappeared without trace. Officials were subjected to ridiculous demands. When he went abroad they were ordered to find accommodation spacious enough for Gaddafi to pitch his Bedouin tent, and were expected to be on call 24 hours a day.

In 1984, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was killed by gunfire from inside the Libyan embassy in London, leading to a suspension of diplomatic contact between Britain and Libya for over a decade. Two years later Gaddafi bombed a Berlin nightclub in 1986, killing two US servicemen, and entered the global stage as a true enemy of the West. American President Ronald Reagan ordered a retaliatory airstrike in which Gadaffi barely escaped with his life, and rebranded the Brother Colonel as “the mad dog of the Middle East”. Sane or not, he had entered the history books as one of the 20th century’s most influential dictators.

ON 21 December, 1988, just 38 minutes into its journey, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and changed Britain’s relationship with Libya forever. It was over a decade before Gaddafi allowed the alleged perpetrators to be handed over for trial and Gaddafi’s name became monstrous, a symbol of Arab terrorism and a cartoon caricature of power gone mad.

But the resolution of the case, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was widely seen as ushering in a period of warmer relations. Gaddafi, the theory went, had seen the toppling of Saddam Hussein and was terrified of a similar fate. He was pictured with various Western luminaries including, famously, Tony Blair, and Condoleeza Rice. In 2008, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was given an extensive briefing on him before a meeting.

“He often avoids making eye contact during the initial portion of meetings, and there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence,” she was told. “Alternatively, he can be an engaging and charming interlocutor… a self-styled intellectual and philosopher. He has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.”

Of all his seven children his son Saif al-Islam, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, was the one being groomed as his successor. A smooth, international playboy who hobnobbed with the glitterati in London and like his father favoured designer clothes and beautiful women, he was slowly taking the reins of a country that had been run into the ground by a dictatorial regime that favoured the privileged few and left the rest in dire poverty.

Yet even as Gaddafi approached his seventies he showed no sign of relinquishing his power. His arrogance and egomania knew no bounds. In 2008 he had an assembly of native tribal leaders bestow upon him the title of “King of Kings”. Despite overthrowing the country’s monarchy and declaring himself a communist, he had always lusted after regal power. He apparently repeatedly said he wanted a “throne of his own”. He even compared himself to the Queen during one of his last public speeches.

Instead, his vast wealth, while not quite giving him the regal status he craved, allowed him to build palaces to himself and his family across Libya. His compound in Tripoli included a zoo, a fairground and an enormous swimming pool, a Libyan mirror image of Michael Jackson’s Neverland. One Libyan rebel who wandered through the gardens after Gaddafi fled the capital city in August told a reporter in disbelief: “Libyan children have no childhood, their lives are destroyed by Gaddafi. But his children, his family, have everything.”

ALL OF which brought Gaddafi cowed and quivering, a man on the run yet refusing to go quietly, to the last day of his life. There are conflicting reports on how he was killed – whether, as some claim, he was caught in crossfire, or whether he was summarily executed by a baying mob. What we do know is that at around 8.30am last Thursday morning, French Rafaele jets hit a car in a convoy of vehicles making their way out of Sirte, on the road to Misrata. A few minutes later a second airstrike destroyed ten more vehicles.

Gaddafi is thought to have been wounded in the leg by the strike. One of his bodyguards spotted two drainage tunnels and suggested they could make for a makeshift bunker. By 11am word had spread of his whereabouts after a Malian mercenary stood in front of the tunnel and cried: “My master is here, my master is here.” The dictator was dragged out of the tunnel screaming, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot”. He was wearing gold-coloured trousers. His captors called him “a dog”.

Bleeding from the shoulder, he was dragged up a ditch and on to the main road, where he was propped against a truck. Dazed and confused, he shouted, “What do you want?” In answer, a pistol was held to his head. The footage cut off before showing what happened next.

He was later shown, still alive, stripped of his shirt and bleeding heavily. His eyes are vacant and unfocused as he lies on the ground. At some point he was shot in the abdomen, after which he was placed in an ambulance. The vehicle was caught in crossfire, and it is said that this caused his head wounds. We may never know the truth, as the National Transitional Council have stated there will not be a post-mortem but what we do know is that by 4pm his dead body had arrived in Misrata, to cheering crowds. Libya was free, and the world had irredeemably changed.

Today, Gaddafi’s dead body still lies in a shopping centre freezer in Misrata, an object of fascination for a cautious yet jubilant populus. It is sometimes said that a dictator’s death is indicative of the regime they have led. Gaddafi’s barbaric death was brutal and bloody, chaotic and undignified. For one so misguided as to believe himself to be a “king of kings”, it can, perhaps, be described as a fitting end.