Who is Muammar Gaddafi?

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Gaddafi in 1969

LONDON — With his penchant for Bedouin tents and heavily armed female bodyguards, along with a readiness to execute his opponents, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has cut a disturbing figure as Libya’s leader for more than 40 years.
For most of that time he held a prominent position in the West’s international rogues’ gallery, while maintaining tight control at home by eliminating dissidents and refusing to anoint a successor.
One of the world’s longest-serving national leaders, Col. Gaddafi has no official government function and is known as the “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.”
Visionary or dictator, his quirky style is unique.
His love of the grand gesture is most on display on foreign visits when he sleeps in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of female bodyguards.
During a visit to Italy last August, Col. Gaddafi’s invitation to hundreds of young women to convert to Islam overshadowed the two-day trip.
U.S. diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website have shed further light on the Libyan leader’s tastes.
One cable describes his insistence on staying on the first floor when he visited New York for a 2009 meeting and his reported refusal or inability to climb more than 35 steps. He does not like to fly over water.
He is also said to rely heavily on his staff of four Ukrainian nurses, including one woman described as a “voluptuous blonde.”
Col. Gaddafi was born in 1942, the son of a Bedouin herdsman, in a tent near Sirte on the Mediterranean coast. He abandoned a geography course at university for a military career.
The young officer took power in a bloodless military coup in 1969 when he toppled King Idris, and in the 1970s he formulated his “Third Universal Theory,” a middle road between communism and capitalism.
He has overseen the rapid development of his poverty-stricken country. One of his first tasks was to build up the armed forces, but he also spent billions of dollars on improving living standards, making him popular with the low-paid.
He has poured money into giant projects such as a steel plant in Misrata and the Great Man-Made River, a scheme to pipe water from desert wells to coastal communities.
At the same time, he has clamped down on dissent, using “purification committees” of army and police officers, joined by loyal students, to keep control.
But he has also won the respect of many Libyans. He is a charismatic figure with the popular touch and has exploited the medium of television unlike other Arab leaders.
Col. Gaddafi embraced the pan-Arabism of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.
In 1977, he changed the country’s name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah.
Reuters

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