The Grisly End

The last minutes in Gaddafi’s life have gained a grisly status, A spectacle of pain and humiliation, the end of the man who once styled himself the “king of the kings of Africa” has been told in snatches of mobile phone footage and blurry stills and contradictory statements.

Why Gaddafi? Why Libya? Why such Death?

A Glance in Tranquility wins...!

Muammar Gaddafi

He was a Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but later ruled according to his own Third International Theory.

For Libya

From 1974 onward Gaddafi espoused a form of Islamic socialism as expressed in The Green Book. His government financed a broad spectrum of revolutionary or terrorist groups worldwide, including the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam in the United States and the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. Libya’s purported involvement in the destruction of a civilian airliner in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, led to United Nations (UN) and U.S. sanctions that further isolated Gaddafi from the international community. 

The African Union

In February 2009 Gaddafi was elected chairman of the African Union (AU), and later that year he gave his first speech before the UN General Assembly. The lengthy critical speech, in which he threw a copy of the UN charter, generated a significant measure of controversy within the international community.

New Interest

Gaddafi fitted the bill as an authoritarian ruler who had endured for more years than the vast majority of his citizens could remember. But he was not so widely perceived as a western lackey as other Arab leaders, accused of putting outside interests before the interests of their own people. As the uprising spread, and the seriousness of the threat to his rule became apparent, Gaddafi showed he had lost none of the ruthlessness directed against dissidents and exiles in the 1970s and 1980s.

Final Day of Dictatorship

Gaddafi met his ignominious and grisly end, when NTC forces found him hiding in a tunnel following a NATO air strike on his convoy as he tried to make a break from his last stronghold, the city of Sirte, where it had all begun. The exact circumstances of his death remain in dispute, either "killed in crossfire", summarily executed, or lynched and dragged through the streets by jubilant, battle hardened fighters. Though it meant the Libyan people and other victims around the world were robbed of proper justice, the news sparked wild celebrations across his former domain that nearly 42 years of rule and misrule had truly come to a close.

What is your view on his death?