[THS] Robert Fisk: Gaddafi raved and cursed, but...

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Robert Fisk: Gaddafi raved and cursed, but he faces forces he cannot control

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-gaddafi-raved-
and-cursed-but-he-faces-forces-he-cannot-control-2222904.html


So he will go down fighting. That's what Muammar Gaddafi told us last night, and
most Libyans believe him. This will be no smooth flight to Riyadh or a gentle trip to a
Red Sea holiday resort. Raddled, cowled in desert gowns, he raved on.

He had not even begun to use bullets against his enemies – a palpable lie – and "any
use of force against the authority of the state shall be punished by death", in itself a
palpable truth which Libyans knew all too well without the future tense of Gaddafi's
threat. On and on and on he ranted. Like everything Gaddafi, it was very impressive
– but went on far too long.

He cursed the people of Benghazi who had already liberated their city – "just wait
until the police return to restore order", this dessicated man promised without a
smile. His enemies were Islamists, the CIA, the British and the "dogs" of the
international press. Yes, we are always dogs, aren't we? I was long ago depicted in a
Bahraini newspaper cartoon (Crown Prince, please note) as a rabid dog, worthy of
liquidation. But like Gaddafi's speeches, that's par for the course. And then came my
favourite bit of the whole Gaddafi exegesis last night: HE HADN'T EVEN BEGUN TO
USE VIOLENCE YET!

So let's erase all the YouTubes and Facebooks and the shooting and blood and
gouged corpses from Benghazi, and pretend it didn't happen. Let's pretend that the
refusal to give visas to foreign correspondents has actually prevented us from hearing
the truth. Gaddafi's claim that the protesters in Libya – the millions of demonstrators
– "want to turn Libya into an Islamic state" is exactly the same nonsense that
Mubarak peddled before the end in Egypt, the very same nonsense that Obama and
La Clinton have suggested. Indeed, there were times last night when Gaddafi – in his
vengefulness, his contempt for Arabs, for his own people – began to sound very like
the speeches of Benjamin Netanyahu. Was there some contact between these two
rogues, one wondered, that we didn't know about?

In many ways, Gaddafi's ravings were those of an old man, his fantasies about his
enemies – "rats who have taken tablets" who included "agents of Bin Laden" – were
as disorganised as the scribbled notes on the piece of paper he held in his right
hand, let alone the green-covered volume of laws from which he kept quoting. It was
not about love. It was about the threat of execution. "Damn those" trying to stir
unrest against Libya. It was a plot, an international conspiracy. "Your children are
dying – but for what?" He would fight "until the last drop of my blood with the Libyan
people is behind me". America was the enemy (much talk of Fallujah), Israel was the
enemy, Sadat was an enemy, colonial fascist Italy was the enemy. Among the heroes
and friends was Gaddafi's grandfather, "who fell a martyr in 1911" against the Italian
enemy.

Dressed in brown burnous and cap and gown, Gaddafi's appearance last night raised
some odd questions. Having kept the international media – the "dogs" in question –
out of Libya, he allowed the world to observe a crazed nation: YouTube and blogs of
terrible violence versus state television pictures of an entirely unhinged dictator
justifying what he had either not seen on YouTube or hadn't been shown. And
there's an interesting question here: dictators and princes who let the international
press into their countries – Messrs Ben Ali/Mubarak/Saleh/Prince Salman – are
permitting it to film their own humiliation. Their reward is painful indeed. But sultans
like Gaddafi who keep the journos out fare little different.

The hand-held immediacy of the mobile phone, the intimacy of sound and the crack
of gunfire are in some ways more compelling than the edited, digital film of the
networks. Exactly the same happened in Gaza when the Israelis decided, Gaddafi-
like, to keep foreign journalists out of their 2009 bloodletting: the bloggers and
YouTubers (and Al Jazeera) simply gave us a reality we didn't normally experience
from the "professional" satellite boys. Perhaps, in the end, it takes a dictator with his
own monopoly on cameras to tell the truth. "I will die as a martyr," Gaddafi said last
night. Almost certainly true.