Lessons learned from Gadaffis's demise

Two days ago, the Libyan dictator did not meet his end fighting in Tripoli. Rather, the man was cornered inside a drainage culvert in his hometown of Sirte. He briefly pleaded with his captors not to shoot, but they shot him anyway.  As many as seven bullets, maybe more, were pumped into his body.  For all his bravado, fine lifestyle and flamboyant attires, Gaddafi looked pathetic in death.

 

But here is the thing that most people did not understand when I wrote my article on Libya long before the first NATO bomb fell on Libya—dictators who turn their guns on their people will not survive long in today’s socially wired world.  The new normal is a global community increasingly impatient with dictators everywhere.  Technological breakthrough has allowed ordinary citizens to become sophisticated chroniclers and purveyors of news of state brutality.  What happens in some remote corner of Tibet, Yemen, or Syria is captured on mobile phones and dispatched to Youtube in seconds for the viewing by millions worldwide.  Interestingly, the final moments of both Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi were captured on hand-held mobile phones.  

 

Furthermore, after the genocides in Rwanda, Sudan and former Yugoslavia, there is a big social movement in western nations especially in Europe and North America that is committed to stopping all potential genocides before they happen.  In the case of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi and his cohorts badly miscalculated the resolve from western leaders who were under intense pressure from their citizens to stop another Rwanda.  

 

Gaddafi mistakenly believed that the West’s insatiable appetite for oil will override all concerns about human rights.  He was wrong because the big push in the West right now is for global citizenship with social responsibility to those facing oppression.   

 

Here then are the lessons that need to be learned from the ignoble end of Muammar Gaddafi.  Foremost, leaders who cling to power too long must prepare to be challenged by a restless population looking for change.  The instinctual state response to such an audacious grassroots revolt is heavy-handed brutality.  The paradox of attempting to put down citizenship uprising by brutal force as Gaddafi did and is currently being meted out by Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and previously by Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is that it only accelerates the exit of the dictator.  Saleh and Assad are not going to survive for long in power and, by that, I am talking months not years.  

 

The second lesson from the Libyan saga is that there will always be attempt to characterize civil conflict directed toward a dictatorship as an internal problem to be sorted only by the citizens.  But the world is now sewn at the hip, and there is no such a thing as a strictly internal conflict.  When bullets started raining on Libyan demonstrators, the pain was felt all around the world as if the victims were in London, New York or Toronto.

 

The same pain is felt every time the government of Syria, Yemen or Sudan drops bombs on their innocent people.  On this, look at world opinion turning ugly toward Sudanese disgraced and indicted war criminal President Omar al-Bashir.  

 

But perhaps the most lasting legacy from the death of Gaddafi is that dictators often begin to believe their own narratives.  In his mind, and perhaps right up to the last hour, Gaddafi believed that the rebels were “rats and cockroaches” that did not merit serious consideration.

 

Were he not completely blinded by his own sense of power and omnipotence, Gaddafi might have realized that the rats and cockroaches were winning, and perhaps, that he needed to negotiate his exit from power, or even arrange exile in a neighbouring nation.  He did neither because he believed only what he wanted to believe and what his coterie of boot-lickers wanted him to hear.  Only when confronted by the spectre of imminent death did Gaddafi sought shelter—in a water drainage—and lost.  

 

The upturned face of a dead Gaddafi boils down to one thing only—dictators everywhere should be afraid, very afraid.