It must be galling for Muhammar al-Gaddafi that Libyans have chosen this moment in time to rise against him.
Tormentor of US presidents for four decades, the desert chameleon had only recently come in from the cold, as US diplomats put it, and become a friend, more Hosni Mubarak, as it were, than Saddam Hussein, in that he was prepared to scrap Libya’s nuclear weapons programme and stop challenging Western influence in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and the striking of lucrative oil deals.
Early this morning it looked as though Gaddafi was reverting to form, preparing to dig in and fight to save his regime, rather than flee to Venezuela as had been widely reported earlier in the day. He has put down rebellions before, but not on this scale. “I am in Tripoli not in Venezuela,” he said in a brief statement. But it has all gone wrong for him, with the Libyan UN delegation quitting over the strafing of civilians by the air force in Tripoli, and two pilots defecting to Malta rather than fire on their own people.
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Crucially, with his support dwindling, Gaddafi’s ambassador to Washington, Ali Suleiman Aujali - a man who as much as anyone in the regime can trace its transition from pariah state to a country the West can do business with – said early this morning he could not support a government killing its own people. Aujali’s intentions could be significant. He was born in the Mediterranean port of Benghazi, where the Libyan revolt began, and spent the early years of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in London as a diplomat. He has also been Libyan envoy to Kuala Lumpur, Buenos Aires and Brazil. Before becoming US envoy, he was a key figure in ten years of secret negotiations with the United States which led to the lifting of sanctions and a $2.7 billion compensation deal for relatives of the Lockerbie bombing victims. In 1986 Libya was a very different place and Aujali a very different kind of envoy. I met him in Buenos Aires, where he was Libya’s ambassador, shortly after US jets bombed Gaddafi’s residence in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by American soldiers. Aujali was with Ibrahim Abu Khzam, then vice secretary of the Libyan People’s Congress, who had been sent by Gaddafi to South America to drum up support for Libya against the US and to deny Libyan involvement in the German bombing. Pinned on a wall behind the two men was a poster showing several colour photos of the mangled and bloody bodies of victims of the US air raid on Gaddafi's compound, with captions in English, French and Spanish reading “Reagan’s peace!”, “La paix comme Reagan la Voit”, and “La paz como la vea Reagan”. I was handed a photograph of Gaddafi’s adopted two-year-old daughter Hana, who was killed in the air raid “on our brother leader’s home”. A caption under the picture read in English: “Kids should never forget my killer: Reagan and Thatcher” (the US planes had flown from England). The United States had accused Libya of setting up training camps for the IRA, the Basque ETA guerrillas and the Italian Red Brigades, and plotting the assassination of the Saudi Royal family and other Middle Eastern and African leaders. But it was also a time of covert and open interference by the United States in Central America and South America, and the envoys said that, rather than Libya being a terrorist state, the US was spending billions of dollars in Latin America “trying to impose dictatorships” while all Libya was doing was backing liberation movements throughout the world. “In Africa, we back the South African people’s struggle against the racist regime; we back the people of Namibia, Ghana, Burkina Fasso, the three million Palestinians who were expelled from their country.” I was then handed a copy of Gaddafi’s little Green Book, his answer to Mao’s red one. Fast forward to 2000, and Gaddafi is chatting with a correspondent of the National Geographic for the November issue, a good way to initiate a thaw. In 2007, Aujali is in Washington, telling the Washington Diplomat that Libya’s decision to accept responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing was a “calculated economic decision” because Western sanctions were crippling the country to the tune of $5 billion a year by depriving Libya of technology. He maintained that there was no Libyan hatred against Americans, “maybe differences, but no hate … At the end of any crisis is negotiation. People sit together, talk directly, explain their problems and move on. This is what has happened between Libya and the United States.” Aujali is an advocate of economic reforms and encourages US investment, and has hinted that talks have been held in the past between Israeli officials and Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam. In 2009 Aujali wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the fact that “a large and growing body of evidence that casts serious doubt on [Abdel Baset al-Megrahi’s] conviction and suggests that an innocent man may have been languishing in prison” had been widely under-reported by the US media. “ The Scottish flags they flew alongside Libyan flags were not an endorsement of the terrible deeds of which [the then recently released Megrahi] was accused,” he said. “They were a powerful sign of solidarity between two very different nations that nonetheless share the value of compassion”. Aujali has striven to distance Libya from its murky past and links with terrorist organisations, pointing out that Libya was the first nation to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden back in 1998. He claims Libya is one of the West’s key partners in fighting the spread of al-Qaeda in North Africa and catching extremists on their way to Iraq to attack US forces. But he has not been afraid to criticise the US, once telling the Council of Foreign Relations: “If I speak about the American people, you have great people. If we speak about the country, it’s a great country. If I speak about the American foreign policy, there are a lot of things to say. Your foreign policy, something has to be done about it. The situation in Iraq, the American invasion of Iraq, the role of America in the Middle East, I think that is what has to really be addressed with courage. You have to tell yourselves, ‘Yes we did something wrong’.” Clearly Gaddafi, in the minds of his people, has done something worse than wrong himself. Will Aujali, the man who has helped transform Libya's foreign policy, play a role in Libya’s future, or is he tainted by the bloodshed and brutal repression of four decades of “our brother leader”?We need your support. Please donate to The Caledonian Mercury
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