Khaddafi on new and unknown roads

"The Crazy Dog in the Middle East" has become a living thing. Now he wants to scrap all plans to produce dangerous weapons and get hooked on a globalized world.

The message came during the Christmas holidays; apparently surprising to most. But Muammar al-Khadaffi has spent the last decade getting rid of the pariah stamp and leading Libya out of isolation. The offer to wind up the weapons program and open the wide-open door for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is just the latest step in a long chain of measures to incorporate the country into the good company.

Already in 1999, Khaddafi handed over two Libyan intelligence officers believed to be behind the explosion of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in 1988. Last year, he agreed to pay compensation to the victims' families; a total of $ 2.7 billion. In the same period he agreed with the French authorities to provide compensation to the victims after a completely different accident; the bombing of a French UTA flight over Niger in 1989. It met three out of four demands of the US administration, minus the latest, which was precisely the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction.

With the agreement of 19 December in port, Libya's famed colonel believes he has given what is possible and that the United States must lift the sanctions against the country. All indications are that they will do so, after the UN sanctions were suspended following the Lockerbie extradition and completely removed last year.

Supported terrorist groups

It has been storming between Libya and the United States for years. The only surprise in the relationship between the two is that the Americans have not bombed the country long ago.

That is to say; they have. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan sent his fighter jets to the two cities of Benghazi and Tripoli after Gaddafi's henchmen – it was believed at least – had bombed the La Belle disco in Berlin. Two Americans and a Turkish woman died in the attack. But the Americans failed to kill Gaddafi in the ensuing attack. Instead, they left another victim on the battlefield; his 15-month-old adopted daughter. Gaddafi's headquarters, Bab-el-Azziziya, were transformed into a smoldering ruin – which stands there to this day as a memorial to American cruelty.

At the heart of the US-Libya hate relationship has been Khaddafi's support for small and large terrorist groups. In the wake of the Israeli-Arab war in 1973, Libya became a haven for various Palestinian terrorist groups, including Abu Nidal and his gang. In the late 70s, other groups were in the fold, such as Carlos, Black September and Baader-Meinhof. The world's most hated leaders, like Idi Amin, received grandiose welcome in Tripoli. But it was also about supporting a number of liberation groups around, such as guerrilla groups in Angola and Mozambique, the IRA, ETA and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines.

Do you believe or know.

However, the terrorist dimension was not the only one. Politically speaking, it was about Gaddafi's colossal scenarios of pan-Arab unity – a legacy from Egypt's Old Abdel Nasser – and the shift towards the Warsaw Pact after the idea of ​​Arab unity was put to death in the 70s. And of course, it did not help that the Libyan leader chose to nationalize the oil industry and that he played a significant role when the Arab countries closed the oil wells to the United States, also in '73.

In short: Libya was a beloved hate object for the United States, but also a hate object that didn't matter much after the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. For the last ten to fifteen years, Libya has only been there, as if, without posing any major threat to either or the other. At one point or another, Libya drifted into oblivion, which is probably one of the reasons Khaddafi wants change.

Political victory

There has been a lot of speculation about Gaddafi's complete reversal, and most are probably correct. It is partly about finances, and to tidy up his house before his son – as planned – takes over.

What Libya wants first and foremost is to get back the US oil companies. The licenses are still there, unused by others, pending their return.

Khaddafi, however, has no poor track record of economics. Gross domestic product per share. The population is still among the highest in Africa. Both the school system and health programs have come into place during the 34 years that Khaddafi has been in power. The position of women has been radically improved, and over half of the students at the university are women.

But like other third world countries with a lot of oil, Libya has not been able to exploit its full potential. And the economic sanctions, introduced in 1992, have hit hard and brutal. A few more years of sanctions, and Libya would have been heading for the cliff.

Had Libya not had oil, they would have had nothing to offer the international community. But the US oil companies are just as interested in coming back as Khaddafi is in receiving them. After all, the country has just as much oil as Norway and the UK combined. And the US has long had on the agenda a proliferation of oil suppliers so as not to be unilaterally dependent on Saudi Arabia.

However, oil is not the most important thing for Washington. Two other elements play an equally important role. One is that the United States can now boast its first political victory after the war against Iraq. And the second is that Libya is completely in line with the United States in terms of the fight against Osama bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists.

Despite his support for more classic guerrilla and terrorist groups, the Libyan leader has never had any sense of terror in the name of Islam. His religion is an Islam adapted to the modern world and where reforms and women's natural rights are banned. That is why Gaddafi has always been a ruthless pursuer of everything that tastes of political Islam – not least because political Islam has been a threat to his own power base. Muslim riots have therefore been brutally crushed. And the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from Libya as early as the 70s.

Following the terrorist attack on the United States a little over two years ago, information has secretly been leaked to Washington from the Libyan capital Tripoli. So maybe that's why President George W. Bush did not mention Libya as one of the countries in the "axis of evil" two years ago.

Many change

But Libya is still on the list of countries that support terrorism. And no one knows when the country will be, or if it will be, removed from it. Nor has the US said anything about when the sanctions will be lifted.

Oil and the common hatred of bin Laden despite: it is Libya that needs the United States, not the United States that needs Libya. But for Libya it is also about things other than financial stimuli, which is important enough. Is Khaddafi about to create yet another grandiose scenario, as he has done before, and which he can only complete if the Americans do not pose a permanent threat?

From the coup in 1969, which brought only 27-year-old Khaddafi to power, and up to the 70s, the vision of Arab unity was the governing of Libyan foreign policy. Throughout the 70s, it was the turning against the Soviet Union. But then, not least after the imposition of the sanctions, Khaddafi turned his gaze south. There was a frustrated distaste for the lack of power in Arab cooperation and the Arab countries' reluctance to rescue Libya.

In recent years, the "Arab" Gaddafi has given way to the "African" Gaddafi. Forgotten are previous wars against Chad and the attempts to promote the revolution in many places. Now it is peaceful harmony that applies, and Gaddafi was central, or thought he was central, in the work of getting an African union in place a few years ago.

Libya's African dimension has been about mediating peace in major nations such as Congo and Sudan, but also about stuffing up a terrorist regime like Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. And he has not stayed away from wars either, with his support for Charles Taylor in Liberia. But his big vision has been about Africa, not Arabia. In 2002, he took the step of outright expelling Libya from the Arab League – a step he immediately regretted, though.

But the "African" Gaddafi has always been an illusion. Libya is separated from the rest of Africa, by the Sahara, and Libyans have no African identity, it is said. The question, therefore, is whether Gaddafi is about to carry out a new shift; back to the Arab world that is now screaming for a charismatic leader?

The situation in the Arab world is characterized by two processes. One is Saddam's fall, which has created a vacuum, and the other is the debate on cautious reforms, which has created momentum. Does Khaddafi imagine that he can play a role in these two arenas?

If he is rational and sensible, the "chameleon of the desert" can see Libya in a role as an engine for a generational change followed by step-by-step economic reforms and perhaps some political ones as well. Only three countries have replaced their old leaders with younger ones, namely Syria, Jordan and Morocco, and none of them can play the role of spearhead for anything. With son Seif Al-Islam in place; With diplomatic and economic ties across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and with bold reforms, Libya can gain a completely different status and position.

It will not happen under Khaddafi because no one trusts him. But it may happen under the son.

The idea is not as strange as it sounds. Libya has tried reforms before, in the mid-80s, when Khaddafi gave cautious concessions to the opposition, facilitated a private sector and sought to repair relations with its neighbors. Even peace with Israel was not ruled out at that time. But it only took two years before the Lockerbie bombing caused everything to crash.

On the other hand: if Khaddafi is his old unpredictable self, he can see himself in the role of the Middle East's new anti-hero, as Saddam was in many ways.

This does not mean that any of the options will materialize, just that Gaddafi may have other thoughts in his head than the purely economic ones. For Gaddafi's tragedy is that the rest of the world just laughs at him, including the Arab – and partly the African as well.

Approach to Israel

This is not strange, considering the many strange developments that have come from Gaddafi in recent decades. One of these proposals is that Israel and Palestine should form a common state, under the name "Israetine", which can be included in the Arab League – they can have ours, as he said, because we do not want to join anymore.

Occasionally it has been difficult to distinguish madness from humor. For that he must have, too, says those who have met him.

But humor or not: Libya has obviously also taken another step lately, namely an approach to the real arch-enemy Israel. Several meetings have been held, including between Seif-Al-Islam and Israeli opposition politicians.

On the whole, there is a lot of news happening in the Middle East at the moment, like when Syria is trying to make contact with Israel, they too, through Turkey. Are there one or more quantum leaps that are about coming first to the future?

For the Middle East as a whole, it is about that most leaders will be replaced in the coming years. In Syria, Jordan and Morocco the sons have taken over. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak is trying to get a son, Gamal, in his position as well. In Libya there is talk of another son. But there are new generations anyway, with a different view of the world and the economy than their fathers.

It is in this landscape that Khaddafi operates. The chameleon adapts to new surroundings, as chameleons always do.