Thirty years ago yesterday, at
6:30am, an unknown voice was heard on Radio Benghazi. People did not know it yet, but it would become very familiar.
"People of Libya," Colonel Muammar al Gaddafi announced, "in fulfilment of your will and of your deepest wishes, your armed forces have taken over the task of ousting the corrupt regime."
Thirty years have passed since Gaddafi's coup ousted the Libyan monarchy. Those were the days in which "free officers" sought to lead Arab peoples to a better future.
In 1952, Egyptian officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser had ousted King Farouk. In 1958 their Iraqi counterparts, led by Colonel Abdel Karim Kassem, killed King Faisal II. And in 1969 it was Libya's turn.
The founding father of the Arab world's "free officers," Nasser, was by then a sick man, politically and physically. He died in 1970.
Gaddafi told a confidant of Nasser's: "Tell him [Nasser] we carried out this revolution for him."
The Libya that Gaddafi took over was a typical post-colonial state. Italian colonial rule broke down in 1943. Until 1951, the year in which the United Nations "granted" it its independence, Libya was administered by Britain and France.
There was a hereditary monarchy under King Idris, whose power base was the Senoussi order, a religious community that had developed from Sunni Islam. Idris sent envoys to London and Washington.
In London, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was not inclined to side with the autocratic Idris, while in Washington, US President Richard Nixon bore in mind the US$1.5 billion that US companies had invested in Libyan oil -- and decided that it was probably as well looked after by the officers as by the king.
The free officers hailed from the lower and middle classes and that, Gaddafi felt, was why they were better able to recognize the wishes of the people.
Gaddafi himself, whom both Arabs and Europeans tend to deride for often preferring to live in a tent rather than in a villa, was born in 1942, a member of a nomadic Berber family. He spent his childhood in the desert, his school years in Sirte and Sebha, where he set up a Nasserite group, and his youth in the army.
As a student he organized nationalist protests against the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the explosion of a French nuclear device in the Sahara, the French colonial war in Algeria, and against Syria when it pulled out of the United Arab Republic with Egypt.
A credo that Gaddafi has advocated to this day is the call for Arab unity, and he has repeatedly fought for it. In 1982, he called on the Arab states to send troops to Lebanon to help the Palestinians against the Israelis, whose troops were on the outskirts of Beirut.
Gaddafi's ideological consistency went so far that in 1996 he expelled Palestinians living in Libya, arguing that they now, after the Oslo accords, had a home: the Gaza Strip and the towns of the West Bank.
Arabs, Europeans and Americans may often deride Gaddafi as slightly mad, but that shows only that they do not want to understand him. His Green Book -- Gaddafi's alternative to capitalism and socialism -- may be criticized for its pretension, but its intention is serious enough.
In it, he rejects representative democracy for Libya as a falsification of the popular will, and suggests people's congresses to execute their will.
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