Qaddafi's People's Temple

by Juan Cole
October 21, 2011
juancole.com

The final weeks of Muammar Qaddafi's violent and
coercive life reminded me vividly of Jim Jones and the
People's Temple Cult. It was obvious from late last
August that Qaddafi had lost. The people in his own
capital of Tripoli rose up against him in all but a few
small neighborhoods, courageously defying his murderous
elite forces.

Qaddafi had on more than one been occasion offered exile
abroad, but sneaked off to his home town of Sirte to
make a suicidal last stand. His glassy-eyed minions
determinedly fired every last tank and artillery shell
they had stockpiled right into the city that sheltered
them in order to stall the advancing government troops.
This monumentally stupid last stand turned Sirte into
Beirut circa the 1980s, as gleaming edifices
deteriorated into Swiss cheese and then ultimately
blackened rubble. Qaddafi had favored Sirte with
magnificent conference centers and wood-paneled
conference rooms even as he starved some Eastern cities
of funds, and in his death throes he took all his gifts
back away from the city of his birth, making it drink
the tainted Kool-Aid of his maniacal defiance of
reality.

Among the attackers were citizen militias from Misrata,
the city of 600,000 that Qaddafi had determinedly
besieged, subjecting its civilian population to cluster
bombs and tank and artillery shells, even bombing it
from the air before the UNSC intervened. The Security
Council strictly instructed him to cease attacking his
own population simply because they had come out to
peacefully protest his rule. Qaddafi's siege turned a
Tahrir-like popular uprising into a civil war, as
inexperienced young civilians in the surrounded city
took up arms to fight off the armored Khamis Brigades
and save their parents and younger siblings from the
awful ire of the dread enforcers of Qaddafi's malevolent
will.

His defiance of the UNSC order turned him into a
recognized war criminal, for which he was indicted by
the ICC. But of course the bomber of PanAm 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland, the butcher of Abu Salim prison,
the aggressor against neighboring Chad, and the fomenter
of wars, tyranny and strife in Sierra Leone and Liberia,
had long been a war criminal when few would mouth the
words in public.

It is hard to see how the UNSC desire that the civilian
population be protected from him could have been
implemented solely on a defensive basis. As long as he
had an offensive capability he would clearly deploy it,
piling up towers of innocents' skulls. Once he besieged
and murdered the non-combatants of Misrata and Zawiya so
mercilessly, all bets were off. He began with 2,000
tanks, which he sent against the demonstrators. When he
had almost no tanks left, he was done, reduced to
secreting himself in a sewage drain.

In contrast to Qaddafi's encirclement of Misrata for
months and use of cluster bombs in areas where children
lived, the Transitional National Council troops
advancing in Sirte regularly pulled back to allow local
residents to evacuate, attempting to convince them to
join the new Libya. Qaddafi never did a similar favor to
civilians in Misrata or Zawiya.

The last stand at Sirte was very like Jim Jones's last
stand in the jungles of Guyana. Jones was an American
religious leader who gradually went mad, demanding more
and more sacrifice and obedience from the members of his
People's Temple congregation, which then gradually
became a cult. I define a cult as a group wherein the
leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-
sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of
mainstream society. When the outside world seemed
clearly to be pursuing the People's Temple into Guyana,
with a Congressmen showing up in Jonestown to rescue a
handful of adherents who wanted to go home, Jones
reacted with fury, first sending a militia to kill the
congressman and the defectors, and then instructing his
followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Many were injected
with cyanide laced with liquids or shot. Those who would
not agree voluntarily to be "translated" to the next
world together with their messianic leader would be
subjected to the ultimate coercion.

Qaddafi's stand at Sirte underlined the cultish
character of his politics, with the Revolutionary
Committees and Khamis Brigades resembling the enforcers
in Jim Jones's encampment. The tragic episode highlights
the irrationality, fanaticism, violence and tyranny of
his acolytes.

It would have been better had Qaddafi been left alive to
stand trial. The exact circumstances of his death are
murky, but it appears that some of his loyalists may
have attempted to rescue him from government troops and
he died in the firefight or was dispatched lest he be
sprung from captivity and serve as a rallying point for
the remaining handful of cultists.

Those who expect Libya now to fragment, or to turn into
a North African Baghdad, are likely to be disappointed.
It is improbable that Qaddafi's cult will long survive
him, at least on any significant scale. Libya has no
sectarian divides of the Sunni-Shiite sort. Almost
everyone is a Sunni Muslim. It does have an ethnic
divide, as between Arabs and Berbers. But the Berbers
are bilingual in Arabic, and are in no doubt as to their
Libyan identity. The Berbers vigorously joined in the
revolution and more or less saved it, and are very
likely to be richly rewarded by the new state.

The east-west divide only became dire because Qaddafi
increasingly showed favoritism toward the west. A more
or less democratic government that spreads around the
oil largesse more equitably could easily overcome this
divide, which is contingent and not structural.

Libyan identity is not in doubt, and most Libyans are
literate and have been through state schools. Most
Libyans live in cities where tribal loyalties have
attenuated.

There will be conflicts, and factionalism is a given.
The government is a mess, with only a small bureaucracy
and limited pools of persons with management skills. But
oil states in the Gulf facing similar problems back in
the 1960s and 1970s just imported Egyptian bureaucrats
and managers, and Egypt and Tunisia have a surplus of
educated potential managers who face under-employment of
their skills at home. Oil states most often generate
enough employment not only for their own populations but
for a large expatriate work force as well. Just as the
pessimists were surprised to find that post-Qaddafi
Tripoli was relatively calm and quickly overcame initial
problems of food, water and services, so they are likely
to discover that the country as a whole muddles through.

The new government already is gaining significant
resources from oil production. In September, the TNC was
pumping 100,000 barrels a day. It is now doing 200,000
b/d, and analysts expect it to pump 500,000 b/d by
January.

The final defeat of Qaddafi and Qaddafism is a victory
for the Fourth Wave of democratization that began in
Tunisia and continued in Egypt. There is now a
contiguous bloc of 100,000,000 Arabs in North Africa who
have thrown off dictatorship and aspire to parliamentary
government (Tunisia's elections are coming up on
Sunday). Those who dismiss this movement because Muslim
religious forces will benefit are exhibiting a double
standard. Roman Catholicism benefited from Third Wave
democracy movements like those in Poland and Brazil, as
did Eastern Orthodoxy. Were democracy to break out in
Burma, Theravada Buddhism would benefit. So what?

The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been
vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre
of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region's
remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to
massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of
peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson
that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the
sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, "The
real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular
politics in the Arab world. People are not in the mood
to put up with semi-genocidal dictators."

I saw George Friedman of the Stratfor group on Erin
Burnett's CNN magazine show rather apocalyptically
predicting a Baghdad on the Mediterranean in Libya.
Those with investment capital who short Libya out of
such overblown concerns will only be missing a big
opportunity. The Transitional National Council needs our
support now, and the new, liberated Libya will remember
who befriended it in these uncertain times. The bulls
are running in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

---

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of
History at the University of Michigan. For three
decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the
West and the Muslim world in historical context. His
most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave
Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored
Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007). Cole commands Arabic, Persian and Urdu
and reads some Turkish, knows both Middle Eastern and
South Asian Islam. He lived in various parts of the
Muslim world for nearly 10 years, and continues to
travel widely there.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate