Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for forty-two years without ever holding a formal office after 1979. Born in a tent near Sirte around 1942 to a Bedouin family, he was the first of them to read, was politicised by Nasser's broadcasts and by the Suez crisis, and went into the army because it was the route to power. He led the coup of 1 September 1969 that deposed King Idris while the king was abroad, at twenty-seven, and closed the British and American bases within a year. His Green Book of the 1970s set out a third universal theory between capitalism and communism: direct popular congresses instead of parties and parliaments, workers as partners rather than employees, and a state that was declared abolished in favour of a jamahiriya, a term he coined meaning something like state of the masses. In practice it was rule by revolutionary committees, and dissidents were hanged in public squares and hunted abroad. Oil money funded free education and health care, one of the highest literacy rates in Africa, and the Great Man-Made River project; it also funded the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Rwandan army, various African coups, and a war in Chad he lost. The bombing of a Berlin discotheque brought American air strikes in 1986, and Lockerbie brought sanctions until Libya paid compensation and gave up its nuclear programme in 2003. He was overthrown in a rising and a NATO air campaign in 2011, and killed by fighters near Sirte in October. Libya has not had a functioning single government since. He also proposed at various times to merge Libya with Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Chad, Sudan and Morocco, none of which lasted, and spent his later years promoting a United States of Africa. He arrived at foreign summits with a tent and a female bodyguard, which is the part most people remember.
- Lived: 1942 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Libyan
- Roles: head_of_state, revolutionary, military_leader, ideologue
