10 facts about Muammar Gaddafi

 

Libya's deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi was injured and captured by fighters of the Libyan National Transitional Council. Here are some facts about Gaddafi:

 

1. Muammar Gaddafi was born to a Bedouin herdsman in 1942 in a tent near Sirte on the Mediterranean coast. He abandoned university geography studies for a military career that included a short spell at a British army signals school.

2. 

   Muammar Gaddafi is the longest-serving leader in both Africa and the Arab world, having ruled Libya since he toppled King Idris I in a bloodless coup at the age of 27.

3. Muammar Gaddafi embraced the pan-Arabism and tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt by him to join Libya and Tunisia also ended in acrimony.

4. In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses) and allowed people to air their views at people's congresses

5. Gaddafi was shunned internationally because the West accused him of terrorism, abandoned his programme of prohibited weapons in 2003 to return Libya into international mainstream politics

6. UN sanctions, imposed in 1992 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects for trial for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing over Scotland, crippled oil-rich Libya's economy, dampened Gaddafi's revolutionary spirit and took the sting out of his anti-capitalist, anti-Western rhetoric.

7. In September 2004, US President George W. Bush formally ended a trade embargo as a result of Gaddafi's scrapping of the arms programme and taking responsibility for Lockerbie.

8. In August 2006, Gaddafi made a series of speeches scolding his nation for over-reliance on petroleum, foreigners and imports and telling them to start making things people need.

9. Gaddafi said in an interview that he feared the change of power in Tunisia was being exploited by foreign intervention

10. He also denied that he had invited deposed Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to Libya. In a speech soon after Ben Ali's departure, Gaddafi said he was "pained" by the violent events in Tunisia, that people there had been too hasty in pushing Ben Ali out and that blood might have been shed unnecessarily.