I love Nadine El Roubi :) Everyone follow her blog, cause she’s awesome.
The death of Muammar Gaddafi has removed a big problem for this country’s transition rulers. It has also imbued the new Libya with original sin it may regret.
The leaders of the National Transitional Council (NTC) during the months of the fight against the colonel often spoke about building a country based on rights, not revenge.
But the iconic image of their moment of national liberation is of Col Gaddafi, a man who spilled oceans of other peoples’ blood, not accounting for his crimes in a court, but being set upon by fighters who killed him.
One man here in Tripoli told me he thought Col Gaddafi should have been spared to make him face justice. But everyone else I have spoken to is just pleased he is dead, and they do not care how it happened.
But if the new Libya is going to be a country of rights, then it has some questions to answer.
The most pressing are about what appears to have been the summary executions of Col Gaddafi and his son Mutassim.
But black Africans have also been rounded up as alleged mercenaries, on little or no evidence, without being given access to a lawyer.
I saw several dozen of them today being driven through Tripoli, hands bound, blindfolded with cloths of Gaddafi green, in the back of trucks with welded-on anti-aircraft cannon and heavy machine guns.
Col Gaddafi was a cruel dictator who ordered appalling acts of murder. He built a system that ran on fear and brutality.
He deserved to face punishment. The one he received was summary justice - of the kind that his own henchmen had meted out for years.
States that have been through deep and violent change tend to do best later on if there is a process of national reconciliation. Old enemies need to learn how to work together.
Maybe dispatching Col Gaddafi and his son will make that easier - or it might make the NTC’s promises of fairness and forgiveness harder to believe.
Right or wrong, killing him quickly solved a problem for the National Transitional Council. The arguments about what to do with the body and where to bury it have been difficult enough.
If he had lived, there would have been months of rows about his crimes, his trial and his punishment.
And there would have been the nagging fear that Col Gaddafi’s existence, and his first public and no doubt defiant appearance in court, would be a focus for the old regime’s loyalists, who are now quietly keeping their heads down.
Nothing compares, no worries or cares; Regrets and mistakes, they’re memories made. Who would’ve known how bittersweet this would taste. - Adele
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