The humiliating death of Muammer Gaddafi, gunned down and apparently dragged through the streets of his home town, Sirte, would seem at first sight to be a final punctuation point in the tumultuous change of power in Libya. Another dictator, like Saddam Hussein before him, found cowering in a bolt hole. Finally, Libyans can breathe easier knowing this monstrous and unpredictable figure is gone from their lives.
But his shadow will only be truly lifted if the new Libyan leadership draws the right lessons, not the wrong ones, from his demise. The right lesson is that it is a cathartic moment that clears the ground for Libyan politics to move forward. The wrong one would be to assume that with the death of Gaddafi all those supporters, whose reasons for so tenaciously defending Sirte are now clearer, will fall in line behind the new government in Tripoli. The first statement from interim prime minister Mahmoud Jibril hit all the right notes on reconciliation. But his words have to compete with the powerful image of Col Gaddafi’s body being dragged through the streets. This is much uglier.
The removal of a leader who capriciously threatened his country and its people as if they were his personal property lifts the fear and loathing that had deep frozen any kind of normal politics in Libya for more than 40 years. This now allows a political space free from the fear of disappearance and life-imprisonment that had been the lot of any dissenter for so long. And, given Col Gaddafi’s lingering hold on the minds of his countrymen, nothing less than his very public end was likely to release them from his last padlock on their freedom.