Biography - an account of the series of events making up a person's life.

Biography

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Colonel Gadaffi
birth place: Sirte, Libya

The revolutionary leader Colonel Mu’ammar Abu-Minyar al-Qadhafi was born into a peasant family in Libya in 1942. The family were Bedouins and lived a nomadic lifestyle.

There is much controversy surrounding Col. Gadaffi. His followers compare him to the prophet Mohammed, and claim that he is a messenger and thinker in the tradition of the North African holy man, or “marabout.”

However, the West has long been deeply sceptical of this viewpoint, often stating that Gadaffi poses a threat to world peace by sponsoring terrorism.

Colonel Gadaffi is the leader of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In theory this organisation is a “state of the masses,” governed by the people through a system of local councils. In practice, though, it is a military dictatorship controlled by Gadaffi.

Gadaffi has no official title, although he is effectively Head of State and has been since 1969.

His “Green Book” was “an attempt to explain the dialectic which exists between Marxism and Capitalism,” and in it Gadaffi proposes his Third Universal Theory – claiming that there is a third way, beyond communism and capitalism, through which social harmony can be achieved. His ideas are allegedly based around democracy, equality, and communion with nature.

However, Colonel Gadaffi is infamous for his support of terrorist organisations including the IRA in Ireland, and the Spanish Basque separatist movement ETA.

He has also shown support - both moral and financial - for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who has been exposed as a tyrant.

For many years he harboured the two terrorists responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, and refused to accept responsibility or pay compensation. For most of the 1990s, Libya endured economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation as a result of Gaddafi's refusal to allow the extradition of the two.

In August 2003, two years after Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi's conviction in a Scottish court - based in The Netherlands - Libya wrote to the United Nations formally accepting 'responsibility for the actions of its officials' in respect of the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay compensation of up to $2.7 billion to the families of the 270 victims. The same month, Britain and Bulgaria co-sponsored a U.N. resolution which removed the suspended sanctions.

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