By Rotimi Fasan

IT’S all ending not with the promised bang but a whimper. After 42 years of what started as a patriotic attempt to return power to the people of Libya from the ruling monarchy of King Mohammed Idris, Muhammar Gaddafi, the one who bore the rank of a colonel but exercised powers beyond those of a Field Marshall was chased away with a $1.4 million prize placed on his head- dead or alive. For Gaddafi, it was a case of pride before a fall.

The above words appeared here in the August 31st edition of this column after Tripoli, the Libyan capital, fell to the warriors of the Transitional Council. Gaddafi had thereafter escaped to Sirte, his place of birth, from where he continued to call on the people of Libya to take up arms against the new leaders of the country.

In my final words of that August piece I had gone on to say that: “Wherever else he may be, he [Gaddafi] must ensure he is caught nowhere away from the battle ground. Otherwise, he would have failed to live up to the oaths of chivalry befitting a warlord”. When Gaddafi was caught and killed last Thursday, initial reports suggested he had died in battle.

Or rather that, although, garbed as if for battle with a golden pistol, he was not actually prepared for a fight. For, according to one report, he was caught hiding in a hole and he pleaded, like Saddam Hussein did, that his captor spares him and not shoot. Apparently, Gaddafi was caught alive and it would appear that the initial report that he died fighting might have been made to justify his killing.

Certainly, his captors couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hit back at a man who, if as his records go, wouldn’t think twice taking out his captors if their positions had been reversed. It was indeed a sad and brutal end for Gaddafi whose mangled body was stripped and dragged on the ground like a dog’s right in his native Sirte. What’s more, the jubilation that followed his sad end didn’t stop in Libya.

It was applauded by many around the world, bringing to mind what happened in parts of Nigeria when Sanni Abacha suddenly died in 1998. So ended, for Gaddafi, the tale that began on February 16. The historian has finally triumphed over and above the warrior for he who must tell the story of a war should not die at the battle front. Now, it’s others who will recount stories of the Gaddafi years and the verdict of history does look dire.

Gaddafi ruled Libya with an iron fist but in the end the people had the last laugh. Things didn’t have to end like this. Death was not inevitable had Gaddafi listened. But like the proverbial dog that would not listen to the hunter’s whistle, he was deaf to the very end.

And his death, like that of a dog, is a sad reminder that there is always a way out for a leader who has the modesty to know when he has been rejected by those he professes to lead. It all started when Zine El Abidine Ben Alli, the Tunisian dictator took the back door out of power after his people rejected him. Hosni Mubarak waited for no long reminder before realising the game was up.

He exited power most dramatically, having boasted only hours before he did that he had no intention to leave. Gaddafi felt bound to Libya by blood and had nothing but scorn, it seemed, for both Alli and Mubarak for relinquishing power. He made the world to understand that what had happened in Egypt could never happen in Libya.

Both Alli and Mubarak (though down and practically on his back) are alive to tell their own story. But like one who has offended the very earth he must lie in, Gaddafi was hunted down like a common thief and his body dragged on the floor. Now his ‘habitation’ has become desolate and his ‘place’ others have taken.

For a man who started out a defender of not just his native Libya, a champion of people power who attained prominence by sheer determination to rebuild his country; for a leader with progressive aspirations beyond Libya, the Arab world and Africa, Gaddafi deserved a better fate.

After years of taking on the major powers of the world and apparently triumphing; after decades of walking in the shadow of death without a strand of hair falling off his body, protected as he was, by the support of his people, Gaddafi would eventually turn against the very people whose support gave him protection. He would reach beyond himself and come to see his people as expendable fodder for the battle he and his sons precipitated at the slightest provocation.

Gaddafi would come to alienate himself from the people, think less and less of them as human beings. He finally got to the point when he could actually turn his weapons on them, beating them into submission- or so he thought. But it’s this seemingly feckless people that would do for Gaddafi what the world powers failed to do for many years.

What these powers had they gave to the Libyan people who had truly become disillusioned with Gaddafi. We live in a world different from the one in which a leader could kill his own people at will. We live in a world where happenings in one place have effects beyond national borders.

The Arab Spring that has swept Alli, Mubarak and Gaddafi from power and may yet shake down the despicable Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Abdullah Saleh of Bahrain- that Arab Spring is the inspiration for the anti-capitalism campaign that has taken over America and Europe, resulting in the occupation of business districts, since August.

It’s a different world and the terms for living in that world must be negotiated, no longer subject to the caprice of a few individuals or nations.

This is the lesson Gaddafi failed, was determined not, to learn. But if the world would be at peace, if nations would not continue to rise against nations, if fathers must command the respect of their children and husbands their wives, it is a lesson we must all learn. Nobody can be suppressed against their own will.