The madness must end

I first heard of the ‘Mad man’ Gaddafi when I was in form 5.  Then a colonel (some says he was only a captain then), he and a group of young officers staged a coup detat, and grabbed power,  apparently with only 48 rounds of ammunition (according to Wikipidea), when the former King was away from the country.

Now that I am in my late fifties, this madman is still around.

He closed the AMerican and British bases, nationalised oil companies, and was one of the main movers of embargo of oil to the west, causing the oil price to escalate in 1973. He was also suspected to be behind certain terrorist groups.

He was called Mad man of Africa for a reason. In recent days, people of Libya has come out in full force to demonstrate and demand that he steps down , after ruling the country as his private fiefdom for 41 years. Instead of negotiating and bowing to such demands, he ordered air fighter planes , which are meant to protect the people of Libya from invasion, to bomb the demonstrators.  He also used mercenaries , as some of his own troops were reported to have resisted his order to open fire on their  own countrymen, to kill demonstrators.

Fighter pilots and navy vessles have gone to Malta to resist his orders. Many diplomats all around the world too have resigned and spoken out against the massacre. It is clear that this is just the beginning of killings, as the mad man has vowed to fight to his last bullets .

The civilised world must do something to stop this madness and massacre of the innocent. Although it is the practice for countries not to interfere in the problems of other countries, in this case, it has already gone beyond ‘internal affairs’ and has become a case of intentional genocides against ordinary people.

By using fighter planes to bomb demonstrators, it has gone beyond normal limits and practice of trying to maintain order. It is massacre and intentional killings, like what the Nazis did to the Jews, only this time, it is one Arab doing it to other Arabs, who have supported him for more than 4 decades.

A ruler has certain obligation to his people, not the least the protection of their lives and properties. The country belongs to the people, not to any single person. It is the people that make up a country. It is the citizens that are the ultimate bosses of the country.

Mao once famously said that power comes from the barrels of the guns, but what gives the legitimacy to that power is the people’s support. When that support is no longer there, insisting on using gun barrels will just buy  time, at the expense of killings tens of thousands of innocent. Ultimately such dictatorship will not be sustainable, as people around him will start to abandon ship.

It is really sad to see innocent people being killed just because they want better lives and more freedom. For the sake of Libyan people, perhaps the army must do to him what he did to the  former King in 1969, for that is the only way to save more people from being killed.