Colonel Gaddafi Part 1: Son of the Desert
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October the 20th, 2011. Just after dawn in the city of CERN on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, a mud-spattered Toyota Land Cruiser squeaches through the rubble-strewn streets, weaving between bombed-out buildings.

There is the incessant rasp of AK-47s all round, the whoosh of rockets, as bitter factional fighting reaches its crescendo. A series of popular uprisings has exploded across the Middle East and North Africa. Known as the Arab Spring, it is marked by spontaneous revolts against decades of autocratic rule, against autocratic rulers. In neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, the old regimes have already been toppled.

Libya is the latest domino to fall, and the hunt has been on in Sirte to locate a person of interest, known to be hiding in the area. The military arm of the Western powers, NATO, has been intervening. Its fighter planes patrol the Libyan airspace. They are enforcing a no-fly zone, launching ground strikes in support of the rebels of the NTC, the National Transitional Council.

Suddenly, a loyalist convoy begins a high-speed breakout. Some 75 vehicles, heavily armed, tear out of the city, hoping to punch through the rebel cordon. It's a bold move, but a conspicuous one. French Rafale jets circling above are alerted to the developments on the ground. One of them looses off a missile. In the dirt and sulphur of the fireball, debris flies, smoke swirls, mangled car wrecks lie all around.

Damaged but somehow not destroyed, the Land Cruiser in question slams to a halt and its stunned occupants stagger out. They cast around for cover, desperate to get off the road and out of sight. Just across the way is a fetid dripping culvert, a sewage pipe. The dazed passengers hustle their VIP across to it and shelter him inside. Petrified and cowering, this man is Muammar Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi. For 42 years,

He has ruled Libya with an iron fist, his brutal authority synonymous with the country that now lies around him in ruins. He's been spotted. It's too late. Bullets ping around Gaddafi as he hunkers down. As his bodyguards are overcome, the circling rebels drag the fugitive out of the pipe. Then they subject him to a protracted, sadistic assault. It's a cathartic explosion of revenge against their lifetime oppressor.

Their bloodlust finally satisfied, the rebels take turns to put a bullet in him. Gaddafi dies mere miles from where he was born. Confused but defiant, to the last he protests that he is their leader, a benevolent one. Later Gaddafi's bloody, leaking corpse is taken to the town of Misrata, up the coast. Here it is laying on a filthy mattress in a walk-in supermarket meat freezer.

Thousands will file past to witness the demise of the tyrant for themselves. Some pose for selfies with the semi-frozen body, in a mixture of ecstasy and sheer disbelief. For Gaddafi's entire adult life, even mere days ago, such a thing was unthinkable. It's a question that echoes around the world. How could a man who exercised such a tight grip on his people, and for so long, end up like this? My name is Paul McGann.

And welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants. In this episode, we're in Libya, a country on the verge of the Mediterranean, at the northern edge of Africa, and at the threshold of the Arab world. We've all heard of Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled Brother Leader, King of Kings, the Falcon of Africa. For Libyans, his name spells Tyrant.

the industrial-scale abuser of the people he claimed to love. To the West, it means terror, the champion of the Munich Olympic massacre amongst countless atrocities, the architect of the Lockerbie bombing. Gaddafi was the revolutionary officer who put Libya on the map but squandered its riches, turning it into the ultimate rogue state. He was the radical leader who took on the West, took on America, and was dubbed by Washington to be the most dangerous man in the world.

There are all kinds of memos from the CIA and others. The theme in the diplomatic correspondence between Washington and Tripoli is "Gaddafi crazy." It's Gaddafi nuts, you know. It got to the point where around 1972, the embassy received a fairly detailed psychological profile of Gaddafi, which suggests that he was insane.

He seemed insane to the outside if you were on the wrong side of his particular argument. I don't think he was insane at all. I think he was a megalomaniac and I think that he was sadistic, but not insane. Whether Gaddafi was evil, mad or both, his life and times demand our attention. Expert historians and eyewitnesses to his terror will guide us through an extraordinary story spanning five decades.

Gaddafi was in power longer than Franco and far longer than Hitler. So although he might not be seen as much of a world figure in the 20th century, his reign actually spans a longer period of time than either. Libya was so isolated from the rest of the world. It was so cut off from the rest of the world. For much of his regime, Libya was Gaddafi and Gaddafi was Libya. That's pretty much all the outside world knew.

From Noisa Podcasts, this is part one of the Gaddafi story. And this is Real Dictators. Just as Gaddafi dies in battle, so too nearly 70 years earlier, he was born in one. It's the early 1940s. World War II is underway. The Battle of the Western Desert is at its height. Across the star-flecked Saharan night comes the distant flash of muzzles and the rumble of guns.

as the tank armies of the Allies and the Axis groan back and forth across the vast open spaces. In the west of Libya, just outside the coastal city of Surt, is a Bedouin-tented encampment. It belongs to a tribe called Gaddafa. From this tribe, their most famous leader will take his name: Muammar Mohammed Abu Minya al-Gaddafi. Derrick Henry Flood is a writer, editor and photojournalist.

who has worked for the BBC, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine, among others. "A lot of what's known about Qaddafi's early years are what he told the outside world. We kind of know what Qaddafi told us." His official records list his birth date as June the 7th, but 1942, 1943, no one's sure. To the Bedouins, documenting births, marriages, and deaths has never really mattered.

Some say he could have even been born several years before that. Ronald Bruce St. John is an expert on Middle Eastern politics and an affiliate professor at Bradley University. Muammar al-Gaddafi was born in 1942 or 1943. The exact year is unclear, as is the exact day. The family was largely illiterate, and keeping records like that just wasn't something that was done at the time.

As an adult, Gaddafi used to say that he was born in Sirte, and that was his hometown. But in fact, he was born in a tent in the desert near the town, the village really, of Qasr Abu Hadi, which is around 20 to 30 kilometers south of Sirte. Muammar Gaddafi's father, Muhammad Abdul Salam bin Hamad bin Muhammad, scrapes a meager living as a goat and camel herder.

His mother, Aisha bin Niran, is rumored to be the daughter of a Jew who converted to Islam, though records never extend to that either. In the Bedouin world, all that really counts is the daily life of the tribe. Many people may not recognize that Libyans often take the name of their tribe in their name. So he is Muammar al of the Gaddafi tribe.

That's important again down the road because the Qaddafi tribe is a relatively minor tribe, a poor tribe. So in itself, being a member of the Qaddafi tribe did not really enhance his ability to move upward in the socioeconomic system at the time. And when he became a leader, he had to ally himself with more powerful tribes in order to establish a base of power because he came from that minor tribe to start with.

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It's unclear whether the infant Muammar is conscious of the tanks and the gunfire raging around him. In any case, as he grows up, Gaddafi certainly hears the stories. About war. About Libya. To truly understand Gaddafi, the man who loomed so large and for so long, you must understand the country he calls home. For the two are inseparable. But what is Libya? Set on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa,

Libya is a sprawling land. At 700,000 square miles, it is by area the 16th largest country in the world, three times the size of Texas, seven times the size of the UK. Modern Libya has established cities in the north: Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata. But a population of a mere 6 million people tells you that most of that expanse is empty. Away from the coast, much of the country lies in the Sahara Desert.

Libya's Mediterranean neighbours include Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria. To the far south lie Niger, Chad, Sudan and the lawless Badlands abutting them. Libya's people are a collective of city and country, of Arab and Berber. In the desert are nomadic Bedouin tribespeople, for whom nationalities and borders, dead straight lines drawn by imperial surveyors, count for nothing.

In the far south, the roaming Tuaregs trudge over sand year after year, generation after generation. The land has been ruled since antiquity by Phoenicians, Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Egyptians, Carthaginians, the Romans, the Spanish, the Knights of St John. It's even been sacked by the Vandals. In the 7th century, the Arabs arrived, bringing with them the new religion sweeping the region: Islam.

Strategically, Libya holds a key position on the Mediterranean. Its 1,100 miles of shoreline were once the hotbed of piracy, known as the Barbary Coast. Juma Bukhleb is a Libyan writer who spent nearly 10 years in Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison. Just imagine a country south of the Mediterranean Sea, about two hours away from Europe, southern Europe, and it's the gate to Africa.

Souvenirs of Libya's past are everywhere.

The countryside is dotted with Greek, Roman, and Turkish ruins, often peppered with bullet holes. They bear testament to the succession of overlords. Libya is a land forged less by geography than by violence. Imported violence. A land under near permanent occupation. By the time of the Ottoman Empire, the vast caliphate that spanned the Arab world, the land we know as Libya was administered by the Turks. It constituted three provinces:

In the west, Tripolitania. In the east, Cyrenaica. And in the desert south, Fezzan. But as time wore on, the Ottoman Turks began to lose their grip. In the late 19th century, the European powers, principally Britain and France, began carving up the continent in what becomes known as the Scramble for Africa.

One European power, whose colonial adventures to date have proven rather less successful, looks covetously due south across the Med: Italy. A new country itself, united only in 1861, Italy senses the weakness of the once powerful Ottomans. In September 1911, 100 years before Gaddafi's downfall, Italy moves in for the kill. The Italo-Turkish war begins.

The fighting foreshadows events in the fields of Flanders that will begin just three years later, in 1914. The new warfare of the 20th century is highly mechanized. There are machine guns, trenches, massive naval bombardments. There is even, as history will record, the first use of aircraft in combat. There are horrific stories of massacres on both sides. Ultimately, the outdated Ottoman army is no match for the industrialized, well-equipped Italians.

By the time of the 1912 ceasefire, Italy finds itself in charge of provinces now known collectively as Italian North Africa. After World War I, as a victorious power on the side of the Allies, Italy retains its overseas possessions. A decade and a half later, in 1934, the Italians merge their new holdings into a single entity, a formal colony, Italian Libya.

Libya comes from an old Berber word meaning "the land west of the Nile". Meanwhile in Rome there is a new man in charge. Benito Mussolini is one of the new breed of thuggish nationalist strongmen. He has designs on creating a new Roman Empire. Mussolini sees Libya as a place to flex his muscles, a place he wants to shape in his image. At his instruction, Libya becomes the first North African fascist state.

Alison Pargetta is a Middle East and North Africa analyst and author of ' The Rise and Fall of Gaddafi'. The period of Italian colonialism was incredibly brutal, even by the standards of the day. The fascists, they basically pushed all of the Libyans out of their own land almost. They rounded up thousands of Libyans, killed thousands of them. They basically saw the Libyans as cheap labour to come and work on their farms or projects or whatever.

That period was really ingrained deeply in people's memory and Gaddafi would have grown up with stories about the resistance against the Italians and anti-imperialism. The Italians may rule the land, but they struggle to subjugate the Libyan people once and for all. Omar Mukhtar, leader of a guerrilla insurgency, evades capture for an incredible 20 years. When he is finally apprehended, he is publicly executed, becoming Libya's first national martyr.

Aggrieved at the still grumbling resistance, Mussolini introduces a policy called the "Pacification of Libya." This is an utter misnomer. It's anything but peaceful. The Italians show no mercy. They use chemical weapons against the Libyan rebels. They commit wholesale slaughter of civilians. There are mass hangings, some 12,000 in the year 1930 alone. This is a gruesome episode of history, one largely overlooked in the West.

The Italians killed around 100,000 people in Saranaca, a full half of the region's entire population, largely comprised of Bedouins. It's something we would nowadays recognize as ethnic cleansing or genocide. Professor George Joffe is a senior fellow of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and a visiting professor at King's College London.

People forget that the Italians in the end herded Libyans into concentration camps where over a third of them died. This was in a country which already was one of the poorest in Africa and so the damage that was done to them was colossal. In 1937, Mussolini celebrates victory with the construction of a massive triumphal marble arch on the border between Tripolitania and Sarenica. There is a lavish opening ceremony

Mussolini even presents himself with a made-up award: the Sword of Islam. The Italian fascists, they like to build a huge building to show their power and strength of Rome. That's the old Rome is coming back. In June 1940, Italy enters World War II, only this time on a different side. Italy becomes part of the Axis as Mussolini throws his weight behind his new pal, Adolf Hitler. As battle rages in Europe,

It's only a matter of time before fighting kicks off over the Mediterranean in North Africa. True enough, the Italian fascist forces in Libya soon square up against their enemies next door in British-administered Egypt. The North African desert is open and flat. Such terrain is ideally suited to tank warfare. The front lines shift back and forth across the vast tracts of sand. In October 1942,

The Battle of El Alamein seals victory for the British and Commonwealth forces. The Axis troops are pushed back, right across Libya to Tunisia. Parts of the retreating convoy run right under the very same triumphal arch that Mussolini had built just a few years before. On the streets of Tripoli, many greet the Allied soldiers as liberators. But at the same time, the Commonwealth forces are yet another occupying army in Libya's long history of occupying armies.

The Libyan landmass is scarred by craters and tank tracks. This is the country, the world, into which Muammar Gaddafi is born. Youssef Sawani is professor of political science at the University of Tripoli and director of the Center for Arab Studies in Beirut. I think he belonged to a generation that saw at least parts or elements of the horrors of the Second World War.

The battles that were fought on Libyan soil, the horrors of the Italian occupation, and the genocide that the Italians attempted. I think that played a great deal in his formative years. European and American armies were coursing back and forth across Libya in an effort to control North Africa.

So he saw early on the negative side of colonialism and imperialism. And that again became a very consistent theme in his ideology and political pronouncements as an adult. Indeed, as young Muammar learns, his paternal grandfather, a man called Abdus Salam Boumenya, was killed resisting the Italian invasion back in 1911. In Gaddafi's own youthful experience,

Foreign occupation has only ever spelt trouble. This is a lesson he will be sure to remember. The desert environment of North Africa is harsh and unforgiving. But while desert life is hard, it's also spiritual, elemental. It's free from the concerns of material possessions. The tribes is a simple existence, one of raising camels, sheep, goats, of subsistence living. As a grown man, Muammar Gaddafi will never forget his Bedouin roots.

The desert will always provide respite. He will retreat there to reflect, to meditate. The Bedouin culture was important. It's not where he lived in those years, but the culture that he belonged to. The culture of Bedouins is that of free movement, doesn't recognize any restrictions. So his Bedouin background played a great deal in shaping his personality.

He became a man that rejected foreign domination of any sort and he also came to reject any dominance of the coastal cities. His favorites had always been rural and hinterland areas. He felt more at ease living there, adopting that style for quite a long time. In tribal Bedouin life, infant mortality is high.

Though he has three older sisters, young Muammar is the only surviving son. To the family, he's a valuable asset. And he's about to be accorded a particular privilege. It's something that you or I would take for granted, but something that no one in Gaddafi's family has ever done before. He is about to go to school. In Libya, education is not free. The family are forced to forego their Bedouin lifestyle and move to the nearby city of Sirte.

Here the boy's elementary education is largely religious. So early on he was schooled largely in Islam, in Islamic principles. And that accounts for his very serious commitment to Islam throughout his life. Muammar sleeps in the mosque at night and walks back home to his family at weekends. Gaddafi is picked on for being a Bedouin, but he learns how to deal with it, the school of hard knocks. According to his own version of events,

He tears through the curriculum, finishing two years early. Whatever the real case may be, young Gaddafi is deemed talented enough to advance to six years of secondary school. Difficult to say whether he was trying to overcompensate for his poor upbringing.

But he was always a very self-confident, visionary kind of person who knew what he wanted to do from an early age, and he was charismatic so that he was able to attract others to his cause. All of that kind of came together to produce a very effective leader. To send him to high school, the family must move again, this time down to Sabah, the old provincial capital in the southern region of Fezzan.

Here his father works as a caretaker. Muammar is a good student. By all accounts, he is also popular. Those that are loyal to him, even in these early years, are not forgotten. One classmate, a similarly driven pupil named Abdul Salam Jaloud, will one day end up as Gaddafi's prime minister. But it's not just books that are shaping Gaddafi's education. Living history is all around him. The Libya Gaddafi now lives and breathes is one of post-war reconstruction.

This is evident not just in the scars and privations, but in the roaring black market trade in scrap metal salvaged from the tank wreckages that strew the landscape. And as ever, Libya finds itself under foreign occupation, still. This time, administered jointly by the British and the French.

Libya had become this military vassal of the post-war West at the time. I think it was, in a cultural sense, very humiliating. Libya had become this sort of allied condominium between France and Britain, where Britain administered Tripletania and Cyrenaica, which is the Northwest and the Northeast down to the Sahara. The French military administered the Fezzan, which is the Saharan and the Sahel region of southwestern Libya.

And so I think if you listen to Qaddafi's early speeches, the Allied administration of Libya, which was from 1943 to 1951, that really shaped how he viewed not only Libya and not only North Africa, but the Arab world as a whole. What he viewed as the colonial pillaging by the French, the Italians, the British. I think for Qaddafi, these were sort of major grievances.

Young Gaddafi is no longer in the care of local Imams, whose focus is on the religious. At secondary school, his teachers are largely Egyptian. They are cosmopolitan. Suddenly the teenage Muammar Gaddafi has access to newspapers and to the radio. There's one station in particular that grabs his attention. It's called "The Voice of Arabs". It's a transnational service, broadcasting out of Cairo, tuning into their programs evening after evening.

Gaddafi becomes aware of a world beyond his immediate vicinity. He becomes aware of politics. This will prove to be a revelation. The new British and French imperial authorities are perhaps more enlightened than their Italian fascist forebears, but they are occupiers all the same. Away in America, in New York, there is a new body convening. The United Nations, its Security Council, has been charged with establishing a new global system

one based on state building and economic development. On December 24th, 1951, Libya is reformed officially as the United Kingdom of Libya. The new state is announced from the balcony of Al Manar Palace in Benghazi. The man delivering this address is Libya's new Western-friendly religious leader. He is an aging and compliant emir, a man placed on the throne by foreigners and granted autocratic rule.

He is King Idris al-Sinusi, Idris I. King Idris comes from a noble Cyrenaican line. He resisted the Italians back in the day. He has a good track record, but his elevation to the new throne has come with little or no consultation with the Libyan people. This is not spontaneous independence, but imposed independence. And besides, with its fierce provincial rivalry, Triple Itania versus Cyrenaica,

This new, united kingdom of Libya is not particularly united. So King Idris el-Sanusi, his regime was considered a regime of elites. I think from Qaddafi's very rural background, they viewed the al-Sanusi dynasty as an elite regime. They viewed them as insufficiently pro-Arab, insufficiently pro-African. Qaddafi viewed him as somebody that was given power by the creation of an independent Libya.

The sad fact is, at the time of independence, Libya can boast of only one international accomplishment. It is officially the poorest country in the world. But it's about to win the lottery. Libya's fledgling nationhood has been underwritten by the UK and the United States. These backers pump aid into the country, in return for special concessions, so-called "friendship treaties". Why are Western powers still so interested in Libya?

You might well ask. It turns out that Libya is sitting on something recently discovered: that industrialized countries are consuming in very great quantity. And it will dominate the West's relationship with the Arab world from here on in: oil. In 1959, Libya began producing oil for the first time. Well, this changed everything. In the next episode of Real Dictators,

As Libya's newfound oil wealth is siphoned off by the elites, many citizens begin to question their king's authority. Muammar Gaddafi continues his formal and political education, imbibing texts and radio broadcasts from across the Arab world. After joining the military academy, Gaddafi is sent to England, where he roams the streets of London in long flowing Bedouin robes. Soon he will return home to Libya.

and ready himself for an extraordinary and audacious seizure of power. That's next time on Real Dictators. Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The Muammar Gaddafi story was written and produced by Jeff Dawson. The show was created by Pascal Hughes. Produced by Joel Dodell. Editing and music by Oliver Baines, with strings recorded by Dory McCord. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink, with edit assembly by George Tapp.

Follow Noisa Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series. If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at wheeleddictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.