In order to understand Kadafi’s role, we need some historic references.
In the early XX century, when the Ottoman Empire was falling to pieces, Libya was invade by Italy (1912) and divided into two separate colonial administrations: Cyrenaic in the East and Tripolitania in the West. Italy remained there till the II World War. After the war, Stalinism and USA agreed on independence for the country (1951) and imposed Idris I as the king. He came from the Cyrenaic tribes and was clearly submissive to imperialist powers.
In 1969, Colonel Muamar Kadafi, original from a Bedouin tribe produced a coup d’etat, with a pan-Arab ideology. In 1977, he founded the Socialist Arabic Yamahiriyya (State of the masses), of Libya: a totalitarian regime, supported by the armed forces and inter-tribe agreements, which however joins the remaining governments in the region – especially Iraq and Syria, who repudiated the agreements between el-Sadat, USA and Israel.
This makes the Libyan regime one of the most hated by imperialism. IN 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered the two main cities in the country – Tripoli and Bengasi – to be bombed. In response, Kadafi boosted several terrorist attacks, including the 1988 one, when a bomb was planted in a Pan Am flight, which blew to pieces when overlying Lockerbie in Scotland.
By 2003, however, increasingly isolated in his policy, Kadafi reached an agreement with imperialism, which included admitting liability for the raid over Lockerbie, Scotland. And an increasing opening of the Libyan oilfields to multinationals, among which there was Shell, British Petroleum, the Italian ENI, French Total and German Wintershal. Among the American companies, we can find the Occidental Petroleum Corp and Conoco Phillips and Marathon Oil Corp.
This give-away makes a further leap when Kadafi signs agreements with the Berlusconi administration. El País (22/2/2011) informed us that, “Two years ago, Il Cavaliere and the colonel signed a Treaty of Friendship, Association and Cooperation. The bilateral business is now more than €40 000 million a year and have spread over all the crucial ranging from energy, banks or construction without omitting military and intelligence agreements…”
Also Kadafi, as the chief commission agent and intermediary of imperialist investors became offensively rich. Kadafi possesses tens of thousands of million dollars in investments in European companies such as the Fiat.
Imperialism returned to Libya hand-in-hand with Kadafi
As many other regimes of the Middle East and the Third World in general and in Latin America, such pro-imperialist swerves are notorious in such parties as Peronism in Argentina, the PRI in Mexico and MNR in Bolivia, with the support of the armed forces, the Libyan regime shifted from rubs with and resistance against imperialism to the position of its direct agent.
Kadafi’s particular feature, having remained in power for forty years and consequently so he has incorporated the trip there and back of relations with imperialism into his curriculum.
This could have happened even in the case of administrations that still have strong anti-imperialist rhetoric, or even can apply some measures that collide with some immediate interests of imperialism, such as the case of Chavez in Venezuela and Ortega in Nicaragua. In the latter two regimes, some features similar to those of Kadafi in Libya have surfaced: oil multinationals have already settled in Venezuela, in both these countries there is rampant corruption and both administration are busy boosting the surfacing of bourgeois economic groups favoured by the state. Consequently, any moment now these administrations can take the pro-imperialist swerve, just the way Kadafi did.
