Col Qazafi as known in Pakistan has been celebrated as a great muslim leader. In 1974 a Stadium in was named on him the Qazafi Stadium later a huge colony in Lahore than in Faisalabad and in Karachi was also named on Col Qazafi. The Qazafi Town of Karachis a huge area what in Faisalabad it is an affluent residential area.
While Libya is burning and the news on world channels are being telecasted Pakistans greedy and psudo media hardly gives any news of Libya. Pakistani channels are busy beating about the bush and trying their best to insult their own government. No channel has given any historical documentry on Qadafi not has any channel has mentioned all those things named on him in Pakistan.
The political government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s PPP who invited Qadaf to Pakistan for Islamic summit conference, is also very quite about Libiya and Col Qadafi.
Here is a complete Biography of Coloel Gadafi for our readers.
The full name of Col: Gadafi is Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (G of Gadafi is actually Q of Arabic) He was born on 7th June 1942 has been the leader of Libya since 1969 when he overthrown the then monorche of Libya.
From 1972, when Gaddafi relinquished the title of prime minister, he has been accorded the honorifics “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” or “Leader and Guide of the Revolution” in government statements and the official press. With the death of Omar Bongo of Gabon on 8 June 2009, he became the longest serving of all current non-royal national leaders and he is one of the longest serving rulers in history. He is also the longest-serving ruler of Libya since it became Libya in 1551.
Early life
Muammar Gaddafi was born in the desert, so no specific place of birth can be listed; however BBC Wikipedia and other sources say it was near the town of Sirte.
As a teenager, Gaddafi was an admirer of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab socialist and nationalist ideology. Gaddafi took part in anti-Israel demonstrations during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
He began his first plan to overthrow the Libyan monarchy while in military college. He received further military training in Hellenic Military Academy in Athens, Greece and the United Kingdom.
Gaddafi followed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ideas of pan-Arabism and became a fervent advocate of the unity of all Arab states into one Arab nation. He also supported pan-Islamism, the notion of a loose union of all Islamic countries and peoples. After Nasser’s death on 28 September 1970, Gaddafi attempted to take up the mantle of ideological leader of Arab nationalism.
He proclaimed the “Federation of Arab Republics” (Libya, Egypt, and Syria) in 1972, hoping to create a pan-Arab state, but the three countries disagreed on the specific terms of the merger. In 1974, he signed an agreement with Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba on a merger between the two countries, but this also failed to work in practice and ultimately differences between the two countries would deteriorate into strong animosity.
Libya was also involved in a sometimes violent territorial dispute with neighbouring Chad over the Aouzou Strip, which Libya occupied in 1973. This dispute eventually led to the Libyan invasion of the country and to a conflict that was ended by a ceasefire reached in 1987. The dispute was in the end settled peacefully in June 1994 when Libya withdrew troops from Chad due to a judgement of the International Court of Justice issued on 13 February 1994.
Gaddafi also became a strong supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which ultimately harmed Libya’s relations with Egypt, when in 1979 Egypt pursued a peace agreement with Israel. As Libya’s relations with Egypt worsened, Gaddafi sought closer relations with the Soviet Union.
Libya became the first country outside the Soviet bloc to receive the supersonic MiG-25 combat fighters, but Soviet-Libyan relations remained relatively distant. Gaddafi also sought to increase Libyan influence, especially in states with an Islamic population, by calling for the creation of a Saharan Islamic state and supporting anti-government forces in sub-Saharan Africa.
Notable in Gaddafi’s politics has been his support for self-styled liberation movements, and also his sponsorship of rebel movements in West Africa, notably Sierra Leone and Liberia, as well as Muslim groups. In the 1970s and the 1980s, this support was sometimes so freely given that even the most unsympathetic groups could obtain Libyan support; often the groups represented ideologies far removed from Gaddafi’s own. Gaddafi’s approach often tended to confuse international opinion.
According the the western media and historians, Throughout the 1970s, his regime was implicated in subversion and terrorist activities in both Arab and non-Arab countries. By the mid-1980s, he was widely regarded in the West as the principal financier of international terrorism. Reportedly, Gaddafi was a major financier of the “Black September Movement” which perpetrated the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, and was accused by the United States of being responsible for direct control of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 200, of whom a substantial number were U.S. servicemen. He is also said to have paid “Carlos the Jackal” to kidnap and then release a number of Saudi Arabian and Iranian oil ministers.
For his anti western policy, Gaddafi gained a negative reputation in western media and diplomatic circles.
Military coup d’?tat
On 1 September 1969, a small group of junior military officers led by Gaddafi staged a bloodless coup d’?tat against King Idris while he was in Turkey for medical treatment. His nephew, the Crown Prince Sayyid Hasan ar-Rida al-Mahdi as-Sanussi, had been formally deposed by the revolutionary army officers and put under house arrest; they abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the new Libyan Arab Republic.[7] The 27-year-old Gaddafi, with a taste for safari suits and sunglasses, then sought to become the new “Che Guevara of the age”.[8] To accomplish this Gaddafi turned Libya into a haven for anti-Western radicals, where any group, supposedly, could receive weapons and financial assistance, provided they claimed to be fighting imperialism.[8] The Italian population in Libya almost disappeared after Gaddafi ordered the expulsion of Italians in 1970.[9]
A Revolutionary Command Council was formed to rule the country, with Gaddafi as chairman. He added the title of prime minister in 1970, but gave up this title in 1972. Unlike some other military revolutionaries, Gaddafi did not promote himself to the rank of general upon seizing power, but rather accepted a ceremonial promotion from captain to colonel and has remained at this rank since then. While at odds with Western military ranking for a colonel to rule a country and serve as Commander-in-Chief of its military, in Gaddafi’s own words Libya’s society is “ruled by the people”, so he needs no more grandiose title or supreme military rank.
Islamic socialism and pan-ArabismGaddafi based his new regime on a blend of Arab nationalism, aspects of the welfare state, and what Gaddafi termed “popular democracy”, or more commonly “direct, popular democracy”. He called this system “Islamic socialism”, and, while he permitted private control over small companies, the government controlled the larger ones. Welfare, “liberation” (or ?emancipation? depending on the translation),[16] and education[17] were emphasized. He also imposed a system of Islamic morals,[18][19] outlawing alcohol and gambling. Like previous revolutionary figures of the 20th century such as Mao and his Little Red Book, Gaddafi outlined his political philosophy in his Green Book to reinforce the ideals of this socialist-Islamic state and published in three volumes between 1975 and 1979.
In 1977, Gaddafi proclaimed that Libya was changing its form of government from a republic to a “jamahiriya” ? a neologism that means “mass-state” or “government by the masses”. In theory, Libya became a direct democracy governed by the people[20] through local popular councils and communes.[21] At the top of this structure was the General People’s Congress,[22] with Gaddafi as secretary-general. However, after only two years, Gaddafi gave up all of his governmental posts in keeping with the new egalitarian philosophy.
From time to time, Gaddafi has responded to domestic and external opposition with violence. His revolutionary committees called for the assassination of Libyan dissidents living abroad in April 1980, with Libyan hit squads sent abroad to murder them. On 26 April 1980, Gaddafi set a deadline of 11 June 1980 for dissidents to return home or be “in the hands of the revolutionary committees”.[23] Nine Libyans were murdered during that time, five of them in Italy
Tensions between Libya and the West reached a peak during the Ronald Reagan administration, which tried to overthrow Gaddafi. The Reagan administration viewed Libya as a belligerent rogue state because of its uncompromising stance on Palestinian independence, its support for revolutionary Iran in the 1980?1988 war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (see Iran?Iraq War), and its backing of “liberation movements” in the developing world. Reagan himself dubbed Gaddafi the “mad dog of the Middle East”. In December 1981, the US State Department invalidated US passports for travel to Libya, and in March 1982, the U.S. declared a ban on the import of Libyan oil[28] and the export to Libya of U.S. oil industry technology; European nations did not follow suit. Libya has also been a supporter of the Polisario Front in their fight against Spanish colonialism and Moroccan military occupation.
In 1984, British police constable Yvonne Fletcher was shot outside the Libyan Embassy in London while policing an anti-Gaddafi demonstration. A burst of machine-gun fire from within the building was suspected of killing her, but Libyan diplomats asserted their diplomatic immunity and were repatriated. The incident led to the breaking off of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Libya for over a decade.[29]
The U.S. attacked Libyan patrol boats from January to March 1986 during clashes over access to the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed as territorial waters. On 15 April 1986, President Reagan ordered major bombing raids, dubbed Operation El Dorado Canyon, against Tripoli and Benghazi killing 45 Libyan military and government personnel as well as 15 civilians.[1] This strike followed U.S. interception of telex messages from Libya’s East Berlin embassy suggesting Libyan government involvement in a bomb explosion on 5 April in West Berlin’s La Belle discoth?que, a nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Among the alleged fatalities of 15 April retaliatory attack by the U.S. was Gaddafi’s adopted daughter, Hannah. Libya responded by firing two Scud missiles at the U.S. Coast Guard navigation station on the Italian island of Lampedusa. The missiles landed in the sea, and caused no damage.[citation needed]
In late 1987, a merchant vessel, the MV Eksund, was intercepted. Destined for the IRA, a large consignment of arms and explosives supplied by Libya was recovered from the Eksund. British intelligence believed this was not the first and that Libyan arms shipments had previously reached the IRA. (See Provisional IRA arms importation.) It has also been alleged that Qaddafi was exporting weapons to the FARC rebel group in Colombia.
For most of the 1990s, Libya endured economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation as a result of Gaddafi’s refusal to allow the extradition to the United States or Britain of two Libyans accused of planting a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, which came down on Lockerbie, Scotland. Through the intercession of South African President Nelson Mandela ? who made a high-profile visit to Gaddafi in 1997 ? and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Gaddafi agreed in 1999 to a compromise that involved handing over the defendants to the Netherlands for trial under Scottish law.: UN sanctions were thereupon suspended, but U.S. sanctions against Libya remained in force.
An alleged plot by Britain’s secret intelligence service to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi, when rebels attacked Gaddafi’s motorcade near the city of Sirte in February 1996, was described as “pure fantasy” by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, although the FCO later admitted: “We have never denied that we knew of plots against Gaddafi.”
In August 2003, two years after Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction, 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 US$2.7 billion ? or up to US$10 million each ? to the families of the 270 victims. The same month, Britain and Bulgaria co-sponsored a UN resolution which removed the suspended sanctions. (Bulgaria’s involvement in tabling this motion led to suggestions that there was a link with the HIV trial in Libya in which 5 Bulgarian nurses, working at a Benghazi hospital, were accused in 1998 of infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV.) Forty percent of the compensation was then paid to each family, and a further 40% followed once U.S. sanctions were removed. Because the U.S. refused to take Libya off its list of state sponsors of terrorism, Libya retained the last 20% ($540 million) of the $2.7 billion compensation package. In October 2008 Libya paid $1.5 billion into a fund which will be used to compensate relatives of the
Lockerbie bombing victims with the remaining 20%;
American victims of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing;
American victims of the 1989 UTA Flight 772 bombing; and,
Libyan victims of the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi.
As a result, President Bush signed Executive Order 13477 restoring the Libyan government’s immunity from terror-related lawsuits and dismissing all of the pending compensation cases in the US, the White House said.
On 28 June 2007, Megrahi was granted the right to a second appeal against the Lockerbie bombing conviction. One month later, the Bulgarian medics were released from jail in Libya. They returned home to Bulgaria and were pardoned by Bulgarian president, Georgi Parvanov.
Gaddafi’s 2009 welcome to the return of convicted Lockerbie bomber Megrahi, who was released from prison on compassionate grounds, attracted criticism from Western leaders and has disrupted his first-ever visit to the United States to attend a UN General Session. Gaddafi often resides in a tent when travelling. His plans to erect a tent in Central Park and on Libyan government property in Englewood, New Jersey during Gaddafi’s stay at the UN were both protested by community leaders and subsequently cancelled by Gaddafi. His tent finally found a home on an estate belonging to Donald Trump in Bedford.
23 September 2009 marked Gaddafi’s first appearance at the United Nations General Assembly where he addressed world leaders at the annual gathering in New York. The Libyan leader while demanding representation for the African Union, used the occasion to scold the United Nations structure saying the 15-member body practised ?security feudalism? for those who had a protected seat. The Libyan leader’s appearance at the United Nations generated demonstrations both for and against Gaddafi
