The African Union has been taking an exceptionally cautious line on the question of the fall of Colonel Gaddafi. Although he is still at large, with Sirte and some other towns towards the Libyan Sahara still under the control of his loyalists, the reality is that power in Tripoli has passed definitively to the ‘rebels’ of the National Transition Council (NTC). This has given the AU potentially one of its most serious crises, as even out of power, the ‘brother leader’ remains a controversial force on the continent.
We should recall that in 1981-4, in the days of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Gaddafy who helped bring that body to its knees and almost split it irrevocably. The initial cause was the decision of the Nairobi summit in 1981 that Gaddafy should be the next Chairman of the OAU. As his ambitions to play a role in the Arab world were frustrated by suspicious colleagues, he turned his attention increasingly to Africa, beginning with a still-born 1980 Union of Libya with Chad.
Attention became diverted by the split in the OAU over the recognition by some members of the Sahraoui Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the former Spanish Sahara, a diplomatic headache since Spain’s attempt to shed its colony with a partition between Morocco and Mauritania. Creating SADR was a riposte by the Algerians, angry at a carve-up in which they had no say, and it became a contest for African loyalties between Morocco and Algeria, after Mauritania caved in to Moroccan pressures.
The issue came to a head during Gaddafy’s chairmanship, as it was at the OAU’s Nairobi summit that 26 of 52 members said they recognised the SADR, seating on the invitation of a pro-active Secretary-General Edem Kodjo. The campaign for African loyalties reached fever pitch as Gaddafy tried to hold his summit in Tripoli in August 1982, which foundered on the lack of a quorum and a boycott by half the organisation’s members.
It was at a time when Ronald Reagan had just come to power in the US and was looking for an issue to show his right-wing muscle. Abetted by his free-wheeling CIA boss William Casey, he targeted Nicaragua, Iran and Libya as terrorist threats. As depicted in Bob Woodward’s book Veil, 1981-2 was the period in which the covert CIA action to replace Goukouni Oueddeye’s National Unity Government with Hissène Habré, proved successful in May 1982, offering a challenge that Gaddafy could not ignore. Thus a second attempt at holding a Gaddafy-chaired summit in Tripoli in November 1982 also aborted, this time on the Chad issue.
The 1983 OAU summit in Addis Ababa, chaired, to the Libyan leader’s fury by Ethiopian leader Mengistu, tried to work out the basis for a solution, but it was only the 1984 summit, also in Addis, that buried the issue, at the price of seating the SADR, resulting in a Moroccan walkout, which has obtained to this day. The SADR still continues as an AU member, (and as an agenda item at the UN), but nowadays it has a rather spectral presence, while Morocco continues as member of the African Development Bank and other African institutions, and, for example, attends the France-Africa summits.
How far was Gaddafy really to blame for the fiasco? The mood of the times, before Africa’s depressed decade set in, was in favour of robust actions faced with a swing to the right in the West, especially as Zimbabwe had just become independent, and apartheid South Africa was moving high up the international agenda. At this stage he would probably not have cared if the OAU had split, a point of view shared, ironically, with some of Reagan’s bully-boys. Gaddafy had a delusional belief in his own powers, a character trait that has survived, matched only by his lack of diplomatic subtlety.
My old friend the late Hon. Godfrey Morrison, at one time editor of Africa Confidential, who was with me reporting on the failed OAU Tripoli summit Mark 2 of November 1982, used to refer to the Libyan leader as a “drama queen,” a reference, perhaps, to the thrill derived from playing a central role, no matter what the cost. It was the same frantic and intemperate quality that prevented him from being taken seriously as a successor to Nasser in the Arab world, or to Nkrumah in Africa.
It was seen in his total lack of understanding of Nigeria when he called for its dismemberment a couple of years back. He was able to use his copious funds to win friends in the continent, which partly accounts for the current ambivalence in the AU, fed not a little by the insensitivity to African sentiment of the Cameron/Sarkozy push for regime change in Tripoli, apparently unaware of the long-standing suspicion of NATO’s attempts to secure a ‘role’ in Africa. But for the moment, the AU seems to feel it better to lie low.
