Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi seized power in Libya as a young army officer in 1969 and dominated the country for 42 years, until he was overthrown and killed during the civil war of 2011. He used oil wealth to transform living standards and promoted his own political doctrine, while his government suppressed dissent at home and backed armed groups abroad. He remains one of the most divisive figures of modern Arab and African history.

Gaddafi was born, probably in 1942 (no exact date has been reliably published), into a family of the small Qadhadhfa tribe near Sirte, while Libya was an Italian colony. As a schoolboy he was inspired by the Arab nationalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and was expelled from Sabha for organising protests. He graduated from the military college in Benghazi in 1965 and trained briefly in Britain. With a secret group of Free Officers he overthrew the ageing King Idris on 1 September 1969, meeting almost no resistance.

As chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Gaddafi proclaimed a republic, banned political parties and trade unions, and introduced sharia into the legal system. British and American bases closed in 1970, and that October the remaining Italian community, about 12,000 people, was expelled and its property seized. Libya pushed up the price of its oil and from 1973 took majority control of foreign oil operations. Revenues paid for housing, hospitals and free education; by 1979 income per head had reached about $8,170, against $40 in 1951.

In 1973 Gaddafi launched a "Popular Revolution" of local people's committees and set out his Third International Theory, a rejection of both capitalism and Soviet communism, later published as the three-part Green Book. In 1977 the state became the Jamahiriya, officially a direct democracy run by popular congresses. In practice Gaddafi kept control of the army and of the Revolutionary Committees, which policed opinion; dissidents were jailed, some were publicly hanged, and several were assassinated abroad in the early 1980s after he called for exiled opponents to be "liquidated".

Gaddafi repeatedly proposed unions with other Arab states, none of which lasted. He fought a brief border war with Egypt in 1977, sent troops in 1979 to defend Idi Amin in Uganda, and intervened for years in Chad until a French-backed offensive drove Libyan forces out. He funded many foreign militant groups. After a Berlin nightclub bombing blamed on Libya, United States aircraft struck Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986, killing around 100 people. Following the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 and of a French airliner over Niger in 1989, the United Nations imposed sanctions in 1992. A Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands later convicted the Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of the Lockerbie bombing; Libya paid US$2.7 billion to victims' families in 2003 while continuing to deny responsibility.

From the late 1990s Gaddafi turned from pan-Arabism to pan-Africanism, helped found the African Union and chaired it in 2009–2010. In December 2003 Libya gave up its chemical and nuclear weapons programmes, and Western governments restored relations. The economy was partly privatised, but no political liberalisation followed.

During the Arab Spring, protests broke out on 17 February 2011 and quickly turned into a rebellion centred on Benghazi. After Gaddafi's forces fired on protesters and threatened to hunt rebels "house by house", the UN Security Council authorised a no-fly zone, and NATO air strikes supported the rebels; the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity. Tripoli fell in August. On 20 October 2011 Gaddafi was captured near Sirte after his convoy was hit from the air. Video showed militiamen beating him, and he was dead on arrival in Misrata; the transitional authorities said he died in crossfire, while some witnesses described him being shot after capture.

Our 1960 map shows the kingdom of Libya before his coup, and the 1985 and 2010 maps show the country during his rule.