CAIRO, Egypt — For more than four decades, Moammar Gadhafi was the face of Libya. He withstood international isolation and U.S. airstrikes, managing to claw his way back to a degree of acceptance by the global community.
Now, from a popular rebellion, he is confronted by the biggest threat to his rule.
If Gadhafi is toppled, the lack of a clear institutional system in Libya and the absence of any kind of established opposition bloc leaves open the question of who could fill the vacuum.
Egypt and Tunisia, whose leaders were ousted in recent weeks, had well-established - but corruption-plagued - governing institutions that allowed for a smoother transition and rebuilding of the nation.
Not so in Libya, where Gadhafi holds no official role in government. The “jamahiriya” system that he set up is designed to give the appearance of a government, with a series of People’s Committees and People’s Congresses.
In reality, it’s a system whose sole purpose is to ensure that power stays in the hands of the Arab world’s longest-serving leader.
“Every time you look at the different strands of Libyan society ... you see that there’s one puppet master, and it’s Gadhafi,” said Jon Marks, a Libya expert with London based Cross-border Information.
Gadhafi turns 69 this year - the month and day of his birth in 1942 are uncertain - and he rose to power in a coup that ousted King Idris in 1969. One of the foundations of the revolution was a rejection of communism and capitalism - shunning anything linked to Libya’s colonial history, and a determination to chart his own course.
With no constitution, the blueprint for governance was his “Green Book,” a slim volume of his philosophies that inspired an entire research department at one of Libya’s main universities.
In addition, no one branch of Libya’s feared security apparatus has a monopoly on power.
One son - Mutassim - was picked to head one branch, while another son, Khamis, headed what analysts say is a British-trained unit. A third son, Seif al-Islam, has become the Western face of the regime and was put forth as the reformer, heading a variety of youth organizations.
All three were left to jockey for power while Gadhafi was depicted on billboards across Tripoli gazing into the distance.
Occasionally, Gadhafi weighed in. For example, he once issued calls to dismantle the government because of corruption and distribute oil wealth directly to the people.
Each statement left observers scrambling for clues as to which son was more in favor.
All the while, Gadhafi watched, careful to remain firmly in control and ready to act in those rare occasions when the fear inspired by the security forces was not enough to maintain order.
Seif al-Islam, in what many see as a thinly veiled warning of a possible escalation of the crackdown, said on state television early Monday that the country could be headed for civil war and that Libya’s army, which fully backed his father, was unlike the armed forces of Tunisia or Egypt.
The son’s comments “showed that Gadhafi, or those close to him, wants to fight it out and create a situation like in Somalia where they will leave behind them a broken society,” said Saad Djebbar, a Libya expert with Cambridge University’s North African Institute.
It’s as if he were saying, “If I lose, you lose the country,” Djebbar said.
Libya, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, produces almost 1.6 million barrels per day of crude and about 80 percent of its exports go to Europe.
Over the years, Gadhafi used his country’s vast oil wealth to support militant movements and their leaders - including Abu Nidal and other Palestinian factions, Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal and the Irish Republican Army.
After the United States decided that Libya was behind a 1986 bombing of a West Berlin disco that killed two American servicemen and a Turkish woman and wounded 200 others, it unleashed airstrikes on targets in Tripoli and Benghazi that killed 41 people, including Gadhafi’s adopted daughter.
But the man President Ronald Reagan dubbed the “mad dog of the Middle East” was undaunted, launching in 1988 an operation that led to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed all 269 people on board and 11 on the ground.
Gadhafi was also said to have had Mansour Kikhia, a former foreign minister and dissident, kidnapped while he was in Cairo for a human rights conference in 1993. Kikhia was said to have later been killed and his body disposed of in molten metal at a steel plant.
For years, much of his energy went into opposing Israel. In 1987, at an Arab summit in Algiers, he wore a white glove on his right hand to avoid contact with those who dealt with Israel. He also heaped scorn on his fellow Arab leaders. In one instance, he sat contemptuously at an Arab League meeting in the center of the room smoking a cigar.
Meanwhile at home, he drew attention to perceived injustices in Libya with little concern that he and his family may have been guilty of some of them.
He decried the corruption that allowed a limited number of Libyans to accumulate tremendous wealth. But Gadhafi and his family are believed to have amassed a fortune - often siphoned directly from the wealth accumulated from sitting atop Africa’s largest proven reserves of crude or from a share in business ventures.
“Gadhafi’s sort of joke jamahiriya system has mutated into some kind of crony capitalism,” Marks said.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/23/2011