Gaddafi and Pakistan: the disconnect

By Kamran Rehmat/Islamabad

Down the memory lane: First Couples, the Bhuttos and the Gaddafis, in the summer of 1974 in Lahore. Of the four, only Gaddafi’s wife, left, survives. Bhutto’s widow, Nusrat, died on Sunday

With the Arab Spring drawing into the winter, power stakeholders in Pakistan appear to have been too busy dealing with existential threats to have noticed the changing weather in the distance.Intriguingly, barring maybe a couple of opinion pieces, one has not even come across so much as a memo to remind the Foreign Office at least that they had to take some sort of pragmatic stance on the epoch-making events that have led to the ouster of Col Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.At the time of writing this piece, Islamabad was yet to come out with a definitive stance on how they view the Libyan uprising, the role of the National Transitional Council - which most of the world has been up to speed to recognise - and perhaps, even a word on the Nato-driven push to get Gaddafi.This is a bit unusual given that democracy and dictatorship is like a forever subject of interest in Pakistan and there’s no dearth of conspiracy theories about who plays what hand in regime change, particularly in the Middle East.Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League was the only political party which made a mention of Libya recently, and in a manner of speaking, mumbled that it would make sense to recognise the NTC.However, the ruling Pakistan People’s Party-led coalition has been slow to absorb the ground realities although earlier in the year when despotic regimes fell in Tunisia and Egypt, the PPP was quick to allay fears that the spring would reach Pakistan and topple its government given the widespread disenchantment over issues of governance.It is another matter that such debate was unfounded in the first place given that Pakistan cannot realistically be bracketed with countries currently facing the brunt of popular uprising for some obvious reasons.For one, Pakistan is a functional democracy where the power of the military is only matched by a fiercely independent media and proactive judiciary, which is sometimes in overreach.But to return to the subject of tyrants in the face of popular revolt, in the end, they go down not fighting but with cowardice lining their faces. Col Gaddafi is the second strongman after Saddam, who found himself cowering like a rat in a rat hole.Some irony in the Libyan’s case because he had called those fighting to rid themselves of his oppression “rats” whom he vowed “to hunt down street-by street, house-by-house”. His deranged condescension reminded one of Louis IV’s l’état c’est mois (“I’m the State”).Last Thursday, he was himself hunted down in a drain pipe with accounts suggesting he was begging his hunters not to shoot him.At page-turning times like these, symbolism takes centrestage. Consider the golden pistol a rebel snatched from him when he was caught. Who in their right minds would want to keep a golden pistol and in the circumstances he was found? But that’s just a glimpse of how delusional he could be.Maybe, he took a fancy to James Bond-style golden gun streak -something that cannot be ruled out after the discovery of that Condi Rice picture album from his private collection a couple of months ago.There must be something seriously wrong when a whole generation settles into the evening of their lives and yet see only one ruler. It defies the concept of freedom in all its hues.Gaddafi stormed into power in 1969 - and to have lived under the shadow of a man whose questionable mental health was the stuff of legend for 42 years could only have been soul-destroying.While there will be time to chronicle his regime’s terrible misdeeds, it makes sense to look at the tyrant in the context of how he was viewed in Pakistan and vice versa.Trust Pakistanis to fall for the emotional quotient difficult as many of them find to detach from glorified illusions of pan-Islamism as the famous Islamic Summit Conference in Lahore in 1974 espoused.The black and white images of the Libyan ruler rubbing shoulders with the debonair Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the rest of the flock made up of leaders of monolithic regimes were voiced over with poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal’s rousing verses by the usual suspect - state broadcaster Pakistan Television.There is a need to deconstruct the myth surrounding Gaddafi’s embrace of Pakistan. Clearly, too much is made of the show of unity at the ’74 Lahore Summit.As for the political connect, Gaddafi appeared to get along famously with the Bhutto family but that didn’t last. There’s still some heartburn at why he didn’t make himself count when Bhutto was persecuted politically by a military despot and executed in 1979.Pakistanis also saw rank opportunism in how Gaddafi’s son read from Brutus’s script a few years ago in making disclosures about transfer of nuclear technology to North Korea with an Islamabad dateline to coincide with Western suspicions in a bid to overcome Libya’s international isolation. By then, Gaddafi had renounced Tripoli’s nuclear ambitions.Interestingly, while his nostalgic apologists long assumed Libya supported Pakistan on Kashmir, the fact is that he propagated for an independent Kashmir, which, in his maiden UN address two years ago, he suggested should be a “Baathist state between India and Pakistan”. Earlier this year, he also insulted Islamabad by ordering his troops and police to crush the rebellion lest “Libya becomes Afghanistan or Pakistan”.Contrast this with how Islamabad has been virtually sleeping over the Gaddafi affair.It would seem there are a few still enamoured of the dictator - as reflected by the name Pakistanis christened for their best cricket ground in Lahore.As a matter of principle, critics point out, there should never have been such reverential dedications to begin with. But if sense was in short supply for decades, the brutal massacre of his people at Gaddafi’s hands this year should have opened the eyes of the foreign policy mandarins, they say.The least Pakistan can do now is to immediately recognise the NTC and scrap the baggage that Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore represents as a legacy.

•The writer is a freelance journalist based in Islamabad and can be reached at kaamyabi@gmail.com