Robert L. Terrell

I have mixed feelings in response to yesterday’s gruesome, street side lynching of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

The dictator, who would be Africa’s king, was slain under murky circumstances shortly after he was dragged like an animal from his last refuge. Rather than a palace, government ministry building, or fortified compound, the refuge was a crude, concrete drainage pipe, covered with asphalt, desert sand and randomly applied bits of graffiti.

The magnificently determined young men who dragged the cold-hearted tyrant from the drainage pipe say he was dazed, wounded and bleeding when they finally got him. They also say he begged and pleaded for mercy, hoping hopelessly that his life would be spared.

Video images of the scene indicate that a large, angry crowd immediately gathered around the wounded tyrant when it became apparent that the profusely bleeding old man in their custody was indeed the deposed dictator. With casual, intense confidence, they moved in for their final assault in much the same manner as lions prepare to feed on a downed, but not yet dead, water buffalo.

With terrified eyes, he searched the faces of the jeering members of the crowd, obviously hoping to identify a friendly face. He may also have been attempting to engender via his forlorn, searching gaze some semblance of the deference and fear he had employed for many decades to cow them and their counterparts in every section of the nation into absolute submission to his will.

But the tyrant’s time had come, and the angry crowd was bent on exorcising his malign influence. First, they viciously beat him. Blood gushed from his head, and covered much of his face and upper body as the brutal attack intensified. He stumbled repeatedly in response to the intense pummeling, but his captors showed no mercy. The last images of him alive show a profoundly frightened old man at the moment of recognition that his time among the living was coming to a brutal, inglorious end.

His frenzied attackers responded in accordance with the behavior he had used for decades to maintain his absolute, tyrannical domination over their lives. For now, we are left the finality of it all. His bruised, battered half naked corpse is currently on display on the grimy floor of an otherwise empty cold storage locker.

People are being admitted to the gruesome scene to view the tyrant’s remains, each one wearing a mask to contain the stench. Those standing in the long, winding line outside the chilly locker are patient, intent on viewing the iconoclastic tyrant’s deteriorating corpse with their own eyes.

He was always an elusive figure, hard to understand and impossible to predict. Moreover, he artfully played his hand such that he was sometimes an enemy, and at other times a questionable friend. Whatever the guise, he was always extremely dangerous. Libya’s graveyards and killing fields are filled with the corpses of those who miscalculated the depth of his cruelty, or engendered his ire.

I am pleased that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been removed from power, and troubled by the horrible manner in which he was put to death. Unfortunately, viscous, homicidal outcomes are dominant, if not entirely necessary, components of the final days portion of the self-serving script by which dictators commonly live and frequently die.