It's not Gaddafi alone

Yesterday some headlines screamed, "Gaddafi legacy still haunts Libya". It was the fourth anniversary of his brutal murder by militias with the help of the French airforce. While Gaddafi's rule cannot be divorced from happenings in Libya it is overly simplistic, and frankly speaking unintelligent to blame all of Libya's current problems on him.

We cannot separate the present chaos from the history. That history includes destabilising external interference. The West is responsible for planting military instability in Libya. They armed the militias who are holding the country to ransom, not Gadhafi.

By the way even in perfectly democratic states military instability can be planted by external powers. Look at Ukraine. Maybe you use the double standard that blames Russia for supplying weapons to rebels, but does not blame the West for doing the same in other parts of the world.

If we want to stay closer to the Libyan context, look at Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and even Egypt. They are all dictatorships of which Saudi Arabia is way worse than Gaddafi.

Saudi Arabia is the closest thing to the kind of caliphate that the Islamic State is trying to establish. This year alone they have already executed nearly 100 people by beheading. Believe me if somebody airdrops several hundred tons of weapons in the Saudi desert we will have a conflagration worse than Libya.

Like most post colonial Africa, Libya is a patchwork of tribes placed inside one border by colonial expediency. Gaddafi is not responsible for that. He stifled but did not eradicate those tribal divisions.

But then which country in Africa is free of such tribal divisions. If you want to check what I mean just get the United States to airdrop heavy weapons in KZN, Free State, the North West, Eastern Cape and Limpopo and then watch what happens.

Would you blame Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma for the violence that is bound to follow?

Mind you in North Africa countries like Tunisia and Egypt went through similar situations but they remained stable because no one supplied weapons to militia groups.

In short blaming everything on Gaddafi is a rather simplistic view, which does not take into account all the geopolitics at play. Like Ukraine, Libya's instability has far, far more to do with interference by big foreign powers than prior bad leadership.