Ever since Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan rebels, Vladimir Putin started a disinformation and propoganda campaign to rehabilitate Muammar Gaddafi. The campaign was aimed against NATO and the West on false premise that NATO killed Muammar Gaddafi. Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Misrata rebels outside Sirtre. The Misrata rebels fought crucial battles against Libya’s Army in 2011 to eventually bring down Gaddafi’s regime.
The Libyan rebels were aided NATO coalition airstrikes that had depleted Gaddafi of his heavy weaponry. The airstrikes were called by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy right before Gaddafi’s forces arrived in Benghazi with the aim to massacre protestors. His son, Saif Gaddafi, who is now in hiding in Libya, had just made a televised speech threatening Libyans with “rivers of blood” if they revolted. Libyans had protested in the streets against the dictator who brutalised them and oppressed for more than four years, yet according to Russian propaganda, Arabs have no agency and everything they did was done on the behest of NATO.
Russia has portrayed everything that took place in Libya as a NATO affair, reducing Libyans to mere puppets who can’t make a decision for themselves. Now it keeps undermining the democratic narrative as it glorifies Gaddafi and his time and propagates the idea that Libya right now is a chaotic mess. Yet, this isn’t the experience of Russian tourists who are travelling to Benghazi where Russia is setting up its new Mediterranean enclave. The Libyan General who controls Benghazi, Khalifa Haftar seems to be going along with Russia’s rehabilitation of Gaddafi, or at least that’s what Haftar’s propaganda units seem to be doing. A recent art exhibition in Moscow by Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter, Aisha Gaddafi, was reported positively on Libya’s pro-Haftar press, whilst emphasising on Libya’s pains caused by “the NATO-backed revolution”.
Russia’s main point is that Gaddafi was a benevolent dictator and NATO killed him causing as a direct result Libya’s current turmoil. In reality, Russia is supporting a general who is dividing the Libyan country and preventing the democratic process from going forward. Russia’s interest in Libya is to acquire natural resources and gradually build its base in the port of Benghazi. By rehabilitating Gaddafi and propagating his image as a benevolent dictator in the African continent, Russia lays the path for the political discourse that justifies its colonisation of Africa on the false pretext of the benevolent Western alternative. Not to mention the fact that the differences between Gaddafi’s Libya and the Libya of today, are not that stark as the Russia propaganda may want to project.
I predict that the same will follow with regard to Bashar al-Assad: dead or alive. Russia will depict Bashar al-Assad as a victim of Western conspiracies and the Syrian people will be reduced once again in the propagandistic discourse into a vehicle of foreign powers. The people are only sovereign if they are ruled by a Russian puppet, whilst the West is imperialist, and so on and so forth.
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