Right up until the start of the Libyan war I too thought Gaddafi was just an African version of Kim Jong Ill, a psychotic, brutal dictator who's only pleasure was to make life hell for his people. Little did I know how much I had been ingrained by 40 years of Western propaganda. I'll just post a few short bits of what I have subsequantly learned, but I highly recommend people who are interested to spend some time looking into this matter, and not just Gaddafi himself, but the Libyan Jamahiriya that he created. While he was nominally the head of state, through this system there was a very high degree of local democracy, so high it was often compared to the Swiss cantonal system. Utterly shocking to learn for those of us who drank the kool-aid with our daily dose of propaganda.
Good stuff:
Gaddafi championed women's rights and female equality. He broke the viscous cycle of fatherly abuse towards daughters and fostering the education of women by conscripting young women into the army for a couple of years. At the army barracks they were educated both conventionally and in martial arts so they could protect themselves. Anyone who struck them was thereby striking a member of the army making it a crime against the state.
Rasied the literacy rate and prosperity of the country from one of the lowest in Africa to the highest.
Constructed the Great Manmade River Project to funnel water from one of the World's larges aquifers in the South Lybian Desert to the coastal cities and to irrigate the desert. It was completed a few months before the bombing started, and interestingly the bombing both destroyed the factories that serviced the project and destroyed much of it. So much for targeting only military targets.
Every Libyan citizen was guaranteed the right to free education through university. If Libya did not provide the education someone wanted domestically, then the state paid for tuition overseas.
Every citizen had a right to free housing.
There was a high degree of local democracy via the jamahiriya, again, interested parties should look this up.
African countries used to pay some of the highest prices to use Western satellite communications until Libya forked over some $400 mill to send an African communications satellite into orbit drastically lowering the price of international calls throughout the continent.
He also fostered a strong pan-Africanism, and called for both an African Union modelled on the EU and a gold backed African currency. The latter was in the final phases of implementation when the bombing began.
All this was funded via nationalising the oil and keeping tight control over the profits.
The bad:
Freedom of the press was not high, mainly to curb Western influences.
He spent a lot of money on pet projects, such as a race-car factory and his private army of female bodyguards.
He put political prisoners into prison without hesitation. Strangely though, most of the political prisoners were Islamic fundamentalists.
Also:
Gaddafi was far from hated by his entire population, though there were many who didn't like him (especially those who disliked female equality, or wanted a bigger piece of the pie for themselves). The fact is there were massive (1+million out of a ~5 mill population) pro-Gaddafi protests before the bombing started. Here is an article that shows how this was not reported in the Western Media:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article170829.html
