Hannibal Gaddafi: when revenge outplaces justice

Do Arabs inherently have the exclusivity of revenge? Obviously not, although we all remember the Bassous war, from 494 to 534, in which two arab tribes, the Bakr and the Taghlib, annihilated each other, when the camel of El Bassous was accidentally killed by Koulaïb Wa’il, a lord of Banu Taghlib.

Translated from French by Raya Boussarsar

French version: Hannibal Kadhafi : Quand la vengeance remplace la justice

However, the story of Hannibal Gaddafi, who has been languishing in Beirut’s dungeons since 2015, bears an eerie resemblance to a tale of revenge in disguise. Instead of bringing to justice Muammar Gaddafi, who was murdered in obscure circumstances by “Sarkozy’s agents”, we have resorted to the son with no valid legal grounds.

The crime? The son of Libya’s supreme leader is paying (today) for the (past) disappearance of Moussa Sadr, the spiritual leader of Lebanon’s Shia community and founder of the Amal movement, a party currently under the leadership of the president of the National Assembly, Nabih Berri.

Moussa Sadr, a true martyr of the Shia movement, was seemingly killed along with two of his associates while visiting the Libyan capital in 1978. Although it is clear that Colonel Gaddafi is the prime culprit behind the disappearance, Hannibal should not be prosecuted for a crime committed by his father’s henchmen when he was only 2 years old. “He claims to be the victim of a denial of justice”, in the words of his lawyer, Paul Romanos, to Le Figaro.

We may not sympathize with the rich kid, who is known for his violence against women and his wild trips to the posh nightclubs of European capitals, where he threw the Libyans’ stolen money out of windows. But that does not legitimize kidnapping him and transferring him to Lebanon in humiliating conditions at the point when Damascus had granted him refugee status.

Could Hassan Nasrallah be behind this outrageous kidnapping? As it becomes evident that the judicial system is being instrumentalized within the tug-of-war between El Assad’s Syria and the Lebanese authorities, the case of Hannibal Gaddafi has become a sticking point between the two countries. The Syrian ambassador in Lebanon “has even demanded his release and return to Syria as soon as possible”!

Libya’s new rulers are also trying hard behind the scenes to get him back. For what reason? The Libyan islamists are now calling for the son’s head to avenge the father through the voice of their leader Abdelhakim Belhaj, for whom Gaddafi has made life miserable.

Although essentializing people is unfair and, after all, George W. Bush, who publicly bragged about taking revenge on Saddam Hussein, has no Arab blood in his veins, justice throughout the Arab world has never been truly fair, and vengeance has replaced justice even at the highest political levels.

How many journalists in the Arab countries, for example, were subjected to heavy prison sentences for no valid reason just because they dared to criticize “a little leader”, whereas their bodies were dismembered with chainsaws when they questioned the legitimacy of “the big leader”.

Yet ever since Rousseau, we have known that “the strongest is never strong enough to be the master unless he transforms his strength into right and obedience into duty”. The strength that leads to revenge is, in fact, a weakness. True strength obtains its legitimacy from what is just. And only justice can constitute the judicial power of the state institution, contrary to vengeance, which is the work of one man or a group of men.

And still, in the Arab culture, it is hard to perceive justice as the power to uphold the rule of law. The execution of that power is rather seen as the moral virtue of those who acknowledge the merits and respect the rights of each individual.

In this respect, the philosopher Francis Bacon was right when he pointed out that revenge is a form of wild and barbaric justice, “which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy”.