Yet in the past two weeks, some officials in Tripoli seem to have realized that defiance, although playing well to Gaddafi’s supporters at home, does not play well in the outside world.
So a new line has emerged, embodied in a more conciliatory speech that Gaddafi delivered last weekend — the Libyan government as peacemaker, a regime that accepted an African Union peace plan rejected by the rebels, a misunderstood administration that has been picked on by former friends abroad but that still wants to solve its problems through dialogue.
“The sense of being unappreciated and misunderstood is a long-standing feeling among Libyans,” and especially in Gaddafi’s mind, said Lisa Anderson, president of the American University in Cairo. “That’s combined with a kind of defiance. . . . They are two sides of the same coin.”
The two approaches are often uncomfortably juxtaposed, as officials propose dialogue but in the same breath denounce the rebels as terrorists who represent no one, essentially a movement not worth talking to.
A common refrain is that Libya was dealing with an armed insurrection, a plot hatched with foreign help, and with protesters who turned violent, seizing arms and burning police stations. Perhaps a few civilians were killed, but “at most 150 to 200,” in Gaddafi’s words.
Any state would defend itself against an armed uprising, just as the United States was forced to react to an armed cult in Waco, Tex., in 1993. Israel can shell the Gaza Strip, and Bahrain and Syria can kill and imprison protesters, but no one is going to war with them, Libyan officials say.
“Even if we suppressed protests, dozens of countries suppressed protests,” government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said. “The Security Council said the Libyan government committed massacres. Of course people died, but it’s not on that scale.”
Officials who worked hard to repair relations with the West during the past decade complain of feeling “betrayed” by their former friends in Washington and London, saying the West abandoned them almost overnight.
“I'm not defending what happened — there was bad management — but it doesn’t warrant war,” said one senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely.
“Okay, so there were demonstrations and some policemen got upset. So what is the role of ambassadors? What is the point of building up good relations? Ambassadors are there to mediate, cool things down.”
In the narrative of the Libyan government as peacemaker and victim, reform was already coming to Libya under the guidance of Gaddafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam.
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