Missing the Dictator: What Gaddafi Nostalgia Gets Right and Wrong

A Funeral in Bani Walid

They buried him next to his brother, not his father. On 6 February 2026, thousands filled Bani Walid for the funeral of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, carrying portraits and the green flag of the Jamahiriya, chanting that the martyrs’ blood would not be shed in vain, and laying him beside Khamis, the soldier son killed in 2011. Tripoli’s interior ministry had promised to secure the funeral in a town of some 100,000. The flags are the thing to watch. Bani Walid parades them every September on the anniversary of the 1969 coup, and they were not sewn for Saif. Nobody misses Saif’s rule, because he never ruled: the green at his graveside was for his father.

Three days earlier, four masked gunmen had entered his compound in Zintan and shot him dead. They had disabled the security cameras first before he was killed in a “cowardly and treacherous assassination”. No one has claimed the killing; claiming it, as one analyst observed, could invite retribution. The Attorney General opened an investigation. Saif had registered as a presidential candidate in 2021, for elections that were then repeatedly postponed. He died a candidate-in-waiting, confined to a house in a town not his own, still the only figure who could plausibly have gathered the scattered loyalist constituencies.3 4 Tim Eaton of Chatham House wrote on 5 February that both the Tripoli government and the Haftar family stood to benefit from his death.3 That is an analyst’s reading of a moving situation, offered two days after the killing, and this essay asserts nothing about the gunmen.

What it does assert, however, is that the grief in Bani Walid was real, and that it was not only about the man in the grave. The mourners were not 'Libyans': they were one town's share of a scattered constituency, mourning something through him. Which leaves the question this essay exists to answer. The flags had already dismissed whether Gaddafi was good or bad as beside the point. The real question is this: what exactly did Libya lose in 2011, and who built the conditions under which losing one man meant losing everything?

No Single Nostalgia

Who was standing in that crowd? The closest thing to an answer with a number in it comes from Arab Barometer, whose 2022 survey, the last national survey conducted in Libya before Saif’s death,  found that 45 per cent of Libyans trusted him a great deal or quite a lot, against 39 per cent for the sitting prime minister, Abdulhamid Dbeibah. Handle that figure with gloves. Trust in the heir is not longing for the father, and longing is not a wish to restore anything: the one hard number on record measures the wrong thing. The before-and-after question itself has been asked outright at national scale exactly once, in the last weeks of 2011, when Oxford Research International surveyed a country at its euphoric peak: 82 per cent of Libyans called the revolution absolutely right. The recurring survey that spans the decade in which the nostalgia actually accreted never carries the item, so no defensible number for the feeling exists, because the asking and the feeling never met. What exists is a trend, one Libyan in five calling the economy good in 2019, half the share of five years earlier, and behavior: flags, funerals, a September parade.

Sirte, the city that made Gaddafi, wears the loyalist reputation, earned by its history and visible in the green cloth at the funeral. But the heartland is not one feeling. Haniya Salem Abukhirais, the only woman elected to Sirte’s municipal council in 2014, waited out the ISIS occupation and finally took up her seat in 2017, telling UN Women she was adamant to rebuild the city, and calling the post-2011 municipal elections a first clear break with the past in local governance. Gaddafi’s birthplace produced a named woman who talks about building new, not restoring old. Whoever in Sirte mourns him by name has not yet entered the verifiable record; that chair stays empty rather than filled by guesswork.

Some of the crowd’s counter-currents mourn against it. For example, the families of Abu Salim kept vigil for the regime’s victims years before 2011, and they’ll get their full hearing later in this essay. Also, Tawergha’s forty thousand, displaced wholesale by revolutionary forces in 2011, grieve a town rather than a ruler, and fit neither the green frame nor the revolutionary one.

And in Jadu, in the Nafusa mountains, in July 2011, a fifteen-year-old named Mira taught children the Berber script in an evening classroom, an act that, months earlier, could have meant one of Gaddafi’s jails. Her own teachers had learned the language in secret at home. Similarly, a father in the same town had been forced to register his daughter Tala under an Arabic name due to the banning of Amazigh names.9 Amazigh grief runs the other way entirely: it is for what the four decades took, and no green flag carries it.

The diaspora splits. The Libyan academic Mustafa Fetouri (sympathetic to the old order) was at the funeral, by Owen Schalk’s reporting; the exiles who mobilized against the regime have their own dead to name, and will. No matched pair of quotes balances that sentence, and it stays unbalanced. So the crowd yields “who” and “what”, but never how many. And the “what”, whenever a mourner names it, is a list of working things: a salary, a safe street, a house, a state that answered. Whether those things were ever really his is the ledger’s question.

Gaddafi nostalgia remembers a real loss. Many Libyans knew more security, more provision, and more predictability before 2011 than they do now. The main contrast here lies in how the memory is recalled: it misleads when comparison hardens into causation, when the working parts of the old state are credited entirely to the man, when those the order excluded or harmed drop out of view, and when the collapse that followed is read as proof that personalized rule was necessary. The collapse itself indicts the intervention and the governments and armed men who came after, yet it also exposes how little institutional life Gaddafi ever let exist apart from himself.

The Ledger: What Was Actually There

Take the mourners’ list seriously, because the things on it existed. In 2010, the United Nations ranked Libya 53rd of 169 countries on human development, the highest place in Africa, with the caveat that Africa’s usual leader, the Seychelles, had been dropped from that year’s tables for missing data. Life expectancy stood at 74.5 years. Healthcare and schooling were free, and a broad public payroll flattened the social ladder. By the end of 2010 the state’s foreign assets had reached 150 billion dollars, close to 160 per cent of national output. Whether the institutions behind these functions deserved the name is a question this essay preserves for later.

Eight days before Benghazi rose, on 9 February 2011, the IMF’s board concluded its annual review of Libya, commending the authorities for their ambitious reform agenda in the same document that observed unemployment had remained high, particularly among the youth.12 Reading it now, the two sentences seem to describe different countries. They described one.

The far column of the ledger is today’s Libya, where the central bank devalued the dinar by 13.3 per cent in a single move in April 2025 and a good economic year means the oil terminals stayed open. On the first claim, then, the nostalgia was right: life was materially better under the old state than after it. The ledger holds that finding. It does not close the case because the next claim is where the arithmetic turns.

Was life as good as the endowment allowed? The four decades were not one country. Through the sanctions decade, the economy stagnated, and by 2002, real income per head had fallen 27 per cent below its 1985 level. The boom that followed, 2003 to 2010, is the country the nostalgia mostly remembers, and it was also the window of Saif’s reforms: sanctions lifted, investment returned, incomes climbed. Yet, at the peak, in 2010, real income per head still sat roughly eight per cent below 1985.14 Youth unemployment ran at 25 to 30 per cent by the government’s own estimate to the IMF, with overall unemployment being officially 13.5 per cent, and figures later supplied to the IMF staff said 26. 

Where did the difference go? Some of it sat. Between June and September 2010, the Libyan Investment Authority’s balance at HSBC swelled to 1.42 billion dollars. Some of it evaporated. In 2008, the LIA had paid about 1.2 billion dollars in premiums on derivative trades that expired worthless in 2011. It sued Goldman Sachs and lost, the court finding no undue influence, which leaves the episode a plain record of how the endowment was managed. A sovereign fund wagering at that scale while the housing list stood still is the adequacy question answered in miniature.

Both columns are true at once, and holding them together is the argument: Libya in 2010 was better than Libya today and worse off than its endowment allowed, simultaneously. One warp in the record should be named rather than corrected. The old state’s welfare is crisply measurable, in tables it was proud of, while the new disorder is mostly testimony; and the same old state under-documented its own atrocities, so the archive flatters it twice. The goods were real, then: rent-bought, unevenly minded, real. Who deserves the credit for them is a different claim entirely, and a lawyer in Benghazi is about to interrupt it.

Why The Goods Became The Man’s

To answer how a welfare state becomes one man’s “gift” to his people, we start with the money. It was scarcely taxed out of Libyans at all: oil supplied roughly ninety-six per cent of government revenue,15 and the IMF’s retrospective description of the model is exact, a regime that used oil revenues to provide grants, increase salaries and expand subsidies. A state that taxes must bargain with its citizens. A state that distributes chooses them, and Libya under Gaddafi was the second kind in nearly its purest form.

It was a rule that distribution was never neutral administration. In the late 1970s, property changed hands by decree, homes to their tenants, companies to their employees, until property rights, as Wolfram Lacher phrases it, “dissolved into chaos”. The same order provided free healthcare and schooling and a public payroll broad enough to flatten the social ladder, and it gained real support by doing so.18 The beneficiaries of these capricious measures, Lacher notes, were many, and the loyalty they returned was real. What a Libyan received marked where they stood with the regime. Provision was the politics.

What made the giver singular was everything missing around him. Dirk Vandewalle's

A History of Modern Libya opens precisely on this: a state kept almost without institutions, its formal structures too hollow to stand apart from the leader. On Vandewalle's account, that hollowness was design rather than neglect.19 Nothing, no parliament with a life of its own, no party that outgrew him, no court anyone feared on its account, accumulated between the oil and its recipients. The goods arrived with no visible author but one. Budget lines are anonymous. Gifts have names. So in the remembered version, the salary comes from him, the clinic wears his face, and the flat was his gift. The memory is faithful to the staging, and the staging was the work.

In the end, the credit claim survives by never looking sideways: the ledger has already shown how far Libya’s own performance fell short of what its resources should have allowed. Those inside the loyalist current do not really dispute the mechanism. Fetouri, speaking from within it, describes what remains today as a socio-political movement more than a party,10 which is what a patronage state leaves behind when the patron goes. Hold the mechanism still and the fusion comes into focus. Rent flowed through one man's staging into daily life, and nothing institutional stood beside him to inherit the role. That fusion has a bill attached, and this essay presents it when it reaches the collapse. The point here is narrower. The goods were the state's, the state was scaffolding around one person, and the scaffolding, as the next section shows, sorted more than salaries. It sorted whose safety counted.

Whose Safety The Old Order Protected

At half past three in the afternoon of 15 February 2011, five Internal Security officers arrived at the Benghazi home of Fathi Terbil, lawyer and spokesman for the families of Abu Salim's victims, arrested him and took his laptop. By nine that evening dozens of the families had gathered outside Internal Security headquarters to ask for him back; by late night they were hundreds, met with tear gas, batons and plainclothes men. He was released before dawn, but the protests were not.

To understand why a lawyer for dead prisoners had clients at all, go back to June 1996. When guards at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison put down a protest over conditions, a kitchen worker named Hussein al-Shafa'i reckoned the dead at around 1,200, and he reckoned it the only way available to a man in a kitchen: by counting the meals he prepared before the shooting and after. Human Rights Watch, reporting his account, said plainly that it could not verify it; an exiled opposition group put the toll at 1,170 and could attach no names. The method is the point. No firm number exists because the state that did the killing kept the count to itself, the same reason, from the other direction, that no firm number measures the nostalgia. What the families had instead of numbers were certificates: Farag al-Awani's brother Ibrahim was taken from the family home in 1995, aged twenty-five, and seven years later the family received a death certificate with no cause of death and no body. "We just want to know what happened and to have the body back," al-Awani said. The families kept vigil for years. Terbil was the vigil's lawyer.

Hold that beside Bani Walid, ten years after Gaddafi's death, where AFP found the green flags still flying, a board of martyrs' photographs above a pile of mortar shells, and residents open about their longing. "We still cling to the past because back then we had security, which is the main thing that's missing in Libya today," the engineer Fethi al-Ahmar said in October 2021. A tour operator, Fouad Fazzani, remembered the same order from the other end of the country: the airport with daily flights to Europe, the thousands of tourists he moved across Libya in the last years before 2011. He is not misremembering, and neither is al-Ahmar; the question al-Ahmar's word carries is what the security was made of, and the families outside Internal Security had spent years learning the answer.

The order concentrated its violence on people it could name, the prisoner counted in meals, the vigil-keeping family, the teacher of a banned alphabet, and so it passed most doors by; that is what made the safety real at those doors, and conditional at all of them. Keeping clear of politics was not a temperament; it was the discipline the system taught. And the price list was policy, adjusted by its author. In the 1980s the regime jailed dozens of Amazigh intellectuals, accusing them of plotting against the state; the same hand later slackened its grip, allowing Saif's overtures to the Amazigh in the years Libya was rebuilding ties with the West. Which is why the essay has already visited a Jadu classroom in July 2011, where Mira's evening lessons in that same alphabet were an act that, in the Reuters correspondent's words, "once could have landed her in one of Muammar Gaddafi's jails". The ban needed no repealing, only a liberated town in which to lapse.

In Bani Walid, Mohammad Abi Hamra, a Gaddafi-faced wristwatch on his arm, told AFP that before 2011 Libyans had been masters of their destiny, and counted the decade since in injustice, bombing, killing and kidnapping.22 The memory of safety in this essay is treated as accurate, because it is. The error is inferential. A safe street proves the street was safe. It does not prove the order was, and the town that could not ask where its prisoners went had no way to price the difference until the bill arrived. One page of that ledger stays folded here: Tawergha's forty thousand, loyal to the old order, met their catastrophe from the revolution's side, and their case belongs to the next movement. So does the claim it complicates. The safety was real, and it had a price list, itemised, named, kept current by the man who wrote it; the argument that the collapse proves Libya needed him arrives already owing an answer for who paid. 

Why The Collapse Does Not Vindicate Him

The claim comes plainest in the street: look what happened without him. It is the strongest card the nostalgia holds, and it deserves to be met on its own ground, because the wreckage is real. But a wreck can indict the thing that broke, the thing that broke it, or both, and this one indicts nearly everyone who touched it.

Let’s look at the design. Emadeddin Badi's study of the Libyan state finds that Gaddafi ran it through parallel security forces, Revolutionary Guards, Security Brigades, a People's Militia, and "significantly weakened the cohesion of the armed forces by engaging in systematic coup-proofing measures", with succession and military command "almost all individually managed by him". Dirk Vandewalle's history calls the result a state kept almost without institutions. That fragility showed in February 2011: General Abd al-Fattah Yunis, the interior minister and former head of the special forces, announced his allegiance to the opposition with eight other officers in the east, and a major general commanding at Tobruk, the deputy commander of the special forces, a senior intelligence officer, and entire units followed. The defections did not cause the fragility. They exposed what the design had made.

The manner of the removal is where the nostalgia scores its fair points, and they are fair. Britain's own parliament, reviewing the intervention in 2016, found that the government "could not verify the actual threat to civilians", "selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value", and built a strategy "founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence"; a mission to protect civilians "drifted into a policy of regime change by military means”. Barack Obama, asked in 2016 to name the worst mistake of his presidency, answered: "Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya". Whether it was the right thing stays contested, Alan Kuperman argues the intervention magnified the harm it claimed to prevent, Derek Chollet and Ben Fishman, both Obama officials, defend the decision in retrospect, and this essay does not settle it. The collapse establishes something narrower: not that removing him was the mistake, only that removing him with no plan for the vacuum was.

And the vacuum drew a crowd. By the 2019-20 phase of the war the UN Panel of Experts found that Jordan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates "routinely and sometimes blatantly supplied weapons", with Russian fighters of the Wagner group deployed alongside the eastern forces. The suppliers are not the story the nostalgia tells, but they share its page.

Tawergha is where the accounting turns to flesh. A town loyal to Gaddafi and used as a staging ground for the 2011 siege of Misrata, its population of some 40,000 was driven out wholesale by Misratan forces once the war turned. Their advocates documented the arbitrary arrest of thousands, the torture of civilians and the wholesale expulsion of the town, in what Human Rights Watch called ethnic cleansing and they themselves called "a scar on the face of Libya's revolution". Their catastrophe came from the revolution's side, and the institutions that might have prevented the expulsion, secured a return, or imposed accountability were not there to do it, because the man now mourned had spent forty years keeping them too weak to act apart from him. Each agent holds something: the post-2011 forces hold the keys to the emptied town, the design holds the void that let it stay empty, the outside powers hold the crates.

So the chaos does not prove the country needed him. Collapse was the default his statecraft had set, not a fate but a setting, one that agency distributed across his planners, his removers and his heirs could have overridden and did not. The stability the nostalgia mourns and the vacuum it dreads were laid down by the same hand. Which leaves the question the feeling has been pointing at all along: if the memory is right about the loss and wrong about the cause, what is it actually saying?

What Kind of Nostalgia This Is

If the memory is right about the loss and wrong about its cause, what is it? Here, one borrowed distinction earns its place, and only one. Svetlana Boym separates two ways of longing for a lost home. Restorative nostalgia wants to rebuild the home and does not think of itself as nostalgia at all, "but rather as truth and tradition"; it runs on two plots, the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia stays inside the longing, keeps company with the irrevocability of the past, and distrusts every plan to return.

The two are not two camps of people. The same mourner, the same green flag, can hold both at once: grief for a lost order and a wish to raise it again, folded together and impossible to weigh from the outside. Which is why the trust figure and the flags cannot by themselves prove any mandate to restore. A programme of restoration is a separate thing from the mourning, and would have to be brought to it from elsewhere.

That gap is also what marks off the foreign nostalgia. Gaddafi keeps admirers abroad who never lived under him, in pan-African commentary that remembers him as one of its own. Theirs is the memory of a symbol. Distance changes what can be remembered; they are not fools, but they mourn an argument. The Libyan memories in this essay were formed inside the order itself, and what living inside it produced, loyalty, grief, resentment, sometimes all three, is why that memory quarrels with itself. Sirte's is not Tawergha's is not the diaspora's, and that quarrel is the surest sign the thing was lived.

The pattern is not peculiar to Libya. In Iraq, twenty years on, more now say life was better under Saddam than say it is better today, a result the pollster who has tracked opinion there since 2003 reads as "a rejection of the current regime" more than nostalgia for the former. A verdict like that is less about the ruler than about the state that came after, the past borrowed as a language for the present. Treat Gaddafi mainly as a geopolitical symbol and something drops from view: Hisham Matar circling the fact of his father inside Abu Salim, Mira teaching a once-forbidden alphabet in a mountain classroom.9 Neither is nostalgia for the man, and neither is propaganda against him. They are what a lived order leaves in the people who lived it, the one thing a symbol cannot carry, and the one thing any settlement will have to reckon with.

Back To Bani Walid

So take the memory as what it is, information, and it reads out as a schedule of demands, most of them old. When Oxford Research International surveyed Libya that December, weeks after the war ended and before the later nostalgia examined here had consolidated, 51 per cent named fighting crime and disorder their first priority for the year ahead; asked what the country would need within twelve months, 42 per cent chose a strong leader or a group of them, and 15 per cent chose a form of democracy.6 Stability, salaries, a state that answered when it was called: these wants were on the table before the nostalgia had formed to gather them under Gaddafi's flag.

What the fourteen years since have done is fuse them to him. Each of those services had been delivered as his personal gift, staged and signed, until in the memory that mourns him the service and the giver set into one object, hard to wish for apart. That fusion is the memory's whole political charge: a demand fused to a remembered ruler is one that anyone can promise to meet by claiming his mantle.

At Bani Walid, they lowered Saif into the ground beside his brother while the old green flags moved in the desert wind, each one at once a dead man's banner and the emblem of the order his father ran. The mourners raised them, and did not say, and did not need to say, whether what they were mourning was a person or a country.