The ghost of Gaddafi

In 2023, Albany Associates (at which I am the Senior Research Executive) undertook research for a report on Kremlin information operations outside the Western environment on behalf of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. This report will be published in 2024. Among the most common narratives we found was NATO as an aggressor.

To reinforce this perception, the Kremlin and other actors have undertaken a rehabilitation campaign of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Having ruled Libya since 1969, he was killed in the 2011 civil war by rebels during a NATO intervention to protect civilians from his indiscriminate attacks. He is now portrayed as an assassinated hero.

The “Gaddafi-martyr” campaign has taken many forms: imagery of a young Gaddafi presiding over a supposedly flourishing Libya; videos of his address to the UN condemning the occupation of Iraq; his “warnings” to the international community that the West would “get him” for his condemnations of “NATO’s attempts to destroy Russia”; and side by side comparisons of Libya “before and after democracy”, with pictures of a ruined landscape – some of them not even of Libya.

While there was much to criticise about the international community’s handling of the aftermath of NATO’s intervention in Libya in 2011, Gaddafi deserves no mourning. His regime murdered thousands of Libyans (at least 1,000 in a single day) and his sponsorship of terrorist groups further destroyed and ruined lives abroad. Despite comparatively high standards of living, Libya trailed far behind other oil-rich states. What oil revenues Gaddafi directed to public services were slim compared to lavish expenses on himself, his clan, and his brutal security system that maintained his regime for forty-two years. Neither was he much loved in the Middle East or Africa, where he was at best viewed as the neighbourhood’s “crazy uncle” — or, worse, as a serious menace.

So how has Gaddafi’s ghost occupied the ethernet as a champion of the downtrodden against the West? The reality is that Gaddafi’s rehabilitation is symptomatic of several coinciding and interlinking factors that are all being exploited by malign actors: a surge in historical revisionism, the democratisation of information, and a general crisis of faith in Western-style democracy.

The first factor is a surge in historical revisionism; specifically, a reckoning with the crimes of colonialism. A racial reckoning in the West has long been developing, but it has accelerated during the recent years marked by migration and refugee crises, populism, and the Black Lives Matter movement. These have caused a reflection on and legitimate criticism of the unaddressed aspects of the West’s legacy of colonialism. This has not just occurred within the West, but also in the wider international community. As the NATO intervention in Libya and its impacts were both recent and lasting, it naturally came under scrutiny — especially in the Saharan and sub-Saharan regions of Africa. The intervention in these regions is held responsible, by locals, and not without reason, for the wave of weapons and instability that is still fuelling jihadist insurgencies and military coups in the region.

Historical revisionism is an important part of historiography and a method of creating lessons learned in policy making; but it is also easily exploited by malign actors who have domestic expertise in manipulating information and weaponising narratives. The Kremlin has historically been at the forefront of these efforts, both in terms of output and the breadth of disinformation narratives employed. Anti-imperialism was at the centre of Soviet “information confrontation” doctrine. To take one example: Operation DENVER (aka INFEKTION, an attempt to frame the CIA for having caused the AIDS pandemic) is deemed to be one of the most successful campaigns in KGB history. Doubts over the origin of AIDS, in some circles, continue to this day.

However, these narratives initially required dominance of information infrastructure and communications economy (or at least sympathetic media abroad) and usually originated within states before being projected outward. And although Gaddafi’s own attempts to extend his cult abroad as the uncrowned “King of Africa” laid the groundwork for his current resurgence, the Gaddafi-martyr campaign is emblematic of how much more swiftly this can now occur in the age of the information revolution.

The reason for the increase in proliferation is heavily linked to the democratisation of information. Much has been written about how social media and online forums have led to the loss of the traditional gatekeepers of what became public knowledge. On the one hand, this has been beneficial for accountability, speaking truth to power and empowering civil society movements. It is difficult to imagine phenomena like the Arab Spring occurring without the unrestricted information flows that social media provided. But on the other hand, the democratisation of information can be hijacked by the malign and misinformed with equal ease.

The authentic appearance of commentators on social media, their separation from the “mainstream media” and their opposition to “the establishment” creates a false impression of being uncorrupted. The Kremlin profits from this through decentralised networks of paid propagandists, inauthentic profiles, and voices who will amplify any “anti-establishment” cause, either for ideological reasons or for personal reward. These influencers may not fully comprehend what they are doing by empowering an authoritarian government, still less its ultimate goals. They are the modern equivalents of Lenin’s “useful idiots”.

Compounding the impact of these machinations is a general crisis of faith in “Western-style democracy”. Nowhere is this greater than Africa. There have been nine coups on the continent since 2020. Meanwhile polls by Afrobarometer show a rise in approval of military rule since 2014 and that approval of democracy is at its lowest level in ten years, which has been reflected in declining turnout in local elections.

Some of this disillusionment is grounded in perceptions of a lack of delivery by following the democratic path. Despite the significant resources available on the African continent and its overall net gains in democracy from the end of the Cold War to the mid 2010s, economic insecurity remains high. Much of this insecurity is explained by the “resource curse theory”: the idea that abundant mineral resources increase likelihood of inequality and corruption due to their ease of movement via grey and black markets. Insecurity is further compounded by weak democratic institutions perpetually undermined by in-country forces or third parties, climate change-driven catastrophes and other recent shocks, such as the Covid pandemic.

But to many Africans this endemic insecurity is evidence that the game is, at best, broken or, worse, rigged. The 2008 financial crisis and the apparent success of the Chinese Communist Party’s model of economic development without democracy further reinforced these perceptions. In the words of one unnamed official “when China comes, they bring a cheque book; you Westerners bring a rulebook”.

At the same time, perceptions of Western double standards in the application of human rights are pervasive — something that is likely to grow in the light of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Against a background of disinformation campaigns conducted by malign actors and useful idiots, Western policies past and present undergo historical revisionism until the truth is unrecognisable. Consequently, the image of Gaddafi changes from that of a murderous dictator, whose military capability was destroyed under the remit of a UN Security Council resolution to protect civilians from his brutal reprisals, into a noble opposition figure, assassinated by his enemies for his resolute defence of Africa from the depredations of the West.

Considering the number of issues affecting international security at the present time, some may ask whether this should be considered an urgent matter. But this kind of online distortion translates into real world effects, including intentional and unintentional justifications for violence. Malign historical revisionism is at the heart of the Kremlin’s propaganda against Ukraine to undermine the concept that Ukraine is an independent and sovereign country. Outside the Western environment the Kremlin has taken this further. It has leveraged the West’s legacy of colonialism and the Soviet Union’s support of liberation movements to foster suspicion of everything from Western vaccines to the concept of counterterrorism partnerships, depicting them not as methods of assistance but of control. Consequently, multilateral cooperation on shared issues suffers, creating knock-on effects that damage global stability.

An added danger is that the rehabilitation of criminal regimes could embolden current malign actors in their violations of international law. Confident in their ability to manipulate perceptions of their crimes in the present and then erase them altogether in the future, it is reasonable to think their risk appetites would grow — as would the horrors that come with it.

Ultimately many of the grievances that create a backdrop for this kind of disinformation to thrive will only be resolved by policymaking, including systemic reform of our international architecture, such as the G20 and the UN Security Council. Likewise, while the censorship of such content by online platforms leads to disputes over free speech, at the very least such content should be marked as misleading, and inauthentic profiles who amplify it should be disabled. This will require content moderation teams to be empowered and possibly contain sub-divisions dedicated to pre-empting state-sponsored propaganda.

But such initiatives will be slow to take effect. In the short and medium term, the West needs to generate decentralised networks of local experts, who can broadcast anti-authoritarian messaging in formats and styles that will resonate with local populations. This requires investment, but it is also important that Western partners remain public but largely silent partners in this. Their role is to contribute resources but avoid any input into editorial policies, utilising transparency to ensure this is publicly known. At the same time, messaging should emphasise that the values of international law and the UN Charter, which figures like Gaddafi and Putin continually violate, are not a purely Western construct, as is so often suggested. While the foundation of the UN in 1945 was driven by the major Western powers and the Soviet Union, its core principles of sovereignty and observance of human rights were later endorsed by the Non-Aligned Movement, which emerged after the Bandung Conference of 1955 and was founded in 1961.

The message of George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four is: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Such control of the information realm no longer ends at the borders of totalitarian states. If we are to create a more stable future, we cannot neglect the past, nor the ghosts used to manipulate it.

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