So Colonel Gaddafi is gone. Few will mourn his death, least of all in Libya, his desert homeland.
I have visited Tripoli many times and have several friends there, and I’m the co-author of a scientific paper in the Libyan Medical Journal. I was impressed by the development of that country in those early years when I was helping to train their present generation of doctors. Gaddafi himself once slipped into the back of the Medical School lecture-hall to check up on the performance of an expat lecturer. Those were the good days.
But I also knew Flora Swire, that promising young Nottingham physiologist who died on PamAm 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. Jim Swire, her GP father, took up the cause of the British victims and says today that he wished Gaddafi could have been arraigned before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The next (and last) time I visited Libya I had to go by cattle-boat from Malta because of the UN sanctions preventing flights in and out of Tripoli. I went to see the Tripoli cathedral that had been turned into a mosque.
Our Christian concept of justice encompasses law rather than vengeance, mercy rather than punishment: we have moved on from David and Goliath. But of the several Moslem tyrants recently overthrown by local and international action, only two have faced a court of law. Now Muammar Gaddafi joins Osama bin Laden in suffering summary execution.
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Correction: A letter from Prince Charles to Col Gaddafi, published this week, suggests that the Maidan al Jazair Square mosque had recently been reconverted back to a church.
