This week Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was killed in Libya, by civilian protesters, putting and end to any remaining conflict about Libyan leadership, the search for Gaddafi, and inadvertently, the legitimacy of the NATO intervention or those of the UN Security Council and the ICC. Reports emerge that the ICC has demanded access to the body of Gaddafi and that investigations into the cause of his death have been launched.
Indeed no-one seems exactly sure how he died– reports concur that it was related to battles in Surt, Gaddafi’s hometown, and that rebel fighters were involved. But the question posed by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in investigating the death of Gaddafi seems to rest on whether he died in battle or was assainated.
If he died in battle, the era of Gaddafi can be neatly tied in an international narrative of the end of a vicious authoritarian and a new revolutionary, and moral unblemished ( save of course the troubling reports of rape, ethnic based attacks and regional conflicts that mar the rebels) government emerging. The rebels and others are aiding in this narrative, claiming Gaddafi was a coward whose last words were “Show me mercy!”, or “What did I do to you?” and complemented with the words in the title of this post: “Do you know right from wrong?”
The latter invokes the uncomfortable reality that the UN and the ICC and the OHCHR must address: how to manage justice and revolution? Again, the question of whose justice emerges, but this time all parties agree that Gaddafi’s death was no great loss–however in terms of what lessons this might teach about the right to kill, administrating justice and the morality of revolution, the OHCHR has for the moment equated justice and morality with a strictly legal and institutional framework indicating that the killing of Gaddafi “robbed his victims of a chance at “cathartic” justice in the courts.”
