Special Report: Six years after the U.S. helped “moderate rebels”
overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has gone from enjoying the highest
standard of living in Africa to a failed state where live human
auctioning for sex slavery is out in the open in Libya, where groups
like ISIS have overrun the nation.
Gaddafi used state money to
offer a variety of popular services including free electricity,
interest-free loans, grants to newlyweds, legal rights to housing,
maternity bonuses for new mothers, free
education, 50-percent subsidies on new car purchases and free
healthcare. The country’s literacy rate also rose from 25 to 87 percent
during his time as its leader. In addition, Gaddafi nationalized Libya’s
central bank and kept Libya free of external debt.
Gaddafi committed a cardinal sin in the lead-up to his assassination –
not against the Libyan people, but against the hegemony of the U.S.
dollar. In the early 2000s, Gaddafi had saved up a large amount of gold
and planned to introduce a gold-backed pan-African currency based on the
Libyan dinar in order to restore economic strength to a continent
besieged by neocolonialism. He had planned to start selling Libyan oil
using the dinar before the 2011 invasion, a move that would have
challenged the petrodollar system – an agreement negotiated in the 1970s
where OPEC nations sell their oil in dollars in order to create
artificial demand for the currency.
