Strange things happen in Mogadishu airport. Day 1 and a British national suspected of al-Qaeda ties is detained. Porn, suspicioussubstances and traditional Arab dress in his luggage. I hotfoot it down to the police station to discover a black man in white Lonsdale vest and blue tracksuit trousers. Only a British Islamist would dress so badly. He says his legal and human rights have been so badly abused in the UK that he has come to Mogadishu to look for a decent lawyer.Then he trots out a story about making his way down the East African coast,starting somewhere “peaceful and sunny”. In fact, he was haplessly trying to get to the port of Kismayo, headquarters of al-Shebab, the local insurgentsallied with al-Qaeda, “to help the Muslims”, as he later tells the cameras.

He appears not to have done his homework. First, 99 per cent of Somalis don’t like al-Shebab. In its latest report on Somalia, Human Rights Watch notes the group’s fondness for “floggings, summary executions and public beheadings”. Second, the authorities, who are currently waging war rather successfully against them with the robust support of African Union forces (Amisom), are hardly likely to wave him through to their enemy. He is quickly deported back to the UK — with an enforced stopover at the British Embassy in Nairobi.

Apart from wannabe Islamists, the airport has recently entertained other exotic creatures: the pair of lion cubs that a local smuggler tried to fly out of Somalia, only to be frustrated by an alert sniffer dog.Then there was a British team of hostage negotiators who arrived in two planes carrying $3.6 million cash for a captured Chinese ship. “They like to use a slower propeller plane from Mogadishu so they can drop the money on the deck,” says my local kidnap and ransom expert. Somali immigration arrested the Brits and relieved them of their dollars.

And don’t forget the two daily flights from Kenya bursting with sacks of qat, the mildly hallucinogenic stimulant that Somalis chew by the ton.

Traffic signal

The last time I was here, a year ago, you wouldn’t dream of travelling across town unless you could hitch a ride in an Amisom Casspir armoured personnel carrier. It’s a sign of the times that these days you can hop into a car and hightail it to Villa Somalia, the presidential compound on a bluff overlooking the city, without so much as a second thought, bar the occasional IED. In the absence of al-Shebab, who were ousted last summer, new markets, street cafés and exuberantly decorated shops have sprung up and are doing a brisk trade. There are even traffic jams, a sure sign ofprogress.

On the journey from the new front line, three miles outside the capital, we pass scenes of utter destruction, misery and human squalor — it’s heartbreaking to compare them with 1950s photos of elegant, tree-lined boulevards, graceful fountains and broad-fronted palaces. Peace and an internationally recognised government have come to Mogadishu for the first time in 20 years. Can the politicians now step up to the plate and extend it nationwide?

Captain Mole

Trying to find out, I have an appointment with Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, the Prime Minister. Mild-mannered, bespectacled and barefooted, the gentleman sitting in front of his laptop is more Mole of Wind in the Willows than Mogadishu warlord. A lot is riding on the shoulders of this Somali-American technocrat, economics professor and tax expert, ex-Harvard,Vanderbilt, World Bank and UN, who is steering Somalia through the Scylla and Charybdis of the final four months of transitional government to a new constitution and elections in August.

Parliament will be cut from 550 to 225 MPs, a sensible trimming of one of the world’s more venal assemblies. Every year since 2007, Transparency International has rated Somalia the most corrupt country in the world. Yet as Peter De Clercq, of the UN’s political mission, argues: “It’s more important than ever for the Somali leaders to be seen as credible and transparent.”

The PM sighs. Good governance and the fight against corruption are priorities. “This is a very difficult and thankless job. Sometimes it gets me down. But it’s rewarding. It’s a duty call, our generational responsibility to make Somalia better for our children and great-grandchildren. If I don’t do it, who will?”

Justin Marozzi is a senior adviser at Albany Associates and the author of The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus

It was instantly terrifying. One moment we were driving quietly down the final stretch of the airport road into the southern Libyan oasis town of Ghadames, then suddenly, out of the darkness, armed men rushed into the road and surrounded our car. A band of Touareg — immediately recognisable from the cotton tagilmus veils wrapped around their heads — ordered us to stop.

“Stop the car! They’re going to shoot!” I shouted, as the car slowed. I was convinced we were not going to stop in time and they were going to fire straight through the windscreen. We would be dead in seconds.

“Get out of the car!” they screamed. Whichever way I looked, I was staring down the barrel of an AK-47 into the adrenaline-charged face of a man who looked as though he was going to pull the trigger. The windless calm of a desert night became a maelstrom of panic. In the driver’s seat my friend Taher, whom I have known since 1998, was shouting not to shoot. Sitting on his lap, his two-year-old son Mohammed started crying. A shrill note of distress came from Taher’s wife, shrouded from head to toe in black, in the back seat.

Before I had time to think, the Touareg were pulling me roughly out of the car on the passenger side, pointing rifles in my face and ordering me to lie down. Taher and his family were hauled out on the other side. I held up my hands in surrender, fearing summary execution. More screaming and jabbing of rifle barrels. Unseen hands grabbed me and threw me to the ground on my stomach. My arms were pulled up painfully behind my back and tied tightly. I could no longer see what was happening to Taher and his family. Then my head was raised, a blindfold was pulled around my head and all was darkness and noise.

Hauled into the back of a pick-up, I was rammed down flat onto a thin mat while my legs scraped uncomfortably against metal. Kalashnikovs, hands and feet shoved me into the required position. I felt completely powerless. They had prepared me for a roadside shooting and there was nothing I could do about it.
“Please,” I began feebly in Arabic.
“No please,” came a curt reply.

I kept silent for the next 30-40 minutes as we tore off into the desert, rearranged like luggage every few minutes. No one would know where we were. My wife in London and a couple of friends in Tripoli would not be expecting to hear from me for another 24-48 hours. I prayed the four of us would be spared.

I WONDERED how it had all happened on this, the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Years earlier, I had researched the history of the Touareg and written a book on Libya. Now I was heading to Ghadames to look up old friends and investigate suggestions that bad things had been happening in this far-flung oasis.

Historically uneasy relations between the town’s Arab-Berber population and the Touareg had apparently fractured into all-out conflict in the wake of the revolution that had ousted Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. For the past six months Gadaffi had been using a Touareg militia as his enforcers.

They had suppressed the initial uprising of February 20 with the regime’s customary brutality, rounding up, imprisoning and beating numerous Ghadamsis. On August 28 the town had risen up and thrown them out. A friend spoke of reprisals. Touareg homes had been torched and bulldozed. I had driven straight into an unreported front line.

For centuries, the Touareg, an ancient desert people, earned their living by escorting caravans through the Sahara. Merchants were “encouraged” to retain armed guards for the journey through areas under Touareg control. Those caravans that eschewed the protection racket were frequently plundered by the same men who had offered their services. James Richardson, the British explorer and anti-slave trade campaigner who travelled across the Libyan Sahara in 1845, was among the first Europeans to come into contact with the “Touarick”. They showed “an excessive arrogance”, he reported, and treated Ghadamsis with “great disdain, considering them as so many sheep which they are to protect from the wolves of the Sahara”. Sitting astride their magnificent white mehari camels, they looked “splendid and savage”.

My Touareg kidnappers, the Toyota Land Cruiser generation, certainly looked savage. The ragged wardrobe of T-shirts, filthy jalabiya robes, camouflage trousers and unkempt tagilmuses was anything but splendid.

Around this time, blindfolded face down in the back of a pick-up with hands tied and heart pumping, I began the sliding descent into fatalism that must be a common reaction to this sort of situation.

After about 40 minutes, the engine stopped. Hands hauled me to my feet. For some reason I imagined I was about to be thrown off a cliff and felt ridiculous going to my end so meekly. Instead I found myself on the ground. My hands were untied, the blindfold was kept on and arms guided me into the cabin of the pick-up where I was ordered to keep both hands on a handrail.
For another 90 minutes I clung on with clammy hands as we drove deeper into the Sahara. We stopped several times. At regular intervals came the disconcerting metallic click of men loading Kalashnikovs. Questions began. What was I doing going to Ghadames? Was I a spy? Why was I travelling when there was a war on? Was I working for Nato? What did I know about the Touareg? We stopped several times as different drivers took turns to ask me the same questions.

I explained I was a historian and journalist who had travelled in the Libyan Sahara with Touareg guides who had become good friends — perhaps they knew Abd al Wahab Behi? I loved Libya and admired the Touareg and their eastern counterparts of the desert, the Tabu. I had written a book about my expedition across the Sahara and wanted to find out more about the current situation.

Finally we stopped, I was pulled out and the blindfold was removed. It was an unforgettable sight. We were not quite at the bottom of a slight basin surrounded on three sides by dunes curving softly in black silhouettes. One side ran out into an unfathomable plain lit by an almost full moon. Above, the overwhelming dome of an indigo sky tapered gently into a pale blue halo ringing the horizon. The stars, already brilliantly clear, grew brighter by the minute. I couldn’t help thinking it would be hard to imagine a more beautiful place in which to meet one’s maker.
Behind me, halfway up the slope, was a cluster of silent Touareg. In front of me were three pick-ups and the beginnings of an overnight camp. I counted 16 men, all with Kalashnikovs.

A Touareg handed me a damp quilt and ordered me to lie down away from the main group. There was no sign of Taher and his family but I was told they were with us. I wrapped myself in the quilt and tried to sleep, as the Touareg made a fire. A clear mind would be more use than one fuzzy with exhaustion.

Much later, a man approached and offered food. I declined and asked for some water, regretting the chance to establish a rapport with my kidnappers but utterly without hunger. Around the campfire, the twentysomething Touaregs gossiped into the early hours.

Before dawn broke, one of the group hustled me awake and we were off. With huge relief I glimpsed Taher and his family 100 yards away, but was told not to look. On we drove.
Eventually, we spilt out of the pick-up, and I was handed some water, a plastic carton of olives, three tiny tins of tuna, half a pack of La vache qui rit cheese and an armful of half-stale bread and motioned to join Taher’s group.

“If they want to kill us, there’s nothing we can do about it,” I said. “It’s up to Allah.” Taher nodded at this statement of the obvious. “Of course, our lives are in the hands of Allah.”

Looking at Taher, I remembered the passage in Ahmed Hassanein Bey’s extraordinary book The Lost Oases, published in 1925, when he described how the Bedouin, when lost in the desert with exhausted camels and dwindling supplies of water, having received no answer to his prayers, would finally sink down upon the sands and await “with astounding equanimity the decreed death. This is the faith in which the journey across the desert must be made”.

This was an altogether different, entirely involuntary journey, but I understood this very Muslim and ultimately liberating reaction, at the heart of which lies the understanding that one’s life is in the hands of a higher, irresistible force.

“They told me if the Touareg prisoners in Ghadames are not released by 12 o’clock, they will kill all of us,” Taher said.

This tested my newfound fatalism rather more keenly than I had expected.

The sun rose and poured down the paralysing heat of a late Saharan summer. Our tiny patch of shade grew smaller and smaller. We squashed together to keep Taher’s wife and brave little child as cool as possible. Three of our captors kept watch on the highest dune far above us. We fell in and out of sleep.

As the deadline neared, I heard a pick-up approach and out jumped a couple of Touareg with their AK-47s and a spade. One started digging and my stomach tightened. This was it. He was digging our graves. A bullet in the head and a desert burial. Instead, he pulled out a thin strip of cloth and a couple of bamboo poles and erected a Heath Robinson shade. Another reprieve.
Around the hottest part of the day I was taken off separately. More questioning. An Algerian translator ran through the usual Nato-spy-infidel stuff. I repeated the desert-loving, Touareg-admiring lines and mentioned that only recently I had been talking to the head of the United Nations in Libya about the difficulties in the south and the problems of the Touareg. I might be able to help, I hinted. One of the kidnappers stepped forward.

“We want you to tell the world what has happened in Ghadames,” he said. “For 800 years we have lived together. The desert came before the city, the Touareg before the Arabs. All Libya is desert. But the Ghadamsis say no, we cannot live in the city any more. They have burnt and bulldozed our houses, killed our camels, sheep and goats, stolen our money and gold.”
I asked if I could take notes and scribbled furiously in my notebook, hastening the transformation from hapless hostage to working journalist. Slightly irritated by the constant kuffar (infidel) remarks, I told them that as a Christian I was one of the Ahl al-Kitab, or people of the book, a Koranic reference to the Christian, Jewish and Sabian religions. Encouragingly, they started calling me modeer, or director.

Then it was back into the pick-up and a long afternoon twisting and turning through an astonishingly beautiful sand sea, moving from the dazzling blandness of the desert into postcard scenes of wilting palms, dollops of green scrub and an ancient fort in what I later found was the tiny oasis of Mougazem. In the late afternoon we stopped for the obligatory tea, a ritual as beloved by the Touareg as the British. One of my captors drew a finger across his throat and said the Touareg were honourable people. They would not kill me. Night came, the stars swung up into the sky, and I was put into another pick-up with a blindfolded old man and Taher’s wife and child. Taher was being held until the Touareg prisoners were released, they said. They would take us towards Dirj, the next town north of Ghadames.

A couple of hundred yards away from the desert road the Toyota stopped. My mobile phone was thrust into my hands, there was a brief farewell handshake and the pick-up disappeared behind a blur of sand. It was over.

AT the time of writing, Taher is still being held in the desert. For the Touareg kidnappers, desperate remnants of Gadaffi’s forces, it is a dangerous and ill-advised move. It has widened the existing fractures within Ghadames. Even before the kidnap, many of the Touareg, whom the local council says number 1,800 of the population of 12,000, had fled, intimidated by the reprisals. “The Touareg can never come back,” says one Ghadamsi. “Not after this.”

Abubakr Haroun, a member of the local interim council, strikes an almost solitary note of reconciliation. “People are very angry now, but the Touareg are a part of Ghadames,” he says. “Of course, of course, of course they’ll come back and they’ll be represented on the council when we have elections.”

In this isolated oasis is a microcosm of the many challenges facing the new Libya. Ghadames needs the urgent attention of Tripoli and its international partners. Reconciliation here, as across Libya, must be the order of the day.

The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants.

For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs don’t do democracy. They are too tribal and fractious for such enlightened politics. For western leaders, it has been a case of better the devil you know, and hang the consequences for the Arabs.

Yet the success in Libya, hard on the heels of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and those so far frustrated efforts in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, suggests that Arabs from the Atlantic in the west to the Arabian Desert in the east are not willing to remain passive victims of dictatorships forever. We need to understand this new dynamic and support it. In the British media, however, there is a tendency to seek out the most pessimistic scenario, for Libya and the Arab world more widely.

Where Libyans talk of creating a new Dubai on the shores of the Mediterranean, sceptics mutter about another Somalia. Where optimists like the lavishly maned French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy pay tribute to the extraordinary breadth of interests represented by the National Transitional Council in Benghazi, cynics spot al-Qa’eda moving in to capitalise on the instability and point to the emergence of Islamists in post-revolution Egypt and Tunisia. Instead of hailing the council’s success at maintaining security, we are supposed to believe that the single assassination in Benghazi of rebel commander General Abdul Fattah Younes invalidates the entire Libyan campaign. It doesn’t.

When David Cameron took the lead in pushing for a no-fly zone back in February, the doom-mongers were already queuing up to denounce what they considered yet another Iraq or Afghanistan. As the campaign progressed, they were quick to detect a ‘stalemate’. The rebels were inevitably ‘divided’. Nato’s campaign, they argued, was ‘running into the sand’. The Italians wobbled, the French faltered (peace talks, anybody?), but London remained resolute. The prime minister maintains it was ‘necessary, legal and right’ to intervene in Libya. He’s been proved right.
Admiral James Stavridis, Nato’s head of Allied Command Operations, says that the key components of success were the legality provided by the UN Security Council mandate, Nato’s ability to draw on a sophisticated command and logistic structure in the Mediterranean, a shared burden of responsibility among the allies and realistic goals (establishing a no-fly zone, introducing an arms embargo and protecting civilians). To these could be added strong regional support against Gaddafi and an increasingly effective and emboldened opposition.

No one would be foolish enough, however, to suggest that it is ‘mission accomplished’ in Libya. Stavridis tells me that challenges abound: ‘The keys will be the new regime’s ability to establish coherent security and basic services, cope with the return of hundreds of thousands of Libyans now in refugee camps across the borders, avoid bloodshed and retribution, create governance along the lines suggested by the National Transitional Council — which include dates and benchmarks to full democracy and elections — and get the economy up and functioning, principally the energy sector.’

That is a tall order for any established government, let alone a transitional council. There is no question that the challenges facing Libyans after Gaddafi are monumental. After 42 years of monomaniacal rule, it would be perverse to think otherwise.
Pessimists will have plenty to cheer in the coming weeks and months. The age-old differences between Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the east will resurface from the very outset. Some politicians may prefer pistols to parliaments when vying for power or resolving a difference of opinion. Small tribes may feel disenfranchised by the larger, stronger ones. A predominantly command economy cannot be restructured overnight. Oil, that unrivalled lubricant of corruption, will test the mettle and integrity of Libya’s new leaders. It will also test to breaking point the patience of long-suffering Libyans, who have watched the Gaddafi clan plunder the national wealth for four decades.

Shukri Ghanem, the former oil minister, estimates it will take 18 months for Libya to get back to its pre-war level of oil production of 1.6 million barrels a day. That will be much too slow for all those Libyans who believe they have already waited long enough. A generation of Libyan leaders unaccustomed to addressing their fellow citizens will urgently need to communicate the scale of the challenges facing the country. Chaos is likely to loom on the sidelines. As Ronald Bruce St John writes in Libya: From Colony to Independence, after four decades spent studying the country, the post-Gaddafi era will be ‘a time of considerable tension and uncertainty, with numerous socioeconomic and political groups vying for power’.

So what reasons are there for cautious optimism? Well, so far the rebel leadership has barely put a foot wrong. With few resources, it has kept the peace across eastern Libya. The fact there has only been one high-level assassination to date is a remarkable success, not a telling indictment. Assisted by the UN, the UK and the US, the Council has drawn up a detailed stabilisation plan for the immediate post-Gaddafi era. More impressively, it has drafted a 37-point ‘constitutional declaration’ which, if enacted, moves Libya towards elections for a constitutional assembly within eight months. This body would appoint a transitional government, draft a constitution to be offered to Libyans for approval in a national referendum, and hold direct elections for a democratic government within 20 months. If, as is suggested, Jordan leads the international community’s transition to democracy team, with the West reduced to providing air cover, that is another encouraging sign. Fellow Arabs should make a better fist of it. No one wants another western boots-on-the-ground intervention.

So much for plans and political theory. What else of Libya and its people? If the rebels I met in my two recent visits to Libya are any guide, the omens are good. They were not vicious zealots or Islamists, but civilised and well-educated people intent on restoring peace and order as soon as they possibly could. Unlike Iraqis, who have been cutting each other’s heads off with gusto at least since the founding of Baghdad in 762, if not much longer, Libya is not riven by sectarian division. The tribes may have their tensions, but there is no Sunni-Shia split. As Guma al Gamaty, the UK co-ordinator for the rebel council, says, ‘We have no ethnic, religious or sectarian differences. We’re the most homogenous Arab society in the world.’ Libya’s Berbers might beg to differ, of course, but the point is well made.

Libyans have also been blessed with fortunate resources and geography. With even a half-decent government in place, the population of seven million should prosper from the black gold beneath the sand, 47 billion barrels of reserves and counting, together with 1.3 trillion cubic metres of gas. Given the immense oil reserves on one hand, and the tiny population on the other, the fact that a third of Gaddafi’s Libya has lived at or below the national poverty line shows the extent of his misrule.

Earlier this summer, I spoke to one businessman in Benghazi who told me, ‘I remember Sheikh Zayed of Dubai coming to Tripoli for an eye operation in 1978. He saw the city and said, “My God, I wish I could make Dubai like this.” Can you believe that?’
Since then Dubai has grown and developed, while Tripoli has stagnated. But now can Libya follow Dubai’s example? It might sound preposterous. There is no law which states that Libya must now descend into anarchy and civil war, nor is there any guarantee of freedom and democracy. Yet the chances of success here are higher than those in any other Arab country yet to take on its dictator. The truth, as every Libyan knows, is that the opportunity is theirs for the taking.

The last of the wartime travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, may have departed the scene, but the genre he graced is still thriving

The longest walk has finally come to an end. After the most dashing life of literary wanderings, in which he crossed a continent on foot, fell in love and ran away with a beautiful princess, galloped into battle in a Greek cavalry charge, secluded himself silently with Trappist monks, kidnapped a German general, became one of this country’s greatest war heroes, swam the Hellespont and built a sun-filled house in the Peloponnese where he wrote what may yet prove to be one of the finest trilogies in modern literature, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ultimate journey was the return home to die in Worcestershire at the age of 96, an Englishman to the last.

The death of Leigh Fermor — friends and fans called him Paddy — removes the last link to that generation of travel writers who fought with such distinction in the Second World War. The prospect of that elusive final volume, which would see our footsore traveller and philhellene complete his serendipitous, marathon-walking tour from the Hook of Holland to reach the city he insisted on calling Constantinople, sometimes Byzantium, never Istanbul, is little short of exhilarating. All his fans who cherish the densely beautiful prose of A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) will be thrilled to hear the news from his biographer Artemis Cooper that an early draft “will be published in due course”. The posthumous gift cannot come soon enough.

The celebration of a life so well lived is likely to bring a renewed flash of interest in travel writing, a genre that has, almost from its very outset, been revered and reviled in equal measure. We may not know what sort of reception greeted the “publication” on clay tablets of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest forerunner of travel writing, if not of literature itself, but we are certainly familiar with the mauling received by the Ancient Greek Herodotus, the first great travel writer and historian, an exuberant pioneer of anthropology, geography, exploration, investigative journalism, tabloid hackery and foreign reportage in the 5th century BC. Within little more than a century, Cicero’s “Father of History” had become Plutarch’s “Father of Lies”, a classical harbinger of the suspicion which has bedevilled the first-person travelogue ever since. From Herodotus to Leigh Fermor via Marco Polo, John Mandeville and Bruce Chatwin, the hostile image of travel writer as self-indulgent fantasist and fibber has never been shaken off entirely.

In May, the doyen of American travel writers. Paul Theroux dropped in at the Hay Festival to promote his latest work, The Tao of Travel, an engaging distillation of travellers’ wisdom and a vade mecum worth popping into the Globetrotter suitcase this summer. The blaze of publicity surrounding Paul Theroux’s handshake that ended a 15-year feud with V.S. Naipaul, another writer who has excelled in the genre, suggests that contrary to many predictions, travel writing is in robust health. From one generation to the next it shrugs off with insouciance the obituaries that are written for it periodically by writers as diverse and removed from each other as Joseph Conrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Indeed the temptation must be to conclude that travel writing, like the poor, will always be with us.

In Britain, which has a proud heritage in this field, the ranks of great travel writers have been sadly thinned in recent years. The monumental Sir Wilfred Thesiger, author of Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, last of the latter-day Victorian explorers, died in 2003. The same year saw the passing of the magnificent, under-appreciated Norman Lewis, whose Naples ’44 is one of the classic literary accounts to emerge from the Second World War.

In 2006, they were followed by Eric Newby, best remembered for his brave and hilarious A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a book that closes with the 20th century’s equivalent of the Stanley-Livingstone encounter. Newby and companion bump into Thesiger halfway up a mountain in Afghanistan, the formidable explorer trailing retainers and pack-animals bearing chests marked for the British Museum, bemoaning the declining standards of Savile Row and gleefully recounting his amputations of gangrenous fingers and removal of diseased eyes. They strike camp for the night. “The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger.”

Profoundly different in their styles and interests, these three writers were bound nevertheless by the shared generational experience of war and their direct participation in it. Thesiger fought behind enemy lines in North Africa with the SAS, Newby was one of the earliest recruits to the Special Boat Section, as the SBS was then known, and Lewis was an intelligence officer in Naples.

Then there was Paddy. The last of his era was also surely the most admirable and admired of all, a Byronic incarnation of what Greeks call leventeia, defined in one of his most life-enhancing books as a “universal zest for life, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything”. His housemaster at King’s School, Canterbury detected “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”. Leigh Fermor was the leading literary light among that band of travel writers who fought in the war and were coloured by it, whose lives and writings bear, to some degree at least, the imprint of that vast, world-changing hurricane. The justly celebrated Jan Morris, who caught the closing years of the war as an intelligence officer in Italy and Palestine, is already at a generational remove.

War may not have defined Leigh Fermor or his writing entirely (it brought to an end the first of his two great loves, a dreamlike romance with the Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene), but his quintessentially dashing, devil-may-care war record certainly underpins much of the affection with which his devoted fans view him today. In some instances, such as that of “The Greatest Living Englishman” blog that was published in his honour, it is a devotion that blossoms into outright adulation.

Meeting Paddy at his home in the Greek fishing village of Kardamyli in 2006, it was very difficult not to succumb entirely to hero-worship. My first sight of this unforgivably handsome man was sitting in what he called his hayati, a sun-bleached, south-facing winter chamber off what Betjeman called “one of the rooms in the world”, strewn with atlases, dictionaries, lexicons, icons, sculptures, lamps, flokkati goat-hair rugs, Turkish kilims and creased armchairs. He was clasping a Loeb edition of Herodotus. At 91, lunch remained unthinkable before two large vodka and tonics. Cigarettes were thoroughly approved of and an unstinting stream of retsina flowed alongside our conversation for hours. The polymath and oenophile was unstoppable. As the post-prandial ouzo shot to my head like a tracer-bullet, I had to pinch myself to remember that this debonair specimen of the literary man of action was the nonagenarian version of the 18-year-old adventure-seeking “tramp and pilgrim” who in 1933 had set out on his life-changing journey across Europe after a high-spirited farewell with friends in London: “A thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine arcade.”

If the prose-poetry of his books is riveting, at times sublime, very occasionally purple, the narrative of his war record is scarcely less vivid. Its crowning moment came at 9.30pm on April 26, 1944, when he stepped out on to a road in the heart of the rough Cretan countryside, intercepted a German staff car and kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe with a team of Cretan resistance fighters and a fellow British officer in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). From a literary perspective, the glory of this episode had to wait until A Time of Gifts, the first instalment of his epic walk — a version was written in 1969 for the Imperial War Museum. In it Leigh Fermor described the terrifying, 18-day manhunt by German forces sweeping the island. At dawn one morning, surveying the crest of Mount Ida, the general started murmuring his way through a Horace ode. Recognising it as one of the few he knew by heart, the Englishman picked up where the German left off, reeling off the five remaining stanzas in perfect Latin.

“The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine — and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. ‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Mani and Roumeli, which describe Leigh Fermor’s wanderings in southern and northern Greece respectively, were hailed by the FT as “two of the best travel books of the century” and contain numerous references to the courage, loyalty, humour and generosity of the Cretans among whom he fought. Artemis Cooper writes in Words of Mercury of the “unbreakable bond” war had forged between the Cretans and the SOE crowd. Typically, Leigh Fermor was not slow to acknowledge it.

In a touching tribute to the Cretan resistance, he translated the wartime memoirs of George Psychoundakis, his shepherd-guerrilla comrade-in-arms, and saw them into print. How many soldiers would have had the literary sensibility-or modesty-to recognise the value of an account told by a local resistance fighter, rather than a self-aggrandising story by yet another officer dropped behind enemy lines? In his introduction to The Cretan Runner, written in 1954, Leigh Fermor likened it to the Rualla Bedouin penning an Arab version of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (the contrast with the self-promoting Lawrence, a very fine writer on the desert, is instructive). “For the roles were reversed, and the British officers and their signallers and NCOs, not the stage-mountaineers of most Resistance writing, were the foreign oddities; and it seemed to me that they were far better and more soberly appraised than their equivalents in English war books.”

Barnaby Rogerson, author and co-owner of Eland, a specialist publisher of travel literature classics, says war seared an indelible sense of place for this select group of writers. “I think the war gave the best of these travel writers a very intense relationship with one region, where their literary souls got mingled with a place apart, also a sense of writing for the dead others. This is obviously true of Paddy, who could sing, dance and drink as well as any Greek shepherd. I never could work out whether he was a reincarnation of Byron or Pan — probably both. Then there’s Norman Lewis with Naples and Sicily. Thesiger similarly bonded with Ethiopia in a totally passionate way as a boy and later as an adult soldier — and of course his best books are set in southern Arabia and Iraq.”

Thesiger was always more warrior than writer. It is only thanks to the persistent pressure of publishing friends, decades after his dramas in the desert, that we have his granite prose. He had seen wartime service under Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, served with SOE in Syria and then the newly-formed SAS in North Africa. In My Life and Travels, he wrote of his “passionate involvement with the Abyssinian cause”. Letters to his mother in 1943 describe how “bitter and discontented” he was not to have played a part at El Alamein. War was “exciting and exhilarating”.

During a lunch with Thesiger in the incongruous setting of his retirement home in the wastelands of Surrey suburbia, his misanthropic growl suddenly lightened into an animated purr as he spoke of his role in the Allied campaign in North Africa, having persuaded David Stirling, founder of the SAS, to take him on. “I said to him, ‘I hear you’re going to make a raid behind enemy lines. I speak Arabic and I know the desert. Three days later we were 150 miles or so behind lines. I came upon a tent packed full with people. Luckily there was no one on guard. I just raked it with machine gun fire a couple of times. It felt rather like murder.” The glacial blue eyes glowed.

The experience of war also formed a critical part of Lewis’s literary hinterland. He wrote in Naples ’44 of a decisive encounter that “changed my outlook”, shattering his “comforting belief that human beings eventually come to terms with pain and sorrow”. On November 1, 1943, contemplating a menu offering either disguised dogfish or horsemeat, he watched a group of blind orphan girls enter the restaurant scavenging for food. Each child was sobbing. “I knew that, condemned to everlasting darkness, hunger and loss, they would weep on incessantly,” he wrote. “They would never recover from their pain and I would never recover from the memory of it.” His horror of the war, combined with its alluring and unrepeatable intensity, propelled him into a lifetime of far-flung reporting from dangerous parts. It led also to his championing of the rights of indigenous peoples in “Genocide”, a seismically shocking Sunday Times article that resulted in the foundation of Survival International, the movement for tribal peoples, in 1969.

War likewise left its mark on Newby’s writings. It also brought him love. He fought gallantly with the SBS and was awarded the Military Cross for his courage during numerous sabotage missions along enemy coasts. Love and War in the Apennines, another Newby classic, tells the story of his time on the run after one dramatic and abortive SBS expedition, when he was smuggled out of a prison camp and later rescued by a young woman, Wanda, his future wife.

The travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who has spent most of the past decade writing an on-the-road trilogy in the footsteps and footnotes of his hero Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century Muslim traveller, says the war may have fostered a certain detachment among these writers. “War is death to, among other things, enthusiasms,” he says. “If you’ve been through it, nothing matters quite as much anymore. For someone writing travel, I think this may give a sort of lordly detachment to one’s observations, which isn’t a bad thing. I’m not sure that post-war generations can quite achieve this.” For John Gimlette, author of At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, war may have been an influence that “discouraged introspection and informality”. Today’s writers, he argues, have become less detached in their work, “using more humour and self-deprecation to place themselves amongst their subjects”.

The Second World War was only part of these writers’ stories. Theroux, who lists Leigh Fermor, Redmond O’Hanlon, Dervla Murphy, Colin Thubron, Lewis, Thesiger and Chatwin among those travel writers he most admires, believes there was another more important literary influence. “It wasn’t just the war, it was also the colonial world that defined them. They were writing with an imperial confidence.” We are talking in the bowels of the Royal Geographical Society, Britain’s Mecca for explorers and travel writers, and for a moment he could be speaking of Sir Richard Burton, another soldier-scholar, who made the haj to Mecca in disguise in the 1850s. “The end of the war also brought an end to this colonial mentality. Somehow the sense of superiority was dented during the course of the war. The bloom was off the rose. Brits could no longer travel as lords and sahibs and colonial masters.”

As the metaphorical baton passes from Leigh Fermor to Thubron, a master of lyrical prose, we lose a literary connection to that all-defining conflict of the 20th century and the more heroic age it encapsulated. The memory of it lives on, recorded in the words of historians, poets, journalists, soldiers, generals, biographers and travel writers alike. It was precisely in order to ensure that the “great and marvellous” deeds of another, much more ancient conflict were not “forgotten in time” or “without their glory” that Herodotus wrote his landmark Histories of the Persian Wars, 2,500 years ago. It is surely profoundly important that the world’s first history book, a fizzing masterpiece of storytelling, relied so heavily on experiential travel. Thucydides needed to get out more.

Scanning the horizon, there appears to be little reason to fret for the future of travel writing. A genre that seeks to understand a constantly changing world, with recourse to history, geography, politics, economics, biography, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and reportage, among other disciplines, is in little danger of losing its relevance. If you want to know what life was like in late 1930s former Yugoslavia, it is hard to beat Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a meta-travel book (1,100 pages) of astonishing compass and vitality. For Iraq in the 1920s, who better than Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell to paint a many-layered portrait? The best travel writing opens up parts of the world that other disciplines can struggle to reach — and explain to a wider audience.

Consider the turmoil in the Middle East. While the breathless media rush to report the next dictator to catch Arab flu, leaving post-revolutionary countries like Egypt largely unreported in their wake, the field is left open for writers with more time and literary space on their hands to make sense of an irreducibly complicated society and situation. Digital communications, mass travel and the supposed shrinking of the world offer only the deadly delusion of a homogenised “global village”. News articles, foreign policy reports and jargon-filled government briefings on “failed states”, “post-conflict environments” and “stabilisation operations” pay only lip service to real-life complexities. What would Paddy have made of the Foreign Official who spoke to me the other day about “ground-truthing” in Benghazi? We should always beware of what Mauriac called “la tendance fatale à simplifier les autres”. Travel writing celebrates the world as it is, with nuance, shading and uncertainty.

William Dalrymple, who sped to fame in the late 1980s, after Theroux, Chatwin, Thubron, O’Hanlon and Jonathan Raban had blazed a renaissance trail of travel writing a decade earlier, points to the proliferation of fine writers of the genre far beyond these shores. It is parochial in the extreme to see this as a British or Western format. Among those with Indian roots alone Dalrymple lists Shiva and Vidia Naipaul, Pico Iyer, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Pankaj Mishra and the novelist Rana Dasgupta, now working on a study of Delhi. Dalrymple says it will inevitably be a completely new take from his own City of Djinns, published in 1993, before Delhi and India had cast loose and surged forward at breakneck speed. “Each generation sees the world very differently,” he says.

Earlier this year, Kamal Abdel-Malek, Professor of Arabic Literature at the American University of Dubai, published America in an Arab Mirror, an anthology of Arab travel writing in the US during the past century that is at once unexpectedly illuminating and disquieting. OxTravels, a new anthology of writing co-edited by Rogerson, reveals a multicultural cast of 36 authors including Aminatta Forna, Oliver Bullough, Sonia Faleiro, Peter Godwin and Rory Stewart. “We could easily have added another three dozen, in a separate collection tomorrow, who would all be in the front rank,” says Rogerson. The compulsively readable Dutchman Cees Nooteboom would surely be among them. Ongoing translation of hitherto inaccessible foreign writers such as the fabulously curious, effervescent 17th-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, author of the ten-volume Seyahatname or Book of Travels, only confirms the universality of the genre.

For a final verdict from the man Jan Morris called a “transcendentally gifted writer”, I travel to West London, where the two tribes of Holland Park and Shepherd’s Bush collide. Thubron is the first travel writer president of the Royal Society of Literature, a tribute both to his virtuoso skills and, if this is not wishful thinking, the enduring significance of the genre. His latest book, To a Mountain in Tibet, was published earlier this year to a symphonic swoon from the critics. It thrust the reader into an enchanted world of sky-dancers and demons, landscapes of fearful majesty and “charged sanctity” that clung to Thubron’s plangent prose. At the Tibetan border “the ebbing waves of the Himalaya hang the sky with spires while ahead the land smoothes into an ancient silence”. Nearing the lung-shredding, wind-haunted summit of his holy pilgrimage, “the mountain valley closes unsoftened around our strange heterogeneous trickle of beasts and humans drawn up like iron filings to the pass.”

Beyond the cool, book-lined sitting room, French windows open on to the blinding clatter of summer: shades of MacNeice’s sunlight on the garden. At 72, Thubron sounds a confident note. Travel writing’s long history of successful adaptation over many generations stands it in good stead, he says. “The genre is very flexible. It will always meld itself to what is there and available, which is abroad, and whether it’s more familiar or less familiar, it’s still going to need a voice to tell us about it. I do think the world has to be reinterpreted constantly, the impetus to explain it is just a human impulse. I don’t think any other genre has that opportunity.”

From Babylon to Ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages and into modern times, history suggests this: that for as long as the world continues to change and human nature remains the same, this curious international tribe will continue to go out and travel and write and tell stories that people want to read, fuelled by what Baudelaire called “la haine du domicile et la passion du voyage”. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “The great affair is to move.”

Paddy, of course, put it differently. One of his favourite sayings, which expressed his own creed as well as our preternatural need to travel, harks back to St Augustine. He personified it with élan: solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking.

Dr Rida ben Fayed, a Libyan orthopaedic surgeon back from Denver, Colorado, introduces his team like an announcer rallying the audience at a live Hendrix concert.

“We’ve got Ahmed on ground information, Walid on IT, Abdullah on medical supplies, Majdi on press, Ahmed on logistics, Colonel Farah on air defence, Colonel Sanusi on naval affairs…”

Midnight in Tobruk and the daily digital diwan is in full swing. Around 20 men, cross-legged on cushions, are gathered in a ground-floor sitting-room. There’s no one on drums tonight, but that doesn’t mean there’s no music. From a bedroom in Manchester a Libyan girl is singing live online about the Libyan fight for freedom. Smoke, laughter and revolution in the air. Tiny glasses of tea so sweet they remind you why diabetes is endemic in the Arab world. Surfing across satellite news channels.

These men are doctors, engineers, businessmen, human rights activists, military types, many from abroad, others entirely home-grown. Half have laptops. Facebook and Twitter to the fore. The familiar underwater jangle of an incoming Skype call regularly punctuates the hubbub. My neighbour is editing a video cartoon mocking a typical, fist-pumping Gaddafi harangue. Others upload and download photos, coordinate medical supplies, pass on information to colleagues across Libya. A former colonel is planning a dangerous 50-hour mission on a fishing boat to take weapons to opposition forces in the besieged city of Misrata.

“This is our digital operations room,” says Dr Rida with pride. “We’re all volunteers.” He thrusts a laptop and a pair of headphones into my hands. “Here, speak to Perdita in Benghazi. She can tell you what she thinks about all the reporting on al-Qaeda infiltrating the Libyan revolution. Her husband was killed three weeks ago by Gaddafi’s forces. She’s eight months pregnant.”

Perdita’s husband, Mohammed Nabbous, was the 28-year-old founder of Libya al Hurra (Free Libya) television station in Benghazi. He was shot in the head by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, barely a month after the channel was launched, after transmitting videos and pictures of regime forces suppressing the uprising with indiscriminate brutality.

A young voice cuts through the ether, dignified and precise. How many more women have lost their husbands to the widow-maker since Nabbous’s assassination? Perdita’s first experience of life after Gaddafi, what it could be like in the future, was intoxicating. “When Benghazi was liberated, we started rebuilding our city. We started to live, to be free for the first time in our lives. Women have taken up positions in the media and are looked up to. We are living in a totally different atmosphere. For us to go back to how it was before is impossible.” She says the first time Gaddafi mentioned the al-Qaeda threat in Libya during the uprising, everyone laughed. Libyans are used to the lies of “The Great Thinker”. They have had to listen to them for 41 years, seven months and counting.

There’s fierceness in Perdita’s new-found freedom. Like thousands of her fellow Libyans since February, she has already paid a savage price for this challenge to the regime. “It was my husband’s dream that our son would be born in a free Libya. Now I’m going to do everything in my power to support the revolution and make this dream come true.”

Foreign visitors in eastern Libya, especially those from the UK, US, France and Qatar, receive daily, often exuberant, expressions of gratitude for their countries’ support. Travelling to Libya for more than 20 years, I have always been humbled by the hospitality of its people. In the 19th century, British explorers and campaigners against the Saharan slave trade remarked upon the same trait. I was constantly struck by this self-denying generosity years later, during a 1,500-mile journey by camel across the Libyan Sahara. The only sour note came from Gaddafi’s security thugs, uneducated, intimidating cowards who arrested us for a week in the storied desert oasis of Kufra. My father, who used to do business in Libya in the Eighties and Nineties, died a decade ago after introducing me to this fabulous country. A great Libyan family friend, whose family’s whereabouts and security in Tripoli are unknown as Standpoint goes to press, still calls my mother regularly to ask after my family. This is what Libyans are like.

Dawn in Tobruk. Under a sliding sky we plunge south on the desert road that leads only to Jaghbub, the remote oasis town, once impenetrable to foreigners, that was the former seat of the Sanusi Order. The Sanusi story — compelling, romantic, ultimately tragic — began in the Arabian desert, where in 1837 Sheikh Mohammed ibn Ali as Sanusi, known as the Grand Sanusi, established an Islamic revivalist movement, a fiercely orthodox order of Sufis.

It quickly spread to North Africa and seeped as far west as Senegal, through a network of zawias or religious lodges. The first zawia in Libya was founded at Baida in 1844. In 1856, the Grand Sanusi founded one at Jaghbub. In time it grew into Africa’s second greatest university, after Cairo’s Al Azhar. The Sanusis derived strength, respect and affluence from their role mediating tribal and trade disputes in the Sahara in the days of the desert slave trade, and for providing education for the unschooled masses.

The sun rises, blazes overhead. The road runs across the desert like a pasted ribbon, blurring off in the distance into a pool of steaming mercury. After an hour, a black smudge drifts in and out of sight on this sun-bludgeoned plateau. The tall, triple- barbed-wire fence, a surreally disfiguring structure amid these wide horizons, was constructed in 1931 by General Rodolfo Graziani, despatched by Mussolini to bring Western civilisation to Italy’s “Fourth Shore”. Libyans called him Butcher Graziani. Rome preferred Pacificatore della Libia. This was, in the Italian’s words, “una guerra senza quartiere”. Graziani herded tribesmen into desert concentration camps behind barbed wire and machine guns, poisoned their wells, condemned men to excruciating deaths in roasting salt pans, and dropped canisters of poison gas on to desert oases. Between 40,000 and 70,000 were killed.

Sanusi fighters led the heroic, doomed resistance to the Fascist occupation under their charismatic chief Omar al Mukhtar. He was captured in 1931 and, after a 30-minute show trial, hanged in front of 20,000 tribesmen. Today his face appears on flags, street hoardings and car stickers throughout eastern Libya, a symbol of the post-Gaddafi order. His call to arms: “We will never surrender. Victory or death.” The picture of a handsome old man in profile, with white beard and white skullcap, was taken by Mukhtar’s Italian captors.

Jaghbub is an unremarkable little cluster of concrete houses. Its heart is an extraordinary expanse of rubble laid bare beneath a pitiless sun. Shattered blocks of white stone, smashed slabs of marble, sections of date-palm trunks, ancient nails, rusting spikes of wire. This is all that remains of the great zawia, architectural jewel of the oasis, that Gaddafi razed in 1988. The local preacher, Sheikh Mohammed Sanusi, a follower rather than a family member, says it took bulldozers 11 days to destroy everything within a compound measuring 47,000 square metres. “Then they finished it off with 17 explosives.”

For Gaddafi, the Sanusi name was anathema, forever associated with the benign, if somewhat ineffectual, pro-Western monarchy of King Idris Sanusi, which he overthrew in the military coup of September 1, 1969. He had the body of the Grand Sanusi disinterred and removed to an unknown   location. The sheikh says the body was miraculously preserved.

The interview with Sheikh Mohammed, a trim, slightly stooped figure of 76, begins awkwardly. He reprimands Christians and Jews for their supposed scriptural inconsistency, invites me to read the Koran, convert to Islam and earn my place in paradise. Some traditions live on. When the Egyptian diplomat, explorer and writer Ahmed Hassanein Bey travelled across the Libyan desert during an epic, 2,200-mile journey by camel in 1923, he described the order as “an ascetic confraternity [...] intolerant of any intercourse with Jew, Christian or infidel”.

As Libyans ponder a future without Gaddafi, some wonder whether a constitutional monarchy might yet return, using the widely praised 1951 constitution as some sort of basis for a future settlement. This was the document, drawn up with the UN’s assistance, with which Libya declared independence as a democratic, federal and sovereign nation with a constitutional monarchy and bicameral parliament.

The sheikh shakes his head. “After King Idris, the Sanusi family involvement in politics is over. No more king.” The otherworldly veteran would rather relate famous miracles of the Grand Sanusi and the Prophet Muhammad than discuss the Libyan revolution. “I don’t care about Gaddafi or politics. I am only interested in God.” In Tobruk’s digital diwan, opinions range from an emphatic “No way” to “It’s up to the people to decide”, a line also taken by the exiled, London-based Crown Prince Mohammed Sanusi.

The next day we arrow fast down the coastal road towards Benghazi, headquarters of liberated Libya, along a shoreline that has seen a succession of foreign invaders come and go across the millennia. The Greeks were the first, Herodotus tells us in his swashbuckling masterpiece Histories, when a settlement was founded at Cyrene in 630 BC, following divine instruction from the oracle at Delphi. Berenice, the Benghazi of today, followed four centuries later, around 250 BC.

As Gaddafi has never tired of reminding his countrymen — one of the few things with which they would agree — the history of Libya is a relentless procession of colonial invasions and occupations. After the Greeks came the Romans and the foundation of provincia Tripolitania —province of the three cities of Sabratha, Leptis Magna and Oea (as Romans knew Tripoli) — created by the Emperor Diocletian in 284 AD. Then there were the Arabs who surged across North Africa in the mid-seventh century, whose Islamising influence proved longest lasting of any invader. The firebrands of Islam were succeeded in turn by the stultifying embrace of the Ottomans (1551-1911) and the wretched, blood-filled interlude of the Italians (1911-1943). During the fighting in the Western Desert in the Second World War, the Germans, French and British joined the fray until independence was achieved at last in 1951. After 18 years of monarchy, during which time Libyans of a certain age will tell you there was just one execution, the Gaddafi occupation began.

Canine carcasses line the road at intervals. I count five between Tobruk and Benghazi. Dead dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Mad Dog and his puppies snarl 800 miles to the west. The road winds through the astonishingly beautiful, verdant landscape of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, and at once one understands the invaders’ age-old, land-grabbing appetite, from ancient Greeks to the Italians who saw in Cyrenaica’s fine red soil and fertile fields a Tuscany on African shores. With rolling slopes, slanting cypresses and enchanted orchards and citrus groves, it is hard to imagine that such a gentle environment, with shades of pastoral Italy or carefree Switzerland, could belong to a dictatorship.

Through the city of Derna, piled on to the shoreline like a shipwreck, and the outpouring of roadside graffiti, daubed in English, French and Arabic: “We are freedom addicts not drugs”; “No to extremism”; “Yes to pluralism”; “Libya is a unified country, Tripoli is our capital”; “Our struggle is for democracy”.

At the next town of Baida a banner hangs from a partially burned-out former regime building on the far side of the square: “Tout le monde doit savoir que les insurges Libyens n’appartiennent pas à Al Qaida. Nous nous sommes sacrifiés pour la liberté.” Opposite is an open-sided crimson tent whose sides are covered with photos and stories of the many victims of Gaddafi’s serial outrages, from this latest conflict and the wars he sent Libyans to fight across the continent in exercises in lunatic adventurism. Here are the dead from Chad, Egypt, Algeria, Uganda and the ongoing revolution. Cartoons of Gaddafi strapped to a rocket, as devil-horned, forked-tailed monster. This is the beginning of the long reckoning ahead.

A group of young men Bluetooth me photos of the recent protests in quickfire succession. One plays a mobile-phone video which he says shows Khamis Gaddafi, who runs his own brigade of killers, training African mercenaries. Hapless black recruits approach a table where they are cuffed over the head and forced to eat large chunks of dog flesh. One by one, they grimace, retch and vomit. Then they are shoved across to the back of a truck and made to French-kiss the dogs’ severed heads.

Night-time in Benghazi. City lights twinkle, doubled in the dark waters of Benghazi Lake. Until a few weeks ago it was known as July 23 Lake, in honour of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 military coup in Egypt. Soon Libyans may call it February 17 Lake.

Precise details of the post-Gaddafi government to come are yet to emerge, understandable amid the chaos and Twitterfog of war in the west. The quietly spoken Mohammed Fanoush, former director of the National Library in Benghazi, is the local director of communications. He says the National Transitional Council (NTC) is working on a proposal for a new constitution, to be drafted by an elected committee and then submitted to Libyans in a future referendum. No one envisages a five-year government of national unity or anything so protracted.

“I used to be optimistic, even in the darkest days,” Fanoush says. “My brother was hanged in the streets. We were always determined to get rid of Gaddafi but we worried it would take 20 years or more.   Now things are changing immensely, and quickly.”

Underpinning his confidence in the future is a demographic quirk, an unexpected consequence of dictatorship. “Unintentionally, Gaddafi did us a great favour by emptying the country of its people. We have 100,000 intellectuals, professionals and young people who left Libya to live and work all over the world. They have expertise in so many areas and now they’re coming back.” I recall a cigarette break on the road to Benghazi when a Libyan stranger offered to translate for an impromptu conversation with a rebel soldier manning a checkpoint. He was a PhD student studying biology from Sheffield.

To tread the corridors of provisional power in Benghazi is to encounter an inspiring corps of Western-educated doctors and lawyers, engineers, human rights activists, businessmen, former political prisoners. Unlike in Iraq, where fears of the returning diaspora’s venality were all too often justified in displays of brazen klepto-cracy, so far the attitude towards the stream of exiles appears overwhelmingly positive. If revolutions could be won on goodwill alone, this one would have triumphed already.

Dr Abdulkadr al Gnein, a hyperactive Danny DeVito lookalike, returned from   Ottawa a year ago, sensing the end of the Gaddafi regime. Nowadays he’s busy helping fund the opposition, setting up a humanitarian NGO, arranging medical supplies and assisting the media.

He says Gaddafi crossed a “red line” with Iman al Obeidi, the law student who burst into the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli and publicly declared she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi’s men. “Women and children are sacred here. This united everyone in Libya against Gaddafi. Every free city in the west accepts the Council is the legitimate government of Libya. We won’t be split.”

The unquestioned chief of the political prisoners, a godfather of the Libyan revolution, is Haj Ahmed Zubair Sanusi, the world’s longest-serving political prisoner. Now 77, he spent 31 years in prison from 1970-2001. His greatest crime was his surname. Libyans may not want another constitutional monarchy, but their respect for the family’s distinguished reputation endures.

We meet in a VIP suite in Al Fadhil Palace, where members of the NTC gather daily. Acres of white sheets on a kingsize bed. A tasselfest of sumptuous soft furnishings. Every bit of furniture in sight is covered in the sparkling decoration so beloved of Arab furniture designers. It is as far removed from his prison cell as possible.

Ahmed Zubair says his death sentence was never commuted during this unfathomable captivity. “Every time a door opened, I never knew if it was going to be someone taking me to my execution,” he says, unbowed in pinstripe suit and tie. The work ahead is immense. “Now we are trying to build a new country under the rule of law. We are united. Tripoli is our capital, Benghazi is our city. It will be difficult after 42 years of Gaddafi. It will take a long time. But the Libyan spirit is there. The people understand. They can wait.” A friend suggests that with his uniquely painful backstory, Haj Ahmed would be the perfect successor to Gaddafi. A Mandela moment in the offing?

Benghazis still smart from the violence meted out by Gaddafi’s forces on March 19, the final catalyst for Nato’s more muscular intervention. Adel Ibrahim, a Benghazi hotelier who owns the Al Fadhil Palace, has a ringside seat at the revolution.

“You know what Gaddafi told the soldiers before they attacked? ‘Kill every man under 50 and the women are yours. Do whatever you want with them’.” He describes a confrontation he witnessed on the streets. “Three men walked up to a machine-gunner with their arms outstretched. The first man said, ‘Shoot me’. The soldier shot him dead. Then the second went up and said the same thing. The soldier shot him in the knees, then the chest. Dead. Then the third man came up, arms open wide. The soldier dropped his gun, turned round and fled.”

At this stage, the al-Qaeda threat appears negligible. Gaddafi poses a far greater menace, both to his people and to the West, whose credibility diminishes with every day he is allowed to remain in power. Noman Benotman, a former senior member of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, says al-Qaeda has no “real presence” and “few, if any, active operatives” in Libya.  Dr George Joffé, Middle East and North Africa expert at Cambridge University, argues that fears of a significant al-Qaeda presence in Libya are “totally” overblown. “I think al-Qaeda has been completely marginalised by the recent upheavals in the region,” says the terrorism expert Peter Bergen, a programme director at the New America Foundation. “No one’s burning American or Israeli flags or carrying placards of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is losing the battle of ideas in the Muslim world.”

When Gaddafi is gone, it is only a matter of time before the enormity of the crimes his regime committed over four decades is revealed. History’s verdict will not set much store by former Labour Party MP Tam Dalyell’s 1993 prediction: “I believe that in the 21st century, Colonel Gaddafi’s government will come to be seen as one of the most effective ‘ecologically imaginative governments’ of the 20th century.” Nor will it agree with Gaddafi’s delusional braggadocio of 1987: “History should show that if there was any mould, I have contributed towards its destruction. If there has been any shackle binding the Libyan people, I have participated in its demolition until the Libyan people have become free.”

Instead, future historians, less distracted by his eccentricity and sartorial pomp, less seduced by Libya’s black gold, will elevate Gaddafi to the top tier of 20th-century tyrants. His regime vies with Saddam Hussein’s for murderous supremacy.

A new and very different Libya will emerge after Gaddafi. However great the uncertainty, whatever the risks of an east-west split, however vicious the predictable tribal disputes that will follow his departure, the prospect of any future government — or even governments if Libya became two Libyas — being worse than this regime is unthinkable.

The country has the potential to become a model for North Africa and the Middle East, open to the world after its traumatic removal from the community of nations. The foundations for success, which will be a tumultuous test of will, can quickly be discerned. Rich in oil, with a tiny population of seven million, Libya has been blessed by nature with favourable resources, demographics and geography, yet under Gaddafi a third of the population lives at or below the national poverty line. Libyans do not have the devastating Sunni-Shia divide, with the resulting bursts of bloodshed that have plagued Baghdad, City of Peace, ever since it was founded by the Abbasid caliph Mansur in 762. The flow of talented, highly educated Libyans returning from exile could become a stampede.

If the words of politicians in the liberated east of Libya are anything to go by as harbingers of a settlement emerging from the wreckage of Gaddafi’s Libya, the desire for national unity is formidable and the aspiration to build a modern nation sincere. That said, expectations, will be unrealistic and major disappointment is inevitable. Many Libyans isolated from the world since 1969 will equate more democratic governance with full employment and a short path to riches generated from the lake of oil on which the country sits.

At present it produces around 1.6 million barrels a day, though after Gaddafi’s attacks on eastern oil installations and the mass exodus of expatriate workers this has slowed to a trickle. Failure to see quick benefits will destabilise the fledgling state. Any new government will therefore need to communicate to its people a realistic assessment of the many challenges ahead. You do not quickly recover from the scorched-earth abuse that has been the hallmark of the Gaddafi regime. “As for the future, with no formal mechanism in place to ensure a smooth transition of power, the post-Gaddafi era, whenever it occurs, can be expected to be a time of considerable tension and uncertainty, with numerous socio-economic and political groups vying for power,” writes Ronald Bruce St John in his 2008 history, Libya: From Colony to Independence. It is difficult to counter such an argument. Ultimately what will be needed, both to remove Gaddafi in the short term and rebuild the country in the long term, is something Libyans have had to demonstrate for far too long already. A senior army officer taken prisoner in Benghazi, terrified for the lives of his family in Tripoli, puts it in one word: “Patience.”

By complete coincidence, my father bumped into Gaddafi on the day of the military coup in which he dethroned King Idris and seized power. It was a year before I was born. The then 27-year-old army captain eyeballed him and gave a brusque warning to get out of town. “You better leave Tripoli before you get killed,” he shouted. “This is a revolution!”

More than 41 years later, it is immensely moving to see — and share — the delight of the countless brave Libyans whose revolution is bringing this unspeakable regime to an end.

“Because the Christian and Jewish holy books have been changed many times over the centuries,” he says. “The Koran has been unaltered for 1,400 years. You should read the Koran, become a Muslim and earn your place in paradise.”

I try to change the conversation but the sheikh is having none of it. Obstinately he sticks to his guns, relating various miracles and prophesies of the Prophet Mohammed. It is hard to get a word in edgeways.

Monarchy

My mission is not so much to discuss religion, as to see what, if anything, is left of the famous Sanusi Order that once held sway here.

The Order was an Islamic revivalist movement of orthodox sufis, established in the Arabian desert by Sheikh Mohammed ibn Ali Sanusi – aka the Grand Sanusi – in 1837.

It spread right across north Africa and went as far west as Senegal through a network of zawiyas, or religious lodges.

In 1856, the Grand Sanusi founded a zawiya in Jaghbub, which grew to become the headquarters of the Order and Africa’s second-greatest university after al-Azhar in Cairo.

When Libya achieved independence under a constitutional monarchy in 1951, it was no coincidence that a member of the Sanusi family – Idris – became king.

The family and the Order had won lasting respect by providing education to the masses and mediating difficult local tribal and trade disputes.

The Idris monarchy proved a benign institution for Libya during its 18 years, though nationalist detractors criticised it for being ineffectual and too pro-Western.

Muammar Gaddafi toppled King Idris in 1969 and sought to marginalise the Sanusis with a vengeance.

Idris’s heir and his family were first imprisoned then sent into exile in London, having been forced to watch their house being burnt to cinders by the regime.

Destruction

Then, in 1988, Gaddafi sent the bulldozers into Jaghbub and the great zawiya was razed to the ground.

“It took 11 days for them to destroy it,” Sheikh Mohammed says, as if it was yesterday.

“Then they finished it off with 17 explosions.”

He takes me outside and we walk across a vast expanse of rubble, sizzling beneath the white desert sun. There are 47,000 sq metres (506,000 sq ft) of smashed marble, white stone, date-palm trunks and rusting wires and nails.

Nothing within the old compound remains standing.

The destruction of such an important part of Libya’s cultural heritage is all the more chilling for being left as it is.

Yet with Gaddafi now gone from eastern Libya, it cannot be too long before the bulldozers return to Jaghbub and the great zawiya rises from the ashes.

The sheikh says he is not interested in discussing Gaddafi or the Libyan revolution. His only interest is in God.

The one concern he does express – probably unique in any commentary on the Arab Spring to date – is this: if the violence in the region continues, so many men will lose their lives that the ratio of women to men will increase to 50:1. This, he says, will lead to outbreaks of lesbianism and same-sex marriages that will represent a real problem for Muslim society. The translator, entirely deferential up to this point, looks a little embarrassed.

Political prisoner

However hard he tried to crush the Sanusis, Col Gaddafi could never completely erase the family and their followers from Libya and Libyan history.

Today the Sanusi story continues in Benghazi, where Ahmed al-Zubair Ahmed al-Sanusi is a member of the Transitional National Council. Now 77, he was the world’s longest-serving political prisoner, languishing behind bars from 1970 to 2001, four years more than Nelson Mandela. During that time, Gaddafi never commuted the death sentence that hung over him.

“Every time a door opened, I never knew if it was going to be someone taking me to my execution,” he says.

Dignified and quietly spoken in a pinstripe suit and tie, he talks without rancour, resolutely upbeat about the formidable challenges ahead.

There are few demands for the monarchy to be restored. But amid the confusion and euphoria in Benghazi, some Libyans look at Haj Ahmed and dare to wonder whether, after almost 42 years of dictatorship, the Sanusi name may yet return to the fore.

For 20 years I have seen Colonel Gaddafi every morning. He greets me with a faraway look in his eyes as I step into my study. It is one of those vast propaganda portraits, 5ft by 3ft, beloved by serial kleptocrat dictators. Looking youthful, almost serene, he sports a bouffant hairdo and military uniform with enough gold thread on his epaulettes to embroider a WMD. Behind him is a desert panorama of rolling sand dunes, date palms, camels and a huge pipe with torrents of water gushing out to create fertile agricultural land, along with combine harvesters, a flock of sheep and the sort of Harvest Festival fruit basket most vicars could only ever dream of. All of this above the legend, ‘THE GREAT MAN-RIVER BUILDER’.

The portrait commemorates Gaddafi’s Great Man-Made River Project, one of the largest feats of engineering in the world. I picked it up from a Tripoli hotel in 1991, the year Gaddafi inaugurated a project described by the Financial Times as ‘a monument to vanity’. The hotel manager who gave it to me thought I was bonkers. Like many Libyans who have had to put up with decades of grinding repression under the world’s most psychotic dandy, he probably thought of the Colonel less as Brother Leader or Great Man-River Builder than as Big Bastard, a term I used to hear muttered sotto voce during visits to Tripoli.

Although it is still far too early to digest the lasting consequences of the Arab awakening in north Africa and the Middle East, the outburst of mass political participation may spell an end to the ability of one man to rule — and wreck — his country unchecked. Whatever else the north African revolutions achieve, they have put an end to dynastic succession in Egypt and Libya. In Cairo the protestors have kiboshed Hosni Mubarak’s plans to transfer power to his son Gamal. In Tripoli, it is safe to say the colonel will not be handing the reins to his son and expected heir, the congenital liar Saif al-Islam.

In 2002, I interviewed the gangster dauphin for the Speccie while he was staying at the Royal Suite — where else for the son of a socialist revolutionary? — at Claridge’s. It was part of the rehabilitating Libya tour, during which Gaddafi Jnr expressed a sudden and unexpected passion for democracy. ‘I’m very enthusiastic to see Libya as an oasis of democracy, a society that respects the environment and human rights and so on, and is a model in the region,’ he said without smirking. Democracy was ‘policy number one’.

He was furious when asked about succeeding his father. It was ‘an unthinkable idea, and you shouldn’t even mention it’. Saif was even more furious when Boris Johnson, the then editor, headlined the article ‘Son of Mad Dog’, reducing Saif’s London PR man to a gibbering wreck.

With Saif al-Islam’s exit from the fray, Libyans will be spared the rule of a man who has been living up to his name — Sword of Islam — in recent days. Like the 14th-century Tatar conqueror Tamerlane, another Sword of Islam, he and his minions have proved only too adept at butchering fellow Muslims. The citizens of Benghazi, currently held by the Libyan opposition, are quite right to fear the Gaddafis’ wrath. As The Spectator goes to press, Mad Dog’s troops have retaken Gharyan and Sabratha in the country’s northwest and Brega in the east. Though their days may be numbered, though the world is watching, the Gaddafis’ revenge will be bloody and uncompromising.

It has always suited Gaddafi Snr to be seen internationally as a clown. For much of his 41-year reign, he was the Mussolini to Saddam Hussein’s Hitler, the one a colourful fool, the other evil incarnate, a deception that conveniently hid the Libyan state’s darker side. In truth, no one should be surprised at Saif al-Islam’s threat to ‘fight to the last bullet’ – anyone who dreams of opposing Gaddafi can only be a drug-crazed youth, rat or cockroach. Behind the swaying palm trees of Tripoli’s Green Square, the exquisite Roman ruins of Sabratha and Leptis Magna and the lucrative oil deals that drove British foreign policy to rehabilitate the regime, Gaddafi’s Libya has always been a brutal police state.

Such was its raison d’être from the outset. On 1 September 1969, the Revolutionary Command Council warned Libyans that any attempt to resist the new order would be ‘crushed ruthlessly and decisively’. That is the path Gaddafi has always taken to deal with dissent, an approach typified by the Abu Salim prison massacre of 1996, in which 1,200 prisoners were killed in cold blood, their bodies reportedly fork-lifted into refrigerated trucks and driven away. Libya denies the atrocity.

To its intense discomfort, the West is suddenly learning that stability in the Middle East isn’t so stable, after all. For years, dictators like the Al Saud family and Mubarak have ruled quite happily in their own interests and those of the West with a catastrophic disregard for their own people. Others, like Assad, Gaddafi and latterly Saddam, after he had helped tie revolutionary Iran down for a decade, have proved as hostile to their own people as the West. Arab governance, once the envy of the world when the Abbasid caliphate headquartered in Baghdad created the most sophisticated civilisation on earth, has shrivelled into an oxymoron.

Now that the veneer of stability has come unstuck, the Arab world faces a period of distinct uncertainty, to the discomfort of global markets. Gaddafi, after 41 years, will leave a country in political ruins and turmoil. Mubarak almost single-handedly destroyed the Egyptian economy during a reign of 29 years and further political turbulence surely awaits. Cracks are appearing in King Abdullah’s Jordan, a stalwart ally of the West. Yemenis understandably want to get shot of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who leads one of the world’s most venal regimes (31 years). In Syria, 22 February marked the 40th anniversary of the Assad family’s hold on power. In Saudi Arabia, land of the odious Al Sauds, 87-year-old King Abdullah has offered a pre-emptive $36 billion bribe — common currency in this part of the world — to buy off dissent.

Western policymakers may discover that it would be better for everyone in the long term if they stopped fretting about their stakes in the region for a minute, and started paying more attention to the interests of ordinary people, rather than the regimes, of north Africa and the Middle East.

The first that Gaddafi’s poorly armed opposition would know of an impending attack on them from their country’s embattled leader would be the distant ‘crump’ of artillery fire.

Moments later the shells would start to land. For a few seconds there might be relief, laughter even, that the shells had either fallen short or gone over  their heads.

But then the gentle desert breeze would blow the deadly smoke from the exploded munitions towards them and suddenly — too late — those fighting for democracy in Libya would realise Gaddafi hadn’t missed at all.

It could be a sudden choking in their lungs, a searing pain in their eyes, the rapid blistering of their skin.

As they slumped to the ground, blinded, vomiting or coughing up blood, they would die in the desert knowing two things. First, that despite his lies, despite his obfuscation, Gaddafi does still have biological and chemical weapons. Second, that he was now desperate and deranged enough to use them.

For now, a biological or chemical attack by Gaddafi on his own people is still only the stuff of nightmares.

But what is worrying a growing number of Western military and intelligence experts is that it could become a terrifying reality at any moment.

Gaddafi may have promised to give up such weapons in 2003 as part of the deal that brought the rogue state back into the diplomatic fold, but the chilling fact is he still has enough to kill and maim an awful lot of people.

He still has almost ten tonnes of the chemicals needed to make mustard gas, the near-odourless gas that condemned so many to a lingering and excruciatingly painful death in World War I — and which was certainly one of the ingredients in the lethal, toxic cocktail that Saddam Hussein infamously used to kill up to 5,000 people in the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988.

He still has 650 tonnes of materials required to produce a range of deadly chemical weapons. Their effects on the human body are probably known only to those who made them and who now store them at the Rabta Chemical Weapons Production Facility — the largest chemical weapons production facility in the developing world.

Libya’s former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil says Gaddafi still has biological weapons — anthrax perhaps; nerve agents such as sarin; possibly even genetically modified smallpox — and that he isn’t afraid to use them.

Anthrax was first used as a weapon by the Japanese army against prisoners of war in the Thirties. If Gaddafi unleashes this deadly disease on his people, the effects could be catastrophic, killing thousands.

The threat of sarin — a substance so toxic that a drop can kill an adult — is just as worrying.

Known as a ‘nerve-agent’ because it overstimulates the nervous system, exhausting glands and muscles and causing respiratory failure, sarin may be within Gaddafi’s arsenal. In 2004, Libya admitted that stockpiles of sarin have been produced in the country’s Rabta facility.

He also has 1,000 tonnes of ‘yellow cake’ uranium, the first step towards building an atomic bomb.

Libya is thought to be some way from being able to make an atomic bomb — details of its fairly rudimentary nuclear programme were revealed as part of the 2003 deal with Washington, and its relatively small stock of enriched uranium acquired from Pakistan and North Korea were handed to the U.S.

But there’s no shortage of the raw material in this highly unstable region of North Africa. Niger, Libya’s desperately poor neighbour to the south, and reportedly the country of origin for many of Gaddafi’s mercenaries, is one of the top producers of uranium in the world.

The nuclear threat from Libya may be small, but it would be a fool who says it had vanished entirely.

As part of the diplomatic deal in 2003, when Gaddafi handed over Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), he destroyed his long-range missiles and 3,300 aerial mortar shells designed for delivering mustard gas and chemical agents.

But, despite this being hailed at the time as ‘the real non-proliferation success story of the new millennium’ by President Bush’s assistant, American Secretary of State Paula DeSutter, the destruction and verification process has been slow, tortuous and incomplete.

Gaddafi still has an unknown number of lethal Scud-B missiles and a huge arsenal of conventional artillery that could be adapted relatively easily for use with chemical and biological agents.

But could Britain, the United States and their Western allies really stand by and let Gaddafi bomb his own people with mustard gas or anthrax as it once stood by and let Saddam Hussein launch his genocidal gas attack on the Kurds? I don’t believe so for a moment.

All the military intelligence I’ve picked up indicates that at the first sign of a biological or chemical attack against the Libyans, Western forces will move swiftly and decisively to bring Gaddafi’s regime to an end.

Gaddafi is a desperate and probably deranged man, who has publicly pledged that he will not leave the country or stand down, but would prefer to die ‘a martyr’s death’. The problem is he has the terrifying capability of being able to impose not a martyr’s death, but a cruel, lingering and excruciatingly painful death on thousands of others, too.

Justin Marozzi is the author of South From Barbary: Along The Slave Routes Of The Libyan Sahara

THE THUNDERER

Doing the rounds on Twitter yesterday was a Vanity Fair story that neatly encapsulated the way Libya has been reported for years. Headlined “Dictator Chic: Colonel Gaddafi —A Life in Fashion”, it featured a series of outlandish costumes ranging from Saturday Night Fever to Liberace. That’s not how it feels to Libyans on the streets of Tripoli. They are more concerned with snipers and helicopter gunships. They’re in a fight for their lives.

I was a child born a year after Gaddafi ousted King Idris, with a father who did business in Libya, so the country was a constant backdrop to my childhood in the Seventies and Eighties, To a small boy, it meant Globetrotter suitcases stuffed with blood oranges, dates, bakhlava and multi-coloured jalabas for my mother and sisters. I was only dimly aware of The Green Book, a trio of slim volumes summarising Gaddafi’s political philosophy, as an eccentric souvenir on my father’s bookshelves.

Only in the Nineties did I experience first-hand the reality of Gaddafi’s Libya. “Don’t discuss politics anywhere and under no circumstances mention Gaddafi by name,” my father said on my first visit. The mukhabarat (intelligence) officials, reviled as “antenna”, were everywhere: in hotel foyers, listening in on telephone calls, doubling as taxi drivers.

Years later, after completing a 1,500-mile journey by camel across the Libyan Sahara, a friend and I were put under house arrest for a week. We were investigated by security officials as suspected foreign spies, harangued daily about British imperialism and warned never to mention Gaddafi by name. Our terrified local guide was subjected to a much harsher grilling. We never discovered what the authorities did to him.

This is a regime in which the disjunction between rhetoric and reality, between clown and butcher, dandy and torturer-in-chief, has been extraordinary. Saif-al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, personifies this reality gap. In 2002, I interviewed him at Claridge’s, where he expounded the virtues of democracy without any trace of irony.

To oust Gaddafi in the teeth of such vicious government repression, Libyans are displaying astonishing courage. This is a regime that, like its fellow Middle Eastern police state kleptocracies, has serially failed its people with failed socialism, failed pan-Arabism, failed pan-Africanism, support for international terrorists and with a human rights record best exemplified by the award of the 1998 Gaddafi Prize for Human Rights to Fidel Castro.

Justin Marozzi is the author of South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

The west is easily distracted. Just as the war in Iraq diverted attention from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to regroup and consolidate its hold over much of the country, so the war in Afghanistan has blinded policymakers to the growing crisis in Somalia. Islamist rebels who on Tuesday killed more than 30 people including MPs and officials in a raid on a hotel in Mogadishu are now exporting terrorism beyond its borders. Somalia poses a genuine danger to the Horn of Africa region and the west.

Last month’s twin bomb attacks in Uganda’s capital Kampala, which killed 76 people, changed the rules of the game. They marked the first time the al-Shabaab group, which controls much of southern Somalia and most of Mogadishu, had struck outside the country. At a stroke a hitherto local conflict within a marginal country that has not had a government since 1991 was internationalised. Ahmed Abdi Godane, al-Shabaab’s leader, warned this was “just the beginning”.

While Washington and London have concentrated on Afghanistan, al-Shabaab has been recruiting foreign fighters. In February, it announced an alliance with al-Qaeda. It is now the strongest armed faction in the country. Jihadists commute freely between Yemen and Somalia across the Gulf of Aden. The southern Somali port of Kismayo has become a logistics hub, allowing the movement of men and materiel into Somalia. For Somalis, the rise of these extremists has been a catastrophe. Daily life is characterised, by Human Rights Watch as “grinding repression” against a backdrop of public beheadings, and stoning of women accused of adultery.

Al-Shabaab’s rise is a threat to the international community on two levels. First, Somalia is becoming a safe haven for foreign fighters schooled in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the group has recruited successfully from the Somali diaspora. The suicide bomber who killed 23 people during a graduation ceremony in Mogadishu last December was a Danish Somali. One of the group’s highest-profile fighters is a Somali-American. Somali-Australians have already tried, unsuccessfully, to attack an Australian military base. The International Crisis Group has warned of the dangers to the US and UK, both of which have large Somali communities.

How can the world help Somalia pull back from the brink? It is tempting to dismiss this as too difficult and dangerous. Internal conflict has been endemic for two decades. Washington recalls too well the Black Hawk Down debacle of 1993. Yet the Kampala attacks underline the folly of “constructive disengagement”, as advocated in a Council on Foreign Relations paper. It was disengagement from Somalia not engagement that led to the current crisis.

The first practical step is to reinforce the under-resourced African Union force (Amisom). Raising troop levels to 10,000-12,000 would allow it to expel al-Shabaab from Mogadishu, freeing civilians from the fighting and allowing President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government to start providing basic public services. More troops are no guarantee of success, yet under-resourcing a peacekeeping mission guarantees failure.

Retaking Mogadishu will also provide Somalis with the opportunity to engage in reconciliation because ultimately it will be Somalis, not outsiders, who solve the problems. Devolved decision-making is required. Last month the autonomous region of Somaliland showed a way ahead when it held largely peaceful elections in which the incumbent president stood down after the victory of the opposition candidate.

Donors must also get serious. It is unrealistic to expect the fledgling administration to behave like a government without adequate resources. In the UN’s report on Somalia last December, it was reported that of the $58m pledged by foreign donors in Brussels in 2009, the government had received just $5.6m. Little wonder soldiers who have not been paid in months are defecting to the better funded al-Shabaab. In return Mr Ahmed needs to pave the way for a new constitution and election to allow Somalis to choose a government.

The world can no longer look away. As General Nathan Mugisha, Amisom’s commander, told me in Mogadishu last month, “If the international community is serious about Somalia, it’s not a complicated problem to solve. But it’s getting more difficult by the day.”

The writer is a senior adviser at Albany Associates