As for her own future, she has every intention of contesting the next election, for her fourth term. Retirement is not on the agenda, but it holds no fears. ‘I’ve got plenty of skiing I’d like to do, trekking I’d like to do, books I’d like to read, plays I’d like to go to.’ These are interests she shares with her husband, Peter Davis, who is professor of sociology at Auckland University.
My tea has gone cold, but at least Clark finished her cup. She stands up, shakes my hand and heads upstairs to her room – she reckons she’s got time for some sleep before her evening schedule kicks off.
THE ROSE LOUNGE
Sofitel St James, London SW 1
* * *
1 × pot of orange-blossom tea
* * *
Total £10.13
* * *
11 SEPTEMBER 2004
Saif Gaddafi
The son also rises
When your father is Colonel Gaddafi, it’s only natural to conduct hostage negotiations and rear tigers during your studies. Now Saif Gaddafi is ready to bring the west and al-Qaeda to the table
By Roula Khalaf
Four months after I first suggested a lunch in London with Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, I received a telephone call from a person close to him. The son and potential heir of the maverick Libyan leader, a doctorate student in London, had settled on a faraway destination: he wanted to dine in Tripoli. A few days later I am sitting on a red velvet sofa, surrounded by walls of colourful Moroccan tiles, in Saif’s ‘farm’, a luxurious Moorish-style villa on the main highway between the airport and Tripoli. A tall young man with a boyish look and a shaved head is facing me; he is dressed in a traditional white tunic over tight black trousers, the top covered with an embroidered vest.
No one is sure what role Saif, second-eldest son to the colonel, plays in Libya. He is often credited with helping to persuade his father to resolve the Lockerbie crisis and to give up his weapons of mass destruction. Though he holds no official position, he’s the man to see if you want something done in Libya – a meeting with the leader or a business deal. His own take on this is that he is an accidental mediator: ‘I get credit because I lived in London during that time (of Lockerbie and the weapons) so it was easy for the west to contact me and easy for me to contact my father.’
The ‘facilitator’, as one businessman describes him, is as eccentric as his father – a sort of new-age Gaddafi. He likes to shock with his behaviour and to provoke with his words. He’s unpredictable: outrageous one moment and pragmatic the next. He tells me he is just back from a jungle, where he celebrated his 32nd birthday. ‘I was invited to go to the end of Russia, to a remote place, a jungle, with birds, deer, no roads, nothing. I saw hot springs, active volcanoes.’
Saif has been studying at the London School of Economics, so our conversation is mostly in English; he speaks it well. But from time to time we switch into Arabic, our mother tongue, particularly when one of us wants to emphasize a point. He is the oldest son of the colonel’s second wife, Safiya, and he has seven siblings. His eldest brother Mohamed (son of Gaddafi’s first wife Fatiha) runs the telecommunications sector in Libya. Then there’s the footballer Saadi, who loves the limelight and has played with Perugia, a team in Italy’s Serie A league. There’s also Aisha, a law student who is looking for a political role and recently offered to be part of Saddam Hussein’s defence team.
Lunch, such as it is, takes place in front of a television screen, tuned to the pan-Arab al-Jazeera channel. Saif sits back and gazes into the distance as if posing for a picture. It’s an instant reminder of his father, depicted in portraits all over Libya with his head tilted upwards, staring into space. We are served sweet mint tea in small glasses, as is the custom in North Africa. There’s a huge basket of fruit on the table and small plates with melon and watermelon cut in cubes. But the pièce de rèsistance are the dates, sweet and juicy. Saif gulps a glass of buttermilk while I sip a fruit juice. ‘It’s the poor man’s meal,’ he quips.
This ‘poor man’ raises tigers as pets. He urges me not to leave without visiting his small private zoo, in the garden outside. I later meet three tigers, including a rare white breed. Saif took one of his tigers to Vienna when he went to study for a Masters in Business Administration a few years back. The MBA was squeezed between his architectural studies and the doctorate he’s still pursuing in London. Along the way he also became a painter. He won’t say who inspires him. ‘I remember the style but not all the names. It’s called the complex style; mixing techniques within one painting: surrealism, collage and realism.’ He has exhibited his paintings in several European capitals.
Saif’s doctorate is in ‘governance and non-governmental organizations’. There is no such thing as a non-government organization in Libya. But the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charity Associations likes to act as one and it has been the vehicle through which Saif has pursued his political ambitions.
The foundation has helped to improve Libya’s image by raising human rights issues, visiting prisons and inviting Amnesty International to Libya. But it was tremendously annoyed when Amnesty later issued a report accusing Tripoli of continuing to jail and torture political prisoners and timed its publication to coincide with Colonel Gaddafi’s arrival in Brussels on his first visit to Europe in 15 years. ‘Amnesty accepted that it had come under pressure [from European political circles] to release the report during the visit. But torture is part of history, it’s finished. There are no such practices any more. We brought them [Amnesty] here to speak about facts and the achievements in human rights.’
A week after the colonel’s European trip a Libyan court handed down the death sentence to six Bulgarian medical workers who had been accused of infecting hundreds of children with the HIV virus at a Benghazi hospital. Human rights organizations and European governments were outraged and consider the case to be fabricated. Saif insists the judgment must be respected, even if his foundation is against capital punishment. The case is now on appeal and there is still hope that Gaddafi will intervene and perhaps pardon the Bulgarians.
Saif tells me he wants to see political reforms in Libya, that The Green Book, his father’s quirky prescriptions of how a country should be run, has not been well applied, and that it would produce a democracy if it were. But he admits that Libya is a bit lost, as it tries to be accepted again by the rest of the world. ‘We haven’t taken the final decision about where we want to go. Now we are without an identity.’ He pauses, thinking about what he’s just said. He jots down notes on a yellow Post-it Note pad. ‘Yes, we’re at a crossroads. We got lost and we don’t have a passport yet.’
The foundation’s other hat is ‘conflict resolution’. It has been involved in negotiations for the release of hostages held by rebel groups in the Philippines and in Algeria, a process that sometimes involves paying a ransom to the kidnappers. ‘We accomplished miracles in that foundation, to free hostages in the Philippines or Algeria, which a lot of people had failed to do. One of the key reasons is good timing and negotiating skills. I do the negotiations myself, even if it doesn’t appear like that sometimes.’
I tell him some people have suggested that such activities could be construed as a continuation of the same unsavoury support for rebel groups that led to Libya’s isolation. Those who criticize the foundation, he says, are simply envious of its success. But he adds nonchalantly: ‘We can do this [negotiate] because we have something in common. We’re all rebels. It’s the history of my family.’
One of the people associated with the foundation is now in a Saudi jail, captured after the Saudis allegedly uncovered a bizarre Libyan plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler. The Saudis have taken these allegations very seriously and the Americans are investigating. But Saif dismisses the whole story as a joke. ‘It’s not professional of me to send someone to wait in a hotel to assassinate the crown prince. It’s a made-up story but not well made up.’
We talk about America and the rather posit
ive outlook he has towards the US. He says the US is a big shopping centre. ‘You pick things you want and leave the rest. They have oil companies with their big dollars to invest so you bring them. They have MIT and one of my dreams is to bring it here for a joint programme with a Libyan university. Americans can you to bring democracy and have a free press. At the same time, sometimes they’re ugly, like in Iraq or Palestine, so you reject them. It’s a big dinosaur. It’s not easy to say America is good or bad.’
I tell him that it strikes me that welcoming the US project to reform the Arab world marks him out as something of an Arab neo-conservative. He is miffed and quickly reminds me of his radical side: he considered the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September not to have been a terrorist act. He also says the killing of Italian soldiers in Iraq is an attack on a military target. ‘But I’m against killing all the Jews and saying they’re all our enemies. I have my own way.’
Saif believes that if elections were held in the Arab world, those associated with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden would win. ‘I challenge governments to hold free elections and see if bin Laden wins.’ Dealing with al-Qaeda, he says, requires a political, not military, solution. He ends our modest lunch by offering himself as a mediator. ‘I’d do it. Why not? I’ve negotiated with groups in the Philippines, in Algeria.’
SAIF AL-LSLAM AL-GADDAFI’S FARM
Tripoli
* * *
sweet mint tea
basket of fruit
melon and watermelon
cubes
dates
1 × glass of buttermilk
1 × fruit juice
13 MAY 2011
Paul Kagame
‘We don’t go out begging’
Some see the Rwandan president as the country’s saviour; others as a bloodstained tyrant
By William Wallis
Paul Kagame, 53, has been president of Rwanda for the past decade and vice-president – and de facto leader – for seven years before that. But for all the power and years of command he appears as lean and austere as he was as the 36-year-old guerrilla commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel army that fought an end to the 20th century’s swiftest act of mass murder – the killing between April and July 1994 of some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu sympathizers.
In the years since, we have met a number of times but this is our first lunch: the president is visiting London and suggests meeting at the Wyndham Grand in Chelsea Harbour, an expensive but unremarkable hotel not known for its restaurant. Our meal is to be prepared by a chef travelling with the presidential party. Kagame’s aides assure me in advance that this is not out of fear of being poisoned. Rather, they explain, it is for organizational reasons – feeding the entourage and past experience with the vagaries of hotel catering – and I half believe them. Kagame’s administration, which has approached development with the same single-mindedness as it approached guerrilla warfare, is nothing if not well organized.
The country that Kagame took over had collapsed, its institutions and people abandoned or destroyed during the genocide. In the ensuing years his government has overseen the return of millions of Rwandans displaced by conflict; hundreds of thousands of genocide crimes have been tried by village committees.
And, with the help of international aid, on which the government still depends for nearly 50 per cent of its budget, Rwanda has seen some of the highest growth rates in Africa. Yet no African leader divides opinion as sharply as Kagame does or inspires such contrasting caricatures: on the one hand, the visionary statesman, forging prosperity out of ruin and courageously tackling continental taboos; on the other, the bloodstained tyrant. He is accused of war crimes and human rights abuses at least as often as he is celebrated with honorary doctorates and global leadership awards.
The polemics are fuelled by Kagame’s mixed record. Unlike many of his African peers, he has relentlessly pursued results in his bid to transform an inward-looking mountain nation into a regional centre for services, agro-processing, tourism and transport. But he has also been given extraordinary licence to repress dissent, and the prosperity of elites in Kigali derives at least partly from the plunder of minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo during Rwanda’s serial invasions of its neighbour.
According to United Nations reports, tens of thousands of Rwandans and Congolese died at the hands of Kagame’s army as he established authority and secured his country’s borders in the face of continuing threats to surviving Tutsis. Political opponents and journalists still end up in exile, jail or, in some cases, six foot under.
Yet Kagame can count among his international supporters the likes of Tony Blair, Rick Warren, the evangelical US pastor, and Howard Schultz of Starbucks among other influential figures in the west. Members of his fan club tend to overlook the more troubling aspects of his rule or support the notion that he has done what was necessary to restore security and lay the foundations for development.
In the anonymous, faintly ascetic meeting room at the Wyndham Grand, where we are about to be served carrot and tomato soup, Kagame says, ‘I have no regrets about being who I am, and being what I am in my country for my people. No regrets at all.’ The round table where we are to eat, bedecked with white cloth and silver cutlery, is something of an oasis in a desert of empty carpet.
The wider global setting is more compelling: Kagame, though relaxed, is not a man for small talk and our conversation moves quickly to the conflict in Ivory Coast, revolutions sweeping the Arab world and the ramifications of both for sub-Saharan Africa. ‘These are not problems that just emerged yesterday: they are problems which people were not paying attention to because it suited their own interests not to,’ he says of the corruption, social injustice and repression that fuelled the Arab uprisings.
Such a statement might raise an eyebrow among his detractors, coming as it does from a head of state who has yet to allow a strong opponent to rival him, and who in 2001 locked up his predecessor Pasteur Bizimungu, when he formed an opposition party. But the attention Kagame has focused on developing Rwanda’s essentially peasant economy has fostered the shoots of a remarkable recovery for anyone bothered to observe it closely. Few of Kagame’s detractors do, something he finds infuriating.
Fiercely defensive of the moral high ground, he is not shy of playing on western guilt at having failed Rwanda in its hour of need. ‘I don’t think anybody out there in the media, UN, human rights organizations, has any moral right whatsoever to level any accusations against me or against Rwanda. Because, when it came to the problems facing Rwanda, and the Congo, they were all useless,’ he says, quietly emptying his soup bowl.
Weary of the problems associated with being a recipient of international aid – from the patronizing, bullying tactics of donor nations to the often fickle nature of their policies in Africa – Kagame has developed an acute sensitivity to western mendacity and double standards. He also has a strong sense of irony. So it is with a wry laugh that he suggests that the historic focus of western governments on stability over freedom and good governance in the Arab world has had its comeuppance. ‘They have to face the reality now I think. They just can’t ignore it …’
If there is a broader lesson from the Arab Spring for countries south of the Sahara, he continues, it is in what happens to those in office who do not pay attention to the interests of their people. ‘You can be up there, talked about, appreciated all over the world, with people singing a lot of songs about you. But if you don’t measure up and you are not really connected with your people … it will explode in your face, no question about it.’
Next on the menu chosen for us by his chef is steak, with beans, green peppers, rice and potatoes. It looks fortifying, so I introduce an awkward comparison. Bahrain, ruled by a Sunni minority distrustful of a majority Shia population now in open revolt, could, I suggest, be compared to Rwanda, with its administration dominated by a minority – ethnic Tutsis, who make up around 14 per cent of the population and were victims of the 1994 genocide.
Not unlike Bahrain’s ruling elite, Rwanda’s fears real democracy would lead to majority rule and that this would invite chaos given the history of extremism among majority Hutus.
Kagame reacts sharply to the comparison. For one, he is not a monarch, he says, like King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. But, I murmur, you were elected by a remarkable 93 per cent of votes only last year, facing no real opposition.
‘In Rwanda there is a constitution. There are term limits; there is a parliament, there are elections. Somebody who makes that comparison, I will just say is ignorant,’ he insists, defending the near unanimous result of last year’s polls as a vote for stability in the context of the country’s peculiarly bloody history.
Yet international concern is, if anything, mounting over whether the peace and economic growth Kagame has established is sustainable alongside a political system that remains rigidly controlled.
He continues with a tactic often deployed by African heads of state but which in this instance seems somewhat disingenuous: to harp on the exaggerated expectations made of developing nations by the west and the west’s failure often to meet the same exacting standards. ‘Why isn’t the majority in the developed world interpreted on the basis of race or colour or tribes? Why? You want to tell me that, in the United States, Barack Obama comes from which majority?’ he asks.
We reach a point of agreement when we decide that had Rwanda been an oil-rich state like Libya it is unlikely that UN peacekeepers would have backed off when mass murder started as they did in 1994. We also agree that in the case of Ivory Coast, the elections that sparked this year’s conflict were premature, symptomatic of the pressure applied on African nations to import political systems that are not always suited to local circumstance.
Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Page 21