by Hisham Matar
The minister of state refuted the suggestion that “business interests motivate our actions.”
Baroness D’Souza then stood up. “My Lords, could the minister confirm when the case of Jaballa Matar last came up in direct discussions between the UK and Libyan governments?”
“In fact I can tell the noble Baroness that the last discussions on Jaballa Matar’s case took place this weekend,” the minister of state said.
Another member, Lord Hunt, broadened the demands further, linking the UK support of a current European Union proposal to strengthen trade relations with Libyan reform. “Would the Minister answer this simple question: does she agree that the EU/Libya framework agreement must be based on meaningful progress in the areas of political and human-rights reform? If she does, can we just hear an affirmative answer?”
“The answer is yes,” the minister of state said.
Another member, Lord Avebury, then spoke. “My Lords, we, too, are grateful to the foreign secretary for his statement on Jaballa Matar….Could the foreign secretary now publish a complete list of all the individual representations that have been made to the Libyan government together with the text of any replies that have been received?”
Peter Mandelson, who, together with Tony Blair, was the other senior member of the Labor Party who had close relations with Qaddafi’s son, Seif el-Islam, was present. Throughout the proceedings, he kept his eyes on me. His expression was theatrically hard and seemed deliberately without emotion. It summed up the cynicism with which some members of the British establishment were conducting relations with the Libyan dictatorship.
After the session ended we felt bold and optimistic. None of us had expected the support to be so broad or so passionate. Lord Lester came to tell us that it was unusual for such questions, which are allotted only a few minutes for discussion, to provoke so many supporting statements. We walked out and for a few moments that afternoon I felt useful.
—
More articles appeared. BBC World Service radio was preparing a documentary on my father’s disappearance. I gave countless interviews to television channels. Then something unprecedented happened. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and former archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, issued a statement calling on Muammar Qaddafi
to urgently clarify the fate and whereabouts of Jaballa Matar…Libya’s passage from isolation to acceptance will only be complete when it has provided victims of human rights abuse with the remedies they deserve. Addressing the case of Jaballa Matar would be an excellent place to start.
Never before had an African figure of Tutu’s stature publicly criticized Qaddafi. Most African leaders, reliant on Libyan handouts, were shamefully servile to the dictator. One of Qaddafi’s rare honorable acts was his long-term and unwavering support of the African National Congress, which made members of the South African anti-apartheid movement even less likely to speak out against human-rights abuses in Libya. Back in 2002, I had sent a letter to Nelson Mandela via a friend who had played a prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement and who knew the South African president personally. In the letter I asked Mr. Mandela whether, given his close ties with Qaddafi, he could inquire about my father’s whereabouts and well-being. The answer, which was given to my friend, was unambiguous: “Mandela says to never ask him such a thing again.” As it was secondhand, it is impossible to be certain of the wording, but what was clear is that even a man as great as Nelson Mandela felt too indebted to Qaddafi to risk upsetting him. Such concerns were clearly not important to the archbishop. His statement gained our campaign extraordinary momentum.
I became a thorn in the side of both the Libyan and the British governments. After several requests to meet with David Miliband, I was finally granted an audience. I took with me a friend, one of the very first and most active organizers of the campaign, and Lord Lester, who had by then become a central figure in our attempts to link British–Libyan cooperation to political and human-rights reform in Libya. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office building is architecturally interesting in the way that it suffers from conflicting influences. Its architect, George Gilbert Scott, was an exponent of the gothic revival, an architectural movement that dominated Britain from the mid 1700s to the mid 1800s. Augustus Pugin, one of its stars and the man behind the frenzied architecture of the Palace of Westminster, where the House of Lords is housed, was an inspiration for George Gilbert Scott. But the brief for the FCO building constrained Scott. It demanded an Italianate design, one deriving its influences from sixteenth-century Italian renaissance architecture. The result is a strangely contradictory building: Italianate bones; eclectic decorations that evoke a sense of British colonial romanticism; and—in the overbearing weight of the interiors, their determination to control the light—the temperament and atmosphere of gothic revival architecture. Like the ministry it houses, the building also wants to be elsewhere. Walking through its long corridors, Lord Lester began telling my friend and me about the various idiosyncrasies of the institution. He seemed anxious. He walked up alongside me.
“One of the things he is going to ask you is why you didn’t come to him sooner. The government is not happy with all the press,” Lord Lester said. A few steps later he said, “Now, remember to compliment him. You can compliment him on the Labor Party’s human-rights record.”
“I can’t possibly do that,” I said.
“Well, you must think of something.”
“Actually, I have,” I said. “I was going to compliment him on his father.” I had read the prominent sociologist Ralph Miliband’s book The State in Capitalist Society.
“What? You mean that Marxist?” Lord Lester said. “For all you know he might hate his father.”
“Even so, a man who hates his father likes other men complimenting him.”
“I think you should think of something else,” Lord Lester said.
We were led into a waiting room, and a couple of minutes later taken to David Miliband’s office. He met us at the door. He was warm and jovial. Made some joke that I now can’t remember. The office was a large room with arched windows, the high ceiling gilded, the walls papered in dark green with a running motif in gold. There was a large painting above the fireplace of a regal-looking Indian man holding a sword. Also present was the Foreign Office’s Libya desk officer, Declan Byrne. We sat on red leather armchairs. David Miliband asked me to take the one beside him. I took note of his exceptionally hairless hands. Lord Lester was right. The first thing Miliband asked was why I hadn’t come to him sooner.
“Before all the noise,” he said, and gestured with his hand, smiling affably.
I didn’t think it worthwhile to remind him that I had made several previous requests for this meeting. All I said was, “But the only reason I am here is because of the noise.”
He was obviously an intelligent and charismatic man, but it was at this point, perhaps in part provoked by the conversation with Lord Lester, that I decided not to bother complimenting him on his father.
The only commitment we came away with was that the British ambassador in Libya would make fortnightly presentations regarding my father to the Libyan government. This was significant. The pressure would be sustained. Walking me out, David Miliband placed his hand on my shoulder.
“So tell me,” he said. “Are you British now?”
“Yes.”
“Good man. Excellent. So you’re one of us.”
Was he patronizing me? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was the genuine warm confederacy of a fellow-Brit. Or, then again, maybe it was the impatient, political, bullying pragmatism of power towards a person of mixed identities, a man whose preoccupations do not fit neatly inside the borders of one country, and so perhaps what Miliband was really saying was, “Come on, you’re British now; forget about Libya.”
—
Every couple of weeks I would contact the Libya desk at the Foreign Office. Several times I went there, signed in at security, and was led through the corridors to a boardroom right on the top flo
or to meet with Declan Byrne and his colleagues. When the Conservatives won the elections, the new foreign secretary, William Hague, decided, according to the FCO, to “carry on with the current policy.” They confirmed Hague’s commitment to these fortnightly representations. At every meeting I asked if these presentations yielded anything, and every time I was told, “No.” I believed that by taking what an unwilling partner was giving me, even if it was insincere, I would be able to maintain the momentum. Once it became obvious, I thought, that these presentations were useless, I could press for a different strategy. That was how my brain worked then; now I think differently.
—
Besides Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, there were many other influential figures within the British establishment who were closely associated with the Libyan regime. We wanted to make those involved in business with the Libyan dictatorship aware of the case. The financier Nathaniel Rothschild was friends with Seif el-Islam. A friend of mine knew his father, Jacob Rothschild, and offered to introduce me. I had never met a man so steeped in power. You could feel it emanating from the walls of his office. Lord Rothschild, who, I learned throughout our meeting, had served for two years as an adviser to the Libyan Investment Authority, began by telling me of various people he knew who were connected to the Libyan dictatorship. He spoke about them with interest and curiosity. I thought, for men like him, the world must seem an amusing affair. I handed him a file on my father’s case.
“Given the close relations British government and businesses have with the Libyan regime,” I told him, “it is a golden opportunity for Britain to play a constructive role in the betterment of the lives of the Libyan people. This case is a good place to start.”
Lord Rothschild said he was willing to help. He said he had met Seif el-Islam on more than one occasion. “I will ask Nat to speak to Seif.”
I walked out of his office, took the shortest route to the National Gallery and stood in front of Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard.
Several days later Jacob Rothschild wrote to say that Seif el-Islam was in London. He included a mobile number and said that he was expecting my call.
17. The Dictator’s Son
Ever since 2004, when Tony Blair went to Libya and relations were normalized, some Libyan friends had urged me to make contact with Seif el-Islam. It was known that on more than one occasion, as Libya’s image was undergoing a facelift, he had released political prisoners. And recently, in 2009, he had done the seemingly impossible: he managed to extract Abdelbaset al-Megrahi—a Libyan intelligence officer convicted of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie—from the clutches of the Scottish justice system. When the plane landed in Tripoli, Seif stepped out victoriously, holding the hand of al-Megrahi up in the air. The wind filled Seif’s sleeve, ballooning the fabric. Shortly after this, Seif bought a house in Hampstead. For several days after I heard the news, I had to drive away thoughts of knocking on his door and shooting him.
—
In 2003, when I was living in Paris, and a few days after I came close to jumping off a bridge, I sat down and wrote Seif el-Islam the sort of letter I had been writing for years to Libyan and Egyptian authorities, detailing the known facts of my father’s case and asking them to clarify his fate. Over the years I have written nearly 300 such letters. I have not once received a response. One day we staged a demonstration in front of the Egyptian embassy in London. The policeman handed our letter to the young Egyptian diplomat standing at the entrance of the embassy. The diplomat held the envelope high above his head, so we could all see him slowly rip it in two. It was not so much his action that remained with me but the expression on his face, vehemence that told of a curious mixture of loathing and shame. That became the face of all those who never answered my letters. I never wrote to Seif again. But now, seven years later and at the height of the campaign, I was a desperate man, willing to talk to the devil in order to find out if my father was alive or dead. That was how I was then; I am no longer like that now.
—
I dialed the number Lord Rothschild sent me. There was no answer. I left a message. Ten minutes later the phone rang, showing a different number. I heard a man’s voice uttering the typical run of hollow platitudes, even more meaningless than usual, for he didn’t leave time for a reply. Then he said, “I am Seif.”
I introduced myself and asked for a meeting.
He said I would be contacted with a time and a place.
In the evening a man called and said, “I’m Rajab el-Laiyas.” He said it as though he expected me to know of him. “We’ll meet tomorrow at 5 P.M. at the Jumeirah. You know it?”
When I hung up, I thought, anything could happen. I could discover my father’s fate or be kidnapped like him. And I recalled those dark few minutes at the edge of the Pont d’Arcole in Paris. What had taken me there was discovering that, although I was living with the woman I loved and, for the first time ever, was able to dedicate most of my time to writing, and the sun shone most days and we ate well, the only relief I could think of from the pain maintained by every ticking second would come from being in that same “noble palace” in Abu Salim with my father.
I telephoned Ziad in Cairo. I asked when he could get here. He took the night flight and was at my door by the following morning. We smoked a lot, we drank endless cups of coffee, and we tried to prepare. We ran through all the possible scenarios: will they ask us up to a room or will we meet in the lobby, or will they ask us to accompany them elsewhere, and what might their strategy be, and how ought we to respond? I notified key figures in our campaign of the time and place of the meeting. Diana was to wait at a nearby café with a list of numbers to call in case we didn’t come back.
The Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel is in Knightsbridge. The only thing I knew about it was that long ago, when it had a different name, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz used to meet there. We arrived ten minutes early and took one of the round tables for four in the café in the lobby. It was to one side, with a good view of the entrance. I am not sure if my recollections of the hotel lobby are accurate or if they have been affected by my state at the time. Either way, this is how I remember it. In the lounge, heavy Arab businessmen sat in gigantic armchairs. Suited English architects or developers leant over them, pointing to spreadsheets and architectural plans. The more these prospecting Englishmen bent over, the tighter their neckties became and the redder their faces grew.
Although neither of us felt like it, Ziad and I ordered tea.
A woman who looked a little embarrassed occupied the center of the lobby, plucking away at a harp. Her skill was clear, but she had obviously been instructed to stick to instrumentals of well-known pop songs. She was now in the opening bars of “Yesterday” by the Beatles. We spotted the television preacher Amr Khaled sitting with a group of admirers. At several other tables around the lobby, high-class prostitutes sat in pairs, sipping wine. They looked like artificial flowers. After a marathon of popular tunes, the harpist allowed herself a brief diversion. One of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Number 7, I think. It lasted about a minute.
An hour after the agreed time, a group of men in jeans and T-shirts, looking more like a hip-hop band than a security outfit, walked quickly towards our table. Seif had chosen his entourage carefully. With him he had Mohammad al-Hawni, a 65-year-old lawyer based in Rome, from where he served Libyan–Italian business interests. We dubbed him the Intellectual, as his main purpose was to impress upon us that some of Seif’s aides read books. The rest were bodyguards—one of whom, Seif was keen to point out, was a member of our tribe. Seif sat opposite me, the Intellectual opposite Ziad, and the bodyguards took the table behind us.
Ziad donned his usual air of confidence and affability. I feared this taxed him more than the role I played taxed me. He asked the men what they would like to drink and whether they frequented this place.
“I suppose it’s your hangout?” Ziad said in English,
and smiled.
Seif then asked, “Who is the writer?”
Ziad told him I was.
“You are the writer?” Seif asked again.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is that all you do?”
“I am afraid so,” I said.
“What, you mean all you do is write?”
“Precisely.”
“You don’t do anything else?”
“I try not to,” I said.
“You are a wonderful writer,” Mohammad al-Hawni put in. “A great talent. We are very proud of you.”
“I’m surprised you read me, given that my books are banned in Libya.”
“No, no, no,” the Intellectual said. “In the Country of Men, right? I read it. I read it in Italian. Excellent book. Do you have anything else on the way? Hurry up, we are waiting.”
All this tedious nonsense had a serious purpose. It was to figure out how on earth this mere writer was able to rustle up such “noise,” as Miliband put it. How did he manage to marshal senior members of the House of Lords, the Foreign Office, Nobel laureates, international legal authorities, human-rights groups and NGOs? Is he a spy? Why is he not tempted by money? How—the question power always asks—can we get to him?
One of Seif’s bodyguards handed him a phone. “Excuse me,” Seif said, and took the call.
“Excellent book,” Mohammad al-Hawni whispered. Then, a little while later, “In the Country of Men.”
Just as Seif was ending his call, Ziad looked at me and smiled his mischievous smile. He said, loud enough for the others to hear, “See this fine young man?”
“What did you say?” Seif asked as soon as he hung up.
“I was just saying what a fine young man you are.”