Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  That is not to say that there were not some privatization success stories. Libya made some advances in privatizing its primitive banking sector.44 Libya's rehabilitation was also accompanied by a mushrooming of private shops, hotels, internet cafés and restaurants, as well as a growing real estate market, all of which changed the face of Tripoli dramatically. However, these businesses were, for the most part, small-scale affairs. Dr Fathi Al-Ba'aja, who became a member of the National Transitional Council following the 2011 revolution, despairingly commented in 2007:

  The private sector doesn't mean these shops that are open now as a way for people to bring in income. These are just small places that consist of brooms, two canisters and some tins of tomato paste … of course this is not what is meant by the private sector. Earning ten, twenty or thirty dinars a day means nothing other than the fact that you managed to continue living.45

  Those private concerns that did take off were generally owned by individuals who had the right connections to the upper echelons of the regime. One of the country's security brigades was behind a string of internet cafés that opened in Tripoli, while some of the smart new cafés and restaurants that sprang up in the centre of the city belonged to the offspring of senior members of the regime, including Qaddafi's own family.46 By the late 2000s, a new ‘entrepreneurial’ class had emerged, to be found rubbing shoulders with the Western businessmen who filled the swanky cafés of Tripoli's smart new international hotels. Indeed, the lobbies of the five-star Corinthia and Radisson Blu hotels became the wheeling and dealing hubs of the ‘new Libya’, where those with the right connections could make their fortunes, while the rest of the population looked on in bitter and distant envy. For all Saif Al-Islam's comments about not creating a group of oligarchs, the new economic opportunities that were accompanying Libya's return to the international community seemed to be concentrated in the hands of a very narrow elite, who were enjoying the bonanza.

  All this became too much for Ghanem, and he was genuinely relieved when, in 2006, he was suddenly removed from office without explanation and sent to head up the National Oil Corporation. While Ghanem, an oil man at heart, may have heaved a hefty sigh of relief to be out of the political firing line, his removal from office brought disappointment, and was widely viewed as an indication that Qaddafi's flirtation with economic reform had come to an end. Indeed, Ghanem's failure was not only down to the hardline elements who stood so fiercely in his way; the main problem was that he never had the real backing of the Leader. While the Colonel might have been persuaded by Saif Al-Islam that bringing Ghanem in was a good idea, Qaddafi never channelled any real political will behind the general secretary's reform agenda. He was content to sit back and let Ghanem and the old guard battle it out, while he continued doing what he had always done. Moreover, the more the country's energy sector got back on its feet, the less the pressure was to reform. Ghanem had served his purpose. He had done his bit to convince the world that Libya was changing, and now that oil revenues were flowing back into the public purse, he could be shunted out of the way and the reformist agenda put on the back burner.

  Jamahiriyah for ever

  If economic reform was piecemeal and mostly ineffective, political reform was to prove even more disappointing. Reforming a system that was believed by its creator to be the pinnacle of human achievement was always going to be a Sisyphean task. But, as in the economic sphere, Qaddafi knew that, for his revolution to live on, he needed to create at least the impression of change.

  As soon as the UN sanctions were suspended in 1999, reformist-minded officials began to speak of a new era, openly condemning the excesses of the past. The dark decades of the 1980s and 1990s were conveniently attributed to the zealousness of the revolutionary committees, as if to exonerate the regime of the brutalities that were committed in its name. Qaddafi also came forward with a number of pronouncements about how it was time to set aside the ‘revolutionary phase’ and adapt to the new realities facing the country. As if to substantiate these assertions, the regime made a number of gestures. In 2004, Qaddafi announced the abolition of the people's courts. Not that this meant the end of political trials, as these courts were quietly replaced by the equally ominous State Security Appeals Court, which held sessions inside a prison belonging to the Internal Security Agency; but the abolition of the courts provided Libya with some positive publicity. So, too, did its claims that it was going to amend the penal code; although a draft penal code was drawn up, it never got to see the light of day.

  However, it was through the figure of Saif Al-Islam that the whole political reform debate came to be articulated most forcefully. The irony of the Leader's own flesh and blood spearheading the reform process was not lost on the Libyans. Yet given the intensely personalized nature of the regime, and the fact that the Colonel did not allow the slightest space for anything outside his Jamahiriyah, the push for reform could only come from within the regime itself. And where better than from within the family? By the end of the 1990s, as they came of age, Qaddafi's children had all begun to make their presence felt in public life, carving out their own spheres of influence. Of all of them, Saif Al-Islam was the most obvious choice to take on the mantle of change-maker.

  Saif Al-Islam was Qaddafi's eldest son by his second wife, Safiyya, and this gave him a natural authority over his brothers. (Although the Colonel had a son, Mohammed, with his first wife, he was generally not inclined to politics.) More importantly, perhaps, Saif Al-Islam cut a different figure from his brothers. As with all Qaddafi's children, his childhood had been far from normal: he, his brothers and his one sister had been largely brought up at the hands of senior figures within the regime and had rarely seen their father. As Saif Al-Islam recalled,

  I never felt that I had a father who shared my problems at school. I did not feel that I had a father with whom I could go to the movies or the theatre, or anywhere else, or even play with us as fathers play with their sons. I hardly saw him as he had difficult circumstances, he leads a whole nation.47

  However, while many of his brothers took the obvious route, following their father down the military path, the more sensitive Saif Al-Islam sought out a different course in life.

  After studying architecture at Tripoli University and working for an architectural firm in Libya, he set his sights on continuing his studies in the West, enrolling in 1998 for an MBA at the IMADEC University in Vienna. The Colonel's son cut a rather immature figure at this point, drawing attention to himself by insisting that his beloved pet tigers, Barney and Fredo, accompany him to Austria, where they were placed in Vienna's zoo so that he could visit them regularly. As he explained, ‘I love playing with my tigers, although they can sometimes be a little rough!’48

  However, for all that he may have been immature, Saif Al-Islam was not entirely frivolous. Far from it: by the late 1990s, the young Qaddafi was steadily increasing his influence at home. In 1997, he set up a charity, the Gaddafi International Foundation for Charitable Associations.49 Although Saif Al-Islam repeatedly claimed that, as head of this charity, he was no more than the representative of Libya's civil society, the organization became a vehicle for his political and economic ambitions. It was through the foundation, for example, that he brokered a series of high-profile deals (such as securing the release of the Abu Sayaf hostages in the Philippines in 2000) and resolved many of the country's most pressing files including the La Belle disco bombing compensation and the eventual release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009. Indeed, Saif Al-Islam used the charity to bypass the formal mechanisms of the state and, despite having no official position, became the country's key negotiator, brokering deals that would enable Libya to restore its place in the international community.

  Meanwhile, the sharply dressed son began to give interviews to the international media, projecting a very different image of Libya to the one the world had come to know. He began extolling the virtues of democracy and employing the latest buzzwords, li
ke ‘transparency’ and ‘rule of law’. In 2002, he told one foreign news outlet: ‘I would like Libya to be strongly linked to the developed world and to be a safe oasis for foreign investment and democracy, respecting human rights and the environment.’50 He even joked about the situation in Libya, telling a US congressional aide who asked him at a dinner whether Libya needed more democracy: ‘More democracy would imply that we had some.’51 Such language was unheard of in the Libyan context. Yet Libya was out to impress, and the softly spoken Saif Al-Islam, with his easy smile, was the regime's most potent weapon in its charm offensive on the West.

  To some, this Jamahiriyah protégé cut a convincing figure; some Western policy-makers and commentators seized on Saif Al-Islam as if he were the hope of the future. For anyone who knew Libya, such talk of democracy was a million miles away from the reality on the ground. Qaddafi was not going to step aside and allow his Jamahiriyah to be swept away and replaced with something he had been railing against for over three decades. Yet while installing a modern democracy was off limits, Saif Al-Islam and his father knew that they had to do something to release some of the pressure that had been building in the country and that was threatening to blow.

  They concluded that the best means of doing this was through the issue of human rights. Taking on the role of ‘champion of the people’, the young Qaddafi set about tackling some of the country's most sensitive files. In 2003, through his charity, he instigated an anti-torture campaign. Posters appeared overnight on the streets of the capital, condemning torture and encouraging Libyans who had suffered to come forward and register their grievances.52 Libyans had never seen anything like it. The Leader's son also began making overtures to Libyan exiles abroad, putting out feelers to dissidents and listening to their demands in a bid to convince them to make their peace with the regime and return home. As one regime opponent, Ashur Shamis, who met Saif Al-Islam for the first time in 2002, says, ‘Nobody had ever come to us from the Gaddafi side talking in these terms.’53

  More controversially, Saif Al-Islam began talking about bringing those who had committed human rights abuses to justice and shedding light on some of the darker events of the past. He was careful not to implicate his father or the upper echelons of the regime in any of the human rights abuses he was uncovering; the blame was still to be placed squarely on the shoulders of the revolutionary committees, which were getting increasingly fed up with having to take all the flak. However, discussing such issues in an open way was something truly new in the Libyan context. This did not mean that human rights abuses became a thing of the past – the grim fate that continued to meet individuals such as Fathi Al-Jahemi, who dared to speak out against the regime, was testimony to that.54 However, Saif Al-Islam had at least enabled those with serious grievances to express their anger and to feel as though someone in the regime was listening.55 What was really important about these moves, however, was that they worked to absorb some of the popular anger that the Colonel knew was threatening to undermine his regime, particularly in the east, where there was hardly a family that had been left untouched by the regime's brutality.

  Yet Saif Al-Islam's most extraordinary achievement was his ‘Reform and Repent’ programme to rehabilitate the country's Islamist prisoners. Under this initiative, his charity entered first into a dialogue with prisoners from the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. After protracted negotiations, a hundred or so Muslim Brotherhood prisoners were freed in March 2006, after they agreed not to enter into any political activity outside the framework of the Jamahiriyah.56 Even more astonishing was what came next: in 2007, Saif Al-Islam embarked upon a similar dialogue with the country's militant Islamist prisoners. In return for their release, these hardened radicals would need to renounce violence and admit the error of their ways. In August 2009, after months of tough negotiations, the LIFG's leadership – including the group's spiritual leader, Said Saaidi, and its emir, Abdelhakim Belhaj,57 (both of whom had been returned to Libya in 2004 under secret rendition programmes) – finally issued a set of revisions in which they renounced violence. While the revisions were undoubtedly heartfelt by many who signed up to them, the pressure on the prisoners was enormous. So desperate was Saif Al-Islam to score a success that he employed tactics of coercion to get them to sign up, bringing the families of some of the militants into the prison to pressurize them, and also offering to provide their children with educational opportunities and other perks.58

  Yet once the revisions were agreed, Saif Al-Islam kept his word: accompanied by scenes of emotion, hundreds of prisoners, dressed in white, were freed from the Abu Slim prison, some of them having been incarcerated for two decades.59 This was a remarkable achievement, especially given that many within the security services were dead set against releasing these militants back into society. Indeed, many of Saif Al-Islam's schemes were to come up against the old guard, which, fearing the loss of privilege and way of life, tried to scupper his plans. Yet this hostility on the part of the regime loyalists had its uses: it enabled the Leader's son to posit himself as defender of human rights and champion of the Libyan people – as a lone man struggling against the state. He became what one Libyan observer described as ‘the oppressed oppressor’.60 Even in a land so saturated with slogans, gestures and promises, the young Qaddafi came to be regarded in some quarters as a saviour of sorts, and whenever anyone had even the slightest problem, it was to him that they went to get it resolved.

  But Saif Al-Islam knew that, if Libya was going to transform itself into something approaching a modern state, he had to go beyond the human rights realm. And so he turned his reformist attentions to the media. Libya's state-run newspapers, with their sycophantic revolutionary outpourings, had long been considered a joke, with the regime only bothering to print some 3,000 copies a day, most of which went unread. Even senior officials in the regime used to jest about how they never bothered to read them.61 Saif Al-Islam decided it was time to shake things up. He established the Al-Ghad media company, to be run by Suleiman Dogha, a former dissident whom Saif Al-Islam had persuaded to return to Libya; launched titles, such as Corina and Oea; and, in keeping with his savvy image, established some internet news outlets. While this new ‘independent’ press amounted to little more than a mini media empire, its importance was that it provided some space for Libyans to criticize the official mechanisms of the state. People were positively encouraged to let off steam about issues such as corruption or the failings of the government, and these publications became the focus of some of the liveliest debate during this period. They were like a breath of fresh air in what had been an utterly stale environment.

  Buoyed up by his success, Saif Al-Islam even went so far as to start tinkering with the political system itself. By the early 2000s, the favoured son had managed to attract a coterie of reformist-minded officials and academics, who saw in him the country's best hope for change in an otherwise bleak landscape. In 2004, he tasked a group of these supporters with forming a committee to draw up a constitution that would not simply enshrine the Green Book, but that would shake up Libya's political structures.62 This was the first real sniff that the regime might be considering a serious shift in the country's political establishment.

  However, these hopes were soon dashed. It was not long before it became apparent that, for all his initial enthusiasm, Saif Al-Islam's commitment to the nuts and bolts of the project was fading fast. As one member of the committee recalled, ‘He was always busy. He never responded to us, not once. Saif Al-Islam wasn't interested in details, problems or challenges.’63 Moreover, the young Qaddafi seemed to have no clear vision as to what this constitution should contain. He relied heavily on outside expertise, and his head was easily turned. After any visit abroad, where he revelled in mixing with Western intellectuals, Saif Al-Islam went back to the committee with new ideas that he wanted incorporated into the draft.64 He would first demand one thing, and then at the next opportunity would demand the very opposite. The committee became so disillusioned that in su
mmer 2008 it handed over the draft it was working on and washed its hands of the discussions. Unsurprisingly the draft was never to see the light of day.

  One of the reasons for the failure of this project was Saif Al-Islam's inability to get his act together. Indeed, he was beginning to look like his father, in so far as he had a habit of championing causes that he did not follow through. Moreover, Libyans became suspicious that the whole project had been about Saif Al-Islam looking for a way to legitimize himself, rather than about any genuine commitment to political change.

  However, the failure over the new constitutional draft was also related to a far bigger problem – that of Qaddafi senior. The Colonel was not amused by his son's efforts to make changes to his already perfect Jamahiriyah. Such was his hostility to the project that he exploded with rage when Saif Al-Islam leaked a copy of the draft to the media in 2008. Although the document was not particularly radical – its main thrust was the establishment of a council of representatives from the social people's leaderships that would sit on top of the existing political system – it was enough to make the Colonel see red. After a serious fight, Saif Al-Islam announced that he was withdrawing from public life and stormed off abroad.