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HERE COMES THE SON

Saif Gaddafi interview
The Independent on Sunday, July 2002

A LIBYAN passport cannot be the easiest document with which to travel. At the best of times, western officials must react to the emblem of The Great Socialist Peoples’ Libyan Arab Jamahiriya much like hungry lions upon spotting an elderly, footsore wildebeest which has lost its way home. What, you can only wonder, do they say upon opening such a passport and noticing that the surname inside it is Gaddafi?
  “Nice question,” smiles Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a young man doubtless used to seeing customs officers’ eyebrows scaling their foreheads all the way up to their hat-brims. “To be frank with you, most of the time I try to hide my name. Not because I’m afraid, but just to protect my privacy. Yes, people are sometimes surprised, but mostly people ask me about Libya and about my father. Really, they just take the chance to ask questions.”
  What’s the most common question they ask?
  “How is your father?”
  And how is he?
  “Good. Thank you.”

THE curiosity is understandable. For much of the 1970s and 80s, the name Gaddafi was one of the most reviled on earth. Back when Saddam Hussein was still being propped up as the west’s bulwark against Iranian fundamentalism, and when the only people who had cause to curse Osama bin-Laden were Russian conscripts in Afghanistan, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was the favoured western symbol for Islamic terror, the grinning villain of the global village pantomime.
  Nowhere was Gaddafi more heartily booed than in Britain. In April 1984, just around the corner from where his son is today ensconced at the Ritz, staff inside the Libyan Peoples’ Bureau on St James’ Square opened fire on anti-Gaddafi protestors, killing Yvonne Fletcher, a 25-year-old constable who was policing the demonstration, (Libya has since accepted “general responsibility” for WPC Fletcher’s death, and compensated her family). Also within a brisk walk are several targets struck by the IRA, to whom Colonel Gaddafi shipped colossal quantities of weapons. Most infamously, there was the 1988 murder of the 259 passengers and crew of Pan Am flight 103, and 11 residents of the Scottish town of Lockerbie, the town upon which the bombed aircraft fell. A Libyan Airlines official, and alleged Libyan intelligence agent, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, was controversially convicted of the atrocity in January 2001, and is serving life in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison; Libya still denies involvement.
  It would be wrong, of course, to visit the sins, actual and alleged, of the father upon the son. Besides which, Gaddafi’s children have already paid a high price. I tell Saif that I can remember being at school in Sydney when American aircraft, flying from British bases, bombed Tripoli in April 1986; my economics teacher, convinced that the world was about to end, gave us the afternoon off. Saif would have had more immediate reason to worry – he was at home at the time, and Chez Gaddafi was on the target list. An adopted baby daughter of Colonel Gaddafi’s was killed in the raid.
  “We knew it was coming, sooner or later,” shrugs Saif. “But we thought they’d hit military sites, not our house. That was a surprise.”
  Saif was born three years after his father seized power in Libya in 1969. Now 30, he is widely believed to be the Colonel’s choice of his children to take over the family business. On first acquaintance, however, the urbane Saif is not obviously his father’s son. His accent is more suggestive of his European education than his Arabic upbringing. Our meeting takes place in a hotel suite, as opposed to a bedouin-style tent. He is wearing a smart suit, rather than traditional robes. His head is neatly shaved, not adorned with an unruly mop of curls and a peculiar hat. His conversation, while breezily self-assured in the manner of those born to bottomless wealth, is thoughtful – there are none of the wild flights of rhetoric or eccentric conspiracy theories often credited to the old man – and there are occasional glints of a dry sense of humour. The furniture, in short, survives un-chewed.
  “I’m a lot more conservative than my father,” says Saif, with a chuckle. “My father is a real revolutionary. Even when I agree with him in principle, I always say we should be rational, and practical, and give things time to mature.”
  As we speak, the Colonel – who now apparently prefers to be known as the Golden Leader – is in Durban for the African Union summit, to which he reportedly took a 400-strong entourage, six million dollars in cash and 60 armoured cars, in three aeroplanes and a container ship. Saif, who appears to travel rather lighter, is visiting London in his capacity as head of the Gaddafi International Charity Foundation, and as patron of “The Desert Is Not Silent”, a touring exhibition of Libyan antiquities and modern art – most of it painted by Saif himself.
  Two weeks before our meeting, I had attended the exhibition in Berlin. Saif’s works are a mix of traditional themes (desert-scapes, representations of camels and giraffes painted on bedouin tent-cloth) and heavily Dali-influenced surrealist allegories (one of which, “The Challenge”, features Colonel Gaddafi gazing disdainfully down from an irridescent sky at three hooded figures waving crucifixes). I’m no expert, but I thought some of the desert-inspired efforts were quite good, and showed an astute command of colour and light. The lurid modernist paintings with a point to make, on the other hand, might have struggled for gallery space if painted by someone called Smith.
  I ask Saif about the undeniably eye-catching “The Challenge”. According to the catalogue notes, “The artist created this work during the years of the [post-Lockerbie] embargo and in the context of the challenges on the powers of the new crusade. Libya was as strong as a rock, against which the arrogance of the neo-crusaders was broken. In this tragedy of the new world order, the leader became the ‘unique eagle’.”
  “I prefer to leave it for the people to understand by themselves,” says Saif, suddenly abashed. “It’s like a quiz. Everyone has his own explanation.”
  Saif is more forthcoming on the Gaddafi International Charity Foundation. The Foundation is, he stresses, an apolitical entity, unconnected with the government of Libya (though upon leaving the exhibition in Berlin, I’d been handed a copy of “The Green Book”, the mercifully brief tract in which Colonel Gaddafi defines his Third Universal Theory of government). Nevertheless, I ask if there is any element of PR about it, any hope that it might, for example, help convince America’s State Department to remove Libya from its list of nations that harbour or sponsor the perpetrators of international terrorism (the Foundation made a donation to the Red Cross’s fund for victims of September 11th).
  “We don’t care about that. It’s America’s business – they’re free to do whatever they like. The Foundation is something private. It could also benefit the country, yes, but it’s not a government campaign.”
  Saif explains that the Foundation is an umbrella organisation, under which are gathered several different “societies”. Among these are the Fighting Drug Addiction Society, which sponsors anti-drug advertising in Libya and helps recovering addicts, the self-explanatory Land Mine Fighting Society and Underprivileged Society, a Human Rights Society, which has helped extricate Libyan Taliban veterans from Afghanistan and is now responsible for convicted Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi, and the intriguingly titled Martyrs Society.
  “In our religion we believe in martyrs,” says Saif. “There are martyrs in Libya, or Afghanistan, or different places. We support their families.”
  Including those of Palestinian suicide bombers?
  “Okay,” sighs Saif, who clearly saw this one coming. “First of all, I’m not just supporting martyrs, but poor people, orphans, the disabled. . .”
  . . . and the families of mass murderers.
  “If someone is a martyr,” he continues, “and he died in an accident or an attack, now we have a family with nobody to support them. It’s a humanitarian issue. We haven’t said that people should go and kill people. The Palestinian Authority give us a list of families who have no help, and we have to help them, regardless of reason.”
  Isn’t that support encouraging suicide bombing, however indirectly? Or do you think it is a legitimate tactic?
  “I would never say that people should kill each other. But we have to work with the reality. Palestinians are under occupation. Their human rights are being violated every day. They feel hopeless, and that’s why the only thing they can do is attack the Israelis through suicide bombers.”
  It’s not the only thing they can do. They could, for example, not do it. But Saif Gaddafi, it seems, is a trenchant adherent of the Cherie Blair rationale – the one which holds that Palestinians are excused the basic strictures of human decency on the grounds of Israel’s bullying. I get the impression that selling him on the merits of civil disobedience and generally refraining from riddling bus commuters and café patrons with TNT-propelled nails is going to take more time than we have today, so we move on.

SAIF Gaddafi is moving to London in September. He will be studying for a PhD in government at the London School of Economics, which will complete an education that already includes an architecture degree from Al-Fateh University in Tripoli and a Masters in business from Imadec University in Vienna. When it is suggested that these sound like reasonable qualifications for a career in politics, he responds like a politician.
  “You know,” he says, “I think to be a Minister in government in Libya is not that attractive a position. You have to talk a lot, and argue a lot, and fight a lot and it’s a lot of headache. I’d prefer to be a Professor at a University. To be a Minister in a developing country is not easy.”
  This sounds a little ingenuous. I can’t imagine that if you’re a Libyan government Minister whose surname is Gaddafi you need to do very much arguing at all.
  “In Libya,” explains Saif gently, “we are extremely socialist. We believe in equality. And my father is the person behind that idea in Libya. That’s why we have to emphasise all the time that our family should be like other people. We are not like the Gulf states, with royal families and citizens who have to treat them a certain way. We are against that. In Libya, there is no special treatment, no privilege.”
  I’ve never been to Libya. It is, I suppose, possible that even its humblest citizens keep pet tigers at home (Saif has two) and stay at the local Ritz when abroad. But any news footage of Tripoli pans over an urban landscape crowded with images of the Golden Leader – statues, posters, paintings. Such manifestations of a personality cult are always strange – I’ve seen it in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Hafez Assad’s Syria, and to live with it must be like living permanently in the week after Princess Diana died. How much more weird must it be if the face on the side of every building, in every shop and cafe, on clocks and watches and rugs and badges everywhere you look, is that of your Dad?
  “I don’t like it very much. If you admire the leader, I think you should express this in a different way. But in the Middle East, people are used to seeing photos of the presidents, the leaders, in every street, on every corner, as you say. I don’t like it. Even my father doesn’t like it very much. He asks people many times to remove the posters and photos, but the people, all the time, they hang them up.”
  Such veneration rarely works out well for the children of the icon. Saddam Hussein’s boys, Uday and Qusay, are the last two on earth you’d want any daughter of yours bringing home – one is a killer and serial rapist, and the other is the head of Iraq’s brutal internal security services. Hafez Assad’s eldest, Basil, died when he crashed one of his sports cars (Assad has since been succeeded by his second son, British-educated optometrist Bashar). Slobodan Milosevic’s pride and joy, Marko, was a gangster. Further afield, Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal murdered his God-King father and the rest of his family in 2001; the new Nepalese heir apparent, Prince Paras, is by all accounts an unreconstructible brat, and a prodigious wrecker of expensive automobiles, best known for running down and killing a popular Nepalese singer while drunk.
  The stories that circulate about Gaddafi’s seven sons are, if true, less sensational: they generally involve beautiful women, expensive drink and irate hotel management, ie precisely the things that many of us would engage in if we could afford it and thought we’d get away with it. They are symptomatic of the distorted ego and sense of invulnerability that often surrounds children of the rich, famous and powerful, and they tend not to involve the nevertheless unmarried Saif, whose public showings have usually been more serious affairs.
  In 2000, he negotiated – that is, paid for – the release of French hostages held by Abu Sayyaf guerillas in the Phillipines (Saif would only have had to borrow his father’s Rolodex to get the contacts – the Abu Sayyaf, like the IRA, once benefited from the Colonel’s largesse). Earlier this year, Saif took the Sunday Telegraph to court over accusations that he was plotting to flood Iraq with fake currency (The Sunday Telegraph apologised, and retracted the story). At a meeting of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, he outlined a Middle Eastern settlement based on a “Federal Republic of the Holy Land”, offering equal citizenship to Jews and Arabs. Such activity adds up to a sober, ambitious young man trying to protect his name with a view to having a crack at the big time, doesn’t it?
  “I really don’t know,” he says. “Architecture is my profession, it’s what I do every day. Government and politics are also part of my life. At the moment, I am concentrating on the Foundation. We have launched a huge project in Africa to combat contagious diseases, especially AIDS. We are building the African Centre for Contagious Diseases in Tripoli. It will be an international campaign led by the Gaddafi Foundation, and we are working hard on it.”
  Despite Saif’s protests, this does sound like a dim echo of one of his father’s most treasured ambitions: a United States of Africa, with a single currency and, presumably, a single head of state – a role which Colonel Gaddafi might just agree to fill if asked.
  “We have the same targets,” concedes Saif, “but different approaches.”
  I mutter something about the irony of such a prominent Arab leader becoming the most outspoken of African nationalists, and Saif laughs out loud.
“Oh, I am enemy number one for Arabic unity. Forget it. And all Libyans agree. It’s an illusion. Arabs are very difficult, you know?”

SAIF Gaddafi’s exhibition reaches London this week. He knows that most British people have fairly fixed ideas about Libya in general and the Gaddafis in particular. I ask him what he hopes people will learn from “The Desert Is Not Silent”.
  “Well, first of all, they will learn that I have tigers, because there are pictures of the tigers. They will also learn that we have wondeful landscape in Libya – sea, desert and archaeological sites. They will also learn that we have painters. Not just. . .”
  There is a long pause. And then a broad grin.
  “Naughty boys.”

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