The cosmopolitan son of Libyan
leader Muammar Kaddafi is surprisingly frank about the
Middle East and his former pariah state’s
nukes-for-prisoners deal with France. ‘It’s an immoral
game,’ says Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi.
In his navy blue
blazer, tight white shirt, trim white trousers, white belt
and white shoes, Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi (his preferred
spelling) looked like he was fresh off a yacht when I met
him on the Côte d’Azur Tuesday, and he was. Having played
a pivotal role negotiating the cynical deals that
surrounded the release from Libyan jails of five Bulgarian
nurses and a Palestinian doctor last week, 35-year-old
Saif al-Islam was taking a working vacation off the coast
of Saint-Tropez.
The 35-year-old
son of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi—or Kaddafi, as
NEWSWEEK typically spells it—is as handsome and
charismatic as his old man once was. (Muammar, in his late
60s, is now in the 38th year of his reign.) And there are
times when a twitchy gesture and a slightly distracted
gaze also hint at the Bedouin theatrics that make his
father seem so crazy. But this offspring of tent and
palace, survivor of American bombing raids, graduate
student at the London School of Economics, foundation
president and go-between with Western governments can be
refreshingly frank, whether talking about the Middle East
peace process or his country’s own chaotic form of
nongovernment.
Clearly Saif
al-Islam was pleased with himself and the deal he’d helped
broker on the medics: his former pariah state is now
promised nuclear cooperation with France that includes a
“very huge” and “very expensive” atomic reactor that will
cost Libya “billions and billions,” plus a uranium-mining
project. Having surrendered a nuclear-weapons program that
had no prayer of working in 2003, Libya now gets the best
civil technology its money can buy.
THE LAST WORD
Saif
al-Islam al-Qadhafi
The French, for
their part, put on the table hundreds of millions of
dollars to infopensate the families of more than 400
children who contracted HIV at the hospital in Benghazi,
Libya, where the nurses and doctor worked until 1999. (The
actual cash reportedly was coughed up by the Qataris on
short notice when it looked like the European Union’s
bureaucracy could stall the funding and queer the deal.)
There are also hundreds of millions of dollars arranged by
the French to fund vast improvements in Benghazi’s
health-care system, said the young Qadhafi, and then there
are secret accords that he told me coyly he couldn’t
really talk about.
Given that
charges against the doctor and nurses almost certainly
were trumped up and they claim to have been tortured to
extract their “confessions” during eight years in prison,
you might think Saif al-Islam would be sensitive to the
charge of geopolitical blackmail, but no.
“Blackmail?
Maybe,” he says, considering the word. “It is blackmail,
but the Europeans also blackmailed us. Yeah, it’s an
immoral game by the way, but—I mean they set the rules of
the game, the Europeans, and now they are paying the
price.” They, and the Americans, too, for that matter, are
merely serving their own political and economic interests,
as far as Saif al-Islam is concerned. While the medics
suffered, governments and multinationals were cutting
deals. French President Nicolas Sarkozy even finagled an
image-enhancing jaunt for his whimsical wife, Cécilia, as
ostensible liberator of the prisoners. “She is the last
person to infoe interfere in that issue and she is the
person who took the medics with her back home,” said Saif
al-Islam. “She’s very lucky. Lots of people tried in the
past and they failed.” The reason: “The French
[understood] the requirements and they were very
flexible.”
In fact, after
some initial gloating when President Sarkozy made a
follow-up visit to Libya last week, the French government
now seems more than a little uninfofortable with some of
the public revelations about its negotiations. Berlin is
furious at the evident perfidy in Paris that undermined
the European Union’s much harder line against the Libyan
government. And the French press has used the incident to
end its honeymoon with the hitherto untouchable Sarkozy
administration. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said
yesterday that “the hypothesis” of a deal for a nuclear
reactor “is far from proven,” and stated flatly that the
French had not paid a penny to free the prisoners. But
such sophistry is hard to sustain.
In a front-page
infomentary, the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé waxed
ironic about “our new friend Muammar Kadaffi,” who has
“remade himself as a virgin. He’s no longer a terrorist at
all. Pardoned: the attack on the [Pan Am 103] Boeing over
Lockerbie and on a [French] DC-10 blown up over the desert
of Ténéré. Forgotten: the attempts to make weapons of mass
destruction, notably nuclear ones. Ended: the status as a
refuge for criminals and terrorists that gave Tripoli its
charm. Even from the psychiatric point of view, things are
going better: the dangerous paranoid, the angry wild-man
has beinfoe a delectable infopanion who’s perfectly urbane.
To take tea with him is pure happiness.”
Of course, it’s
the personable young Saif al-Islam with whom most
Westerners actually prefer to sip their Earl Grey or
gunpowder. His youth, energy and openness seem such a
contrast to the father in his Monty Python uniforms with
his bloated face that looks like a reject from the back
room of a wax museum.
But precisely
because Saif al-Islam’s manner is so cosmopolitan, I
wonder sometimes if people are listening to what he
actually says. And at the end of the day, because his
presence is so coveted, the open question of how much
authority he has may be left unanswered, or unasked.
On the Middle
East peace process, for instance, Saif al-Islam dismisses
the idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the
Palestinians as “not viable,” and says his country wants
no part of the Saudi-backed peace initiative that is
supposed to offer the Israelis peace with the whole Arab
world.
After the elder
Kaddafi got into a heated public exchange with Saudi Crown
Prince (now King) Abdullah at an Arab summit in Beirut in
2002, he reportedly mounted a plot to kill Abdullah in
Mecca. The alleged conspirators were rounded up and both
the Saudis and Americans made some of the information
about them public. When I talked to Saif al-Islam, he
could have denied that his father’s people are still
playing those kinds of games, but didn’t. “I heard some
story that they tried and failed,” he said. “I have no
idea.”
Closer to home,
Saif al-Islam talked about Libya’s need for a
constitution. “Nothing is well defined,” he said. “And
because nothing is well defined, you open the door for
rumors, speculation, expectations, you know, because
nothing is clear and transparent.” But, in fact, his
father has used the chaos of his self-styled “people’s”
regime, in which he holds no formal title, to keep the
population insecure and himself firmly in power since
1969. Does he back his son’s plans for a constitution? “I
think so,” said Saif al-Islam. “Maybe not 100 percent.”
The two truly
critical areas of contact and cooperation between Libya
and the West are in the realms of oil and espionage where,
it seems, Saif al-Islam has relatively little to say. The
head of Bulgaria’s intelligence service, for example, said
Monday that the intelligence services of “a score of
countries” were involved in the infoplex negotiations to
free the nurses. A key figure was the former head of
Libyan intelligence, Musa Kusa. When I asked Saif al-Islam
about Kusa, he said, “Yeah, he was a member of our team,”
and left it at that.
As for oil, a
critical question is who owns the stuff lying beneath
Libya’s soil: the nation, or the foreign infopanies that
are buying it through what are called “product-sharing
agreements.” Oil infopanies want those millions of barrels
of crude as assets on their books, but this is such a
loaded question for Arab nationalists that most Middle
Eastern oil producers won’t even contemplate such
arrangements. Libya has embraced them, however, which is
one reason oil infopanies have so wholeheartedly embraced
Libya. “Yeah,” said Saif al-Islam. “We have sharing
agreements. It’s very tricky whether they own the oil or
not. Legally, it’s very tricky.”
In the end, not
surprisingly, it all infoes down to money. But Saif
al-Islam must have learned that lesson even as a kid.
After the Reagan administration tried its best to kill his
father and, for that matter, him and the rest of his
family in a bombing raid on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986,
Saif al-Islam remembers that they all hated the United
States. Then came the years of sanctions led by Washington
after Libya was implicated in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Yet all that time, a British subsidiary of Halliburton was
building public-works projects in Libya worth billions of
dollars. Dick Cheney, who was running the infopany back
then, was quoted by colleagues as saying he had some
qualms about that deal. But, then again, he had a
fiduciary obligation to his stockholders. And the
paychecks just kept infoing.
No wonder Saif
al-Islam is so infofortable with self-serving cynicism. If
you’re a Qadhafi, that’s what makes your world go around
Newsweek - International Edition
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