Saif al-Islam predicted it himself in a notorious TV broadcast as the uprising against his father’s regime gathered pace in February 2011. “There will be civil war in Libya … We will kill one another in the streets,” he said, wagging his finger at the camera. “All of Libya will be destroyed. We will need 40 years to reach an agreement on how to run the country, because today, everyone will want to be president, or emir, and everybody will want to run the country.”
It was the finger-wagging that made Libyans so angry, as if they were naughty children and he was the headmaster’s top prefect. The alternative he offered was a continuation of his father’s 42-year rule, with himself as a putative successor, offering reform on his terms.
“Saif’s condescending manner, the way he wrote off the revolution as a conspiracy, made me so angry,” says Nizar al Mhani, a dental surgeon who joined the uprising that day in response.
Other jihadi groups are active in the eastern towns of Derna and Benghazi. The borders are open – there are no police to stop thousands of African migrants crossing the desert and setting sail for Europe from the Libyan shore. Tribes fight each other in south. Local militia control many towns; kidnapping and smuggling are rife. Last September, the elected government was forced to flee to the east from where it vies for power with members of a rival parliament, many of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who hold sway in Tripoli. A UN peace process, aimed at establishing a government of national unity and fresh elections, has failed to attract the support of key power brokers, especially in the capital.
Such is the despair with the revolution, in the past few days small numbers of Libyans have demonstrated in several cities, including Benghazi, holding up pictures of Saif and chanting: “Zintan, Zintan, free Saif al-Islam.” It’s the first time any pro-Gaddafi demonstrations have taken place since the revolution.
Despite this anarchy, judges in Tripoli continued with the trial of former Gaddafi officials, including Saif’s uncle, the former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, and Gaddafi senior’s bodyguard, Mansour Dao, for crimes allegedly committed during the revolution. Saif initially appeared by video link, neat in a blue prison uniform, wearing rimless spectacles, but after June 2014, when Tripoli was taken over by the current authority, those in control of Zintan stopped cooperating. Forty-three-year-old Saif has not been seen in public since.
Last week, four of the accused were acquitted, 22 sentenced to varying prison terms and nine, including Saif, condemned to death for crimes including recruiting mercenaries, planning and carrying out attacks on civilian targets, shooting into demonstrations during the revolution and inciting murder and rape.
The Zintan militiamen who hold Saif refuse to hand him over to the judges in Tripoli, ostensibly because his trial was unfair but really because he is an important bargaining chip should a deal between Libya’s feuding factions ever be reached. Either way, it may save his life.
Earlier this week, a video emerged showing Saif’s younger brother Saadi, who is accused, among other things, of killing a football player while head of Libya’s football federation, apparently being beaten on the soles of his feet in Al Hadba prison in Tripoli, where the other defendants are being held. Prisoners can be heard screaming off camera; he offers to talk and is beaten more.
“Saif is lucky to be in Zintan, not Tripoli,” says John Jones QC, his counsel for a separate case before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “He’s much safer there.”
During the 2000s, Saif became the face of a North African glasnost, an opening up which his supporters in the west thought might – as had happened in the Soviet Union two decades earlier – lead to perestroika, a restructuring of the system. He came to embody the hopes of foreigners who believed that the Middle East could shift gradually away from dictatorship through a process of reform not revolution. But he could never overcome an inherent contradiction: he had a licence to challenge the system because he was his father’s son, but his heritage gave him a breathtaking sense of entitlement that fuelled resentment among Libyans.
Saif al-Islam set himself up as a hostage negotiator, successfully brokering the release of western hostages captured by the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines. Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, falsely accused of infecting children with HIV, would have languished indefinitely in prison in Libya’s second city, Benghazi, had it not been for Saif’s intervention.
In 2001, a Scottish court determined that one of Gaddafi’s intelligence operatives, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, had been responsible for the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Saif was instrumental in persuading his father to compensate the victims of Lockerbie and later, when al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish gaol, it was Saif who brought him back to Tripoli.
As he developed a reputation as the spearhead of change in Libya, Saif invited renowned thinkers, including Francis Fukuyama, Joseph Nye and Bernard Lewis, to speak in Tripoli. He was, in turn, invited to gatherings of the wealthy and influential. He spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, met Prince Andrew and was invited to parties at Nat Rothschild’s house in Corfu with the Russian aluminium tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Blair’s close associate Peter Mandelson.
A court case from 2000, when he successfully sued the Daily Telegraph for libel, gave an intriguing insight into his view of himself. Aged 28 and just emerging into the limelight, he wrote a personal statement to show that his feelings had been hurt by allegations that he was corrupt or dishonest. He seemed unable to distinguish between himself and the country his father ruled. Despite his famous name, wrote Saif, he was a normal student with normal hobbies, such as reading, painting, working out, falconry and keeping pet tigers.
He had breached no international convention by bringing his beloved white tigers to Austria, where he was studying for an MBA – at least not knowingly, because someone else dealt with the paperwork.
“When I arrived in Vienna, I discussed the tigers with the mayor of the city, and with the head of the Schönnbrun Zoo,” he wrote. “They both said they would be delighted to have my tigers, which are very rare, in Vienna, and we therefore arranged for them to be transported … I was certainly delighted to have my tigers nearby, because it meant that I was able to go and see them and play with them.”
“Fortunately, the Libyan government treated this insult to me very seriously and threatened to deny Austrians visas to enter Libya if the decision was not revoked. The Austrians changed their mind very quickly, and I was allowed to stay,” he wrote. “A similar incident occurred in Switzerland in 1997 when the Swiss government refused to extend my visa and the Libyan government threatened sanctions.”
After Austria, Saif moved to London where he studied at the LSE, gaining a PhD that later turned out to have been largely written by a consultancy firm, Monitor Group.
A generation of Libyans briefly saw him as their only way through an impossibly corrupt and brutal system. He negotiated with the families of 1,200 prisoners who had been killed by soldiers at the Abu Salim prison in 1996, acknowledging for the first time the wrong that had been done.
“I didn’t trust Saif, but I thought this was an opportunity to make a first step,” says Giuma Atigha, a survivor of the massacre who later became Saif’s human rights adviser. “At that time, the very words ‘human rights’ were forbidden.”
In 2005, Saif opened a dialogue with jihadi prisoners, including Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, who, as leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and associates of Osama bin Laden, had lived in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. They had been returned to Libya through extraordinary rendition with the connivance of the CIA and MI6. Saif pushed a deradicalisation programme in the prison that eventually, after months of patient discussion, resulted in the extremists rejecting violent jihad and being released.
To outsiders, Saif appeared to be his father’s heir apparent, and anyone who wanted to do business in Libya had to go through him. At home, however, he was engaged in a fierce battle with his younger brother Mutassim for his father’s mantle. By the time the revolution erupted in 2011, Colonel Gaddafi had over-ruled many of Saif’s reform initiatives; Libya had become a mafia state with the six brothers fighting each other for money and power.
“Saif thought he could calm people down, but in the end he had to appear as the most radical so his brothers couldn’t blame him,” said a source close to Saif at the time. “It was because of the conflict within the family. That’s why he was so angry.”
Saif believed that his foreign friends would protect him, but the British and French took the lead in bombing Libyan government forces and allowing the revolution to succeed. He had seen himself as an actor on a world stage, a change-maker, but in the end he was just the son of a dictator whose time had gone.
The last outsider to see Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was Melinda Taylor, defence counsel acting for him at the International Criminal Court, who visited in 2012. “He was held at a secret detention facility and was brought to see us elsewhere,” she says. “He was being moved around.” Taylor was herself detained for nearly a month after the Zintan militia accused her of taking in a hidden recording device and coded documents to her client. She maintains she did nothing wrong.
She and John Jones QC represent him in a case at the International Criminal Court in which he is accused of crimes against humanity, including murder, as the Gaddafi regime attempted to put down the 2011 uprising. The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, has requested the Libyan authorities to refrain from carrying out any sentence and instead surrender him to The Hague. Saif is unlikely to face the firing squad because the Zintan militia will not give him to the authorities in Tripoli, but nor are they likely to hand him over to a foreign court.
A photograph taken shortly after he was captured shows Saif al-Islam with bandages on his right hand. His captors had cut off the fingers he had wagged at the camera. A surgeon reportedly tidied up the job.
The Brother Leader’s second son has ended up a victim not just of a revolution turned sour but of his own hubris, and of his father’s refusal to create a state that could survive his inevitably violent demise.
Source- The Guardian
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