Saturday, October 22, 2011

Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, a Tragic Figure?

Graham Harman has recently offered some reflections on Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi’s second son and often thought to have been his heir apparent.
I’ve mentioned before that I saw Seif lecture in Cairo maybe 18 months ago. He showed his true colors in the spring of 2011 with his violent television speech, but I’m afraid he had me pretty well fooled during his Cairo speech (which wouldn’t have happened if I’d bothered to research some of his previous public statements ahead of time). It was a smooth, likable, progressive-sounding talk about the future of Libya and of all Arab countries–and obviously complete bullshit, in retrospect.
I’m not so sure.

I have no direct knowledge of Saif, but a friend of mine did, Ned McClennen. Ned had admitted Saif to a Master’s level philosophy program he ran at the London School of Economics (LSE) and had worked with Saif in creating a new constitution for Libya, drafting both a bill of rights and a preamble. Critical Inquiry recently asked Ned about his experience with Saif. Here’s the long penultimate paragraph:
But Saif al-Islam, prior to the Spring of 2011, was not simply committed to finding a personal path distinct from that of his father: he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into an ambitious reform project that sought to make Libya a respectable member of the international community of nations, and that, as my preamble seeks to express it, invokes a vision of a Libyan society that is antithetical to the one his father actually created. My own sense (and this was a rumor that emerged this spring) is that, contrary to Barber’s “blood is thicker than water” account, one of his brothers confronted him with a drawn gun and made it clear that he was either with them or dead. In the first long speech televised in the West, his words about “rivers of blood” if the rebellion continued seemed to me a prediction and warning about how he knew his father would respond. A threatening tone? Yes. He would have been required to convey the spirit of Colonel Gaddafi and to foretell what would come. But the hypothesis of imminent threat, by itself, does not to me seem deep enough to illuminate all that occurred in subsequent weeks. From news reports flowing secretly out of Libya and from his own broadcasts, Saif seems to have changed. Perhaps it is some strange version of the Stockholm syndrome, in which the hostage comes to identify with the goals of the hostage-taker. Or, his enthusiastic, loyalist responses might come from being in an environment in which he came to perceive his immediate family and supporters, civilians as well as military, as being targeted for extermination by powerful external forces. I am trying here only to describe his possible perceptions, not to justify them. Being charged with crimes against humanity by the International Court, along with his father, would give him no position for negotiation, and the quick repudiation of all his reform efforts—at his own peril—and even his intellectual accomplishments, could only have made him more bitter towards outsiders. Although I ask myself repeatedly if, like Plato, I have been deluded by a clever political player, I can find nothing in my relationship with Saif, either as a teacher or as a member of the CCC, that makes me feel that I had judged him incorrectly during the times we interacted.
In his final paragraph McClennen observes that the constitution he and others had helped Saif draft ”still exists, and is in the hands of one of the key members of the Rebel Group in Benghazi.”

Finally, consider the story of “Ibrahim O. Dabbashi”, who headed Libya’s delegation to the United Nations. Eight months ago, early in the uprising, after Libyan helicopters had gunned down many people, and after Saif’s infamous—and distracted—televised address, he and his delegation chose to defect. The New York Times reports on Dabbashi’s statement as follows:
Mr. Dabbashi called Colonel Qaddafi a genocidal criminal, and said his son’s remarks were “a declaration of war against the Libyan people.” Apologizing to the international community, he called on the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone to prevent arms and mercenaries from reaching the capital, Tripoli, and asked for safe passage for humanitarian aid to hospitals.

And he bluntly renounced the government that had sent him — and his colleagues — to New York. “We state clearly that the Libyan mission is a mission for the Libyan people,” the statement said. “It is not for the regime.”

It concluded by calling on all Libyan diplomatic representatives around the world “to stand with their people and condemn the crimes that are being committed against their people.”
While one can wish that Saif had responded in a like manner, I didn’t bring this up to make such a banal point. Given the unambiguous force of Dabbashi’s denunciation of the Gaddafi regime, I’m wondering how deeply torn he and his diplomatic colleagues in the UN and around the world must have been only days and weeks before when there were representing the Gaddafi regime. And years, years of living a life torn between the job they had to do and the job they wanted to do.

Could Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi not have been even more deeply torn?

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