24/09/2007

A Son Radiates His Own Light in His Father’s Libya

By: ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: September 23, 2007
 

Jehad Nga for The New York Times - Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, above, one of the sons

of Libya’s leader, recently announced plans to promote tourism in his country.
 

CYRENE, Libya — The thin man with a shaved head smiled slightly as he made his way to a podium erected amid Greek ruins, a serious presence in a boisterous crowd that gathered last week to celebrate plans for an eco-development region near this town in the deserts of eastern Libya.

In a skullcap and white tunic with a gold-trimmed vest, the man talked slowly, deliberately, even a bit nervously, presenting data in English about desertification, oil and carbon emissions. He corrected even the smallest grammatical errors in the printed speech he was reading.

“Climate change is a global problem, but global solutions start with local solutions,” he said in faintly accented English.

Societies, he said, should be built in a way that allowed them to reduce greenhouse gases. “The day will infoe when oil will run out, and if we wait for that it will be too late,” he said.

The man — part scholar, part monk, part model, part policy wonk — was Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the powerful 33-year-old son of Libya’s extroverted and impulsive president, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. He is, in short, the un-Qaddafi.

The younger Qaddafi is in the final stages of his Ph.D. program in governance at the London School of Economics, and his meticulous training showed itself in Cyrene, a rare appearance for him at a large public event. He reeled off statistics about the rate of desertification and calculations of the tens of thousands of jobs that could be created in fisheries, architecture and ecotourism in the region with his project.

Speaking with a small group of journalists after his presentation, he listened carefully to questions in Arabic and English, thinking before each answer. Although his handlers had announced that journalists should confine their questions to the ecotourism project, the queries inevitably got broader, having not been screened in advance.

“What about democracy in Libya?” someone asked.

“Of course we are going toward more democracy,” Mr. Qaddafi said carefully. “But this project is not about democracy.”

In recent years — and especially in the past few months — he has been an up-and-infoing force in Libyan politics, and the country’s unofficial liaison with the West. His Qaddafi Foundation is brokering countless infomercial deals and projects as Libya emerges from years of ostracism. He has expressed a degree of openness about the country’s problems that other Libyans — less connected and more nationalistic — dare not utter.

“He’s put himself forward as someone who represents the new generation in Libya and who also represents his father,” said George Joffe, an expert on the region at Cambridge University. “He’s the most likely potential leader — no one else is better positioned — but he’s a work in progress, and for the moment it’s not at all clear that he has the control to lead, to be a successor.”

In addition to the environmental project, Mr. Qaddafi helped broker the release of six foreign medical workers who had been sentenced to death in Libya, and he has promised to privatize one of Libya’s cellphone infopanies.

He emerged on the world stage in 2000, when he helped negotiate the release of hostages taken by Islamic terrorists at a Philippine diving resort. He has spoken out against revolutionary infomittees, which exist in schools, businesses and offices to enforce political orthodoxy.

Perhaps as a sign of his growing importance, his security detail has increased in the past year, say those who know him.

“He doesn’t have an official position, but it’s clear he has influence and power — Saif is right in the heart of it all,” said Rajeev Singh-Molares of the business consultancy the Monitor Group in London. He has advised Mr. Qaddafi for three years, working on a strategy for economic development. Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, also serves as a consultant for Mr. Qaddafi.

Westerners who have worked with him say he is smart, well read and quick to pick up the telephone to call the prime minister or his father. But “he understands that there are red lines that he cannot cross,” said an associate who asked to speak anonymously.

The Qaddafi Foundation he runs “was certainly helpful in the nurses’ case,” said Richard J. Roberts, who led a group of Nobel Prize winners in petitioning Libya for the release of the medical workers, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor. (Dr. Roberts is a molecular biologist who was awarded his Nobel in 1993.) “At this point one would like to believe the best about them.”

Mr. Qaddafi has recently made some extraordinary admissions: he said that the medical workers were tortured with electricity while in prison and that the infection of children with the virus that causes AIDS in Benghazi resulted from poor sanitary conditions at the city’s hospital and was not — as his father and the prosecutors contended — a plot by the foreign workers to infect them.

Also this year, in a televised speech, he said Libya should adopt a proper constitution that would guarantee freedom of the press. He has opened two private newspapers, and this summer he addressed a gathering of more than 100,000 young Libyans.

He is the president’s second-born son, the first child of Colonel Qaddafi’s second wife, Safiyya. His siblings include Muhammad, a businessman; Saadi, a professional soccer player; and Aysha, his sister, who is a lawyer.

Mr. Qaddafi is, experts say, clearly an emerging force for liberalization. But his country has a long way to go, and one free-thinking, Western-educated technocrat may not make a difference. Libya is ranked the third most repressive economy in the world by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in the United States.

“He is eager for reform and understands the need for Libya to diversify its economy,” said Mr. Singh-Molares of the Monitor Group. “In that sense he’s a visionary leader. He wants to make Libya something special. But the capacity of Libya to keep up with his vision is limited at this point.”

It is hard to gauge how much influence he wields in Tripoli and whether he is powerful enough to define policy. “It is difficult to know just how independently the Qaddafi Foundation operates,” said Dr. Roberts, who went to Tripoli to plead the foreign medical workers’ case.

Also, it is difficult to know how popular this technocrat with an M.B.A. from Vienna is in Libya.

“He’s popular with the young elite because they can see the opportunities,” said Mr. Joffe of Cambridge. “But he’s unpopular with political Islam.”
 

The New York Times