Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“Qaddafi claims that he is not the Leader, and Saif claims that he is the opposition, and they are both liars,” said MaÎtre Saad Djebbar, an Algerian lawyer who has worked on Libyan affairs for many years. Others see a personal agenda. “The Leader is a bedouin from the desert and simply wants power and control—he is content to rule a wrecked country,” the expatriate poet Khaled Mattawa told me. “But his sons are urban; they have traveled, studied abroad, learned sophistication. They go falconing in the Gulf states with the princes of royal families. They want to drive BMWs and rule a country that is accepted in the panoply of nations.”

Saif’s office is in Tripoli’s tallest and fanciest tower—a hulking glass building topped by a gigantic circular apparatus that was intended as a revolving restaurant but neither revolves nor serves food. The foundation’s suite is modest and sparsely furnished, and its staff members appear to be the busiest people in Libya, bent over computers, talking simultaneously on several phones, surrounded by papers. The walls are covered with posters for Saif’s causes: one shows a man with his face wrapped in barbed wire, with the caption “International Campaign Against Torture: Middle East Area: Libya the First Station.”

Saif, however, is usually elsewhere. I met him last fall in Montreal, where he was opening an exhibition of his own paintings. These are rendered with expressionist enthusiasm in a variety of familiar styles and may feature images of horses, desert skies, the face of the Leader, or one of Saif’s beloved pet Bengal tigers. Saif has bestowed his pictures on urban centers from Paris to Tokyo, where they have been received as documentary curiosities, like the personal effects of the last tsarina. Whether the primary function of these exhibitions is political, social, or artistic is never discussed.

We met at the Sofitel, which had given over the top floor to Saif and his entourage. Various deputies and advisers had gathered in a large, nondescript suite. When he came in, everyone sat up straighter. Though Saif tries to be intimate and casual, his presence, even his name, makes other people formal. He wore a well-cut suit and moved with grace. At thirty-three, he is good-looking and hip, with a shaved head, and he speaks intelligently, though with the vagueness about self and reality that afflicts royalty and child stars, and that comes from never having seen oneself accurately reflected in the eyes of others. He has more than a trace of the paternal charisma, but it has yet to harden into genius, incoherence, or his father’s trademark combination of the two.

When I asked why Libya was not proceeding more rapidly toward democratic reform, Saif said, “In the last fifty years, we have moved from being a tribal society to being a colony to being a kingdom to being a revolutionary republic. Be patient.” (After centuries of Ottoman rule, Libya was occupied by Italy between 1912 and 1943.) But, like his father, Saif relishes extravagant pronouncements and soon proposed that Libya give up its entire military.

“The whole faith and strategy has changed,” he said, looking to his courtiers for nods of agreement. “Why should we have an army? If Egypt invades Libya, the Americans are going to stop it.” During the Reagan years, he said, Libya was “expecting America to attack us anytime—our whole defensive strategy was how to deal with the Americans. We used terrorism and violence because these are the weapons of the weak against the strong. I don’t have missiles to hit your cities, so I send someone to attack your interests. Now that we have peace with America, there is no need for terrorism, no need for nuclear bombs.” Saif dismissed any comparison between the terrorism that Libya had sponsored in the past and the kind associated with al-Qaeda. “We used terrorism as tactics, for bargaining,” he told me. “Mr. bin Laden uses it for strategy. We wanted to gain more leverage. He wants to kill people. Fundamentalism in Libya—it’s always there, though not so strong as in the 1990s.” Saif did not mention that in the 1990s his father’s security forces routinely imprisoned fundamentalists.