Exit the Colonel (27 page)

This mini Berber Spring is a telling example of the limits Saif the reformist had in mind and is perhaps a clue to the limits of how far he was willing to go. While the releases and the minority rapprochement were happening, Saif increasingly peppered his public statements with reminders of the “limits” to expression. The sensitivity of the Berber issue was underscored—and contributed substantively to tensions with the US—by the expulsion of a US diplomat by the Libyans, after he met with members of the Berber community while on a personal trip to the Jebel Nafusa.
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Not long after, in 2008, Gaddafi named his son Mu'tassim Libya's national security adviser, an appointment that signaled to many that Gaddafi had far more confidence in his fourth-eldest son than they had previously suspected. Many analysts saw this as an indication and a public sign that—
however he felt about Saif, and Saif 's reformist stance—Gaddafi was ready to play hardball if things got out of hand. It might also have been, as author Dirk Vandewalle posits, that Gaddafi had made the overall limits of reform—and in particular, the distinction between economic and political reform—clear when he removed Ghanem as prime minister in 2006.
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In the context of the general opening and under the ostensible leadership of Saif Al Islam, the Libyan regime undertook a series of actions that ultimately proved momentous. It notified 112 families of Abu Selim victims of their relatives' deaths between 2001 and 2006 and offered them incremental amounts of compensation: first, Libyan dinar 120,000 (US$98,590) if single; LD130,000 (U$106,800) if married. The regime then increased the offer by June 2009 to LD200,000 (US$164,300).
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As with the case of the Bulgarian nurses and the Lockerbie and UTA families, the offers came with conditions; victims had to renounce all internal and external claims against the government. Notification was carried out in stages, with a stepping-up in the first half of 2006 and verifications provided to, of the 351 families, 160 from Benghazi, and others from Tripoli, Derna, Al Beida, and Misurata. In some cases, officials in Tripoli provided death certificates, but no formal apology.

We must understand the context of the growing opposition: of the 1,235 killed most were political prisoners, and of those, most were from Benghazi and neighboring cities and towns. Benghazi's population—minus the 150,000 to 200,000 foreign laborers, mostly Egyptian—was under 700,000. If we assume 1,000 of the Abu Selim victims were from Benghazi or nearby towns and villages, this means at least one person of every thousand, in a highly insular society with large extended families living in close proximity. Every person in Benghazi would have known at least one and likely several of the “disappeared.”

In March 2007, thirty of the victims' families took the unprecedented action of filing a claim against the Libyan regime in North Benghazi Court to try to force the government to reveal the fate of the Abu Selim detainees.
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Equally, if not more unprecedented was the fact that the government in April 2008 acquiesced to the creation of a Coordination Committee of the Families of the Victims, led by Fathi Terbil, a well-known name in Benghazi, who would attain almost heroic status during the Libyan revolution, and a lawyer colleague Mohammed al Ferjany. This body proceeded, under more
or less formal cover, to organize sequential demonstrations in Benghazi, in front of the headquarters of the security services, beginning in June 2008 in Benghazi, and in Al Beida and Derna, growing in size from 150 on November 30, 2008, to more than 200 subsequently. This was more than the regime had bargained for, and there are indications that at this point that more hardline forces within the government thought the appeasement campaign was going very wrong: the attempt to repress or intimidate various members of the committees, and singling out the Terbil, who was arrested and then released on March 30, 2009.

That same month, the Coordination Committee publicly released, via opposition websites, a list of demands on the Libyan government, including the identification and prosecution of those responsible (which, of course, meant Gaddafi's head of internal security, Abdullah Senussi), full hand-over and identification of remains, an official apology, and the release of all other detained family members. This would not be the first appearance of Senussi, who had in recent years become Gaddafi's undisputed “iron fist.”
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On June 29, 2009, there were sizeable protests in Benghazi by Abu Selim families, including many women and children. Then minister of justice, Mustafa Abdeljalil (who soon became head of the National Transitional Council after the 2011 revolution), seemed to encourage a legal process and establishment of a legal process through the courts as the way for those who did not accept compensation to go forward. Abdeljalil told Human Rights Watch in April 2009, “The offers of compensation were made in the context of reconciliation. Around 30 percent of the families who had so far been informed of the death of their relatives have accepted the offer of compensation, 60 percent have refused because they believe the amount is insufficient, and 10 percent have refused on principle.”
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Perhaps in an attempt to end the process, on August 10, 2009, Saif Al Islam's Gaddafi Foundation issued a public statement saying that 569 families had been compensated (and, implicitly, had accepted the government's terms), and that negotiations were continuing with the families of 598 victims.

Gaddafi (or someone with his ear, whether Saif or someone else) had apparently concluded that it was necessary to come clean, at least to a degree, about Abu Selim. It would be better to resolve the claims, as with all the external victims' families, than let this issue further motivate revenge against the regime. One of the issues, of course, was that short of implicating those directly responsible—notably, Abdullah Senussi—trying them, and fully compensating the families, half-measures were likely to have the
opposite of the intended effect. Further, Gaddafi probably felt he could not risk implicating one of his own (Senussi) without weakening and delegitimizing himself and his power structure. A similar calculus was presumably behind Gaddafi's obsession with bringing Megrahi home from Scotland, for the Lockerbie bomber was a significant remaining source of dirty laundry hanging outside Libya proper.

This extended process of tying up loose ends with respect to internal abuses proved significant, because, like the National Economic Strategy and its associated ventures, it created a series of intermediaries who would work together on behalf of the victims and their families and communicate with other groups, such as lawyers and other officials working on the Benghazi HIV infections, and Saif 's appointed reformists. There was, therefore, a social network around “rehabilitation” disproportionately located in the eastern Libya.

On August 20, 2009, Abdelbasset al Megrahi was released from his Scottish cell after eight and a half years of incarceration, by order of Scottish Secretary of Justice Kenny MacAskill, on “compassionate grounds” stemming from local physicians' determinations that he had less than three months to live.

The Blair government made this decision, contravening assurances given by the UK to Washington that Megrahi would serve his full sentence in Scotland. The timing was significant, as the release coincided both with Saif 's now-customary August Green Square address and, more importantly, with the fortieth anniversary of the Al Fateh revolution on September 1, 2009, for which Gaddafi wanted to see Megrahi back in Tripoli.

The circumstances behind the return of Megrahi are not completely known, but a January 27, 2011,
Vanity Fair
exposé by David Rose presents a complex layering of deals and quid pro quos among Gaddafi, the Blair government, the UK's then Foreign Minister Jack Straw, the Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill, and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, all in the name of UK interests. Those interests were primarily the BP oil and gas deals Blair thought he had secured with Gaddafi in May 2007. Gaddafi had since made clear that he wanted Megrahi back before he died in prison of advanced, terminal prostate cancer, which would have had disastrous effects on the Libya-UK relationship.
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Told of the foreign secretary's recommendation to MacAskill that a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) be signed, but with an exclusion for Megrahi, Gaddafi was allegedly furious
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and held
up official validation of the oil contracts. This resulted in a flurry of conversations in the UK between senior UK officials and Scottish officials regarding how to secure Megrahi's release. Rose argues that the Scottish government, originally vehemently against any PTA, may have assented to a quid pro quo (again phrased “in the national interests”) whereby London would put a statute of limitations on tort claims filed by non-Scottish UK prisoners who alleged mistreatment in Scottish jails. (Scotland was facing a spate of such claims, which threatened to be very costly.)

Senior UK and Scottish officials deny the claims. Lord Peter Mandelson, UK Business Secretary in 2009 and erstwhile friend of Saif, called suggestions of a trade-related quid pro quo “offensive.”
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Whatever the claims, Rose points out, Megrahi was freed, and the tort law was amended. These eleventh-hour wranglings over Megrahi illustrate the growing bilateral insidiousness of a ratcheting-up process that Gaddafi had turned into an art: once an individual or government made one compromise in service to a commercial interest, other deeper compromises were necessary in order to preserve the original interest. This was Gaddafi's hook-and-bait game. In the 1990s, when the US and Britain were calling the diplomatic shots, handing over Megrahi for trial was the first condition Libya had to meet before normal relations could be restored. Once Megrahi was convicted and sanctions began to be lifted, pressure was exerted in the other direction. As far as Qaddafi was concerned, Megrahi's return to Libya was the price of fully opening up Libya to the bankers and the oilmen.

While Obama criticized the Brown government for Megrahi's release, many in the administration, as well as many of the Lockerbie families, believed the US position should have been much stronger, and that President Obama's and Secretary Clinton's relatively soft responses indicated the administration must have been informed of the deal in advance.
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To the extent that the US was disapproving, it only had itself to blame: the Bush administration (and in truth, the Lockerbie families) had chosen not to continue to isolate Gaddafi and opened the floodgates to an endless number of such transactions across multiple countries.

Megrahi arrived by Libyan Afriquiya Airways jet at Tripoli's Metiga Airport on August 20, 2009, at 8:45 p.m., flanked by Saif, wearing traditional dress. At the airport, there was a reception of about a hundred young people.
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According to a US State Department cable, “a much larger throng” had been removed subsequent to President Obama's statement demanding that Megrahi be placed under house arrest. The same cable described press coverage as “low key”; simultaneously, a large rally was being held at Green Square, under patronage of the Gaddafi Development Fund, that “created the perception of a hero's welcome” despite the fact that many of those present seemed unaware of Megrahi's release. Libyan TV did not carry the event live, and Saif did not speak as he had in previous years. The spokesman of reform had made several comments during this period that were not appreciated—to put it mildly—in the US or the UK.

At a press conference, Saif specifically thanked the Scottish government for its efforts to help free Megrahi and proclaimed, “Our efforts have succeeded.” Text messages sent to Libyan phones announced the release of “the national hero Megrahi.” As the State Department cable notes, the Libyans seemed to be trying to “manage the optics” for two audiences, while “technically” sticking to the agreement.
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Subsequently, Saif was “rewarded” by the General People's Congress (at Gaddafi's behest, of course) with the offer of an official post, that of General Coordinator of the People's Leadership Committees, a new body Gaddafi had created to manage the regime's relations with various national tribal leaderships. Many external analysts read into the nomination and Gaddafi's remarks that he might retire to consider more “global matters” as tantamount to announcing that the succession issue had finally been put to rest: Saif was Gaddafi's man.

As with many things hatched in Gaddafi's mind, Saif's anointment as heir apparent may well have been the opposite of what it appeared: an effort by Gaddafi to “tame” Saif 's agenda by giving it a more mainstream channel. Indeed, Saif was remarkably unclear about whether he would formally accept the post, choosing instead to make a series of bold, reform-minded statements, some with more overt political content: “We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.” “We can be the Dubai of North Africa.” With regard to a new role within the regime, he said, “I will not accept any position unless there is a new constitution, new law and transparent elections—everyone should have access to public office. We should not have a monopoly on power.”
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About this time, rumors began to percolate that Saif 's actions—his support for Benghazi victims' associations, prisoner amnesties, talk of a new constitution, for example—were making Gaddafi, Saif 's brothers Mu'tassim
and Saadi, and members of Gaddafi's inner circle decidedly nervous. Gaddafi had supposedly heard something on one of Saif 's television stations that he did not like and showed up at the studio in person to harangue the staff and order the station closed.
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In late January 2010, Saif 's pro-reform newspapers
Oea
,
Quryna,
and
Cyrene
, announced they would publish only online, before resuming print copies that July. On November 4, 2010, Prime Minister Baghdadi Ali Mahmoudi (one assumes, axiomatically, with the approval of Gaddafi senior) closed down all Saif 's media outlets after an op-ed appeared alleging government incompetence and calling for a “final assault” on corruption.
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A few days later, the regime arrested between ten and twenty-two journalists in “Saif's camp.”
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