Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Religious extremists had “created a lot of problems in Libya,” Saif said. “They tried to destabilize the whole society. But not anymore. Now they are weak. But the threat is there, the potential is there.” Saif noted that three Libyans had been involved in suicide bombings in Iraq last year. “They are being recruited by Zarqawi,” he said, referring to the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, “who wants to create cells and attack American interests in Libya—oil companies, American schools, and so on. It’s a disaster for us because we want the American presence. There aren’t so many of these extremists, several dozen, but even that in a country like Libya is a big headache.” As for American security interests, he said, “We are already on your side, helping the American war on terror. It’s happening, and it’s going to happen.”

Saif’s rhetoric may beguile his Western admirers, but to the hard-liners in Libya’s government it remains anathema. Saif, for his part, refused to acknowledge the substantial Libyan opposition to reform: “Maybe there are three or four citizens like this. Not more.”

That was the most outlandish of his declarations. An American congressional aide who has worked closely with Saif accurately described him as “eighty percent sophisticated.” Saif’s prospects will depend not upon his profile abroad but upon his ability to orchestrate support at home. Despite his political presence in Libya, his father’s legacy will not easily be assumed; there are too many competitors for the next generation of power. But Saif is a canny fellow. “The Principal knows that one secret of leadership is to see where the parade is headed,” one of his advisers told me, “and rush in front of it before it gets there.”

In 2004, two decades of American sanctions came to an end after Libya agreed to pay compensation to the Lockerbie families and renounced weapons of mass destruction. (Saif, who has spent a good deal of energy trying to rehabilitate Libya’s image in the world, was involved in both negotiations.) Since then, the great question in Tripoli has been how deeply reform will penetrate a country that has been largely isolated for decades. Within the government, the fighting is bitter. The National Oil Company (reformist) and the Department of Energy (hard-line) are in constant conflict, as are the Ministry of Economics (reformist) and the Libyan Central Bank (hard-line). Since Qaddafi makes the ultimate ideological decisions, the spectacle calls to mind the worst aspects of multiparty democracy, albeit without parties or democracy.

According to Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, a Libyan expatriate who chairs the political science department at the University of New England, in Maine, Qaddafi “plays his biological son Saif el-Islam against his ideological son Ahmed Ibrahim.” Ibrahim is the deputy speaker of the General People’s Congress, and the most public of an influential conservative triumvirate that also includes Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan intelligence, and Abdallah Senoussi, who oversees internal security. Ibrahim has declared that the United States, under orders from President Bush, has been “forging the Koran and distributing the false copies among Americans in order to tarnish the image of Muslims and Islam.”

The infighting helps Qaddafi moderate the pace of change. “He thinks reform should come ‘like a thief in the night,’ so that it is hardly noticed,” one family friend said. In some areas—notably with respect to civil liberties and economic restructuring—the rate of change is glacial. “What’s the hurry?” A. M. Zlitni, the country’s chief economic planner, asked when we spoke, with the careful blandness that Libyan officials affect to avoid affiliation with either camp. “We are not desperate.” In other areas, change has occurred with startling speed. Although the country is still afflicted with the legacies of its two colonial powers—Byzantine corruption and Italian bureaucracy—it has opened up to international trade with dispatch: foreign goods are for sale, even if few Libyans can afford them. You can buy Adidas sneakers and Italian shoes, along with local knockoffs such as a brand of toothpaste called Crust. In bookstores once devoid of English-language titles, you can find editions of Billy Budd, Invisible Man, and the works of Congreve. The private sector is back in force. Hundreds of channels are available on satellite TV, and Internet cafés are crowded. One senior official said, “A year ago, it was a sin to mention the World Trade Organization. Now we want to become a member.” The editor of Al Shams (The Sun), a leading state-owned paper, described a newsroom policy shift from “expressing struggle against the West to advocating working with foreign countries.”