Memo From Tripoli: Unknotting Father’s Reins in Hope of ‘Reinventing’ Libya
TRIPOLI, Libya — Prying open a closed economy is no easy job, especially if the country in question is Libya — a nation that has spent more than two decades with its back turned to the world. It becomes all the more challenging when doing so means taking on the legacy of your father and fighting an entrenched bureaucracy with little interest in serious change.
Yet that is the goal of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son and possible successor to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, as he sets out to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism introduced by his father 40 years ago.
“It is hard work reinventing a country,” he said in an interview last month, as he slouched on a sofa in his villa in the hills above Tripoli, picking at a tray of fruit including fresh dates brought to him by a black-suited waiter. “But that is what we are doing. We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.”
In the last few years, Mr. Qaddafi, 37, who has a doctorate from the London School of Economics, flawless English and a bold independent streak, has emerged as the Western-friendly face of Libya and symbol of its hopes for reform and openness. When he was nominated last year to lead a powerful government body overseeing tribal leaders, analysts saw it as a sign of his father’s endorsement.
But in Libya’s opaque politics, little is seldom as it appears. And it is far from clear to what extent the younger Mr. Qaddafi’s vision is official policy or wishful dreaming.
Despite his broad international appeal and evidence of popular support at home, analysts say that resistance to his pell-mell approach to modernization appears to be building.
Recently the government curtailed the operations of two crusading newspapers he backed. His entreaties for Western investment were undercut last month when the government imposed a visa ban on more than 20 European countries hoping to do business here. And the old, bellicose Libya seemed to hold sway last week when Colonel Qaddafi escalated a running feud with Switzerland by declaring a “jihad” against it.
The developments have bolstered the view that the hard-line faction championed by Seif Qaddafi’s equally ambitious older brother, Mutassim, the country’s national security adviser, was gaining ground.
“A lot of people have jumped on Seif’s bandwagon as if he were the future of Libya,” said Dana Moss, a Libya expert and the author of a forthcoming monograph on United States-Libya relations. “But that is not clear yet. In a future Libyan system both Seif and Mutassim will have a say, but the question is who will have more of a say.”
Since Libya agreed to renounce its nuclear weapons, an initiative led by Seif Qaddafi, and began to mend ties with the West in the last decade, experts predicted that the opening of the economy would soon follow, spurred by privatization and an influx of foreign investment beyond the presence of international oil companies.
Those expectations were buoyed last October when Seif Qaddafi was proposed to lead the umbrella grouping of local leaders, a position that would give him, like his brother, a voice in the government and an official platform to further his reform agenda.
But months later, he has yet to accept the job. In his first public comments on the subject in London in January, Seif Qaddafi said that until Libya adopted democratic institutions he would stay on the political sideline.
“I will not accept any position unless there is a new constitution, new laws and transparent elections,” he said. “Everyone should have access to public office. We should not have a monopoly on power.”
Instead, he has continued his high-wire act, using his status to occasionally challenge his father’s ways — pushing for openness, opposing the ubiquitous revolutionary committees, allowing human rights critics into the country — while trying to retain his viability as his father’s successor business
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