“Why shouldn’t I trust them?” That was Seif al-Islam al-Gadhafi’s blunt reply when asked why he had placed his confidence in Islamist prisoners held in his father’s jails in Libya, men he was negotiating to release.
He then set out, at length, the logic behind his gamble. He said the Islamists had admitted that taking up arms against the Libyan state had been a mistake, and that building “Tomorrow’s Libya” required the participation of all Libyans.
He added that those he had negotiated with and freed had proven worthy of trust and would not return to violence.
Seif spoke during a meeting with him during one of his visits to London in the late 1990s or early 2000s. At the time, he was focused on emptying his father’s prisons of members of Islamist groups, including leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
That group had waged a guerrilla war in the mid-1990s to overthrow the regime and had nearly succeeded in assassinating Moammar al-Gadhafi.
Libyan security forces eventually defeated it in the late 1990s. Some of the group’s leaders had been imprisoned in Libya for many years, while others were handed over to al-Gadhafi by the United States during the “war on terror” targeting groups based in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
My question to Seif al-Islam al-Gadhafi about “trust” was rooted in my awareness that there was a current within his father’s regime, which included at least one of his brothers, that was leading a campaign entirely opposed to what Seif was pursuing.
Those holding the opposing view argued that Seif was making a mistake by trusting that those he was releasing would not revolt again when the opportunity arose.
At the time, a senior security official responsible for detaining leaders of the Islamic Fighting Group said, “They will not leave except over my dead body,” in a direct challenge to Seif, believing that the elder al-Gadhafi shared his view rather than that of his son, regarding those the regime referred to as “heretics.”
In any case, Seif’s opponents failed to stop his efforts. Leaders of the Islamic Fighting Group agreed to issue what became known as the “revisions,” in which they declared armed action against ruling regimes in Islamic countries to be forbidden and condemned many practices attributed to al-Qaeda and other groups influenced by its ideology.
Ultimately, it was Moammar al-Gadhafi who settled the matter, siding with what Seif wanted. At the time, Seif was being promoted as a potential successor to his father.
When the February 2011 uprising erupted in Libya, Seif was among those most criticized by people around his father for his “trust in Islamists.” Some of those released were among the first to take up arms and join the rebels.
This, it was said at the time, prompted Seif to adopt a hardline stance against his father’s opponents in his well-known speech at Bab al-Aziziya in Tripoli in the early days of the uprising.
In reality, Seif’s relationship with his brothers had long been the subject of rumors and quiet speculation in the years before the fall of his father’s regime.
Talk circulated of deep disagreements between Seif and his brother Mutassim, who was killed alongside their father in Sirte in 2011. When asked about this, Seif's response suggested a degree of self-assurance.
He spoke with satisfaction about how hard the Americans were trying, but how little they understood about what was really going on between him and his brothers. He did not deny the existence of differences, but his answer suggested that the family ultimately remained united under their father.
Seif was a frequent visitor to London at the time.
He was reaping the results of efforts by Libyan negotiators working to resolve cases in which his father’s regime had been implicated.
These included the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, the bombing of a French UTA airliner in 1989, and the case of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor accused of infecting children at a Benghazi hospital with HIV.
Seif’s efforts succeeded in settling most of those cases, which involved compensation totaling millions of dollars. But his work was bound to collide eventually with the reality that he was trying to present a different image of Libya from the one shaped by his father’s rule.
That was the focus of a question he was asked during a public event before an audience of students at a London college. He replied, “I don’t like this question.”
