The New Middle East (55 page)

Two hundred and seventy people died when the Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air and crashed onto the small town below. It was the worst atrocity against US civilians in the nation’s history, and was only superseded by the attacks on 9/11. Two Libyans were indicted by the US and Scottish authorities, and the international sanctions that followed, until the men were handed over, began to cripple the regime. Gaddafi’s government, however, never admitted being behind the bombing. The closest it came was in a letter in August 2003 to the United Nations Security Council in which its envoy Ahmed Own wrote: ‘Libya as a sovereign state has facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103, and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.’
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The Libyan government also renounced terrorism and promised to pay US$2.7 billion in compensation to the victims.
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In the end only one of the two men indicted, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty. He was freed from a Scottish jail in 2009 on compassionate grounds because he was expected to die, within weeks, of cancer. In the end he outlived Gaddafi and his regime and died in Tripoli in May 2012. Many assumed that the prospect of finding out the whole truth of what happened over Lockerbie probably died then too. In his last interview al-Megrahi said: ‘I am an innocent man. I am about to die and I ask now to be left in peace with my family.’
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The Syrians were among those first blamed for the bombing. After the Libyan indictments President George Bush said in 1991: ‘A lot of people thought it was Syrians [but] the Syrians took a bum rap on this.’
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Some family members of the victims of the Pan Am bombing remained unconvinced of Syria’s innocence. The fall of the Assad regime, like the fall of Gaddafi’s, may throw up new evidence.

Though Gaddafi’s was, pointedly, only a partial admission of guilt over the bombing it was a watershed moment for his regime, because it was enough to begin his rehabilitation. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein had focused the Colonel’s mind. Months later he abandoned his own programme to develop weapons of mass destruction. This eventually brought Gaddafi back in from the cold and earned him visits to his tent from a host of world leaders, including famously Britain’s Tony Blair.

The person he ‘desperately’ wanted to meet though was his ‘African Princess’. Gaddafi ‘had a slightly eerie fascination with me personally’, wrote Condoleezza Rice after she became the first US secretary of state to visit the country since 1953. It was, she acknowledged, ‘a major milestone on the country’s path to international acceptability’. Rice though ‘declined’ to meet him in his tent. After dinner she had what she described as an ‘Uh oh’ moment when Gaddafi announced he had made a videotape of her. ‘It was a quite innocent collection of photos of me with world leaders . . . set to the music of a song called “Black Flower in the White House,” written for me by a Libyan composer. It was weird, but at least it wasn’t raunchy.’
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Gaddafi was past his prime. His charms were now incapable of seducing anyone. But with the sense that time was running out on the elder Gaddafi’s era, the Western world did start courting his second son, Saif al-Islam.

Saif looked the part. He was urbane, had a doctorate from the London School of Economics and, compared with his father, was articulate. He said the right things about economic liberalisation and took steps to improve the country’s human rights record. Even those in the capital Tripoli who opposed his father had begun to put their hope in Saif. As it turned out, Saif’s attempt to present himself as a champion of reform was as dodgy as the means by which he obtained his Ph.D. An inquiry later found he got his staff to do a lot of the research for him.
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Before the uprising many Libyans wanted to believe in Saif largely because he wasn’t his brother Mutassim. Mutassim, who would eventually be captured and killed in Sirte along with his father, was considered to be a chip off the old block.

Gaddafi had five other sons and a daughter. Mohammed, the eldest son, headed the Libyan Olympic Committee, and the post and telecommunications network. Then there was Saif al-Islam, followed by Saadi Gaddafi. Saadi became famous for being rumoured to be the only player in history to have paid his team to allow him to play professional football rather than the other way around. He had brief and undistinguished stints at various clubs in the Italian football league and captained the Libyan national side regardless of his form. Mutassim was the fourth son, then came Hannibal, who was the reason his father petitioned the United Nations for the abolition of Switzerland. This followed the arrest of Hannibal and his pregnant wife, a former lingerie model, in Geneva 2008 for beating up two of their servants. Though they were soon released and the charges dropped, the Colonel took his son’s detention very personally. He withdrew millions of dollars he had stashed away in Swiss bank accounts, halted oil exports to them and for good measure held two hapless Swiss nationals hostage. His onslaught continued until he had the ‘Swiss literally bending over backwards to assuage Libyan demands’.
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Saif al-Arab, the sixth son, had the lowest profile and was said to have found religion. He died in a NATO airstrike in April 2011. The youngest son was Khamis, who had a reputation for brutality and was in charge of the elite 32 Brigade stationed close to the capital. He was hated by the opposition, which triumphantly announced his death on four different occasions during the war.

Gaddafi’s only daughter, Aisha, was a lawyer, and part of the team that unsuccessfully defended Saddam Hussein after he was tried in Iraq following his overthrow. She was ironically a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.

When I was in Tripoli in October 2010 it was rife with rumour and gossip about which of his sons was being groomed to replace him. The locals examined the size and positioning of the boys’ faces on government posters to work out who was most likely to come next. Exactly one year later the capital had its answer. None of them. His sons were dead, on the run, or in jail. The government officials who had swaggered around their offices that winter offering me tea with one hand and throwing brickbats with the other had fled. When I left Tripoli at the end of October 2010 I had no idea that I would be back just a few months later to witness the final chapter of the longest-running, most murderous Middle Eastern soap opera of modern times. I also had no idea that my return would start with an audience with its star.

Gaddafi was one of the hardest people to meet in the world, so I expected to be taken to a secret location, or perhaps a grand pavilion in the desert. Instead our rendezvous was a seaside restaurant in downtown Tripoli. I was watching the sun starting to slip over the horizon on a spring evening in 2011 when I realised all the traffic had disappeared. Suddenly there was a row of cars, lights flashing as they hurtled along the road. One pulled up and from it emerged Muammar Gaddafi, his eyes hidden behind a pair of gold Cartier sunglasses. He was strident and grand. His brown flowing robes gave off the light scent of sandalwood. He took his seat and spoke for more than an hour.

‘I don’t like money,’ he said. ‘I have a tent.’ One look at his black leather cowboy boots and you could have been fooled into believing he was telling the truth. The soles were cracked and pitted. The heels were worn. The millions he had squirrelled away were clearly not being spent on his shoes. His long rambling speeches on Libyan state TV have made many people question his sanity, but throughout the meeting he was confident, lucid and robust. I did not think he was crazy. But he was clearly out of touch.

The interview had been given to Marie Colvin of the
Sunday Times
, but the regime wanted TV cameras there too, as part of their media offensive. Marie suggested the BBC and America’s ABC. She and I then sat in the Rixos Hotel with Muhammad Abdullah al-Senussi, the son of the intelligence chief, to negotiate the details. Muhammad had a bushy black beard that covered most of his fleshy young face. His nose was broad and flat like his father’s. Whenever we met he was wearing green army fatigues, and over his tight curly hair he wore a beret of the revolutionary freedom fighter style. He looked like he’d ordered his outfit from central casting, but for a man born into one of the most murderous regimes in modern history he was surprisingly engaging. At this stage he had refused to tell me his full name. Sometimes he was ‘Abdullah’, sometimes ‘Muhammad’. Only a few days later, when he got angry over media reports that his father might have defected, did he reveal what I already knew. ‘Why are you all reporting that my father has defected?’ he shouted at me. ‘He is in his office now, I just spoke to him.’ Muhammad was later reported to have died in a NATO airstrike alongside Gaddafi’s youngest son Khamis, though neither one’s body was identified.

When the interview took place Colonel Gaddafi had already lost the eastern side of the country. But he knew who was to blame, he said: ‘It’s al-Qaeda. It’s not my people. They came from outside.’ His détente with Western governments had come from the post-9/11 era when being against al-Qaeda covered a multitude of sins. It was a card he still hoped he could play. The same claim would be made, a year later, by the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to explain his plight, though Gaddafi made it sound less convincing. He had already told Libyan state television that the protesters had become the unwitting pawns of terrorists who had provoked them into rebellion by putting ‘hallucinatory pills in their drinks, their milk, coffee, their Nescafe’.

They did come from outside, but it wasn’t al-Qaeda, it was Qatar. It gave US$400 million to arm and train the rebels and, said a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, ‘provided Special Forces to lead the rebels in their August 2011 assault on Tripoli . . . one U.S. military official described Qatar’s overall political and military contribution to the Libya effort as “nothing short of decisive.” ’
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But it did not stop there. ‘The Qataris kept sending very sophisticated weapons to some groups even after Gaddafi’s death,’ a senior Arab diplomat told me. ‘It wasn’t just for the sake of the Libyans and their freedoms. They have another agenda.’

But as the Qataris were gearing up for their latest regional power play, Gaddafi seemed to me to be blind to the possibility he might lose. During the interview the Brother Leader’s body language made it obvious that he was a man who was not used to being challenged. His feet rocked and tapped in apparent agitation as he listened to the questions and only calmed down when he got his chance to respond. At his most angry he switched from Arabic into English. Halfway through the interview the sunglasses came off. But when he left he took the time to shake all our hands and posed for a few photographs. He even briefly began to put his arm around my shoulders. ‘They love me. All my people are with me, they love me all. They will die to protect me, my people,’ he had told us. ‘No one is against me, no demonstrations at all in the streets.’ I’m sure he believed every word he was saying. But at the time you only had to drive twenty kilometres from where he was sitting to find people willing to say openly that they wanted him and his family strung up.

‘I came back to Libya from Wales where I was living and working on February 20, 2011,’ Nizar Mahni told me in the capital Tripoli the year after the uprising.

At that stage we were still in a phase where peaceful demonstrations seemed to be the way forward. We were taking our inspiration from Egypt and Tunisia. But when you see people being gunned down in the street, when you see injuries that you can’t even comprehend, people with holes in their bodies, it begins to become apparent that standing in the street waving banners and flags is just not going to cut it.

Nizar witnessed these scenes on the same day I was covering another opposition demonstration in Tripoli where, because of the presence of the international media, the security forces limited themselves to rubber bullets and tear gas. During the war the vast majority of Gaddafi’s intelligence and security apparatus was concentrated around the capital. Nizar, who had been training as a dentist, and his friends were driven underground by the regime’s violence. They started a dangerous campaign of covert disobedience to raise the morale of the capital’s population and helped run guns while they waited for the tide to turn and for the city to rise up, as it did on 20 August 2011. They styled themselves the ‘Free Generation Movement’.

It was an attempt to show that opposition existed in Tripoli. So we were rigging up speakers in and around Tripoli blasting out the [old] national anthem, which was punishable by life imprisonment even before the war. We bought speakers and fitted timers to them and recorded the national anthem on a loop. And we timed the speakers to set off ten minutes after we had placed them in strategic locations having hidden them in rubbish bags.

They placed cameras in tissue boxes and left them in abandoned cars so they could film the swarm of armed security men who arrived to rummage through the trash trying to stop the noise. They also systematically burned the huge images of Gaddafi dotted around the city, flew the independence flag and dropped leaflets. It was very dangerous, and if they had been caught they would have ended up either in one of Gaddafi’s prisons or dead.