On the Death of Libya's Saif al-Islam Gaddafi

From superficial reformer to, in death, a symbol of privatized violence and murky politics.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who was a key advisor to his father Muammar Gaddafi (1942-2011, in power 1969-2011), was killed by unknown gunmen at his home in Zintan, Libya on February 3.

For a biography of the younger Gaddafi, this BBC profile from 2017 is a good place to start. Born in 1972, S. Gaddafi was a reformist voice in the 2000s, assisting his father as he undertook what scans to me as a strategic and pragmatic, or one might say outright cynical, opening towards Western powers, including the United States. He received a doctorate from the London School of Economics in 2008 (not long after, there were serious allegations that his dissertation had been plagiarized and/or ghost-written), and was well-connected within the United Kingdom and beyond. The analyst Jalel Harchaoui has a fascinating piece about tensions between Saif al-Islam and his more hardline brother Mutassim, who was more deeply embedded in the regime’s security apparatus (despite a volatile career there). Amid the Arab Spring and the ensuing Libyan revolution, Saif al-Islam ultimately proved himself a regime hardliner. He was arrested in November 2011. Wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, among other charges, he was detained and held for nearly six years by a militia called the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Battalion, named for the first Caliph to succeed the Prophet Muhammad. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s release in 2017 amid a general amnesty triggered international outcry and calls for him to be handed over to the ICC, but he found a way to live underground in Zintan - until now.

I have three brief reflections on his death:

• In a way his story encapsulates a classic dynamic: the regime that tenders some light reforms that then, by highlighting how much more might be reformed, end up revealing the cracks in the system. As one illustration of how his reforms ended up generating unintended consequences, some of the same ex-jihadist figures whose release he supervised in the late 2000s became major figures in the revolution of 2011. At the same time, had the Libyan revolution received less international support, and had the regime survived for years long, we might be telling a much different story about Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. That’s not to say I think he was particularly clever or effective, it’s just to acknowledge how much Libya’s post-2011 trajectory colors understandings of the 2000s.

• His death marks, to state the obvious, a serious blow to the political future of the Gaddafi family. Of Gaddafi’s children, three sons were killed in 2011 (including Mutassim, mentioned above), and several others survive, but in exile and without a serious foothold in the sphere of formal politics. And while there is some nostalgia in quarters of Libya for the Gaddafi era, Harchaoui in his piece on Saif al-Islam and Mutassim, notes that Saif al-Islam’s reported presidential ambitions in 2021 and beyond were unlikely to resonate widely - Harchaoui argued that both victims of the regime and remaining loyalists alike were mainly going to resent Saif al-Islam for very different reasons. I think we could even go further and say that Saif al-Islam’s story is a cautionary tale for the various would-be monarchs and come-back kids of the Middle East and North Africa; a son might succeed a father while the machine is running, but it’s much harder to restart such a machine once it’s stopped.

• The symbolism of his death is ambivalent at best. Some of the Libyans who were celebrating his death exulted that it fell in February, the month in which the revolution began. But I wonder how long the celebrations will last; his death is part of a long process of closing a chapter, but it changes little about the present realities of fragmentation and uncertainty. And his death also underscores a lack of accountability, a recourse to privatized violence that feeds on and enables chaos; accountability that comes in the form of masked gunmen might gladden some victims’ hearts, but it joins a stream of murky episodes and a politics of violence. I do not mourn his passing but his shabby death echoes and parallels his father’s ignominious end, right down to the photos of his corpse now circulating on social media. Two corpses, fifteen years apart, representing a road that proved to be a long and tragic dead end for Libya, but in their absence, few answers about the road forward.