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The assassination of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the second son of Libya’s late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is a reminder of both how violent Libya remains more than 15 years after his father’s demise – and how much Saif had come to be perceived as a threat to Libya’s governing elite.
The loyalist Gaddafi green movement remained a potent gathering point for some Libyans nostalgic for a return to imagined past security that Saif’s father symbolised.
Gaddafi, 53, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen who stormed his house in Zintan on Tuesday. His political office quickly demanded an impartial inquiry into his death, casting doubt on the ability of the UN-backed government based in Tripoli to mount such an investigation.
The Tripoli-based prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, holds on to power even though a UN-led process in 2021 had only intended to install him as an interim leader pending new elections that never happened.
As a result, Libya remains divided between an authoritarian east led by the family of the warlord Khalifa Haftar and the UN-recognised west that is trying to demonstrate that the country has shed its violent past.
But Saif Gaddafi’s difficulty was that he did not fit neatly into this picture of a country divided in two – and as such represented a threat to many.
One Libyan said: “There is a large constituency inside Libya that has come to support what he symbolises, and if there were elections it was likely that he would do better than Dbeibeh and Haftar, especially since there is a nostalgia for the past that is remembered as more secure. Since there have been no national elections in Libya since 2015 there is a large group of voters that have no personal experience of Gaddafi’s father or what he did.”
The conspiracy theories swirling around Saif’s death are made all the more intriguing by recent reports that the rival camps had met in Paris last week to discuss a common approach to elections. The two sides were brought together by Donald Trump’s adviser on Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos.
Any national unity deal between the two sides would have faced the obstacle of Gaddafi’s apparent determination to stand as a third force. Already his supporters are lauding him as a martyr.
But his death also marks another step back for international justice.
Elham Saudi, the director of the London-based group Libyan Lawyers for Justice, said: “Saif Gaddafi is the last person who had an outstanding arrest warrant at the international criminal court for violations in 2011, and for that avenue to justice to be closed off now would be very regrettable, especially since this is the 15th anniversary of the uprising. It would be a sad day for victims if that file is now closed with his death.”
More sophisticated and western-oriented than his father, Saif was often seen as the slick interlocutor with western powers as they negotiated Libya’s abandonment of weapons of mass destruction or compensation for the families of those killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland.
Educated in the west, his modern image managed for a period to beguile London academia – including the London School of Economics, which in 2008 granted him a PhD soon after Libya promised the institution £1.5m of funding over five years.
But once the Libyan civil war erupted in 2011 Saif was unambiguously by his father’s bloody side and was captured by Islamist revolutionary forces as he sought to flee for Niger. The militia that captured him – the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq battalion – for six years ignored the ICC warrant, and released him in 2017 as part of a general amnesty.
Slowly he entered a third phase in his political career, acting as a populist alternative to the corrupt elites in both the east and west.
In 2021, he attempted to run for president, appearing in the southern city of Sabha in tribal dress to deliver his nomination papers.
His message, as relayed in a rare interview given to the New York Times, had a resonance. “There’s no money, no security. There’s no life here. Go to the gas station – there’s no diesel. We export oil and gas to Italy – we’re lighting half of Italy – and we have blackouts here. It’s more than a failure. It’s a fiasco.”
His candidacy was blocked and the whole election process stalled amid arguments between all sides about the qualifications required to run for the presidency. Yet Saif Gaddafi paradoxically benefited from being silenced. Untainted by being in government, and the endless corruption, he retained a mysterious allure.
In recordings smuggled out more recently he questioned why “martyrs” had sacrificed themselves in 2011 only to find they were being ruled by foreign ambassadors from Turkey, Britain, the US and France or by UN special envoys such as the American Stephanie T Williams.
Now no one will know whether he could have won a presidential election. But the story of how his death is investigated, the culprits identified and his life memorialised still has the potential to influence the future of Libya. Fifteen years after the death of Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator’s shadow still looms large over the country.
