Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (46 page)

I sometimes ask interviewees, especially those who seem profoundly disenfranchised, whether they want to ask me anything. The invitation to reverse roles helps people feel less like experimental subjects. In Rwanda, these mothers’ questions tended to be the same: How long are you spending in the country? How many people are you interviewing? When will your research be published? Who will read these stories? At the end of my interview with Uwamahoro, I asked whether she had any questions. “Well,” she said a little hesitantly, “you write about this field of psychology.” I nodded. She took a
deep breath. “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more? I want to love her so much, and I try my best, but when I look at her, I see what happened to me and it interferes.” A tear rolled down her cheek, but her tone was almost fiercely challenging when she repeated, “Can you tell me how to love my daughter more?”

Only afterward, too late to tell Uwamahoro, did I marvel that she did not know how much love was in that question.

Since Paul Kagame took power in 1994, Rwanda has had a stable political environment and an average of 8 percent annual growth of GDP. The poverty rate is down by nearly a quarter. Child mortality has been reduced by two-thirds, and enrollment in primary schools is almost universal. The World Bank ranked Rwanda as one of the easiest countries in the world for starting a business.

But Kagame’s regime is accused of assassinating opposition leaders and journalists, mass murder of civilians in Rwanda and abroad, invasion and exploitation of natural resources in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, and political suppression of the Rwandan people. Only Sudan and Syria have higher levels of political exclusion than Rwanda. The government has shuttered independent newspapers and barred opposition parties from registering for elections. An opinion leader in the
New York Times
has described it as a “country on lockdown.” In 2015, Kagame persuaded Rwanda’s high court and legislature to relax presidential term limits, ostensibly by “popular demand,” thus paving the way for a permanent presidency. The United States and other governments asked that he show an example for the region by relinquishing his post in 2017 after two seven-year terms. Kagame has expressed displeasure at such foreign interference, but has set up a referendum process on the question, which is almost certain to pass. Given the history of assassinations of those who have come out too strongly against Kagame, the Rwandan opposition said they could not find a lawyer in Rwanda who was willing to bring a suit against the president.

My friend Jacqueline Novogratz, who has worked in Rwanda
since the 1980s with her Acumen foundation, described talking to a friend there who said, “This culture is about lying. We all lie, all the time, to everyone. It’s the only way to survive here.” Jacqueline said, “Do you lie to me?” Her friend said, “I don’t know. We lie so much that I can’t even tell when I’m lying anymore. I don’t know when I am lying to you; I don’t know when I am lying to myself.”

New Yorker
, May 8, 2006

Qaddafi’s regime was extremely secretive, so while his terrorist foreign policy was deplored widely, the ludicrous humiliations of daily life in Libya went largely unchronicled. A month in Libya felt like a decade. Many other countries where I’d worked required complicity in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and some featured random violence, but in no other was so much public and personal energy devoted to such pointless enterprises.

H
ere’s a story they tell in Libya. Three contestants are in a race to run five hundred meters carrying a bag of rats. The first sets off at a good pace, but after a hundred meters the rats have chewed through the bag and spill onto the course. The second contestant gets to a hundred and fifty meters, and the same thing happens. The third contestant shakes the bag so vigorously as he runs that the rats are constantly tumbling and cannot chew on anything, and he takes the prize. That third contestant is Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the permanent revolutionary.

Libya is about the size of Germany, France, Italy, and Spain combined, but its population, just under 6 million, is roughly the same as Denmark’s. Oil revenues make Libya, per capita, one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, yet malnutrition and anemia are among its most
prevalent health problems. It is an Islamic country where alcohol is illegal and most married women wear the hijab; it is a secular country where women are legally allowed to wear bikinis and Qaddafi is protected by a phalanx of gun-toting female bodyguards. The version of socialism promulgated in the mid-1970s by Qaddafi’s political manifesto, the
Green Book
, is honored; the country is in the throes of capitalist reform. The head of the Libyan Publishers’ League says that the books most often requested in his store are the Koran and Bill Clinton’s
My Life
. Then, of course, there’s the official line that the country is ruled by its citizens through Basic People’s Congresses, and the practical reality that it is ruled by Qaddafi. Libyan officials must far outstrip the Red Queen in her habit of believing six impossible things before breakfast.

For Americans, there’s an even more salient contradiction. A regime led by a man President Reagan dubbed “the mad dog of the Middle East”—a regime that throughout the 1980s sponsored such groups as the IRA, the Abu Nidal Organization, and the Basque ETA and was blamed for the explosion that, in 1988, downed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland—is now an acknowledged ally in America’s war on terror. Libya’s governing circles are beset by infighting between those who think that this alliance is a good thing and hope for closer ties to the West and those who regard the West with truculent suspicion.

Qaddafi came to power in 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, when, as a junior military officer, he helped stage a bloodless coup against the pro-Western King Idris, who had been installed by the Allies after the Second World War. Now Qaddafi claims that he has no formal role in Libya and is simply an avuncular figure dispensing wisdom when asked. Yet Libyans are afraid to say his name, except in official contexts, where it meets with predictable cheering. The general euphemism is “the Leader.” Informally, people refer to Qaddafi as the Big Guy or the One, or just point an index finger straight up. Saying “Qaddafi” aloud is thought to invite trouble. So is questioning his sometimes absurd policy proposals. He once insisted that families use only one bar of soap a week. On another occasion, he proposed that currency be eliminated in favor of barter. “He believes in desert
culture, even though the desert has no culture,” one cosmopolitan resident of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, told me. “He is trying to take life to its childhood.”

The name of Qaddafi’s second-oldest son and possible successor, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, is seldom spoken, either. The inner circle refers to Saif, who is one of eight children, as the Principal, but he is also called the Son, the Brave Young Man, Our Young Friend, and the Engineer. The relationship between father and son is a topic of constant speculation. The Principal holds no title and, in keeping with his father’s decree, maintains that the position of Leader is not hereditary. He does, however, sit comfortably close to power. The Leader, for all his opposition to royalty, looks a lot like a king, and the Principal is his crown prince.

Saif’s role is to be the face of reform, “to polish his father’s picture,” as one prominent Libyan writer suggested to me. His academic papers at the London School of Economics, where he is pursuing a doctorate in political philosophy, are said to show a solid grasp of Hobbes and Locke. He founded the Qaddafi International Foundation for Charity Associations, which fights torture at home and abroad and works to promote human rights. He appears to be committed to high principles, even though real democratic change might put him out of the political picture. One of Saif’s advisers told me that Saif would rather be the first elected head of the Libyan state than the second unelected leader of the revolution, but that he could go either way.

“Qaddafi claims that he is not the Leader, and Saif claims that he is the opposition, and they are both liars,” said Ma
Î
tre Saad Djebbar, an Algerian lawyer who has worked on Libyan affairs for many years. Others see a personal agenda. “The Leader is a bedouin from the desert and simply wants power and control—he is content to rule a wrecked country,” the expatriate poet Khaled Mattawa told me. “But his sons are urban; they have traveled, studied abroad, learned sophistication. They go falconing in the Gulf states with the princes of royal families. They want to drive BMWs and rule a country that is accepted in the panoply of nations.”

Saif’s office is in Tripoli’s tallest and fanciest tower—a hulking glass
building topped by a gigantic circular apparatus that was intended as a revolving restaurant but neither revolves nor serves food. The foundation’s suite is modest and sparsely furnished, and its staff members appear to be the busiest people in Libya, bent over computers, talking simultaneously on several phones, surrounded by papers. The walls are covered with posters for Saif’s causes: one shows a man with his face wrapped in barbed wire, with the caption “International Campaign Against Torture: Middle East Area: Libya the First Station.”

Saif, however, is usually elsewhere. I met him last fall in Montreal, where he was opening an exhibition of his own paintings. These are rendered with expressionist enthusiasm in a variety of familiar styles and may feature images of horses, desert skies, the face of the Leader, or one of Saif’s beloved pet Bengal tigers. Saif has bestowed his pictures on urban centers from Paris to Tokyo, where they have been received as documentary curiosities, like the personal effects of the last tsarina. Whether the primary function of these exhibitions is political, social, or artistic is never discussed.

We met at the Sofitel, which had given over the top floor to Saif and his entourage. Various deputies and advisers had gathered in a large, nondescript suite. When he came in, everyone sat up straighter. Though Saif tries to be intimate and casual, his presence, even his name, makes other people formal. He wore a well-cut suit and moved with grace. At thirty-three, he is good-looking and hip, with a shaved head, and he speaks intelligently, though with the vagueness about self and reality that afflicts royalty and child stars, and that comes from never having seen oneself accurately reflected in the eyes of others. He has more than a trace of the paternal charisma, but it has yet to harden into genius, incoherence, or his father’s trademark combination of the two.

When I asked why Libya was not proceeding more rapidly toward democratic reform, Saif said, “In the last fifty years, we have moved from being a tribal society to being a colony to being a kingdom to being a revolutionary republic. Be patient.” (After centuries of Ottoman rule, Libya was occupied by Italy between 1912 and 1943.) But, like his father, Saif relishes extravagant pronouncements and soon proposed that Libya give up its entire military.

“The whole faith and strategy has changed,” he said, looking to his courtiers for nods of agreement. “Why should we have an army? If Egypt invades Libya, the Americans are going to stop it.” During the Reagan years, he said, Libya was “expecting America to attack us anytime—our whole defensive strategy was how to deal with the Americans. We used terrorism and violence because these are the weapons of the weak against the strong. I don’t have missiles to hit your cities, so I send someone to attack your interests. Now that we have peace with America, there is no need for terrorism, no need for nuclear bombs.” Saif dismissed any comparison between the terrorism that Libya had sponsored in the past and the kind associated with al-Qaeda. “We used terrorism as tactics, for bargaining,” he told me. “Mr. bin Laden uses it for strategy. We wanted to gain more leverage. He wants to kill people. Fundamentalism in Libya—it’s always there, though not so strong as in the 1990s.” Saif did not mention that in the 1990s his father’s security forces routinely imprisoned fundamentalists.

Religious extremists had “created a lot of problems in Libya,” Saif said. “They tried to destabilize the whole society. But not anymore. Now they are weak. But the threat is there, the potential is there.” Saif noted that three Libyans had been involved in suicide bombings in Iraq last year. “They are being recruited by Zarqawi,” he said, referring to the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, “who wants to create cells and attack American interests in Libya—oil companies, American schools, and so on. It’s a disaster for us because we want the American presence. There aren’t so many of these extremists, several dozen, but even that in a country like Libya is a big headache.” As for American security interests, he said, “We are already on your side, helping the American war on terror. It’s happening, and it’s going to happen.”

Saif’s rhetoric may beguile his Western admirers, but to the hard-liners in Libya’s government it remains anathema. Saif, for his part, refused to acknowledge the substantial Libyan opposition to reform: “Maybe there are three or four citizens like this. Not more.”

That was the most outlandish of his declarations. An American congressional aide who has worked closely with Saif accurately described him as “eighty percent sophisticated.” Saif’s prospects will
depend not upon his profile abroad but upon his ability to orchestrate support at home. Despite his political presence in Libya, his father’s legacy will not easily be assumed; there are too many competitors for the next generation of power. But Saif is a canny fellow. “The Principal knows that one secret of leadership is to see where the parade is headed,” one of his advisers told me, “and rush in front of it before it gets there.”

In 2004, two decades of American sanctions came to an end after Libya agreed to pay compensation to the Lockerbie families and renounced weapons of mass destruction. (Saif, who has spent a good deal of energy trying to rehabilitate Libya’s image in the world, was involved in both negotiations.) Since then, the great question in Tripoli has been how deeply reform will penetrate a country that has been largely isolated for decades. Within the government, the fighting is bitter. The National Oil Company (reformist) and the Department of Energy (hard-line) are in constant conflict, as are the Ministry of Economics (reformist) and the Libyan Central Bank (hard-line). Since Qaddafi makes the ultimate ideological decisions, the spectacle calls to mind the worst aspects of multiparty democracy, albeit without parties or democracy.