For years, stories about Saif al-Islam Gaddafi have been reported about his arrest, death, escape, and discovery alive in a rebel camp, and others about his disappearance in southern France. His press statement yesterday, brought him back to the fore, presented his vision to the world, for the first time, since his arrest during the Libyan revolution. He is in Libya, free, or, as he said, his jailers became his guards and friends, after they were “liberated from the illusion of revolution.”
In torn Libya, perhaps if Gaddafi returns from his grave, he will rule, after ten bloody years in which militias and mercenaries ruled the country. A large section of the Libyan people may not agree with this view, by accepting Gaddafi, but even these people have no alternative to the bad situation that we see no end.
Will Seif return to political work and restore his father’s rule? He can, but in front of his dream, take an additional road paved with blood and pain as a result of the accumulation of local Libyan conflicts, regional, tribal and personal. There are external challenges from Arab countries with influence or partial influence, such as Turkey, Italy, France and the United States. Is it the return of Napoleon from exile, benefiting from anger and chaos, or just the dream of the exiles in their caves, which added chaos? The Libyan tragedy, like the Syrian tragedy, has come to an end but without a real victorious knight.
It is difficult to repair a government that is broken, as it was, which requires so much wisdom, reconciliation, and compromise. Saif al-Islam says he will return with the Green Book, which is not an attractive electoral promise. Saif is not Muammar, although his son. We knew that the son tried to change the Jamahiriya, by opening up and benefiting from wealth internally, and ending his father’s foreign adventures, and he succeeded in part during the last years of the father’s rule, but Saif was not in the throne until he was judged.
It is easy to point out the tragic situation in Libya and Libyans after the collapse of the regime and to say that the ideal option is to return the situation to what it was before February 2011. The world of Gaddafi the father was an abstraction outside the reality in which the majority of people wanted to live. On the other hand, any leader who will raise the promise of achieving security, stability and decent living will inevitably find support after a decade of chaos, the rule of rival groups and foreign interventions. And the dilemma of Libya, after ten years of the failed revolution, is no longer about a rejection of some kind of regime; It is against the complete collapse and division of the country as a result of the leaders’ fighting. In Libya there is no longer a state, but states ruled by militias.
In the current situation, Saif al-Gaddafi can compete and reach the seat of government, this possibility was impossible in the past, but today it is among the bets on the table. And until it is achieved, will the Libyan people accept it? Will the big countries allow it? And the most difficult challenge is, can he win what all the local forces have been unable to achieve during the past ten years, by uniting the country and ruling it from the capital? Achieving this goal is not enough for him to have a talk in the New York Times.
