TO THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI:

In Qaddafi’s son, a riddle for the West (Craig S. Smith, December 15, 2004, The New York Times)

Seif el-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son of this country's idiosyncratic leader, was just 14 in 1986 when American bombs destroyed his home and killed his 4-year-old sister. Despite that harsh experience, he has emerged in the past few years as the new, Western-friendly face of this former pariah state.

His fingerprints are on almost every major international move the country has made since it began its recent rehabilitation, from compensating the families of victims of past terrorist attacks to abandoning the program to produce unconventional weapons. Most recently he has been preaching democracy in a part of the world where strongmen have long been the norm.

"Democracy is the future," Qaddafi, 32, said at his Moroccan-style villa outside Tripoli, where he keeps a white tiger, Freddo, among other exotic pets. "We have to be ahead of the world in our region, the Middle East, and not to be lagging behind, because the whole world is heading toward democracy." [...]

[L]ibya is changing, and to many young people the young Qaddafi represents a hope that the country will become a more Western-oriented, open society than the African-focused socialist state that his father has shaped in the past 35 years.

In many ways he is the opposite of his father: Fluent in English and educated in Europe, he dresses in a hip, understated style that contrasts sharply with his reclusive father's flowing Bedouin robes.

Even his closely shaved head is the opposite of his father's unruly bush of hair.

At times he clearly speaks on behalf of the government. But on other occasions, diplomats and Libyan academics say, he seems to be pursuing his own agenda, particularly on human rights.

"He can be a force for good," said one Western diplomat, who credits him with pursuing allegations of torture used to extract confessions from two Bulgarian nurses convicted earlier this year of infecting Libyan children with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Some of the policemen involved have been punished. The younger Qaddafi is now helping to negotiate the release of the nurses, who were sentenced to death.

But it is when he speaks of political change that people really start to wonder whether his words count.

The words always count more than we understand them to--begin to accept the necessity of democracy rhetorically and you end up with it, as witness our authoritarian allies of last century from the Phillipines and Taiwan to Spain and South Africa.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 15, 2004 10:35 AM