Lara Marlowe meets Seif al-Islam Gadafi, the flamboyant son most likely to succeed his father as leader of the People's Jumhurriya in Libya
Seif al-Islam Gadafi smiled when I asked whether he will succeed his father as leader of the People's Jumhurriya. "I've been asked that question a thousand times before," Moammar Gadafi's 29-year-old son replied with a hint of condescension.
Hopes that a new generation might invigorate the Arab world are fading. Mohamed VI replaced King Hassan in Morocco, King Adullah followed King Hussein in Jordan and Bachar succeeded Hafez al-Assad. Westerners find the Jordanian and Moroccan dynasties more acceptable - after all, there are still royal families in Europe - but when Saddam Hussein grooms his thuggish sons Udai and Qusai for the post-Saddam era, when Moammar Gadafi sends his prodigy to Europe to polish up his image, there is reason to despair of democracy ever reaching the Arab world.
Democracy, Seif al-Islam claimed, was what distinguished Libya from its Arab brothers. "I don't want to say we are against the succession process in Syria or Morocco. Maybe it's good for them. But for myself and my country, we have a completely different system. We are proud we have developed direct democracy. There are no parties between the people and the power." Hmm.
My colleague from Le Figaro got a more direct answer: "Obviously, I'd be lying if I told you that there's no chance I might become the leader one day. But, thank God, we don't have a hereditary system." Seif al-Islam Gadafi is tall and elegant in his designer suit with breast pocket handkerchief. His shaved head and slight growth of beard give him the look of a spoiled son of an oil potentate you'd expect to meet in a Paris nightclub in the early hours of the morning.
He tries hard to project seriousness of purpose - there are six other brothers competing for the succession - but like his father, Seif al-Islam Gadafi has an odd, flamboyant side that sometimes comes to the surface.
When Seif al-Islam flew to Vienna to enrol at the International Business School five years ago, he walked off the plane with two white tigers and four bodyguards. The tigers ended up in the Schönbrunn Zoo. Back in Libya after obtaining his MBA, the young man adopted two more tigers. One of them died recently.
"I was sad," he told Le Figaro. "The other one is bored now. I'm trying to find him a female."
When the young Gadafi is not horseback riding, deep-sea diving or hunting with a falcon, he paints - yes, pictures - and presides over the Gadafi International Foundation for Charity, an organisation which, he claims, "has zero links with the Libyan government" so it can act where it would be diplomatically delicate for the People's Jumhurriya to intervene - for example, helping Chechens at war with Russia.
Gadafi jnr recently travelled to Pakistan to organise the repatriation of 40 Libyans who fought with the Taliban. He has built mosques in the Philippines, dispensaries in Tahiti, orphanages in Iraq. He says he has given aid to victims of the September 11th attacks and food to the hungry in North Korea.
Seif al-Islam became internationally known in 2000 when his father dispatched him to the Philippines to help negotiate the release of French hostages held by the Abu Sayyaf rebels in Jolo. The Abu Sayyaf group was once financed by Gadafi snr, and safe passage to Libya was one of the kidnappers' demands.
The arrangement was fishy, to say the least, but it worked. France dropped all demands for the imprisonment of five Libyans convicted in absentia in March 1999 of planning the bombing of a UTA DC 10 airliner over Niger in 1989. One hundred and seventy civilian passengers were killed. One of the men convicted in a French court was Col Gadafi's brother-in-law, Abdallah Senoussi.
But Seif al-Islam shrugs off what he would prefer to dismiss as "history". Franco-Libyan relations "are like a heart chart," he explains prosaically. "Up and down, up and down." The young Gadafi and a retinue of 70 Libyans were on the Tripoli-Paris flight when Libyan Airlines reopened the route on February 25th.
French officials stressed that it was a "private" visit, but Seif al-Islam was invited by the French government-financed Institut du Monde Arabe to inaugurate an exhibition of contemporary Libyan painters, including himself. He met the secretary general of UNESCO and gave a lecture on Franco-Libyan relations at the French Institute for International Relations - which is also government-financed.
Reading his prepared speech in choppy English, the young Gadafi gave the impression he would rather be in a nightclub. But he handled a verbal attack by Francoise Rudetski, the head of "SOS Terrorisme", over the UTA bombing with a slipperiness many politicians would envy.
"First of all, thank you for the question. I am not angry with your question," said Gadafi jnr. Libya paid compensation to the families of the victims, with whom he sympathised. "We have letters from the French government saying Libya fulfilled all obligations." As for the Libyans who were supposed to have been imprisoned in their own country, "if you are talking about people who killed in Sabra and Chatila, in (US bombing raids) on Tripoli, Benfree who have killed. We have to talk about it." Libya's relations with Washington remain poor. Although Libya extradited two men to stand trial before a Scottish court in the Netherlands, the US demands compensation for Lockerbie victims and an admission of guilt by Gadafi. The former is possible - "because they are a superpower and they can do what they want to," Seif al-Islam said - but an admission of guilt is unlikely.
"The leader," he continues, established a fund to compensate all victims of terrorism - including the Libyan victims of US air raids as well as Lockerbie. "It is the best solution; it's the golden bridge." Libya has renounced pan-Arabism and wants to concentrate on creating a "United States of Africa" with a single currency on the European model. "Young people in Libya don't care about the past. They care about tourism and cultural exchange and they want to study in Europe."
Seif al-Islam Gadafi knows. In the mid-1990s, he was refused student visas to France, Canada and Switzerland. "Our generation has nothing to do with the past, and thank God," he concluded.