Some years ago, on a journey from one Middle Eastern country to another, I was stopped at a security post by an immense guard who declared that my passport was not fully in order and therefore I could not proceed. I became irascible and demanded to see a senior officer. One duly appeared, smaller and more quietly spoken; but he took the same view as his colleague and answered my continued protests with the offer of a meeting with his superior. Such a man eventually emerged and began to speak in a courteous half-whisper, addressing me solicitously as “My dear”.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I observed to my travelling companion. I then saw that she was in a state of near-terror; she muttered to me that unless I wanted to experience what one of the local prison cells was like, I should immediately back down, return to our car and drive in the opposite direction. She understood what I stupidly did not: that the quieter and more polite the security officer, the more afraid we should be.
I was reminded of this while watching Jeremy Paxman interview two London-based Libyan opponents of Colonel Gadaffi’s regime about the defection of Musa Kusa, the much-feared former chief of Libya’s intelligence service. One, the writer Hisham Matar, told how his father had been kidnapped by this organisation, tortured and personally interrogated by Kusa. He added: “If you had to choose one person that is most connected not only to the ruthlessness of the violence inflicted on the Libyan people by this regime but also its macabre nature, you could not choose better than Musa Kusa.” To this, Paxman responded: “He doesn’t look like a brute.”
Perhaps it is a failing common to Britons of a certain background that we tend to assume that if a representative of a dictatorship is well dressed and well educated and can drink a cup of tea without making slurping noises, then he is really one of us — civilised and even clubbable. Indeed, it had been in the salubrious surroundings of the Travellers club in Pall Mall that Kusa negotiated with MI6 the arrangements under which Libya would abandon its ambition to build nuclear weapons and agree to compensate the victims of its terrorist acts, including those slaughtered at Lockerbie.
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To the objection that Kusa had been the mastermind of the Gadaffi regime’s policy of terror and was not a suitable man to invite to tea at the Travellers, British intelligence officers could reasonably point out that it was precisely for this reason that he was worth wooing. As one of the early British negotiators with Sinn Fein/IRA once told me, he gave this response to a Sinn Fein man who had piously protested that he didn’t speak for the men of violence: “If you really don’t speak for those who are doing the killing, what is the point of us having this meeting?”
It is respectable to suck up to dictatorships when their domestic policies have terrorised their populations into acquiescence The Blair government saw an exact parallel between the Irish peace process and the detente with the Gadaffi regime (which had supplied the IRA with Semtex, among other weapons of the terrorists’ dreams): if they stopped being nasty to us, then we would stop being nasty to them.
Better still, we would make them respectable, invite them to all the best social events, that sort of thing.
Kusa found this aspect very attractive: when a terrorist gets to a certain age and has children who want to attend a good university in Britain, he tends to crave such respectability. (That, incidentally, helps explain why the London School of Economics was co-opted by the British government — all part of the attempt to make the Gadaffi family, or elements of it, presentable in polite society.)
Although the LSE has been ridiculed and even discredited for its warm relationship with the Gadaffis, it is a little odd that it should have been only after Libya’s regime began to fight for its life that the college’s reputation collapsed. It seems, however, to be an iron law in such matters that it is respectable to suck up to dictatorships when their repressive domestic policies have successfully terrorised their populations into sullen acquiescence; only when such repression starts to fail — as it has across north Africa and the Middle East — do politicians and universities suddenly rediscover how wicked such regimes are.
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Thus the British government now says ominously that Kusa, even though he has finally broken with the thuggish Gadaffis, cannot be allowed to evade the justice of the international criminal courts; yet when he was the unmistakably sinister Libyan foreign minister, our government would have wanted to preserve him from such an indignity.
To be fair to the Foreign Office — an unconventional suggestion — it has always argued that the fact that we recognise deeply unattractive governments at all times and in all places does not mean that we approve of them. However, the last Labour government went much further than that in the case of Libya. Amid the mire and misjudgments of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya’s abandonment of terror was seen as a desperately needed foreign policy triumph. The result was that Tony Blair and his foreign secretary Jack Straw went overboard in their effusiveness towards the odious, corrupt and hated Gadaffi family (of which Libya was a wholly owned subsidiary).
We can contrast this performance with that of the Bush administration, which was a model of good taste by comparison. Negotiations with Kusa were conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, just as they were by MI6: indeed, the CIA would argue that its rapprochement was the more essential. Yet the Americans, while allowing that the regime for which Kusa was consiglieri could now be removed from its list of rogue states, never treated Tripoli with anything other than icy formality; would that Britain had behaved with such a sense of decency.
There is a lesson here, in our treatment of the emissaries of other loathsome regimes now facing popular uprisings. Paxman showed a surer touch in his interview with the Syrian ambassador last week, his eyebrows soaring in comical incredulity as His Excellency Sami Khiyami declared (following the line set by his boss, President Bashar al-Assad) that the disturbances in Syria had been set in motion by Israel: “The Israelis could be behind it. They could be behind any bad thing in the world.”
Here we saw in full measure the decadent cynicism of a certain form of classic Middle Eastern leadership, the sort the Foreign Office traditionally regards as respectable. For the benefit of western governments, such family-run tyrannies use the local threat of Muslim extremism as justification for their permanent grip on power and the revenues of the state: to their own people, brought up on a toxic diet of anti-Semitic literature and legend, they use the existence of Israel for the same purpose.
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The Syrian ambassador, under the pressure of Paxman’s interrogation, blurted out the line that plays well in the Middle East but which comes across as paranoid in this country. Although, come to think of it, there is no shortage of British university campuses where the suggestion that Israel is “behind any bad thing in the world” might seem almost to amount to received wisdom.
As a matter of fact, the Foreign Office has for some time now been warning Israeli ministers not to travel to London unless they want to risk facing a local summons for crimes against humanity under so-called “universal jurisdiction”. Do you think they warned the Libyan foreign minister of the same possibility in his case when he told them he was heading this way? It would have made little difference if they had: if anyone understands the nature of the engulfing terror from which he is escaping, that man is Musa Kusa.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk
Further reading:
Musa Kusa implicated in a number of IRA bombings
Defect or die, Kusa tells Gadaffi’s henchmen
‘You have no future, you son of a pig dog’
Exile returns for revenge
Jihadis join battle to oust regime
Dictator’s forces fool Nato into killing rebels