Conflict Transmission 85 My dad is anti-Gaddafi, I have best friends that are anti-Gaddafi. That’s not what I’m looking at. You said you want to open up a window, a door for us to help the Libyan youth, I’m there. And I told him about a [Libyan] scholarship fund that I started [here in the US]. He loved that idea. A Washington, DC-based exile named Fadel explained, “That was a big debate – because is my problem the regime’s policies, or the regime itself? Can I work to change the regime’s behavior, or I just have to work until I get rid of the head?” For Fadel, dialogue seemed like a logical pathway to liberalization. Isolation is better for dictators. They love it because they just can live and control their own people, and you don’t have any leverage over them. Look at North Korea! So I was against the isolation. I was more for constructive engagement, to make a change. So that was part of the divergence in thinking about can I make real change – if the regime has five thousand political prisoners, if I can get five hundred out, is that good? Or is it five thousand or nobody? Ask for [Gaddafi’s] head, or nothing else? Likewise, the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood-in-exile represented by Dr. Abdul Malek in Manchester joined the reformist camp out of what he characterized as “pragmatism.” He explained that during this time, “Gaddafi was a fact of life” and “if we can get something for the people and at the same time Gaddafi is still there, then we will work on that. That is why we had dialogues with Saif and others in the government hoping that we could carry out some serious reforms in Libya. But the opposition did not see that.” Saif’s efforts to woo Libyans back home and incorporate them into the reform process divided the dissident community. Some came to believe that the campaign was a complete shill, and a dangerous one at that. Amr Ben Halim, the son of a prominent political figure from the time of King Idris, recalled, A lot of us thought that there was some hope in [Saif’s reforms] because we never hoped it was possible to remove Gaddafi from power. He was so entrenched, he was so pervasive, that the idea of him being removed from power in a peaceful way or normal way was just not possible. Clearly, his son is preparing himself, so let’s see what can be done with the son. He speaks the right language, he says the right things. But then after the fact, over time, we found out that it was not legitimate. It was really more a manipulation that allowed him to the point where he was set to take over. He had some very bad dictatorial instincts that he would hide when he would meet the foreign press, the foreign politicians. But when he came back here [to Libya], he was a very brutal kind of person, very much in his father’s mold. Others condemned the normalization of relations with Gaddafi without preconditions for human rights reforms. Hamid, a young activist who had grown up in exile in the United States and whose relatives had been executed by the regime, explained that he and his friends remained strongly opposed to Saif’s half-hearted measures. “We always tried to educate the other Libyans [about] what was really happening,” he remembered. “We were like, no, you can’t side with the devil. Our parents and our great grandparents are expecting https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press