THE NEW YORK TIMES: TRIPOLI, Libya — Aisha el-Qaddafi, the daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, likes to tell her three young children bedtime stories about the afterlife. Now, she says, they are especially appropriate.“To make them ready,” she said, “because in a time of war you never know when a rocket or a bomb might hit you, and that will be the end.”
In a rare interview at her charitable foundation here, Ms. Qaddafi, 36, a Libyan-trained lawyer who once worked on Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team, offered a glimpse into the fatalistic mind-set of the increasingly isolated family at the core of the battle for Libya, the bloodiest arena in the democratic uprising that is sweeping the region.
She dismissed the rebels as “terrorists” but suggested that some former Qaddafi officials who are now in the opposition’s governing council still “keep in touch with us.” She pleaded for dialogue and talked about democratic reforms. But she dismissed the rebels as unfit for such talks because of their use of violence, hurled personal barbs at President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and, at one point, appeared to disparage the basic idea of electoral democracy.
After arranging the interview last week, Ms. Qaddafi spoke for more than an hour late Sunday afternoon, just hours before NATO escalated its airstrikes with an attack that disrupted state television and another on the Libyan leader’s compound in Tripoli. Ms. Qaddafi, one of the many unofficial and sometimes rivalrous Qaddafi family power brokers who dominate Libya’s economic and political life, said the crisis had pulled the family together “like one hand.” » | David D. Kirkpatrick | Tuesday, April 26, 2011
