Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has registered as a candidate for the country’s upcoming presidential elections.
Gaddafi “submitted his candidacy for the presidential election to the High National Electoral Commission office in the city of Sebha,” said a statement released by the Libya’s electoral commission on Sunday.
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Western-educated Gadaffi was once seen as a natural successor to his father, who governed Libya from 1969 until he was captured and killed by militants in the 2011 Arab Spring. Under his father’s dictatorship, Gadaffi cultivated the image of a reformer, but his pro-human rights and democracy brand was tainted after a series of brutal crackdowns on protesters during the uprisings in 2011.
In a video released by the electoral commission, Ghaddafi, 49, appears dressed in khaki coloured Libyan traditional clothes resembling images of his father, but with longer facial hair. In the video he gives a brief election message with a few random Quranic phrases that translate as “judge between us and our people in truth”, “God always prevails in his purpose,” and “even if the unbelievers hate it”.
After the fall of Ghaddafi’s regime, a civil war divided the country between two de facto governments backed by different foreign powers. The oil-rich nation was split between rival authorities, one based in the capital, Tripoli, and the other in the east, each with its own armed groups and militias.
An interim government was put in charge in February this year after months of UN-backed negotiations to end a decade of chaos in the country and hold presidential and parliamentary elections.
Gaddafi was captured in 2011 and held for five years by militia fighters from the mountain region of Zintan. During that period he was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in Tripoli, but later was pardoned by the government and released in 2017.
He is still facing war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court, but he has managed to gradually re-emerge into the public sphere, and is one of the best known figures in the country. Other candidates expected to register include warlord Khalifa Haftar, Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah and Aguila Saleh, speaker of the Libyan House of Representatives. The elections are expected to take place on the 24th of December.
Human Rights Watch has already questioned the possibility of holding “free and fair” elections in Libya.
“Human rights conditions in the country remain precarious. Free and fair elections will hardly be possible without the rule of law and accountability that are currently sorely lacking,” said a Human Rights Watch statement.
