April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

Shanghai Jiaotong University but who worked with him from 2001 to 2007.
“Undue pressure was put on me to do things I regarded as unethical.
Incidents such as these have repeatedly gone on at the LSE.”
London’s Independent on Sunday has just reported, “Leading figures at the
LSE openly joked about getting a donation from Saif Gaddafi before he had
even been examined for his PhD… Professors just one rung below the
former director Sir Howard Davies, who resigned last month over the
scandal prompted by the university's links to Libya, were ‘anticipating the
solicitation of a donation’.”
In Saif’s thesis, entitled, “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation
of Global Governance Institutions,” he declares his bias: “liberal
individualism as a political ideal within which liberty is an inalienable right
of individuals and a just government must protect individual liberties in its
constitution and laws.”
Recalling that tired old line: "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged
and a liberal is a conservative who got arrested.”
The Gaddafi family’s mugging by democratic Libyans should be joined by
all anti-racists, for as Muammar bluntly told Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi just six months ago, Libya was willing (for a price) to play the
role of gendarme for Euro-xenophobes, by ensuring no Africans reached
Italian shores: “We don't know what will be the reaction of the white and
Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant
Africans. We don't know if Europe will remain an advanced and united
continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian
invasions.”
This aspirant ‘King of Africa’ is obviously a tyrant with little confidence in
bottom-up globalization, yet his son Saif’s PhD thesis makes the case for “a
tripartite system that includes civil society and the business sector
formally as voting members in inter-governmental decision-making
structures in the United Nations system, the Bretton Woods institutions,
the World Trade Organisation and other global governing institutions.”
In reality, many of these institutions are, it can easily be argued, just as
destructive as the Gaddafi family, when it comes to democratic ideals,
civil society and social justice. Yet Saif’s thesis sought out “prospects for
civil society to evolve from its current expert and advisory role in global
governing institutions to a more formal role in new collective decisionmaking
structures” which will in turn provide “fair, mutually beneficial
arrangements on a global level.”
Given the global balance of power now and in the near future, this is a
ridiculously naïve thesis.
The late LSE professor Fred Halliday strenuously objected to Held’s Libya
programme, writing in an October 2009 letter to the school’s governing
Council, “I have repeatedly expressed reservations about formal
educational and funding links with that country.” One reason was that
Saif’s GICDF was recycling dirty monies which “come from foreign
businesses wishing to do business, i.e. receive contracts, for work in Libya,
most evidently in the oil and gas industries.”
Concluded Halliday, “Libya has made no significant progress in protecting
the rights of citizens, or migrant workers and refugees, and remains a
country run by a secretive, erratic and corrupt elite.”