As I write (Wednesday morning), the tragedy in Libya is growing. Dedicating a column to the parsing of a speech might appear horribly to mistake the scale of events. But Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi’s TV address, delivered in the early hours of Monday morning, has been given much attention in the international media already. The speech is held to throw a shaft of light on what is happening.

He gave the speech after strong rumours he had been shot by one of his brothers for being pro-reform. Many commentators found his address to be bizarre and rambling. His former LSE Ph.D. supervisor did not recognise the man he knew in the words he heard.

I have never met him. But listening to the speech as it was broadcast for the first time on Libyan TV, I found it to be a carefully calculated performance, even the long pauses and apparent gaps in logic.

First, why was it he who gave that first speech, not his father? The choice suggests the speech, unlike his father’s given almost 48 hours later, had three audiences in mind.

There were those western states that had courted and invested in building long-term relations with Dr Gaddafi even before all the international sanctions on Libya had been lifted. They were told what could happen to Libyan oil (and the prospect of an Islamic emirate on the Mediterranean coast clearly influenced the judgment of the Italian Foreign Minister; just as the chant of “Allah hu akbar” by some Libyan crowds in Benghazi rattled some Maltese online commentators, even though the phrase, in this context, is not a theocratic manifesto but means something like “Judgment Day arrives for everyone”).

There was Libya’s youth, whom Dr Gaddafi has tried painstakingly to cultivate. He had long spoken on the need for Libya to have a Constitution. Now he promised it again together with a second Jamahiriyya, like a second Republic. Only he could have done so.

And then there was a new audience, for him at least: the tribal people of western Libya, because even while he spoke of the need to maintain Libya’s unity, he was alluding to a history of division with special connotations for the inhabitants of the former Ottoman province of Tripolitania.

Factional “tribal” infighting – the past he held out as the likely future if his father’s revolution was rejected – is far more true of recent Tripolitanian history than of Cyrenaica (eastern Libya), whose rivalries had been harnessed by the Sanusiyya religious brotherhood by the late 19th century. The more populous Tripolitania, however, remained riven by factions right up till independence in 1951.

The first republic in the Arab world was declared in Tripolitania in 1918 but quickly collapsed. An independent polity was briefly declared in the Nafusah mountains. Even while Italian colonial expansion was gearing to reassert itself, after World War I, war broke out between the city of Misurata and the centre of the Warfalla tribe, in Beni Walid.

Internal divisions partly explain why Tripolitania was conquered several years earlier than Cyrenaica and also why the region preferred to accept Cyrenaica’s Idris al-Sanusi (the leader of the Sanusiyya religious brotherhood) as national ruler rather than one of their own. The 18 years of the monarchy were continually rocked by the jostling for position between the notables of Tripolitania and of Cyrenaica (with government reshuffles of Italian frequency).

Hence, why Dr Gaddafi anathematised Bayda and Derna while minimising the scale of the uprising and deaths in Benghazi. The latter city is “mixed”, having many inhabitants of Tripolitanian origin.

But Bayda is the former base of the Sanusiyya brotherhood while Derna also has a distinctly eastern identity.

The point of the address was to speak of the east while evoking the spectre of Tripolitanian history for a western Libyan audience. Even while he was speaking, Twitter was ablaze with emphatic assertions that Libya was one and unified. But the emphasis, I believe, was partly out of fear that he might manage to convince the tribal part of his audience that his playbook was the realistic one.

For, however strange his performance might have been to non-Libyan ears, it was carefully calibrated to sound like a conversation men of tribal background might have when calculating how to respond to the behaviour of a rival tribe.

He began his speech by saying he was going to talk not just from his heart but with “aql” – the practical reason much prized in men of influence in tribal political games.

His pauses and not entirely spelled out reasoning allowed his listeners to fill in the gaps for their own context, their own fears for the country. It gave his address that sense of conversational, cultural intimacy.

The pauses and elisions also enabled the paradox of his central argument to remain less evident: If Libyan youth wanted a modern, reformed Jamahiriyya, everyone would need to live up to his tribal duty (and coalesce against a breakaway Islamist east).

It was, therefore, no rambling speech. Whether it persuaded his listeners is another matter. Because Dr Gaddafi, like his father, has to face up to another paradox. Libya’s tribes – despite the connotations of the term to European ears – are not archaic organisations. In the late 20th century, tribes developed responsively to changing times, inventing new ways of imagining and exercising social solidarity. If they do not respond to Dr Gaddafi’s aql, one reason will be that tribal solidarity was transformed by the long social revolution initiated by his father.

ranierfsadni@europe.com