HS in Libya: Discussing 42 years under Muammar Gaddafi

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By Tommi Nieminen and Markus Jokela in Tobruk
     
      A pot of sugared mint tea is passed around inside the smoky tent. Plastic chairs – similar to the ones on Finnish restaurant terraces, are placed in a semi-circle.
      Men in Tobruk, the Libyan rebel city, sit in the tent on the side of the main square, recalling news from the front of the ongoing civil war: about Misrata, Ajdabija, and the aerial bombardment of Tripoli.
      Gentlemen, a question please: what has it been like to live during the long 42-year reign of Gaddafi?
     
When a group of officers led by the 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi took power in 1969 from King Idris, Manam Barrani, a professor of botany at Omar Al Mukhtar University was three years old. Soon after that the Libyan Arab People’s Socialist Republic was set up.
      “Can you imagine? I have known no leader other than Gaddafi”, Barrani says.
      When Barrani went to school in the 1970s, the teacher made them read the Green Book, an ideological propaganda guide. The best thing about it is that it is short – just 110 pages long.
      “Nobody understands what the texts mean”, says 56-year-old Muhammed Mtawea, who is sitting next to him. He fled to The Netherlands in 1991, and has come to Tobruk to help expedite Gaddafi’s departure. “Gaddafi projected an image of himself as a man chosen by God to bring happiness to the people.”
     
Libya has had oil money since the 1970s, but the money has been unevenly distributed. The east of Libya is still full of villages of huts in the area between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea. In Gaddafi’s inner circle, the material prosperity is dazzling.
      The people were spied on as was the case in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; according to various estimates, between 10 and 20 per cent of Libyans were involved in Gaddafi’s surveillance apparatus before the war.
     
The men in the tent air a long list of grievances about Gaddafi.
      They list approximately the same events. In June 1969 Gaddafi had more than 1,260 people killed at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.
      It is claimed in rebel circles that in that in 1998 Gaddafi had ordered that 426 Belgian children should be infected with the HIV virus. It later came out that more than 400 children actually were infected by HIV while in hospital, but there are doubts as to whether or not the infections were caused deliberately.
     
The men also mention the war that Gaddafi started against Chad in 1987, in which 7,500 Libyans were killed. Then there was the Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed on a plane that was blown up over Scotland, and in the town of Lockerbie where it crashed. In late February, Minister of Justice Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who defected to the side of the rebels, confirmed that Gaddafi himself gave the go-ahead for the attack.
     
Former Libyan People’s Congress representative Farah Adem from Tobruk sits in one of the plastic chairs with his two grandsons. He says that he has known Gaddafi personally since the 1970s, but has never been in his inner circle. If he had been, he would not be able to proclaim it.
      “We have eaten together, spoken with each other, and photographs have been taken of us. I can say that he is a great liar”, Adem says. “He knows me. There have always been problems between us.”
      It is hard to say if Adem had been one of the silent yes-men in the political rubber stamp, the Libyan People’s Congress – the kind that all dictators need. Now he speaks defiantly as if he had always opposed Gaddafi.
     
Gaddafi’s political system carries the ideological title jamahiriya, the state of the masses. But the masses have never had a voice, because the state is based on the power of the inner circle of Gaddafi.
      Political parties are banned. Freedom of the press is the weakest in all North Africa and the Middle East. Hangings of dissidents were televised.
     
The cream of Tobruk are sitting in the tent. The director of the Chamber of Commerce, 51-year-old Mohammed Haddouth explains how Gaddafi made his seven sons into leaders of the security apparatus. Each of them got his own brigade, and now these special units are fighting the rebels.
      “He has bought all of his friends with money”, Haddouth says. “He is not human. He is Satan.”
     
Haddouth already has a vision of the future, even though the fighting in the west of Libya is still intense. He says that the post-Gaddafi Libya will be led by a democratic administration, and will be a friend of all countries except China and Russia.
      “They do not support us now”, Haddouth says. “We will tear up every treaty signed with them.”
      But there is no point getting ahead of events. Gaddafi is tenacious, and possibly delusional, and he continues to control Tripoli and parts of the west of Libya.
     
“Gaddafi has made the people serve himself. He has turned Libya into his own farm”, Professor Barrani says.
      He points at the pictures of the victims of Gaddafi that have been hung on the wall of the main mosque of Tobruk.
      “We are his animals.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.3.2011
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  HS in Libya: Undocumented workers fleeing country (22.3.2011)

TOMMI NIEMINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.nieminen@hs.fi