THE BABY girl lying on a hospital bed was presented as a victim of a Nato airstrike, proof that the alliance was killing rather than protecting Libyan civilians.
But as journalists crowded around her bed, a handwritten note was passed to a Reuters reporter by a member of the hospital’s medical staff. “This is a case of road traffic accident,” it said in English. “This is the trouth [sic].” Nearly three months into Nato’s bombing campaign, Muammar Gadafy’s government churns out daily propaganda about the supposed civilian casualties inflicted by the alliance.
Last week, it said that 718 people had died from mid-March to late May and that 4,067 had suffered significant injuries.
But it has failed to show foreign journalists more than a handful of dead or wounded people.
Indeed, when reporters are taken on official trips, what they see suggests that Nato is being accurate and careful.
In the past week alone, up to a dozen loud explosions have been heard in Tripoli every night, but reporters are allowed to see only a fraction of the bombed sites.
On Sunday, journalists were taken to look at some broken windows in a church but were not allowed to visit a nearby military site that had been destroyed.
Then they were taken to a farm where they were shown a dead dog and dead chickens. A man there said no humans had been injured, but that story changed by the time the journalists reached the Sharia al-Zawiyah hospital.
As the baby slept, a man arrived at the bedside and was introduced first as a health ministry spokesman, and then as a neighbour of the family.
“Killing our children, this is what Nato does,” he said, giving his name as Imad Gheith.
Prompted by an official at his side, he repeated the regime’s slogan. “God, Muammar, Libya, that’s all we need.”
A few hours later, in the early hours of Monday, the journalists were taken on another trip, to a different part of the Libyan capital, to see a rusty rocket lying in a field behind some houses, a wooden picnic table overturned and a furrow gouged in the earth.
“Were there any civilian casualties?” one reporter shouted.
“Look, the table,” an official replied.
Members of a family emerged, and the press team was told that they were having “lunch” in the field when the rocket struck around midnight.
Then, Gheith was spotted.
Pressed on why he had come to the site, he eventually admitted that he was a Libyan “journalist” who worked for the government’s media operations team.
Then, as he explained that the rocket had fallen from the sky and gestured at a Nato warplane still audible overhead, a reporter saw Cyrillic lettering on a piece of the rocket, which looked more like part of a Russian Scud than a Nato missile.
The story quickly changed.
Perhaps Nato had bombed a Libyan military site and this rocket was part of the debris, Gheith suggested.
It feels like some vast piece of political improvisation, with the participants just following the central theme – that Nato is killing Libyans, all of whom love Col Gadafy – without having any regard for the truth. The propaganda machine grinds on, with officials filling out reports of trips conducted for the media, perhaps without even admitting to themselves that no one had been convinced.
Deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim said it was not government policy to make up stories. However, he allowed that residents might occasionally exaggerate “to show journalists there is injustice and targeting of civilians”.
Not that Nato is beyond reproach in this surreal propaganda war. In late May, the British government declared it had used precision-guided weapons to bring down guard towers at Col Gadafy’s compound. It also said the Libyan regime would no longer be able to hide behind “high walls” to spread terror and crush opposition. A trip to the area the following day showed the towers and the walls still intact.
In the real war more heavy blasts hit Tripoli yesterday afternoon in what witnesses said was one of the heaviest days of bombardment since air strikes began in March.
In stepped up Nato air strikes on the capital, a day after rebels seized the town of Yafran in the southwest, driving Col Gadafy’s forces from the lower end of the town where they had been for more than a month, salvoes of bombs struck the city every few hours, with the pace of bombing steadily increasing.