People in eastern Libya complain of decades of marginalisation and neglect, the results of which are only too obvious, writes MARY FITZGERALD
THE LANDSCAPE along the 700km road that leads from the Egyptian border across “liberated” eastern Libya to Benghazi, the city where the country’s uprising began earlier this month, shifts dramatically from flat, desert scrubland to verdant valleys the further west you travel, but there are some constants.
Teenage guards at makeshift checkpoints; the red, black and green flag of pre-Gadafy Libya flying from government buildings, shops and private homes; smashed monuments to Gadafy’s Green Book, the text that outlined the ideology underpinning his regime; and an overwhelming belief among the population that it is not a matter of if but when the man some call “the monkey king” is toppled.
In Tobruk, a port town where gas and oil flares burn down by the jetty, volunteers camp outside the deserted mataba where the regime’s local militia once held sway. Nearby, the walls of the gutted police headquarters are covered in graffiti. “Gadafy – dog of dogs of Africa”, reads one in red scrawl.
Here, as in other towns strung along the coastal road to Benghazi, those who Gadafy last week lambasted as “cockroaches” and “rats” have organised themselves into committees to oversee the distribution of food and medicine, and the collection of weapons. Many are doctors, lawyers, academics and engineers who bristle at being described as “the opposition” or “rebels”.
“We are the people,” admonished one. “Remember this is a people’s uprising.” In al-Bayda, a large marble portrait of Gadafy has been covered with a poster of Omar al Mukhtar, the storied local resistance hero who fought Italian colonial rule in the 1920s before he was caught and hanged. Every Arab school child knows al Mukhtar, and many in eastern Libya have invoked his famous declaration “Victory or defeat” in recent weeks.
Outside the offices of one committee a banner proclaims: “We are all Libyans – no to tribalism.” It’s a common refrain from those who want to protect the uprising’s fragile gains from being hijacked by tribal machinations. “There is no government here any more so we are doing it ourselves,” said one man. “This is a first step towards a new Libya.”
People in eastern Libya complain of decades of marginalisation and neglect, the results of which are only too obvious. Apart from installations connected to the oil industry, local infrastructure is either creaking or absent. Al-Bayda, Libya’s third largest city, has only one hospital. A man with dual British-Libyan nationality tells of schools without windows in Tobruk. “No part of the east ever saw any of Libya’s oil money,” he said.
Close to al-Bayda in the heart of the region known as Jebel al Akhdar (Green Mountain) is the town of Shehat, where residents have renamed the main thoroughfare Roqiya Street in memory of a 10-year-old girl who was killed as she watched clashes between unarmed protesters and regime forces from the balcony of her home.
The shooting dead of Roqiya and several others prompted an angry crowd to move on the katiba, a compound where about 2,000 security personnel were once stationed. “Our youth came here with nothing more than sticks and stones,” said Awaz As-Saleh, a professor of literature, as he gestured around the blackened compound. “They had nothing else to fight against the soldiers and the foreign mercenaries brought in to kill.” By the time the battle came to an end the following night, 18 protesters were dead and some 700 injured, according to one man who took part. Some in the town say the army split during the fighting as happened in several other parts of the east, with many soldiers joining the protesters. The katiba now lies in ruins, its exterior walls half-collapsed. Abandoned tanks stand outside the entrance.
The killings in Shehat and al-Bayda, where security forces also tried to brutally snuff out peaceful protests, triggered the resignation of Libya’s minister for justice, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who is from al-Bayda. “Young men were shot directly in the head and chest by mercenaries and snipers,” he said. “I realised then that with a regime like that justice could not be served.”
On the other side of Shehat, a school has been turned into a makeshift prison for some 200 suspected mercenaries, Libyan and foreign. Many were captured during clashes at an airport further east, having been flown in by the Gadafy regime.
In al-Bayda more than a dozen suspected mercenaries were hanged in front of the courthouse. The men guarding the school, where a poster of Gadafy acts as a doormat, say they are protecting those inside from locals who might want revenge. Most of the prisoners huddling beneath blankets in three empty classrooms say they are from Sabha, a town in Libya’s central Saharan belt associated with Gadafy’s tribe. Many look like they are barely out of their teens.
They all tell a similar story of being invited to attend a pro-Gadafy rally in Tripoli, only to end up on an army base in the east where they were later abandoned. Three teenagers with wide-eyed stares say they travelled from their hometown in Chad several weeks ago to look for work. They were told they could get a free flight to Tripoli. “We cannot trust what they say,” says one of the guards. “It sounds like they were all given a story in case they were captured.” In central al-Bayda, a large version of the tricolour of King Idris, the monarch Gadafy overthrew in a military coup in 1969, complete with star and crescent, flutters in the breeze. There is no sign of the regime’s all-green flag. “Thank God that rag we had to look at for so long is gone,” one woman spits.
Gadafy’s flag may no longer fly in eastern Libya, but it remains hoisted in the capital, Tripoli, as the ageing dictator keeps an unsteady hold over the increasingly shrinking territory under his control. In between, a whole country’s fate hangs in the balance.