Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (48 page)

The two radical decades that ensued—televised public hangings, burnings of Western books and musical instruments, the sudden prohibition of private enterprise, intense anti-Zionism, official solidarity with terrorist and guerrilla groups—met with sharp international disapprobation. Libya’s rogue status allowed Qaddafi to consolidate power and play protector of his besieged population, a role in which he excels.

One Libyan in early middle age who had lived in the United States until September 11 and who missed America spoke of what was wrong with Qaddafi’s Libya and then said, “But I wouldn’t be where I am without the revolution. They paid for my education, sent me to America, and gave me a life I wouldn’t have dreamed of without them.”

In part, that reflects the extreme poverty of prerevolutionary Libya. The Jamahiriya benefited from the dramatic increase in petroleum prices that began in the seventies, and from the more aggressive revenue-sharing deals Libya imposed on foreign oil companies, so that oil earnings in the midseventies were roughly ten times what they had been in the midsixties. Oil money made possible major investments in education and infrastructure. The literacy rate in Libya has risen from about 20 percent, before Qaddafi came to power, to 82 percent. The average life expectancy has risen from forty-four to seventy-four. More than eighty thousand kilometers of roads have been built. Electricity has become nearly universal.

And Qaddafi has become, for most Libyans, simply a fact of life. Three-quarters of Libya’s citizens have been born since he came to
power. During that period, the cult of personality has sparked and dimmed in a way that has a certain congruence with the phases of Soviet leadership: a heady moment of Leninist-style revolution when many people believed in the ideals; a Stalinist period of cruel repression and deliberate violence; a long Khrushchev period of mild thaw; and now a Brezhnev-style period of corruption, chaos, and factionalism. Many of Saif Qaddafi’s admirers hope that he will prove to be the reforming Gorbachev of the story.

That an essentially repressive society can be characterized as being in the midst of reform reflects just how grim things used to be there. In Tripoli, I heard stories about life inside prison from many people whose only offense against the Jamahiriya was to be critical of it. In 2002, a former government official who publicly called for free elections and a free press was jailed; he was released in early 2004—only to be sent back to prison two weeks later for criticizing the regime to foreign reporters. There is no opposition press; an Internet journalist who had published stories critical of the government spent several months in prison last year on trumped-up charges. “Social rehabilitation” facilities—effectively, detention centers—are supposedly for the protection of women who have broken the laws against adultery and fornication, some of whom are in fact rape victims rejected by their families. A woman in these compounds can leave only if a male relative or fiancé takes her into his custody.

More widely covered is the case of five Bulgarian nurses who were accused in 1999 of deliberately infecting 426 children in a Benghazi hospital with HIV. The nurses were tortured until they confessed, then sentenced to death in May 2004. Among people outside Libya, the accusations seem bizarre and concocted; among most Libyans, it’s taken for granted that the children were deliberately infected and that the Bulgarians are the likeliest culprits. (Whereas Western investigators have blamed the infections on poor sanitation, a Libyan doctor close to the case maintains that only children on the ward where the convicted nurses worked were infected, and that the infections ceased when the Bulgarians left, even though sanitary conditions in all the
wards remain far from ideal.) Saif has said that the convictions were unjust, a brave stand given how important it is that he not appear to be capitulating to Western pressure. “Sure, the Big Guy let Saif say the nurses were innocent—to see how it would play,” a junior government official explained. “And it played badly.” A few months later, Qaddafi reaffirmed the hard line, declaring that the infections were caused by “an organization aiming to destroy Libya.” Negotiations with the Bulgarians are ongoing, however, and Libya’s supreme court has granted the defendants a new trial, which is to begin in May. (NB: They were finally extradited to Bulgaria in 2007, where they were pardoned.)

Qaddafi is no Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin. He has been brutal and capricious, but he has not killed a large part of his own population. It is illegal to slander the Leader and Law 71 makes a capital offense of any group activity opposed to the revolution, but this rule has been less strictly enforced lately. Libya has signed the UN Convention against Torture, and the minister of justice has said that he will bring Libyan law in line with international human-rights standards. Some of this is window dressing. “They closed the People’s Prisons, where all our political prisoners were,” one Tripolitan lawyer told me. “And what happened? The political prisoners got reassigned to other prisons.” The foreign minister, Abdurrahman Shalgham, told me with pride that four hundred policemen had been arrested for human-rights abuses—then admitted that none has been found guilty.

Last year, Omar Alkikli, a highly regarded fiction writer who was a political prisoner for ten years in the seventies and early eighties, sued the Libyan government for excluding former prisoners from the Libyan Writers’ League. “I lost, and I knew I would lose,” he said. “But I made my point.” Hasan Agili, a medical student at Tripoli’s Al-Fateh University, told me, “Okay, they’ve fixed maybe four percent of our serious problems, but I guess it’s something.” An official in Benghazi said, “The laws that were made of stone are now made of wood.”

Few Libyans are inclined to test what civil liberties they may have. Giumma Attiga, a human-rights lawyer and one of the founders of Saif’s Qaddafi Foundation, said, “The fear is very intense, very deeply ingrained. The highest official could tell people to speak freely and
openly, with every guarantee that it was safe to do so, and the words would stick in their throats.” In fact, it is a felony entailing a three-year prison sentence to discuss national policy with a foreigner, and although such offenses have been less frequently prosecuted recently, most Libyans speak of these matters anxiously. The atmosphere is late Soviet: forbidding, secretive, careful, albeit not generally lethal. I was asked not to mention names on the phone or in e-mail. Several people asked me not to write down their phone numbers, lest my notebook be “lost.” “I am speaking from my heart,” an outspoken woman told me. “Carry it in your head.”

Surveillance is pervasive in Libya. I was warned that the cabdriver who had been helping me get around was reporting to the security services, and I understood that my cell-phone conversations were not to be considered private. All the same, I was surprised when a press officer questioned me about shades of meaning in a personal e-mail I had written home a few days earlier. Someone from Saif’s office called me indignantly one day and said, “You were heard in the hotel unfairly saying that you were unhappy with the help we’ve given you.”

One night, I had dinner with a bureaucrat who complained about local politics. He told me that he had been questioned at length after a recent conversation with a foreigner. “Our interrogators were trained in brutality, cruelty, and sneakiness by the best—people from Cuba, East Germany, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt,” he explained.

When we had finished our meal, the waiter cleared all our dishes, then came back and redeposited the sugar bowl.

“What’s with the sugar?” I asked the bureaucrat.

He gave me a bleakly mischievous look. “The other one ran out of tape.”

For the most part, when Libyans talk of democratization they envision not elections but more personal privacy, greater educational opportunities, and expanded freedom of speech. “
Democracy
here is a word that means the Leadership considers, discusses, and sometimes accepts other people’s ideas,” said Zlitni, the chief economic planner. Qaddafi views electoral democracy as the tyranny of 51 percent—he
has memorably written that citizens of Western-style democracies “move silently toward the ballot box, like the beads in a rosary, to cast their votes in the same way that they throw rubbish in dustbins”—and recently announced, not for the first time, that Western democracy was “farcical” and “fake.” He declared, “There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet. Countries like the United States, India, China, the Russian Federation, are in bad need of this Jamahiriya system.”

For most Libyan pragmatists, political reform is about changing the mechanisms of Qaddafi’s control, not about relaxing it. One government minister told me, “In most European countries, there are many parties, and in the US only two. So here it is only one! It’s not such a big difference.” Even reformers seldom express much enthusiasm for electoral democracy. Most aspire to a sort of modernizing autocracy: their ideal is closer to Atatürk or the Shah of Iran than to Václav Havel. “There are no democracies in the Arab world,” said Ahmed Swehli, a young businessman who had recently moved back to Libya from England, where he was educated. “We aren’t going to go first. What we need is a really good dictator, and I think Saif al-Islam might be just that. And maybe he’ll be that and be elected, too, though I can’t think why he’d bother.” Others are less cynical about electoral democracy as an ideal, but no more hopeful about its implementation.

One reason that many Libyans are leery of elections is their fear that, in a highly tribal society, the larger tribes would win control and everyone else would be squeezed out. Less intimate and specific than families, tribes are a second layer of identity, stronger for some people than for others. Especially among the less well educated, groups based on kinship and descent—tribes and their various subsets (subtribes, clans)—provide both a social network and a safety net: members of your group will get you a job or help you if you have money problems or mourn you when you die even if they didn’t like you much while you were alive. “Better Qaddafi, a tough leader from a minor tribe, than one who represents his own tribe a hundred percent,” one Libyan intellectual said.

Meanwhile, the Basic People’s Congresses provide at least a theater
of political participation. They are open to any Libyan over eighteen and meet for a week or two, four times a year. In principle, you can discuss anything at a Congress, though an agenda is set from above. When in session, the 468 Basic People’s Congresses meet daily. Afterward, a brief report is sent from each Congress to a Central Committee. (Libya is committee heaven—there is even a National Committee for Committees.) A typical Congress includes about three hundred members. Most educated people who are not trying to climb the political ladder do not go. The format is town hall with touches of Quaker meeting and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Basic People’s Congresses were in session while I was in Libya, and I repeatedly asked, in vain, to visit one. Then, by chance, I mentioned my interest during an interview with the director of the National Supply Corporation (NASCO), which administers the subsidies that are a mainstay of the Libyan economy; he said a meeting would be held at its offices at noon and invited me to attend.

I had hoped to sit quietly in a corner; instead, I was escorted to the front row, and someone scurried in to serve me tea. A voluble woman made an impassioned speech asking why Libya imported tomato paste when there was enough water to grow tomatoes. A discussion of tomatoes ensued. The officials introduced issues of economic reform. My interest was more in the session’s dynamic than in its content, so I was paying scant attention
when my translator shifted from phrases such as “openly traded equities” and “reallocation of subsidy funds” to something about how “we are lucky to host a prominent American journalist”—and just as I was registering this new topic, he said, “who will now address the Congress on the future of the US-Libya relationship,” and I was handed a microphone.

While each of my sentences was being translated into Arabic, I had a fortunate pause in which to think of the next, so I gave a warm and heartfelt speech, saying that I hoped we would soon see full diplomatic relations between our countries, that I had loved meeting the Libyans and hoped they would feel similarly welcome in the United States, and so on. I received a protracted ovation, and thereafter every speaker prefaced his remarks with kind words about me. I was just settling into the comfortable glow of new celebrity when my translator said, “We have to go now,” and took me outside, where three journalists from
Al Shams
wanted to interview me. We wandered through fairly predictable territory, and then they asked my opinion of Qaddafi’s efforts to broker peace in Darfur. (Qaddafi has publicly met both with rebel leaders and with the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir.) I said that anyone working on that situation deserved support. I also said that Qaddafi’s opposition to terrorism would appeal to Americans.

The following day,
Al Shams
ran a nearly full-page story with three large photographs
of me at the congress, under a double-banner headline that said, “The World Needs a Man Like Muammar Qaddafi to Achieve Global Peace,” and, below, “The American People Appreciate Muammar Qaddafi’s Role in Easing the Pain Inflicted by September 11th.” The morning that the piece was published, I received my long-awaited invitation to the Qaddafi compound.

A minder from the International Press Office called to tell me that I was in for “a surprise” and that he would pick me up at my hotel at 4:00 p.m. At the International Press Office, near Green Square, I joined some twenty other “international” journalists, all from Arab countries, and talked about why Qaddafi might want to see us. I was solemnly told that one never knows what the Leader wants: “One comes when asked.” Finally, at about six forty-five, a minibus appeared. We drove twenty minutes and then stopped by a vast concrete wall, at the perimeter of Qaddafi’s compound. The car was searched and we were searched, and then we drove through a slalom course of obstacles and another security gauntlet before being ushered into an immense tent with a lavish buffet. Within the next half hour, four hundred or so people piled in, many in traditional robes.