On the Shores of the Mediterranean (37 page)

To Colonel Muammar Al-Qathafi,

The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah. Tripoli

A1-Jamahiriyah Al-Arabia Al Shabiya Al Ishtirakiya Tarabulus.

Dear Colonel Qathafi,

I am engaged in writing a book about the various countries on the shores of the Mediterranean and I would very much like to visit the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah.

I have a particular reason for wishing to do so, which is as follows:

I am an ex-officer of a British Infantry Regiment, The Black Watch (The Royal Highland Regiment). On the morning of 20
November 1941, the Second Battalion of the Regiment which had previously taken part in the defence of Heraklion Airfield in Crete was ordered to break out of the Tobruk fortress which at that time had been invested by the Axis forces commanded by General Rommel for more than seven months and take a strong point to the south-east of the perimeter. Although the battalion succeeded in reaching and taking this objective the cost was very high. In the course of two hours 456 men and 24 officers were either killed or wounded.

Those who died that morning and many who died subsequently are buried in the British and Commonwealth War Cemetery at Tobruk. I am sure that you, as a soldier, will understand how much I would like to visit the Cemetery, and also Tobruk itself of which I have so many vivid memories even after more than forty years have passed.

I do hope that you will give this request your sympathetic consideration, and if you do grant it I would also very much appreciate being given the opportunity to meet you personally. I would also like to bring my wife with me.

As we are at present in Italy, at the above address, may I ask that if permission is granted, it is relayed to your Diplomatic Mission in Rome, rather than to London.

Yours sincerely,

Eric Newby, ex-Lieutenant, The Black Watch

(The Royal Highland Regiment)

There was nothing in Rome at the People’s Bureau when we went there to find out. The Libyans do not refer to their missions as Embassies any more. Nothing in London when we returned there. Then one day an envelope arrived with a Libyan stamp on it. It contained a letter typed on a flimsy sheet of paper with bright green edging and in the margins two of what were presumably
the Leader’s
obiter dicta
in Arabic, French and English. One of them read ‘To Dispense with The Natural Role of Women Is Start In Dispensing With Human Society’, the other ‘The Blacks Will Prevail In The World’, which seemed a rather mysterious statement by someone who was quite rightly proud of the fact that he was a Beduin.

The letter read as follows:

Dear Sir,

This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter addressed to Brother Colonel Muammar Qathafi, Leader of the ‘ELFATA’ Great Revolution.

We are pleased to inform you that we have no objection to the visit you wish to pay to Al-Jamahiriyah, in the context of your request.

With best regards,

Revolution Leader’s Bureau

Jamahiriyah, a word difficult to translate really, means the People being the Source of Power (the State of the Masses, the Authority of the People, People’s Polity, are other ways of expressing it, all of which have official blessing). It is synonymous with El Fatah, The Great Libyan Revolution, which took place in 1969 when the then ruler of Libya, King Mohammed Idris Al-Senussi, was deposed by a group of army officers, twelve of whom formed the Revolutionary Command Council, one of whom was Colonel Muammar Qathafi, the man who formulated the principle of Jamahiriyah, which he expressed in his definitive work on the subject,
The Green Book
, which has the same authority as a source of good in Libya today as did until recently the
Thoughts of Chairman Mao
in China. These abstractions were given concrete form by the creation throughout the country of People’s
Committees which make their feelings known at what are known as Popular Congresses. Their propositions are then submitted to the General People’s Congress whose members debate them and then propose a series of amended draft propositions, which are then sent down the line again and submitted to the Popular Congresses, People’s Committees, Syndicates and Unions and so on, that make up this apparently democratic way of doing things. Once this has been done, and the motions to go ahead carried, the People’s Committees responsible to the Popular Congresses can then start executive action. This, in its simplest form, is, so far as I can make out, the revealed theory of Jamahiriyah.

But what at that particular moment interested us more, not yet having been able to lay our hands on a copy of
The Green Book
which had been out of stock in Rome when we were there, was from whom this unsigned letter emanated.

We were left in no doubt about this when we went, armed with it, to apply for visas at the Libyan People’s Bureau, next door to William Waldorf Astor’s old town house in St James’s Square, and handed it to the Secretary of the People’s Committee, the Head of the Mission, otherwise the Ambassador.

‘It really is quite a rare letter,’ he said, having perused it closely. ‘Why don’t you frame it? Meanwhile I will have it photostatted.’

‘I wonder if he’s going to frame the photostat,’ Wanda said when we were once more out in the street on English soil. A couple of weeks later we arrived in Libya, whether as guests of the Leader or not was uncertain. Whether we were to blame or whether his executives were to blame was also uncertain, but whoever was at fault we had somehow contrived to slip into this at the best of times difficult-to-get-into country unnoticed. No mean feat, having survived three successive passport checks and an inquisition by the teenage customs officials. It was only when we went to the bank to change some money that it was discovered
that we had somehow failed to be given a currency declaration to fill in, and were sent back through immigration control to go through the whole process of entering the country again, as if we had been playing snakes and ladders and had landed on a particularly long snake. By the time we made our second debut in Libya more than an hour and a half had passed since our first visit and if anyone had been meeting us they would by now have long since given up and gone home. As a last resort I rang the only telephone number we had in the entire country, which was that of one of the Leader’s advisers who had at one time fallen from grace but had now apparently been reinstated in favour, but there was no reply.

Three hours after landing at Tripoli airport – ‘How time flies!’ as Wanda said – we set off for the city, which some people call Tarabalus, in a bus loaded with genial, moustached Turkish labourers, all as tough as old boots, who were on their way back from the wilds of Anatolia to complete what for them was a three-year, wifeless stint building apartment blocks in what had been, until 1912, when the Italians took over the country, part of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. Meanwhile, outside in the open air, a cloudburst was in progress, accompanied by thunder and lightning which lit up the shells of some of these apartment blocks in the western suburbs, which from what one could see of them in such conditions looked surprisingly well designed and robust, as were a lot of the buildings we subsequently saw in Libya, many of which had been designed by distinguished foreign architects and apparently constructed without thought of expense. From time to time the bus stopped to allow little bands of Turks to get down and stagger off to their billets in the rain and darkness with bulging suitcases, and by the time we reached the centre of the city the bus was Turkless.

By this time, too, the rain had almost ceased, and in the absence
of any taxis and with the help of a kindly Libyan boy who was a conscript in the navy and just like conscripts anywhere in the world hating every minute of it, we lugged our luggage half a mile or so through waterlogged streets to the Libyan Palace Hotel, the sort of hotel to which people like ourselves naturally gravitate when travelling at their own expense round the shores of the Mediterranean but which, modest though it appeared, still cost the equivalent of something like £28 ($40) a night for a double room with breakfast, having previously tried, without success, to locate a Youth Hostel which is said to exist somewhere in the city.

There we were allocated a succession of rooms on various floors. The first had no electric light bulbs; the second had lights but they could not be extinguished; the third had no lock on the door; the fourth, which we finally accepted, was reached by a carpetless corridor from which the paint had been stripped in preparation for redecoration and looked out over a gloomy well on to the windows of other similar rooms. By the time we got to the fourth room, dinner was off. Told that we could dial room service for dinner in our room, I did so. We instantly received an iron tray covered with newspaper which bore a soggy bread roll sliced in half, two cubes of Lurpak Danish butter done up in silver foil, and two small segments of Pingouin pasteurized French cheese packed in a similar fashion but with no knife to spread it, presumably in case we might be tempted to use it to do away with ourselves, no plates, no glasses, but with a festive magnum of Pepsi to celebrate what was my birthday. Outside the storm had returned, the thunder rolled and the rain fell into the well outside our window in such torrents that I wondered if we ought to move to the top floor in case it filled it.

After this repast, principally because it was my birthday which had not been going all that well up to now, Wanda suggested that we might descend to the foyer and mingle with the other guests,
most of whom were in Libya to fulfil the 1981–5 Five-Year Plan on behalf of their hosts. Among them we identified, and in some instances spoke to, Italians, here regarded as the best of all foreign workers, Southern Irish, South Koreans, Canadians, Filipinos, members of the Eastern bloc impossible to identify because they hardly ever spoke, and Cubans, regarded by the Libyans as the worst of all foreign workers. Some were drinking what was really excellent coffee, others were going to pieces as I had already done on Pepsi Cola drunk straight from the bottle. All those we spoke with were counting the days, months or years that would have to elapse before they could finally go home and never return. Possession of alcohol in Libya, quite apart from drinking it, is a criminal offence, even for diplomats in the seclusion of their embassies, yet according to a Canadian who seemed well informed about such matters, some of the Eastern bloc countries financed the entire day-to-day running of their embassies by smuggling Scotch into the country and then trading it at £100 a bottle, £1200 a case.

All in all it was an appropriate end to a drinkless birthday on one of the wilder shores of the Mediterranean. After the best part of half a magnum of Pepsi I felt as if I was the Graf Zeppelin, about to float out over the Gulf of Sirte where I would be shot down by the Sixth Fleet. I decided to take up smoking.

The following morning we asked to be moved and they took our luggage to the room without any lights. Then they put it in another room and couldn’t remember which one. By this time we felt our reason going. All the telephones in the hotel were out of action because of the storm which was now blowing out of a cloudless sky, hurling the sea over the harbour mole and threatening to uproot the palm trees, and so we set off for the British Embassy, which was not much more than a biscuit’s toss away on the
waterfront, in order to try and find some way of getting into communication with some members of the Libyan administration. Fortunately for us, the Chargé d’Affaires was, besides being an Arabic speaker, a kindly, hospitable man and after a lot of telephoning which thoroughly disrupted his morning, he succeeded in handing us over to them.

Apparently, the Libyans had been searching for us high and low but could not conceive that we would have stayed in anything as sleazy as the Libyan Palace Hotel; and now we were instantly transferred to the recently completed Grand Hotel, a lap of luxury if ever there was one, in which double rooms were £100 ($140) a night, built by the Swedes and equipped by the East Germans with such sophisticated bugging apparatus that every time we went to the lavatory we felt we ought to apologize for the noises. It was a pity that by the time we checked in, which was about 3.30 in the afternoon, there was hardly anything left to eat in the restaurant. So instead of eating, having been told that there was a fifty-fifty chance of meeting the Leader in the course of the next few days, I sat down and began to formulate the sort of questions that leaders tend to get asked when they grant interviews, and pretty feeble they sounded when I read them back.

But I was never to meet the Leader, whose guests we now were, and who acted throughout our stay in his country rather like a fairy queen in a pantomime, although in this case an invisible one who continued to be invisible, because, as it later transpired, he had other more pressing matters on his mind (what may have been the prelude to an assassination attempt – if it was an attempt, it was the ninth since December 1982).

Invisible he may have been, but he appears to have waved a magic wand which enabled us to get to Tobruk, and it was a strange sensation being back there after so long, a near miracle it seems in retrospect. I had been there in the winter of 1941, one
of a detachment of the Special Boat Section, a little force set up in 1940 to land behind the enemy lines, which were out in the desert forty miles west of Tobruk at Gazala. From Tobruk we operated with a flotilla of MTBs which was using the port as a base. They were glamorous craft armed with torpedoes, twin Oerlikon guns, Lewis guns, depth charges and so on and it was fun roaring about in them at thirty knots or so, but they were not ideal for the sort of clandestine operations we were endeavouring to engage in. They were incredibly noisy: each boat was equipped with three 1000 h.p. aircraft engines and they could be heard dozens of miles away. For this reason, returning from some long abortive sortie westwards of Gazala towards Derna, with the sun already up in the east and ourselves just abreast of the enemy line, it always seemed a miracle to me that we were not given the Stuka treatment.