Libyan city continues to fight, but this time for normality

The pigeons barely moved in their small cages. The ducks, free, gathered around each other on the asphalt as the bulbuls chirped in the background.

In Misrata’s Friday makeshift birds market, simple Libyan peasants, children and few old men stood by their goods in unintended rows. Potential buyers walked to and fro, inspecting the birds. Misrata was a big city of half a million residents but it still had the spirit of a small village. For few months, it has been trying to regain its normality after a heroic fight against Gaddafi’s forces.

“Get that yellow paper please,” said the security officer at the gate of Misrata airport. Me and Mohamed Madi had just arrived from Benghazi. We understood quickly. It is Misrata, and you have to get your details entered into a database before you enter the city even if you came from another Libyan city.

January 25 2012. Five months since the end of Gaddafi’s siege and his intensive offensive against Libya’s third biggest city. Misrata has not yet recovered from its deep wounds.

How quickly will that happen? The experience at the airport left bitterness in my throat. “Did the war turn them into xenophobes?” I wondered.

I met Ahmad Ben Wafaa, a 20-something Libyan blogger from the city. He took me around to show me the scars of a bitter fight for survival. Gaddafi thought that by taking Misrata, 200 km east of Tripoli, his grip would be maintained on western Libya. The resistance by the Misratans was not only about their lives or their city. It was about the unity of Libya that had then been split in two: the east (Benghazi and Green Mountain) and the west (Tripoli).

In most of the buildings near the city centre, holes in the walls of many houses from tank and mortar shells remain gaping in awe. Every building was dotted with what looked like indiscriminate machine gun fire. A bank stood closed, while the storeys above it were pitch-black from fire. Another, which housed a pension fund, was completely charred and its silver metal façade turned into a scary structure of burnt aluminium.

Building in Shari Tripoli st. (from www.dl3-ly.com)

Between February and August 2011, the fighting in Misrata was focused on its main streets: Tripoli St in the west and in the east Benghazi st. On the sides of Tripoli streets, houses and businesses were still closed and many were partially destroyed. A mosque nearby was decapitated, as the upper part of its minaret was shelled out of this world.

The cool and humility of Misratans hid scars of trauma that I – the Gazan – recognized very well. The last real war Misrata saw was probably WWII, but 2011 was not only about fighting, either. It was about betrayal and solidarity.

Bin-Wafaa told me various stories about the efforts made to take care of the city’s inhabitants under the rain of Gaddafi’s Grad rockets and Mortar shells. The distribution of food, the supply of medical services and the prayers. The prayers that were uttered day an night by the frightened civilians.

The war is over now. The wounds of Misrata will take time to heal, however.

Bin Wafaa spoke bitterly about the residents of Taourga, the smaller city 45 km to the south, whose residents always worked in and traded with Misrata.

But Taourga, or most of its residents, sided with Gaddafi’s forces. They were promised to take half of Misrata if Gaddafi wins. Bin-Wafaa went on to say that the good ties with Misrata had been forgotten as the Taourgans pillaged Misrata and according to him committed horrific crimes, such as gang rape of Misratan women and men, murder and theft.

Things didn’t work according to plan and Taourga now is a ghost town after its residents fled quickly before the wrath of Misratans reached them. For Bin-Wafaa, this was a better outcome since massacres were averted.

I already knew about what happened in Taourga. Like many others, I cried racism. Taourga’s residents were descendants of African slaves and news reports spoke about black Africans being singled out. Bin-Wafaa categorically said no. It was not racism. He added that Gaddafi’s forces were based in nearby Zliten (20 km to the west), but there was no vengeance from Misrata. Unlike Taourga’s, the civilians of Zliten did not join Gaddafi’s forces with promises of the spoils from Misrata’s defeat. I also saw many black Libyans in shops, cafes and streets of Misrata. While I and Bin-Wafaa walked on, an old man said hello. “Saw him? He is from Taourga but has lived here with us for a long time,” said Bin-Wafaa

In Misrata’s tiny market, businesses have reopened and some repairs were done to few buildings. In a nearby café, young Libyans sat smoking their Shishas and sipping macchiatos but the grimness in the faces is startling.

The six-month-long season of fear has turned into a sense of pride of what Misrata did to protect itself and keep the push against Gaddafi alive. I understand now why the excessive security measures and graffiti on the walls declare: “no to reconciliation”.  Misrata is now sarcastically known by other Libyans as the “emirate of Misrata”.

Libyans in a café were looking at TV, but their eyes were almost aimless. Smiles can hardly be seen, even though teens were drifting their cars dangerously in Misrata's tiny streets in an expression of their freedom. 

It is possible to deal with physical pain, but overcoming the trauma within is not going to be easy, for Misrata will never be the same.

Libya 2012: Of Green trainers and curly hair

I have raised eye-brows in Tripoli sooner than I thought. Since my arrival, it was the tiny details that appeared to matter most for Libyans. The first incident involved my trainers with their lime green stripes. Our taxi driver pointed at them in a “the-fuck-is-this?” manner. My poker face pleaded not guilty, and I insisted that it was fluorescent yellow, not lime green.

During my first dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Zawiyat al-Dahmani, where my hotel is located, another Libyan man wondered about what on earth made me wear a dark green jumper. This time, I swallowed my tongue. I realized the extent of intolerance to anything that could evoke Gaddafi, including his favourite colour.

Luckily, no one has so far made any comment on my curly hair, or Chafchoufa in Libyan dialect – the word of 2011 that Libyans used to mock Gaddafi’s hairstyle. I anticipated that by quickly having a haircut the following day.

Regardless of my lack of tact, Gaddafi and his legacy do still have a place in the hearts and minds of Libyans and is likely to do so for a while.

I went with Mohamed Madi to his grandma’s house in Gorje, an underdeveloped housing neighbourhood west of old Tripoli. The warm welcome quickly faded into a debate between the grandma and Mohamed’s friend (who drove us there).

The young man was complaining about the decisions by his university to suspend early results of examinations. To him, this was as fair and unjust as another decision to ban all cars manufactured before 1987 (which includes that wheeled box that he drove).

Gaddafi quickly came back to the discussion. After all, under his rule, universities became scenes for occasional mock trials and executions of opposition Libyan dissidents.

The grandma, who actually didn’t look that old, overflowed with emotions about Muammar. She admitted that his killing was inhumane. But she went on to say that he reaped what he sowed. She also said that his son Saif al-Islam, who is now held by the rebels, should face a similar fate.

The strong emotion about the late colonel is one thing, but I must say that the admiration of some of his acts - e.g. his alleged humiliation of Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi - seem to still provoke the admiration of few Libyans that I talked to.

A young Libyan man bragged about Gaddafi’s famous jet-lag remarks at the UN General Assembly (when he tore the UN charter). Another, with whom I smoked Shisha at Algeria square, told me that had Gaddafi been the president of Egypt, he would have done better to help the Palestinians. Certainly, Libyans hated the colonel and his sons for the squandering of Libya’s finances and despotic rule. But this is not the case when it comes to Gaddafi’s quirky behaviour i.e Libya’s foreign policy.

A Visit to Free Libya January 2012

 

 

My journey from the UK to Libya started with awkwardness. The interior of Tripoli airport was as dusty as if it was in disuse and the scruffy immigration officers began to complain about the hung-up computers. You only need to reset your computer pal! But No. Apparently, another officer with a captain rank began to stamp everyone’s passports and to hell with those modern abacuses! This meant that if you were blacklisted in Libya, you could still get in to the country with no hindrance. It seems that Libya became libertarian rather than liberated.

The brand-new baggage carousels started to push bags and cases As I and my mate waited near the Cairo carousel (from where we traveled), we were surprised to find our cases appearing on the Tunis carousel, behind us! Luckily, there were only two carousels there, and whether from Cairo or Tunis, our baggage finally made its way.

Since the fall of the Gaddafi’s regime, I saw and heard a lot about the chaos in Libya. Militants who contributed to the takeover of the capital were everywhere with their anti-aircraft guns and ad-hoc checkpoints that challenged the local police and their firing in the air as if “they were at war with the sky”, as Charlie Brooker described it. For few Libyans, an iron-fist rule was still in need.

Soon enough I would be challenged as we made our way to the taxi and our driver set off. There were the usual scenes of traffic mayhem; cars that just move and switch lanes aggressively, I was taken by feeling that we would sooner or later crash into another car.

As we drove toward the city, I saw no militias and no militants. The road from the airport was in an excellent condition, and within 15 minutes we started to get to the scenes of the real Tripoli.

I expected the colour green – Gaddafi’s trademark – everywhere on buildings and streets, but again it was not there. Modern yellow housing complexes sprawled the road from the airport to the city, as new rising towers slowly headed towards us - or us towards them - in the horizon.

I could see that some aspects of life in Tripoli were still in limbo. The new Libyan tri-colour flag hovered on top of many places and from uncountable balconies. The three colours of the flag with the white crescent and star also covered what seemed to have few months earlier been billboards and pictures of defiant Gaddafi. However, most of the cars – and my visa – still had the name of Gaddafi’s “state of the masses” - or Jamahiriya - on them.

This transition – or contradiction – seems to be the headline of the moment. The graffiti written here and there and the nice billboards told the current story of Libya: a wish to restore law and order and move on versus the energetic armed militants who refuse to lay down their arms. .

One spraying apparently by the Misrata militants, who captured and killed Gaddafi, said: “Libya is everyone’s capital; Misrata is the capital of martyrs”. “Al-Zintan revolutionaries were here,” declared another statement on another wall.

Rebels from Misrata (200 km east of Tripoli) and Al-Zintan (75 km south of Tripoli) became a strong force in the toothless capital when Gaddafi’s supporters made their way in their last trip to Sirte, few hundred kilometres to the east. Stories in Libya about the strange actions of these militants are many. Mohamed told me that few militants from Al-Zintan apparently took the elephant in Tripoli’s Zoo back to their city. A local paper reported that rebels towed Gaddafi’s Scud missiles from Sirte to Misrata!!

However, in every Tripoli street I passed through, billboards showed a clear anti-militant sentiment. “A martyr’s will: Tripoli is everyone’s capital but without arms”. “Let us be enlightened, tolerant and let’s co-exist”. “Yes to police, to national army, no to arms”.

This may explain why the militants vanished from the streets and their fight with the sky came to an abrupt end.

Against this backdrop of cultural battle lied a city that seemed to be waking up from a year-long slumber, if not a 42-year coma, which is how long Gaddafi remained in power.

During my first day, I came face to face with my preconception of the Libyan revolt and alleged Islamist impact that was propagated in the West. I saw many women without headscarves, and more of them were driving, likely on their way to have an espresso or to an aerobics session somewhere. Chic teenagers seemed to care more about their hair style and Western clothes than the application of Shariah law.

We drove by a café called Pentapolis, and outside, Libyan men sipped their espressos and macchiatos. While I couldn’t hear what they were saying from inside the car, I was able to see the vivacity of a life finally free of oppression and awoken to a new dawn.

I arrived at my hotel room with its stunning of Tripoli’s harbour on the Mediterranean. The clear blue sky and warm weather filled me with a feel-good sensation as I am about to spend an amazing time in Libya.

Honk for Saudi women

Saudi Arabia's "Arab spring" is almost there

 The "Women2Drive" campaign against the ban on female drivers enters its latest stage before the 17 June launch. 

Scores of Saudi female drivers are expected to switch on the engines of their cars, or the cars of their parents, and hit the road on Friday.

In a sign of good preparations,  a set of instructions have been issued to deprive critics from their sensationalist ammo.

The participants will wear their headscarves, raise only the posters of Saudi King Abdallah and flags of the kingdom and will not assemble at any point.

They will drive to pick up their children from school, go shopping or visit hospitals - and uploading a video of the journey on YouTube is optional.

Saudi style

Beyond the masses in Syria and the war in Libya, this time, Saudi women come out as the unexpected revolutionaries.

On 9 June, four Saudi women - SarahAl Fayez, Maysa Al Manea, Rasha Alduwisi and a woman known as R - were released from custody after their brief arrest for driving their cars publicly.

Their "pilot" has produced mixed results. For one, their arrest must have been slightly traumatic, but on the positive side, they showed other women that they could also do it, without being socially ostracized.

"No need to be frightened. If you will be arrested, they will only ask you to write a pledge [not to do it again]," said one of the instructions on the campaign's Facebook page.

Women vs. Clerics

On Friday, these women will challenge the clerics, the moral police, aka Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue services, and the coating of dumb social customs with piety.

 Indeed, the question of driving by women in Saudi Arabia appears to have been exaggerated out of proportion.

"I think it is a personal subject that is discussed by families, by a husband and his wife," said Saudi journalist Saleh al-Tariki said in TV interview on 3 June. "The public cannot decide on this private matter."

"It is amazing that some have managed to transform it into a public concern."

Common place outside the cities

Many in Saudi Arabia know very well that women there have always driven their cars and until the early 2000s, the moral police have observed the ban only in the cities.

Al-Tariki also added that outside big Saudi population centres, driving by women - to their farms or shops - is very common. 

In "Kif al-Hal?" (how is it?), a 2007 Saudi feature film production, one of the strongest scenes shows a Saudi woman surreptitiously taking the keys of her father's 4x4, before she drove in the dunes of the Saudi desert.

 

Riding camels 14 centuries ago

The ban on driving is clearly a problem that was worsened by the clerics' insistence on forcing all Saudis to observe their purist interpretation of Islam.

Writing in The New York Times, Farzaneh Milani said: "Aisha, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, commanded an army of men while riding on a camel. If Muslim women could ride camels 14 centuries ago, why shouldn’t they drive cars today? Which Koranic injunction prohibits them from driving?" 

This control - which includes forcing people to go to prayer, and patrolling shopping malls - extends also to women, where segregation between the sexes is enforced with an apartheid-like efficiency.

But why do some Saudi men object to that?

"It is about dominating, excluding and subordinating women. It is about barring them from political activities, preventing their active participation in the public sector, and making it difficult for them to fully exercise the rights Islam grants them to own and manage their own property," Milani added.

Furthermore, insecure by nature, many Arab men tend to view the freedom of women as an antagonism to their own, and an invitation of sorts to immorality and vice.

Obama and Saudi women

Unlike Syria, where the USA said it has no leverage, Obama does not have to fight the Congress or do much to make this campaign work.

The US administration must therefore make it clear to Saudi Arabia that this ban must be lifted. A statement by a senior US official would suffice, for it will show the Saudi rulers that the ban is futile, on the one hand, and a source of damage for the kingdom's standing, on the other.

The Women2Drive revolt is about civil society and the empowerment of half of Saudi Arabia's population. It is imperative that the Saudi rulers restore the right to drive to its appropriate place: a private matter that can be decided by the woman and her family only, on the basis of safety and aptitude, not choice.

Saudi Arabia is a huge country, and the number of women expected to drive might not be huge owing to family or community pressure or the fact that snatching the keys of a father's car would not be easy. 

However, on Friday 17 June, we have to remember these women and honk in their support.

Will the USA take Makhlouf's Israel bait

Rami Makhlouf, the cousin of Bashar al-Assad invoked the security of Israel during his defence of the Syrian regime in remarks published by The New York Times on 10 May.

In the interview, Makhlouf delivered a two-part message. The first is that the regime is adamant on crushing and repressing the democratic rights movement in Syria. If Al-Assad's regime falls, Israel's security will be under risk, he added in the second part.

Makhlouf's assumption has been - duly - highlighted in Israel's media, as shown in this report by Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz (and here by Yediot Aharonot):

 

Israel's lobby grouping in the USA, AIPAC, reacted similarly:

 Regime U-turn?

While the Syrian regime is crushing the Syrian protests, its image abroad has been badly damaged.  

To repair this, Makhouf sought to bury the bloody crackdown on the Syrian protestors in Israel's security ahead of the AIPAC conference later this month. 

If this shows anything, it proves that the Syrian regime is in a political disarray to the extent that it is pinning hope on changing the US course on the protest as a result of Israel. 

But this ploy has been unsuccessfully tried during Egypt's revolt.

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that Makhlouf has previously refused to answer the NYT correspondent's request for an interview:

"An e-mail sent to Mr. Makhlouf’s company on Saturday, asking for comment, went unanswered. Calls to the headquarters seeking comment were not answered Saturday," said the NYT article on Syria on 30 April. 

Now, The NYT correspondent Anthony Shadid has been exceptionally allowed into Syria with the apparent aim of interviewing only Makhlouf and Bouthaina Shaban, the Syrian president's media adviser.

 It goes without saying that the choice of Makhlouf to speak for the regime is peculiar.

Editor of Beirut-based The Daily Star Michael Young said that Makhlouf's interview was "revealing":

Lifting of Syrian emergency laws means little

The problem in Syria goes far deeper than the emergency laws.

The decision by the Syrian regime to lift the state of emergency law that has been in force since 1963 has turned out to be another farce.

The Syrian security forces continued to fire at the peaceful Syrian protestors to prove that it is business as usual.

Map of Syria

To add insult to injury, the Syrian authorities also arrested on Tuesday, 19 April, an opposition activist after he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera TV.

This happened as the cabinet was voting on the repeal of the emergency laws.

According to the London-based Syrian human rights observatory, Mahmoud Essa, a prominent activist, had been arrested in a raid by the security services.

Syrian human rights activist and one of the undeclared leaders of the protest movement Haitham al-Maleh said that the decision to lift the state of emergency was "meaningless" without an independence of the judiciary and holding the security forces accountable.

He said: "The problem is that the ruling elite and the security have put their
hands on the judiciary and that other legislation they had introduced
exempt the security forces from being held accountable to law."

Tadmor prison, Syria

Syrian activist and writer Mustafa Khalifa, who spent 13 years in a Syrian prison for affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood even though he is a Christian, said that lifting the emergency was a sham.

"The issue of freedom in Syria has nothing to do with the emergency law, which was not put in force since1963.

"What took place in practice was a thousand-fold worse than the emergency laws, which, at least, included legal checks and respect to some of the basic individual rights."

Khalifa, whose story was immortalized in his memoir "The Shell", went on to say: "As prisoners, we wish that even the emergencylaws had been implemented."

Al-Assad: the myth of the beloved president

After 11 years of failures, Bashar became like any other Syrian: a prisoner of the regime.   

That many Syrians disapprove of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is no surprise.

This became clear in the month-long protests that are taking place all over Syria.

The divisions over Al-Assad are as old as his time in power, and these emotions have been crystallized in stronger ways these days.

Often, protests inside or about Syria in other countries end in clashes between pro- and anti-Assad demonstrators.

In few examples, pro-Assad supporters took part in the dispersal of protestors by the security forces.

But 11 years after he became president, why do some Syrians still love him?

Early reformer

There is no easy answer to this question. While many in Syria are forced to love him owing to their job or their interests, others seem to be genuine about it.

A comment by one Syrian on a recent Al-Jazeera commentary can sum up this emotion:

"I can't imagine the events occurring in Egypt to happen in Syria because we really like our president, not because they teach us to like him."

Indeed,  Bashar's past at the helm shows that he had tried to do something.

In early 2000, Bashar became the president of Syria after the death of his father, Hafiz al-Assad. His rise was seen as a good sign by some Syrians.

He was as young as many Syrians. An ophthalmologist by education, he did not boast of a past career in any of Syria's feared security services.

Compared with Gaddafi, Mubarak or other Arab autocrats, Bashar's young age in fact set him aside.

In addition, for a brief period, Syria did change under his leadership in what became known as the Damascus Spring.

Then, political salons mushroomed, and bristled with discussions about reforms and change.

Ebullient debates by otherwise underground activists about the future of Syria became a daily routine.

Real Bashar

However, this dose of freedom irked the symbols of the old regime, who clearly feared that the rug might be pulled from underneath their feet.

Afterwards, the Damascus Spring became history. The salons were closed, the expression of opinions muzzled and the arrests of dissidents resumed.

Ever since that moment, Bashar has but extended the legacy of his father. He ruled with an iron fist, meddled in the affairs of Syria's neighbours and championed - albeit verbally - the pan-Arabist dream.

He also added cronyism and corruption to the Syrians' lexicon, and under his leadership the economy almost crumbled.

It looked as if either Bashar radically changed, or worse still, was co-opted by the old guard in his father's junta. And by doing that, he subliminally dragged many Syrians into believing in him.

Pattern of weakness

Following the eruption of protests in Syria on 15 March 2011, these symptoms of Bashar's weakness and his inability to deliver reforms have become even more visible.

His announcements after the protests are one case in point where the passive language and the sense of delegation therein have not reflected the strength of a chief executive.

First, it was the emergency laws that will be lifted after an examination by the "regional command" and a discussion "by the relevant authorities", according to his first speech after the protests. Several weeks passed until the emergency was lifted on 19 April, without a clear end in sight to repression.  

Another case is Bashar's alleged orders for the release of protestors detained by the security forces.

Mahmoud Mar'i, a Syrian human rights defender, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera on 15 April that orders by Bashar for the release of those protestors were not put into force.

"It seems that even the security forces do not carry out the orders of the president," Mar'i noted.

To this day, 19 April, at least 200 Syrians have been killed and thousands remain in detention.

Prisoner in his homeland

It is therefore inconceivable that some Syrians still believe in Al-Assad or his ability to lead reform.

By forfeiting the protestors, and slurring them in his first speech, the president of the Syrian republic has also wasted a golden opportunity to solidify his reported pro-reform agenda.

Endless possibilities could have opened up had Bashar capitalized on the Syrians' anger against the status quo.

Commenting on Syria, Syrian writer and broadcaster Rana Kabbani told the BBC on 13 April that Al-Assad's regime was simply "unreformable". 

She added: "A lot of people believed [in his reform platform] and have been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. In 11 years, he has not been able to make one meaningful concession or reform."

It seems therefore that those who supported Al-Assad have done it only because of his weakness. For he, essentially, is one of many other Syrians who have become prisoners in their homeland.