How Libyans Became Revolutionaries
The New York Times reports:
On the evening of Feb. 8, Khalid Saih found himself in the back of a speeding car on the outskirts of Tripoli. It was not by choice. Saih, a lanky 36-year-old lawyer, was part of a small group of Libyan activists who were openly calling for a new constitution and more civil rights. After months of harassment by the police, he and three fellow lawyers were ordered to report to the Interior Ministry in Tripoli. From there, with no warning, they were bundled into a car and told they would be meeting the Leader.
The men were terrified. None had met Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi before. All of them had friends or relatives who had been tortured or murdered in his prisons. As they rode, they made contact with friends back in their hometown, Benghazi, to report their location, in case they were imprisoned or killed. To calm their nerves, they recited a prayer that is invoked in situations of great danger:
God is great,
God the dearest of all Creation,
God is greater than what I fear,
I take refuge in God,
There is no protection but he from the evil servant and his soldiers,
God be my protector from the bulk of their evil.
After a half-hour they arrived at a gated compound with a sign marked in Arabic “Equestrian Club of Abu Sitteh.” There were uniformed guards with guns and layers of barbed wire. The car stopped, and a man took the lawyers’ cellphones and escorted them to a large Bedouin-style tent, illuminated by an enormous bonfire in front. They went in and sat down at a long, dimly lighted table. An attendant brought them glasses of fresh camel’s milk. Then Qaddafi entered, wearing brown Bedouin robes and a fur hat with flaps hanging down the sides. With him were two of his top security aides, Abdullah al-Sanousi and Ahmed Qaddaf al-Dam, both well-known and feared men. The Leader shook the lawyers’ hands and joined them at the head of the table.
For the next two hours, Qaddafi lectured the men. He warned them not to encourage the kinds of protests that had overthrown one dictator in Tunisia and would soon topple another, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt. “Take down your Facebook pages, your demands will be met,” Qaddafi said. At times, he muttered to himself at length, leaving the lawyers baffled and embarrassed.
As he listened, Saih felt his fear giving way to a deep and unexpected reassurance. It was not Qaddafi’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the Leader’s seeming desperation or his promises of reform, which Saih did not believe. Instead, it was the mere sight of him up close, an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face.
“I saw he’s a real human being,” Saih told me. “After so long, we had come to think maybe he is a robot, that he will never die. The youth had begun to lose hope. But when I saw him, I thought: He is just a man. This will come to an end, finally.”
When I met Saih in early March, he was at a bare desk in the Benghazi courthouse. The city, the largest in eastern Libya, freed itself from Qaddafi’s control a week earlier. A damp sea breeze came in from the window. Saih, dressed in a rumpled brown suit, had become something of a celebrity: Al Arabiya, the satellite TV channel, was waiting outside for an interview. He was a member of the Libyan National Council, the governing body set up by the rebels. The courthouse was its base, an array of featureless gray buildings along the city’s Mediterranean seafront. Ad hoc municipal committees were meeting in rooms once used for trials and interrogations; paper signs hung on the doors, stating their new purpose. Young men in red military berets strode through the corridors, their faces glowing with zeal. The walls were covered with fresh graffiti lampooning Qaddafi. Outside, a loudspeaker blared the refrain of a revolutionary anthem — “we will remain” — as crowds of people milled around to hear the latest news.
It was not clear how long they would remain. Battles raged already in the desert towns of Ras Lanouf and Brega, less than 150 miles to the southwest. The rebels’ ragged volunteer militia was vastly outgunned by Qaddafi’s forces, which would reach the gates of Benghazi before American and European war planes began pounding them with bombs on March 19. The Libyan revolt started with Facebook calls for protests just like its counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt. Now it was devolving into a much bloodier and more prolonged civil war. Libya’s struggle would draw in the United Nations Security Counciland a fragile coalition of Western and Arab military partners, muddying the heroic narrative of an indigenous Arab uprising.
But on that morning, Saih still had the dazed look of a survivor who cannot quite believe his own good luck. No one, he told me, not even the most committed dissidents or the most naïve optimists, had believed that Qaddafi would be defeated in Benghazi. The courthouse where he now sat in his own bare office, with a view of the wintry waves just across the city’s corniche, had been a place of fear and oppression. “Now it is the heart of Free Libya,” he said.
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