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in better hands. It’s true. In a city which is now coming under almost constant attack, the hospital has got to be the safest place, relatively speaking.
It’s late now. Dr M and his son have been constantly looking out for us. Dr M has been in and out of theatre, performing surgery. He is looking very, very tired. The man was just on a holiday visit to see family in Libya and didn’t even work here, yet right now he seems to be indispensable in the hospital. ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ he says. We are taken up to the children’s ward, which is now empty of patients. We have no luggage, no change of clothes, no toiletries, nothing. But we have a hospital bed to sleep on and a bathroom close by. It doesn’t take long before we are all asleep, exhausted by our experiences over the past twenty-four hours.
Sunday, 6 March
I wake early, before the others. In the few seconds before I really come to, all I can see is hospital paraphernalia – the beds lined up opposite mine in the ward, the emergency masks hanging above them, the oxygen tanks standing by. Where am I again? Then I turn over and see Martin and Tim curled up on the adjacent beds. OK, now I remember. I creep out quietly trying not to wake them. I go to the bathroom. There are already a few young medics up and working. One stops me. He’s friendly and curious and wants to talk – and I want to hear what he has to say about Libya and the Gaddafi family. He introduces himself as Dr Salah and tells me that although many of his age (he’s in his twenties) have long despaired of the Colonel, they had until very recently a lot of respect and much hope about Saif al-Islam, his most high-profile son. Until the start of the Libyan uprising, Saif had also been viewed by Western politicians as a possible successor to his father. He was educated at the London School of Economics, speaks English fluently, and was considered forward-thinking, almost liberal, and, most importantly, part of Muammar Gaddafi’s inner circle. A man the West could do business with.
However, all those hopes disappeared at the end of February this year when Saif made a rambling television address as the protests first spread to Tripoli. The protests were brutally crushed with live ammunition, but there were few independent witnesses, with journalists having to rely on accounts from protesters who described indiscriminate firing into the crowd from snipers on rooftops around Green Square. One said he thought the snipers were using what sounded like machine-guns.
‘Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt,’ Saif al-Islam said in his television address, denouncing the protesters as ‘drunkards and thugs’. Troops had opened fire on the crowds because they were not trained to handle civil unrest, he said, and the casualties were not as many as was being reported. He finally lost swaths of supporters by declaring that the country was on the brink of civil war and this was being stoked by international media reports which were exaggerating the demonstrations and discontent.
‘We are so disappointed in Saif,’ says Dr Salah. This doctor is so young, I am thinking, young enough to be my child, but he is so brave, so strong emotionally. He continues: ‘I thought maybe, just maybe, he could lead us out of this, but not now.’ He talks about his hopes for his country, talks about the inequalities, the natural resources which most Libyans never see. He talks about how he has not known any other ruler than Colonel Gaddafi, how Zawiya was known previously for being exceptionally boring and conservative. ‘This was a very, very quiet town before,’ he says. ‘The most exciting, unexpected thing was a traffic accident. Now we have tanks all around attacking us. To us, this is unbelievable. It’s not happening to us. We cannot even believe it now.’
Dr Salah is young but articulate and strikingly frank. ‘You don’t know the fear, Alex,’ he says. ‘People have been so afraid, too frightened to speak out, to disagree, to protest. But now there is a strong feeling. They won’t put up with it for any longer. Everyone wants Gaddafi to go.’ He wonders why the West is not helping. ‘How can we do this on our own?’ It’s a question I can’t answer.
He knows all about Lockerbie and the bombing of the Pan Am jet which ended up killing all on board and landing fatally on the Scottish town. He is ashamed at the link with Libya. ‘Do they all hate us where you come from?’ he asks. ‘What do they think of Libya in the UK?’ I can’t tell him anything too heart-warming and say most of our perceptions are based on Colonel Gaddafi and he has given the world a fairly solid impression of himself as an erratic dictator who is both crazed with power and with keeping it.
Dr Salah is both charming and determined. He was diagnosed with leukaemia a short while ago but has had treatment and believes he is in remission. Now this young doctor is facing down Gaddafi and his military machine and he isn’t afraid. He has already beaten worse than them.
Young female nurses come up to us while we are chatting and offer us tea or coffee. I accept the coffee gratefully. Tim and Martin are stirring now and come and join the chat. It’s still early and we have another day of trying to escape from Zawiya. We need to start, and the earlier the better. It’s only when we try to make our early-morning call to London that we realize we have no mobile phone signal. At first I think it’s just my phone or maybe we are in an area of the hospital where there is poor reception. But it’s more serious than that. The network has been cut. The regime is turning the screw.
One of the kindly nurses turns to me. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ she says, ‘it will be OK, inshallah.’ I haven’t said anything to her. She has just read the look on my face. ‘Do you want to come into our room, maybe get a coffee?’ I accept, slightly embarrassed by my unguarded expression. She leads me down the corridor with wards on either side to a door which is locked. She knocks. ‘Nabila, open up, it’s just me.’ It takes several knocks and much coaxing before the door is opened by a younger woman. She looks as though she has been crying and she is wiping her eyes with the hijab she is wearing over her head. ‘Come in,’ the first woman says while she hugs her teary friend. ‘You can take off your hijab here,’ she says to me.
There are just three other women in the room. I have been wearing a scarf over my head as I go through the hospital. I don’t want to upset any of these people by appearing to be disrespectful of their religion or their feelings.
When I enter, the mood lifts. I can feel it. Now they have a foreigner in their midst and I am their guest. There’s a rush to find coffee grains and milk powder and, oh my goodness, the foreigner wants sugar. Please don’t worry, I will take it as it is, I say, but they will hear none of it. The wish appears to be to maintain a very Libyan stiff upper lip, but all the same they are friendly and curious.
We’re all worried, all scared, but in this room, just for a few minutes, we can talk and get to know each other a little. It’s brief but we talk about families and our children, exchanging names and ages and anecdotes. We’re not so different after all. I remember Martin and Tim and feel guilty about sipping a much-needed coffee without them.
‘I don’t suppose you have two other cups of coffee for my colleagues, do you?’ I ask timidly. Of course, of course, is the answer. I am just walking out with cups in hand when Martin comes into view. A couple of the women seem to physically withdraw. To them he’s a stranger and a non-Muslim one at that. But Martin is soon getting them to giggle and laugh over their coffee-making abilities.
I find Dr Salah again and tell him I need to go and see the Square. I want to know what is happening there, if anyone has survived. I have to know if the rebels have been beaten into submission or not. I just don’t know what is happening there this morning and we have no communication with anyone. Remarkably, he agrees to take us. His car is in the hospital car park. He knows the routes through the rebel checkpoints and the safest way.
The doctor takes us along several small roads and through a number of barricades manned by rebels who recognize him as someone from Zawiya. Then we can go no farther. Opposition fighters stop us, there’s a small discussion, and we are asked to get into a small, battered people carrier. It takes us down one of the main roads leading to the Square. As we get closer there are signs of battle everywhere, smouldering ashes, broken barricades, burnt-out cars, debris littering the streets. There are holes punched into the walls from shells and rockets and the buildings are peppered with machine-gun pock-marks. We are all stunned. What a battle. What destruction.
As we enter the