Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford
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‘How can you go into Libya if you don’t speak Arabic?’ He’s smiling a smile which indicates he’s not smiling much inside. I’m thinking, can you please just let us on the plane? What difference does it make to you? But he won’t be persuaded. In fact I think he’s enjoying our discomfort and our pleading. ‘I am so sorry, ma’am.’ He doesn’t look sorry at all to me. I think he’s a Gaddafi loyalist. He doesn’t want to make this easy for us. We don’t give up until the plane actually takes off.
Then it is time for Plan B. Tim has heard Air Afrique is letting people on without visas. That’s the good news. The bad news is the planes are leaving from Paris. We get the next plane to France. We book a hotel near to the airport, and by now we’re all becoming very twitchy about our complete lack of success in getting into Libya. We’re actually moving further away.
Still, optimism never dies. We have to hold on to that. I ask the foreign desk in London whether our colleagues in Tripoli need us to bring anything out for them. Lisa Holland has been reporting from the capital ‘under the restrictions of the Libyan government’, helped by producer Lorna Ward. We’re given a huge long list of items to bring out which includes coffee, tea bags, energy bars, sun cream, snacks and odour-eaters (no one owns up to asking for these). Tim gets up really early to rush round a supermarket close to the airport to fill a rucksack full of these various ‘essentials’. He rings up at one point as Martin and I are checking out of the airport hotel to ask for the French word for ‘odour-eaters’. Oddly, neither of us knows. Then we all set off for the airport.
We get as far as the check-in desk and, again, an airline official stops us. No visa? Hmmm. But she is a Libyan who has lived and worked in Paris for years now and is much more sympathetic. She has the personal number of one of the Gaddafi officials in Tripoli and rings him up in front of us. Somehow our names are on a list and she agrees to let us on. Hurdle one crossed.
It’s a short flight to Tripoli – only a few hours – and we are bursting with anticipation and suppressed excitement. What will it be like? How will we be treated? Will we get through the airport security OK?
When we land we are immediately segregated from the other passengers, the ones who all look like Libyans and have Libyan passports. We’re taken to a small room where there is already a European crew. They say they have been waiting for hours. We sit down. Within a very short time, the other crew is led away. They have their permissions to enter the country.
The BBC’s Wyre Davies is on our flight and he joins us in the room. There is a large picture of Colonel Gaddafi in the corner and I get Tim to take a picture of me with it. It’s the closest I ever get to the leader. So we sit and wait and wait and wait. All of us are tired already and we use the time to sleep. There’s plenty of time.
Wyre is told he has his visa within half an hour, but we are there for another three and a half hours. Finally we are allowed through immigration. As we walk out we see Wyre. He’s still here. He hasn’t been able to get any transport and he joins us. The airport is very busy. There are people milling around everywhere trying to get flights out. Many governments are evacuating their nationals out of Libya and those people who haven’t got help from their government are still trying to leave. Even though it’s dark and already night-time, it’s still pleasant temperature-wise – around the early thirties – typical Mediterranean weather, very balmy. We’re on the coast of North Africa but somehow it feels undeniably Arabic here, with a number of women wearing the hijab (Muslim headscarf). We walk out of the airport, following a Libyan official who says he will take us to the media hotel. We’re led onto a government bus and notice – even through the darkness – there are lots of people waiting outside the airport’s front entrance. We’re told not to film and none of us wants to do anything to irritate the official who has just let us into the country. So we don’t.
It feels tense. Everyone seems tense – the workers, the would-be flyers, the newly arrived, the armed guards who are standing both inside and outside the airport. Everyone seems edgy. Several towns in eastern Libya have already erupted in fighting – Tobruk and Benghazi are the two most notable. It began on 17 February, just over two weeks ago, when a general call for uprising was answered in several towns. It is the date the Libyans are calling the start of their revolution. They’ve seen their neighbours in Egypt (to the east) and Tunisia (to the west) rise up and defeat their dictators. Now it’s their turn. The fighting has already spread to Tripoli, with heavy gunfire heard in the capital and reports that the airport itself was taken by the rebels in the last week of February. Several planeloads of African mercenaries from neighbouring Sudan, Chad, Algeria and Niger have been seen being flown into Tripoli to help the Colonel fight his own people. Already there have been some defections from the Colonel’s own military: he needs to find other soldiers to help him stay in power.
The People’s Hall in Tripoli (banned to the actual people), which was the meeting place of the Libyan General People’s Congress, has been set on fire about a week before our arrival. Several police stations have been set alight, as well as the Justice Ministry in the capital.
We’ve seen pictures uploaded onto YouTube of Libyans burning the Green Book in Tobruk. This is Gaddafi’s book of ‘rules’ and ideas – his political and economic philosophy for Libya. It is compulsory reading for every Libyan, a sort of Libyan answer to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. It is both hated and scorned. In it, the Brother Leader, as the Colonel has renamed himself, teaches that the wage system should be abolished, that people should earn just what they need to and no more, that they should not own more than one house, that private enterprise is ‘exploitation’ and should be abolished. For the past twenty years, Libyans have told me, Gaddafi’s state machinery has even attempted to restrict access to private bank accounts so the regime can draw on those funds for government projects. He has set up People’s Supermarkets where prices are controlled. He says often that he wants to ban money and schools. As the American commentator Michael J. Totten put it, he ‘treats his country, communist-style, like a mad scientist’s laboratory’.
Despite some liberalization over the past couple of decades, there is huge discontent and many of the educated and wealthy Libyans have long fled abroad to neighbouring Egypt or farther afield to Britain and America. Now there are large street protests, the Brother Leader has responded with bizarre and eccentric speeches on state television, threatening to slaughter protesters and promising the death penalty for numerous crimes. In one speech he addresses his discontented nation from underneath an umbrella. ‘We will fight to every last man, woman and bullet,’ he says.
We were hoping to see here in the capital some of the seething discontent of forty-two years of built-up repression. We know it’s happening; finally Libyans are saying, ‘No more!’ But this seems to be contained in the east – in Benghazi and Tobruk. The fighting in Tripoli seems to have been quashed so far, with forces loyal to Gaddafi tightening their grip here. Certainly there’s no obvious sign of rebellion right now, not here anyway. I had expected more evidence of fighting somehow, but there’s none. Mind you, it’s dark. I half wonder whether that’s why we have been held in the airport for so long – to ensure we can’t see very much on the journey to our accommodation. And if that is the case, it has worked. The streets seem clean and quiet from what we can make out on the way to the hotel.
The bus journey is swift. The Rixos Hotel, our destination, is already full to overflowing, not just with journalists but also with Gaddafi officials and minders. Lorna has said there is no room for Martin and me, so we say we’ll go to stay at the Corinthia Hotel. This is the second media hotel, selected for us by the regime, but it’s some distance away and virtually unoccupied. Many journalists feel the place to be is the Rixos, as the news conferences are held there and any information to be gleaned from the Libyan authorities is probably going to come from this location. Martin and I are fine with being away from the media pack. We prefer it that way.
We get off the bus at the Rixos only to say a brief hello and goodbye to our colleagues. We’re famished, even more so when we notice that the hotel is serving the most wonderful five-star buffet. I look at Tim’s rucksack laden with snacks, tea bags and the vital odour-eaters and think, why did we bring all of that?
Martin and I guzzle down a quick meal.