LIBYA: MARY FITZGERALDreviews Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution By Lindsey Hilsum Faber and Faber, 288pp. £12.99
TO CROSS LIBYA’S deserted eastern border post in late February last year was to enter a land whose story during more than four decades of Muammar Gadafy’s rule remained all but unknown to the outside world. For us journalists streaming into the country’s liberated eastern flank just days after its towns erupted with the anti-regime protests that would later tip into armed revolt, there was an exhilarating sense of exploring uncharted territory.
The few reporters allowed into Libya before the revolution began were usually invited by the regime and had to operate under severely restricted conditions. Last spring was the first time in 42 years that journalists were able to enter the country freely, interview whomever they wanted, and have those people speak without fear of the consequences. Everyone we met, from swaggering rebel fighters to dignified elderly women at rallies holding framed portraits of loved ones long disappeared, had a story to tell of life under Gadafy – many sad, others horrifying. These were stories of cruelties large and small, spanning the range of human experience. I just didn’t want to stop listening, and neither did Channel 4 News’s distinguished international editor, Lindsey Hilsum.
Fully aware that in order to understand the impulses that drove last year’s uprising one has to understand what had happened over previous decades, Hilsum threads her riveting account of Libya at a time of revolution with tales of ordinary Libyans who endured extraordinary things during Gadafy’s experiment in tyranny. The stories of five in particular form the backbone of the book.
One is a man who spent 19 years in Abu Salim, Gadafy’s most notorious political prison, and, in 1996, witnessed regime forces massacre more than 1,200 inmates within its walls. Another is a young woman who left her life in Britain to join last year’s revolution, fired by the memory of her father, an opposition activist stabbed in his London shop at a time when Gadafy sought to eliminate dissidents living overseas, in what was known as his “stray dogs” policy.
Among the others is an oral surgeon, living in Cardiff, who returned home to begin, with his sister, the clandestine Free Generation Movement, which plotted novel acts of civil disobedience in a tense, locked-down Tripoli as the regime struggled to keep itself from unravelling. And we also meet the quietly spoken Islamist who lived in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan before being rendered back to Libya by US and British intelligence services and now wonders what shape his homeland will take after the revolution he has long dreamed of.
Looming over everything is Gadafy himself, the leader who pompously – and so very characteristically – declared “I am Libya” as the uprising against him gained momentum. Hilsum dissects the man and the myth, tracing his evolution from the mercurial young army officer who seized power in a 1969 coup (and thrilled many with his Nasserite rhetoric) to the megalomaniacal self-styled “Brother Leader” who claimed, laughably, that he merely guided the people. The man who ordered that football players in Libya be referred to by number, not name, in case one of them became more popular than Brother Leader, was, in his final years, something akin to “a sinister Middle Eastern Michael Jackson”. Botoxed, bloated, and delusional to the end, he was, as Hilsum writes, “a man out of time. He seemed like a character from an old movie that no one wanted to see again.”
To her credit, Hilsum grapples with the complexities and contradictions of Gadafy and resists the temptation to simply demonise or ridicule. Her account of the Libyan leader’s rehabilitation from “the Mad Dog of the Middle East”, as Ronald Reagan, then the US president, put it, to valued ally in George W Bush and Tony Blair’s so-called war on terror serves to highlight the many hypocrisies laid bare by last year’s revolution, which, as the rebels themselves admit, succeeded only as a result of Nato-led military intervention. Hilsum writes of how European leaders embraced the man who had armed the IRA and was blamed for the Lockerbie bombing and other atrocities, and how senior MI6 officials fawned over him and helped deliver his exiled opponents back to Libya’s torture chambers.
The Gadafy of more recent years, she observes, had, with his flamboyant dress, provocative statements and eccentric behaviour, “become a clown, a Botox-enhanced oddball . . . but to Libyans he remained a terrifying figure, who could condemn anyone to death on a whim, with a single word or gesture”.
I encountered Hilsum several times on Libya’s see-sawing front line last year, and she vividly captures the high drama of those days when ragtag bands of rebel fighters, most of whom had never picked up a gun before, raced through the desert towards Gadafy’s tanks.
She doesn’t spare the rebels, however, pointing out that there was a “dark side to the revolution, a violent undertow of the tide towards freedom”. This manifested itself in a number of ways, including the detention, ill-treatment and sometimes killing of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa who were falsely accused of being Gadafy’s mercenaries.
Since Gadafy’s demise last October, some of the former rebels have slaked their thirst for vengeance through the hounding, and worse, of those suspected of residual loyalty to the old order. “The new ways were not dissimilar to the old ways,” observes Hilsum. As one man I met in Tripoli in March put it: “After 42 years, every Libyan has a little bit of Gadafy and his mentality inside them. We need to fight it and purge it so we can all become better citizens in the new Libya.”
What that brave new Libya might look like is the great unanswered question of this book, though Hilsum hints at some of the dynamics, including the Islamist current, that are likely to play a role. What happened in Libya last year was the one true revolution of the Arab Spring, in that it resulted not just in the toppling of a dictator but also in the complete levelling of his idiosyncratic regime. The challenges post-Gadafy Libya faces are immense. Hilsum quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”
Mary Fitzgerald is Foreign Affairs Correspondent. She has reported extensively from Libya, most recently last month
