FEAR IN CAPITAL:People in Libya have to deal with disruptions to phone and electronic communications to tell the world what is happening, writes MICHAEL PEEL
AT AN army checkpoint near Tripoli’s Green Square, the commanding officer had an idea for what to do when yet another Libyan official turned out to be unavailable: go to the national museum in the nearby 16th-century Red Castle instead.
Within minutes, Salah Alajab, the curator, had materialised and was holding forth on the lessons his institution offered for the crisis that has gripped the country since an uprising began last month against Muammar Gadafy’s 41-year rule.
“From this fortification, we can see Libya faced many conspiracies throughout time,” he mused, at the foot of stairs to an open-air exhibit featuring a fountain encircled by mean-looking entwined snakes. “We hope all the people work together to solve this problem, and find the right solution to save their lives and build their future.”
The surreal vignette is a small example of the strangeness, heightened during this time of conflict, of a city long noted for the odd happenings and unsettling atmosphere overseen by a ruthless four-decade-old regime. With people more scared than usual to talk and communications controlled even more tightly by the authorities, Tripoli is filled by nervousness, supposition and waiting – and the occasional unexpected event.
For all its cosmopolitan population and superficially open Mediterranean feel, Libya long ago became one of the world’s most closed societies under Col Gadafy, the world’s longest-ruling autocrat. Freedom House, the US civil liberties group, ranks the country in the same bracket as Burma and North Korea.
The civil conflict has added another dimension to the fear and repression. The regime has buttressed its armed offensive against the opposition with a spree of night-time disappearances that Human Rights Watch says have targeted people sending information out of the country.
The lives of people who want to tell what is happening in Libya have been made even harder by disruptions to phone and electronic communications.
One business worker, asked when the internet might return to normal, said: “Maybe soon. We never know. Inshallah.” The web near-blackout adds to the sense of a city paralysed, with information as crudely obscured as the anti-Gadafy graffiti that has been painted over by regime supporters on walls all over town.
At the mall beneath the Libyan Investment Authority, the copy of the International Herald Tribune(and the Financial Times) on the news-stand was dated February 16th – the day after the uprising against Col Gadafy began. The front page picture of the Tripoli Postwas of the fireworks in Cairo to celebrate the fall last month of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Many people, including some in government, have stayed away from their offices. Others do not pick up their phones and those who do are often too afraid to talk. One official who took a call declared the situation to be “stabilising”, but, when asked if he would elaborate on his view, replied: “That would be difficult.” Daily life in Tripoli continues with a kind of normality, albeit with an at times strained and slightly desperate tinge.
Next to the museum entrance, a boy was trying to catch his dinner in a makeshift trap made of a cardboard box propped up by a mineral water bottle tied to a string that he held in his hand.
“Pigeon, 100 per cent!” he said, making a flapping motion with his hands.
The colonel himself may be appearing only sparingly in public but he remains an all-pervasive presence in posters around the city – despite his longstanding insistence that he is not a president and just an ordinary Libyan. He appears in a variety of sometimes unusual settings: in one, the sun shines behind him; in another, he clutches the hand of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.
By mid-afternoon, the red carpet had been rolled out for Col Gadafy at the Rixos hotel in central Tripoli, where scores of foreign journalists were gathered for the promised visit. A government official warned that anybody who went to the roof to watch the leader’s arrival would be shot dead. Then it was time for another long Libyan wait, this time for a mercurial ruler who is both creator and embodiment of a country where, more than ever, the disconcerting and the disturbing have become routine.
As a doctor in a Tripoli bread queue put it with a shrug: “No information. It’s a psychological state.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)