Bab al-Azizia was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s huge, fortified compound in southern Tripoli. Ten months after his fall, it has been reduced to rubble by fleets of bulldozers. When I ventured in to take photographs, half-a-dozen armed militiamen accused me of spying, forced me into a car, and drove me away for interrogation. How many times had I visited Libya, I was asked? Where had I gone? Who had I met? Had I supported Gaddafi?
I replied that I had been detained twice by Gaddafi’s thugs during last year’s revolution, and was somewhat surprised to be detained again by those that toppled him. I was finally released, but I had glimpsed the dark side of the new Libya—a country that has deposed its dictator but has yet to shed the culture of fear and repression that he fostered for 42 years.
This is not immediately obvious to the casual visitor. Indeed Tripoli appears almost normal—an adjective seldom applicable to Libya’s capital. All outward traces of Gaddafi have been destroyed, except for his face on one-dinar banknotes, and on those it has often been obliterated. People no longer glance nervously over their shoulders to see who is following them, or speak in code on their mobiles. In Martyrs Square, formerly Green Square and the site of so many bellicose Gaddafi rallies, there is now a children’s funfair, and on Friday afternoons a Libyan Speaker’s Corner, where people complain about the treatment of injured revolutionaries or the failings of Tripoli’s unelected council.
Oil production is back to normal, though the revenues, at least £30bn this year, far exceed the spending capacity of a transitional government with no administrative structure. There is a flourishing new independent media, and an emerging civic society that is determined, amongst other things, to preserve the relative emancipation that Libyan women achieved last year. Some 4000 candidates and 80 per cent of eligible voters registered to participate in the 7th July elections for a 200-member national congress. Having appointed an interim government, the congress will oversee the drafting of Libya’s constitution.
Appearances are deceptive, however. Libya remains anything but normal. The Zintan brigade, which has held Saif al-Islam Gaddafi without trial for seven months and detained a team from the International Criminal Court that went to see him, is just one of countless well-armed militias that have divided Libya into fiefdoms. These self-styled guardians of the revolution frequently ride roughshod over human rights, and hold thousands of suspected Gaddafi supporters in secret, often brutal, detention centres.
Far from reining in these militias, the National Transitional Council has approved a law providing immunity for actions performed in defence of the revolution. It also passed laws banning criticism of the revolution and any “glorification” of Gaddafi, though the latter was revoked in June.
I visited Zintan, a town in the Nafusah mountains south of Tripoli, in an attempt to see the younger Gaddafi’s jailers, if not the man himself. I failed, but it was a revealing journey. In the scorching desert near Gharyan I found a former police training camp where the town’s militia holds 1250 sub-Saharan Africans in metal huts with no air-conditioning, inadequate sustenance and no contact with the outside world.
Emad Saki, the militiaman in charge, claimed they were illegal immigrants awaiting deportation to countries like Niger, Chad and Mali, but admitted many had been there for months. The inmates said they had been rounded up simply because Gaddafi, who brought tens of thousands of black Africans to Libya as cheap labour, had hired a few as mercenaries so all were now considered suspect. Across Libya sub-Saharan Africans are being “detained, arrested, beaten, tortured and abused,” a western human rights official said.
Further on, up on the flat-topped mountains, I came across the once-prosperous town of Mushashya. Its dusty streets were deserted, its homes ransacked and burnt, its shops looted. Walls were pockmarked by shell and bullet holes. The only untouched building was the mosque, the only life some wild cats and dogs scavenging in the debris. The town sided with Gaddafi, I learned, so all of its 8000 inhabitants—men, women and children—were driven out. Graffiti denounced them as “Gaddafi’s dogs.”
Libya is on the edge, one senior western aid worker said, and much depends on whether next month’s elections can produce an executive with a mandate strong enough to unite the country, curb the militias and persuade their gunmen to join the fledgling national army or police. Will the new constitution enshrine real freedoms, or only the illusion of freedom? Will Libya shake off the baleful legacy of dictatorship which is all that most of its citizens have ever known?
Despite the violence and anarchy of the past nine months, things could have been far, far worse in a country that is rife with weapons, and where ancient tribal and regional enmities had been suppressed for four decades. But for all Libya’s wealth and natural resources a peaceful and prosperous future remains far from assured.
