This photo of a hopeful Libyan woman was posted Thursday at 17th February Libya, an opposition web site founded by the exile Hassan al-Djahmi. The words are those of Omar Mokhtar, the martyred guerrilla leader during the Italian occupation known as the "Lion of the Desert," probably the most important Libyan hero of all time.
In a more than half a dozen cities across Libya, however, the government of Muammar Gaddafi is doing what it can to crush hopes like hers. And that includes shooting protesters dead, as shown in this video from the coastal city of Ajdabya south of Benghazi. {Caution: Extremely graphic.} After two days of demonstrations, another coastal city, al-Bayda, was said Thursday to be more or less in control of the protesters. But reports claim security forces and militias have been fighting back since early Friday. Among other things, hoping to make the delivery of troops and supplies more difficult, protesters plowed up the runway of al-Abruk airport, a small military installation. At least one report claimed that protesters had "executed" some people hired by the government to fight dissidents.
In the video below, protesters in the coastal city of Tobruk near the Egyptian border, trash and burn a center of the Greens, ideological hard-liners who spy on other Libyans for the government and are known for their frequently brutal behavior. The concrete slabs with Arabic writing on them that the gleeful protesters are toppling represent the three volumes of Gaddafi's ideological treatise known as the "Green Book."
Several similar assaults on Green offices have been reported via social media sites and by cellphone, including one in Zentan
reported at Daily Kos Thursday.
Witnesses say that tens of thousands of people were on the streets in Benghazi early Friday for a funeral for 42 dissidents who are said to have been killed. The numbers of fatalities have not been independently unconfirmed.
While the Washington Post claimed "there were no signs of unrest in the capital" other than pro-government demonstrators, one of my step-daughter's brothers reached by phone late Thursday night said he had joined other protesters in the streets in Tripoli during the day. The city seemed quieter on Friday.
Al Jazeera is banned from Libya, and very few outside journalists from other media are assigned to the country. When they are, or when operating as free-lancers, the government closes monitors their movements. It is, therefore, impossible to independently verify various reports of how many protesters are involved or of how many fatalities they have suffered in confrontations with security forces, armed Greens and non-Arab mercenaries that it is said the government has employed in Benghazi and at least two other cities. For instance, one Libyan activist, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said via email to me that he saw some young men and boys who, to escape a threatened attack by mercenaries, leaped from a high bridge that spans a briny lake in Benghazi. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 24 protesters have been killed across the country. But witnesses commenting on social media put the numbers at least twice that high.
While widely viewed by outsiders as a clown, Gadhafi has managed to stay in power for four decades because he is shrewd and ruthless. He ordered students to be hanged on the campus of al-Fateh University as an example, busing in high school students and forcing them to watch. He mercilessly crushed several mini-uprisings in eastern Libya.
He sent conscript troops to Chad in 1986, trying to take advantage of long-standing internal strife. When the once-divided Chadians fought back hard, many Libyans were simply abandoned to their fate, and their families never learned what happened to them. In 1996, some 1200 inmates of the Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli, most of them political prisoners being held indefinitely, were summarily executed over the course of a few hours. Not until recently did their families learn for certain what happened to them.
It was, in fact, the arrest Tuesday of Fatih Tarbel, a leader of the families of the Abu Salim victims, that sparked a small protest in Benghazi that has since turned into massive demonstrations. Security forces have fired tear gas, hot water from high-pressure cannons and live ammunition into the crowds. Unconfirmed reports from social media have claimed as many as 50 people have been killed in the city since protests began three days ago,
The 17 February Libya web site has published a few photos of dead "martyrs." {Caution: These images may be disturbing to some.}
Although protesters are cautiously optimistic that they may be able to replicate the overthrow of the regime the same as Tunisians and Egyptians did, Libya is considerably different than either of its immediate neighbors.
“I’m not wildly enthusiastic about the prospects for overthrowing Gadhafi,” says Ronald Bruce St John, author of seven books on Libya. “He’s systematically destroyed civil society, as well as any organization beyond the family.
With the largest oil reserves on the African continent, and a return of foreign oil companies over the past few years, Gaddafi has plenty of money to try to buy off the population. And, in fact, he has partially done so. Not so long ago, young unemployed Libyan men could be seen in Malta buying chocolate and Marlboros to take home and sell on the black market created in part by the U.S. embargo. As their only livelihood, they would make the 12-hour trip from Tripoli to Valetta, buy their goods, stay overnight, then return to Tripoli, repeating this sometimes three times a week.
Since then:
“In the past four years [Gaddafi]'s created a welfare society,” said St John. Subsidized food and housing and free education have raised living standards. But failure to diversify the economy from the lucrative oil and gas industry, as well as strict controls on business and property have given the young little hope for future jobs.
Whatever improvements have been made in the economic situation, violations of human rights, deep corruption, spying and thuggery by the Greens, and rough suppression of dissidents have not given way to even a pretense of democracy.
Gaddafi, who proclaimed after overthrowing King Idris in 1969 that he would never create a dynasty, has plundered the country's oil wealth for his own benefit and that of his sons and cronies. Until now, Libyans speculated which of the dictator's sons would follow in their 68-year-old father's footsteps. Would it be Saif ("Sword"), the suave new face of the regime he once criticized; Saadi, the former mediocre football (soccer) player and "businessman"; Hannibal, the servant-bashing, wife-beating, fast-driving playboy, who once worked for a Libyan oil-transport company; or the tight-lipped Moatassem-Billah Gaddafi, formerly a lieutenant-colonel in the military and now the country's national security adviser. Three other sons and a daughter are out of the running. So most people have assumed it will be either Saif or Moatassem.
In the past three days, however, some Libyan activists have begun pondering what seemed impossible a month ago: Perhaps the next leader of Libya will not be named Gaddafi at all.
