libya_ the losers by max rodenbeck

8/3/2019 Libya_ the Losers by Max Rodenbeck

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Libya: The LosersOCTOBER 13, 2011

Max Rodenbeck

Marco Salustro/CorbisSupporters of Muamm ar Qaddafi protesting in Tripoli, Libya, March 2, 2011

The truly strange thing in your lives is that you not only fail, but fail to learn your

lesson. No matter how much your beliefs betray you, this is never accepted by

you. You are distinguished by your inability to recognize the truth, no matter how

irrefutable.

Muammar Qaddafi,Escape to Hell, and Other Stories *

Compared to the office of his intelligence counterpart in Cairo, a luxury suite featuring

plasma screens, crystal vases, and a jacuzzi, Tuhami Khaleds was modest. For

protection from aerial bombing, the head of Colonel Qaddafis internal security service

did his business on the ground floor of its headquarters, an ungainly, antenna-studded

tower on busy Sikka Street in central Tripoli. But like the chief of Egypts Mukhabarat,

Khaled enjoyed a separate entrance and an attached bedroom where he was reputed to

cavort with women seeking favors from the regime.

The bedrooms occupants one day recently were two elderly men shuffling about in

slippers and house robes, taking their meals seated on the tiled floor. Hadi Mbairish and

Muhammad Abdu were being kept in custody here by revolutionary Libyas new rulers.

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The captives were both generals, comrades of Qaddafi since before the 1969 coup that

brought him to power. As members of a six-man operations control room for state

security, they ranked among the top commanders of the fallen regime, responsible for

seeing the Brother Leaders orders executed on the ground.

Frail and ashen in complexion, General Mbairish chaired the group. During Libyas

revolution he is known to have issued handwritten instructions to burn the vermin,meaning the rebels. General Abdu, his ebony face chinless and spectrally gaunt like an

African mask, headed Qaddafis military police. This was the force formally in charge

of Tripolis Abu Salim prison, notorious for the 1996 massacre by machine gun of

some 1,200 inmates, and more recently a holding pen for thousands of Tripolis

ordinary citizens suspected of rebel sympathies. The massacre was covered up for

years; members of the victims families traveled monthly to the prison from the far

corners of the country in order to deposit gifts they assumed would reach the men

inside. The arrest of the Benghazi lawyer who bravely championed these familiesproved the immediate spark for the revolution.

The generals insist that their captors have treated them kindly, and think they will be

vindicated in court. They will understand that we only followed orders, says Mbairish

hopefully. This is just a summer cloud. His colleague mumbles that whenever any

prisoner in his charge was sick, it was he who made sure they went to the hospital. The

generals give no sign of contrition or even awareness of the magnitude of the crimes for

which they certainly bear some responsibility. They tried to resign, they say, but wererefused. They could have slipped away abroad, as some others did to escape capture.

But why should they, as Libyan patriots?

The generals complain that for the final months of fighting they never saw their families,

since the operations room moved from one site to another to escape NATO bombs,

ending on the twenty-sixth floor of Tripolis plush new Marriott Hotel.

As for Qaddafi himself, the generals say they rarely met with him in recent years. Their

instructions were delivered by phone. Seif al-Islam, the second of Qaddafis seven

sons and the most media-hungry, did make an appearance at the Marriott HQ in the last

weeks before Tripolis fall on August 21. Overriding the generals warnings, he assured

them that Libyas masses would defend the Brother Leader to the end.

General Mbairish turns stone-faced when asked what Qaddafis intentions are today.

My opinion is that Qaddafi will never stop. He will accept that thousands die. He will

fire rockets on cities if he gets any chance. The general pauses and toys with his Rolex

watch before adding softly, Hes gotten used to killing.

The contrast between the sallow, whispering prisoners and their ebullient captors could

scarcely be more striking. Behind the desk in Tuhami Khaleds former office, with a


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trim black beard and a pistol holstered over desert combat fatigues, sits thirty-six-year-

old Khaled Garabulli. The fellow revolutionaries who saunter nonchalantly in and out,

sporting motley bandanas, shades, and firearms, treat him with jovial deference. When

the call to prayer sounds it is Garabulli who leads the fighters who choose to pray. No

one seems to mind that some of them dont.

Garabulli is one of Libyas new heroes. He joined the revolution soon after it began onFebruary 17, returning from Morocco, where he had moved to get away from Qaddafi,

back to his family seat in a fishing village east of Tripoli. From there he and his brothers

smuggled thousands of guns and rocket-propelled grenades to rebels in the capital,

sending divers to locate where they had been dropped offshore by NATO planes, then

lifting the crates by pumping air into flotation parachutes.

Just two weeks before Tripolis fall, only minutes after loading and dispatching a truck

with a final consignment of two thousand FAL rifles, Garabulli himself was arrested byQaddafis police. The three satellite phones and thirty SIM cards he was carrying made

it clear what he was up to, and the purple crisscross of welts that still marks his back

leaves no doubt what Qaddafis men thought of it. Garabulli was freed from Abu Salim

prison on August 21 to find that his was one of a thousand names on a list of prisoners

scheduled to be executed on the first of September, the anniversary of Qaddafis coup.

Other veterans of Abu Salim man the Mukhabarat chiefs office, now the temporary

base for an ad hoc squad in revolutionary Libyas fledgling national army that ischarged with hunting fugitive officials suspected of crimes. They have caught several

dozen so far. Aside from the pair of generals, these include such big fish as Bashir

Saleh, the slick, Nigerian-born adviser who managed Qaddafis money; Khaled Kaim, a

former diplomat and chief propagandist; Fawzia Shalabi, an exminister of information

notorious for cheerleading public hangings of Qaddafis enemies; and Ahmed bin

Ramadan, for four decades the leaders private secretary, the man who conveyed

orders by phone. When trapped at a farmhouse outside Tripoli, Ramadan rushed to a

bedroom and tried to shoot himself. The bullet only chipped his skull.

Smaller fry include several female recruiters, among them a Paris-trained professor of

international law whose job was to pay needy women to spy on neighbors, chant at

pro-regime marches, and shoot regime enemies. These agents were reputed for special

viciousness: a female sniper in Tripoli is said to have shot a dozen people, while

another is believed to have escaped to Tunisia after firing a gold-plated pistol into

celebrating crowds in Martyrs Square, as Tripolis main seaside plaza has been

renamed, several days after the capitals liberation. Also still at large are Mukhabaratchief Tuhami Khaled himself; his deputy and chief interrogator Abdul Hamid Sayeh;

General Mansour Dao, who personally supervised the Abu Salim massacre and has fled

to Niger; and Abdullah Sannusi, the overall security chief who ordered the killings.


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The arrests have been of special satisfaction to another volunteer with the snatch squad,

Fathy Sherif. He too was freed from prison on August 21 following a four-month-long

ordeal. A chemical engineer trained in Ireland, Sherif was rounded up in March along

with five brothers and several cousins. Charged with promoting a bloodily suppressed

uprising in the well-to-do Tripoli district of Fashloum, he was kept for six days in a

cupboard-sized box, and for thirteen more in a ten-by-ten-foot steel container that was

tilted at an angle, with no food for those inside, who sometimes numbered scores, anda plastic bottle for a toilet.

When he was finally taken for questioning, Sherif would be asked a question but told to

wait before answering and then left, naked, blindfolded, handcuffed, and kneeling, for

twelve hours at a time. His interrogators played back tapes of phone calls with his wife

from as far back as 2004, as well as recordings of recent calls. In all, they said, they

had 20,000 hours of his taped conversations. A diabetic, Sherif was denied insulin for

the length of his stay. The electric shocks were not so bad, he told me, after the firstfew times: you got used to them. Yet he says he was lucky. Prisoners who dared bang

on cell doors at Ain Zara, another facility where he was held, were shot in both legs and

left untreated, until they started to smell. Inmates took to banging on doors in unison

when someone needed help.

Sherif can still scarcely contain his joy at surviving to see the revolution triumph. As

with many in Libya, his grudge against Qaddafi extends much further back than a few

months. The forty-nine-year-old engineer happens to be related to the royal family thatQaddafi toppled, whose roots go back to the eastern oasis of Jaghboub. Not only did

he share the general Libyan trauma of four decades of brutal and capricious rule, under

ridiculous laws applied by thuggish sycophants, for no particular reason the regime had

also confiscated a business his father had built.

Still, Sherif says he bears no special animosity toward the charming ladies and

gentlemen now passing through his care. The high-value prisoners are being

transferred to Maitiga, the sprawling air base in Tripolis eastern suburbs that wasleased to the US Air Force before Qaddafis coup, and now serves as the capitals

military headquarters. It is precisely because of their cruelty that we will try them with

absolute fairness, says Sherif, adding with an undisguised wink that almost any court

would be likely to hang most of them anyway.

Sherifs humor infects the young fighters, who affectionately title him doctor, cackle at

his jokes, and savor his refined invective. This, it must be said, has become something

of a national sport. After forty-two years of being terrorized by Qaddafi, the urge to

curse him in every possible way seems irresistible. Honking cars drag his effigy through

Tripolis streets, cheered by passing groups of children. Touring families throng the

smashed, looted, and torched ruins of the Brother Leaders quarters in the sprawling


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AP Images

Rebels arresting one of Qaddafis fighters,

Tripoli, Libya, August 26, 2011

a a - z z a arrac s, or t e s eer p easure o tramp ng across s ear- nsp r ng

inner domain.

I come across an old man dragging a sack onto the busy seafront corniche and tossing

from it copies of the Green Book, the Brother Leaders meandering exposition of his

Third Universal Theory of utopian governance. Such claptrap notions as his insistence

that sport must be for participants only, since spectatorship is undemocratic, will becrushed into the asphalt by passing traffic.

Aside from political screeds, the fallen dictator also penned two volumes of what he

took to be literary works. The rambling essays and stories in these collections, the

better known of them titledEscape to Hell, may be comically turgid, but they are oddly

revealing nonetheless. The relentlessly haughty, sarcastic tone suggests an almost

sociopathic inability to feel empathy. The leitmotif of doom-laden alienation comes

across as prophetically self-referential.

Repeatedly, Qaddafi returns in his stories to the theme

of the simple Bedouin wrenched from healthy, wide-

open spaces and condemned to live in the dark, grim

city, a mill that grinds down its inhabitants, a

nightmare to its builders, a place where houses are

not homesthey are holes and caves. Decrying this

mass of people, who poisoned Hannibal, burnt

Savonarola, and smashed Robespierre, he concludes,

So what can Ia poor bedouinhope for in a

modern city of insanity?

Since his people erupted in revolt, Qaddafis speeches have seemed increasingly

disconnected from reality but similarly telling about the man himself. Consistently he

has blasted his enemies as drug addicts and rats. Yet as it turns out it is the Brother

Leader who has spent much of the past decade living underground, in the elaborate

maze of tunnels extending from Bab al-Azizia. It is Qaddafis own bloated face that

shows telltale signs of self-loathing and abuse.

In Tripoli at night two weeks after the citys fall, celebratory gunfire still rolls out in

waves, thumping and cracking and chattering around the horizon like a wild electric

storm. Spontaneous choruses of young men, or children with piping voices, burst into

revolutionary anthems. The revolutionary flag and the V for victory are everywhere. It is

all very corny, and the sustained enthusiasm suggests that whenever Qaddafi himself is

caught or killed, this city of three million will erupt in a party the likes of which have

never been seen.

Of course, many Libyans do share fears that even when Qaddafi is gone for good, their


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trou es w not e over. He eaves e n a country t at s r c n cas an resources,

but socially fragmented and intellectually impoverished. His long reign held in suspense

the ordinary struggles that forge historical progress, such as between social classes,

between competing regions, or between people of secular and religious bent. Libyas

rebirth has created new tensions, too, between those who feel they have earned a right

to power by virtue of youth and sacrifice for the cause, and what they see as the gray,

suit-clad men, many of them with technocratic pedigrees under the ousted regime, whopresume to speak for the interim government.

The real battle is beginning now, says Fathy Ben Issa, a journalist who resigned from

Tripolis new, self-appointed town council because he felt the unelected body had

fallen under the sway of Islamists aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. But for now,

people such as the smuggler Khaled Garabulli, who says he waited for a fatwa from a

senior Saudi preacher before casting his lot with the rebels, and his cohort Fathy Sherif,

who wants Libyan passports to be respected again so he can travel freely to old hauntsin the West, remain happy comrades.

Perhaps Qaddafi has alreadyas he seems to have wished for himselfescaped to

hell, as the title of his book puts it. His people have certainly escaped from it.

September 15, 2011

1. *

Stank, 1998, p. 18.

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libya_ the losers by max rodenbeck

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