By Maher Mughrabi
When I sat down with six Libyans in May 2011, we soon found ourselves navigating a landscape of fear and rumour. Did they believe that one of Gaddafi's sons, Saif al-Arab, had indeed been killed in a NATO air strike at the end of April?
"This is all just lies," said one. "No one can believe it. All those years ago, when he [Gaddafi] said they killed his adopted daughter" – in April 1986, during the US air strikes known as Operation El Dorado Canyon – "she is alive and well and studying abroad!"
From left: Anwar Gebril, his wife Ragaa Il-Shawish, Gauhar Ezawi, his wife Amal Rhema, Abdulhadi Ezawi and Ahmed Sharef with the flag of post-Gaddafi Libya. All were based in Australia in May 2011.Credit: Pat Scala
I asked the group if they believed claims put forward at the UN by US ambassador Susan Rice that Gaddafi's forces were being given Viagra to assist them in a campaign of rape. This allegation seemed a mirror image of Gaddafi's hysterical claims that his opponents were dosed up on pills supplied by al-Qaeda. Yet the Libyans I spoke to endorsed it.
"Certainly, there have been so many abductions and rapes," said Ragaa Il-Shawish, a 32-year-old masters student who had lived in Australia for two years. "The imams have been warning about it in the mosques and we have heard about these cases."
Rebels take the Libyan dictator's compound at Bab al-Aziziya in Tripoli in August 2011. The statue of a plane and fist commemorated the US bombing of the compound in 1986.Credit: Reuters
Shawish had felt the impact of the conflict directly. As early as February, her 32-year-old cousin – a married father of two – was killed in Benghazi, though he had taken no part in the fighting. Since then five members of her family had taken up arms with the rebels, one had been killed and another had gone missing.
Gauhar Ezawi, a 47-year-old masters student, also had a relative fighting for the rebels in the north-western city of Zintan, near the Tunisian border. He, like most of the group, hailed from Tripoli, the capital that was still in regime hands. It made them wary of having their photograph taken. "You have to understand Gaddafi," Ezawi said. "He will not hesitate to use collective punishment, to strike at those dear to you."
Shawish's husband, Anwar Gebril, from rebel-held Ajdabiya, is the son of an opposition leader of the 1970s who spent nine months in solitary confinement. Ahmed Sharef, studying for a fine arts doctorate, lost his brother-in-law in the 1996 massacre of 1200 inmates at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. "You do not say 'no' to Gaddafi," he concluded.
Gauhar Ezawi's older brother, Abdulhadi, a softly spoken man who sat diffidently at the edge of the group, held his hands up when I looked to him. "I am one of those who were students in the 1980s – I was a close friend of Rasheed Kaabar," he said. Kaabar, an activist arrested after protests at Tripoli's College of Engineering in 1980, was hanged on campus in April 1984. His fellow students were forced to watch. "This was meant as a message," Abdulhadi told me. "And we understood."
Tyrant: Muammar Gaddafi at a ceremony in September 2009 to mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution that brought him to power.Credit: Reuters
Libyan students not only needed to obtain visas to enter foreign countries but also a "visa" to exit their own. The conflict cast them into uncharted waters. (Khamis Gaddafi, another of the dictator's seven sons, had been on an internship in the United States with engineering giant AECOM. His visits to high-tech companies and defence contractors ended abruptly in February, when he returned home to lead the feared "Khamis Brigade", deployed against the rebels.)
But being abroad had given the six Libyans a new perspective. Access to Facebook and to YouTube – both banned in Libya – had startled and galvanised them. "I never realised while I lived in Libya that it was such a rich country," said Amal Rhema, Gauhar Ezawi's wife. "On the streets in Tripoli you see so many struggling just for bread. To learn that we had so much oil revenue was a shock."
Libyan rebels celebrate the fall of the town of Sirt in October 2011. The country has since been crippled by infighting between rebel groups.Credit: Reuters
When she saw the people rise up in Tunisia and Egypt, had she thought that the wave would reach Libya? "I was sure of it, from the beginning," she said, smiling for the first time. Ahmed Sharef shook his head. "I was surprised," he said. "The price for standing up is so high. Yet I remember a day in February 2006. It was the time of the Danish cartoons controversy, and people had been given permission to stage a demonstration in Benghazi. But once they were gathered in the streets, the demonstration became directed against the regime. And in the end the security forces turned their guns on them, and 25 people were killed."
"I remember reading on Facebook one student," Rhema said. "He asked Gaddafi: 'How can you be my father and shoot at me?'"
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the second son of Libya's dictator, after his capture in November 2011. He predicted civil war if his father's regime was removed.Credit: AP
Pundits suggested that the regime's demise would bring other social forces to the fore, from radical Islam to tribalism. In a tirade against the rebels, Gaddafi's second son Saif al-Islam warned that Libya's east and west might come to resemble North and South Korea. The Libyans I spoke to dismissed such fears. To them, there was no question that democracy is consistent with Islam – one cited a line from the 42nd chapter of the Koran that enjoins Muslims to consult one another, a line I had also seen on a banner raised by a rebel assembly in Benghazi. When I asked them about tribes, Gebril took the rebel flag – the tricolour of the pre-1969 Libyan kingdom – and held it in front of me.
"You know what this means?" he asked me. "The red is for the blood of our martyrs, from across the land, east and west. The black is for resistance. The green is for Tripoli. We won't fall apart."
Women in Tripoli celebrate the news of Muammar Gaddafi's capture and death in the town of Sirt in October 2011.Credit: AFP
"Even Gaddafi [from Sirt in the west] married an easterner!" others chimed in. (After we spoke, however, Gaddafi's Benghazi-born wife Safiya was reported to have fled the country, and was said to be in a refugee centre on the Tunisian island of Djerba.)
The flags the six brought to our meeting told a story of solidarity: they were made by a Sudanese tailor living in Noble Park. What kind of solidarity did they seek from Australia? "Australia needs to recognise the new government [in Benghazi]," said one. "They need to arm the Free Libyans," said another. All wanted to see some unfreezing of Libya's assets in this country, so that they could at least stop worrying about their immediate futures.
Did they worry, I asked, about the mounting NATO air strikes on Tripoli, where their friends and family still lived? Could they accept civilian casualties as the price of liberation? "There are no civilians affected," Shawish told me. "The murderer uses the media to attract the compassion of westerners. If NATO can eradicate him, we [Libyans] will do the rest."
"We can touch freedom," said Sharef. "There is no going back now."
Maher Mughrabi is the Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald