by Tony Horwitz
I tapped out my article, giving it a hopeful spin. There was the young Jordanian farmer who had told me, “You must say hello to your neighbor, whether you like him or not.” There was the Israeli artist who had begun sculpting the word “PEACE,” in Arabic, on a bluff facing Jordan. As a counterpoint, I included the story of Mohammed Abu-Helal, the poor Palestinian farmer, though I treaded cautiously on the bits Ahmed had claimed “he says for you.” Overall, it seemed to me that residents of both banks were weary of conflict and eager to get on with their lives, in peace.
Three weeks later, the occupied territories exploded in violence. The intifada had begun. An editor returned my Jordan River feature, which hadn’t yet run, and suggested I consider a rewrite. When I returned to Jerusalem, along with hundreds of other journalists, the cobbled alleys of the old city echoed with the high-pitched pop of rubber bullets. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, I watched an Israeli patrol beat an old woman until she crumpled to the ground. Five minutes after driving into the Gaza Strip, a chunk of concrete crunched through the window of my rented car. And I realized too late that I should have been listening to what fiery-eyed Ahmed had been saying for me.
10
LIBYA
The Colonel’s Big Con
Woman is a female and man is a male.
—MUAMMAR QADDAFI, The Green Book
The summons came, like so many others, on a bad phone line in the middle of the night. America had shot down two Libyan warplanes over the Mediterranean earlier that day, and after dialing twenty times, a colleague in Cairo finally got through to Tripoli.
“Please,” the Libyan official shouted through the static, “tell all journalists, come.” Then the line went dead.
“That’s it?” Geraldine asked when a correspondent called us to share the news. “‘Please, all journalists, come’?”
“That’s it.” There was a flight to Italy in the morning, he said, and a connection to Libya in the afternoon. “If we’re lucky, we’ll all get stranded in Rome.”
Tales of journalistic woe in Libya were legendary. Not-so-secret police shadowed your every step. There were no decent phones. No one to talk to. And worst of all, no booze. “You feel depressed all the time, and followed in your depression,” said a Yugoslav reporter named Bosko. “Libya is the Romania of the Middle East.”
Libya was also one of those Middle Eastern countries—Iran and Saudi Arabia were two others—that routinely ignored journalists’ visa requests for months, then granted entry with a few hours’ warning, to everyone. But even by these minimalist standards, the invitation to Libya seemed thin.
The Italian agent issuing my ticket to Tripoli was skeptical. “American journalist?” he asked, checking my passport in Rome. “Horwitz? No visa?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Buona fortuna. I wish you much luck.”
Twenty reporters were already at the airport bar, taking on liquids in preparation for the thirsty days ahead. The Middle East press corps, at least at the time of my tour, had its share of old-school hard drinkers.
“In a few hours you’ll be dreaming of this,” declared one veteran Englishman, holding aloft a glass of white wine. The only booze available in Libya, he added, was bathtub gin called “flash.”
“First you get drunk, then you go blind.” He chuckled, refilling his glass. “Then the Libyans give you eighty lashes.”
The Jerusalem-based press corps was rather more sober, searching bags and pockets for stray shekels, El Al stickers and forgotten laundry receipts written in Hebrew. Libya wasn’t the sort of place where you wanted to arrive carrying any evidence of contact with the Zionist entity.
Not that an American passport was anything to crow about. Qaddafi liked to call the United States “Enemy Number One of Humanity,” and he had once advised young soldiers to “drink the blood” of Zionists and Americans. Now, to make the relationship even worse, the United States was claiming that a factory in Rabta, south of Tripoli, was about to produce poison gas; there was even talk of an American air strike on the plant. The Libyans were apparently letting us in to present their side—that the Rabta plant made medicines.
“Aspirin, extra-strength,” quipped a half-drunk reporter. “And deodorant.”
“Spray-on,” a companion chimed in. “The kind you wear a gas mask while using.”
I made the naive suggestion that if the Libyans were really producing mustard gas, they’d be crazy to let us in to document the fact. An Australian across the table looked at me incredulously.
“Mate,” he said, splashing more wine in my glass, “this is Libya. Logic doesn’t apply.”
* * *
Waiting in line to board the Libya Air plane, I gravitated toward the one passenger who wasn’t wearing rumpled khakis and the besotted grin of a foreign correspondent. He was slight and balding, clad in tight jeans with a black leather belt and fierce tattoos on both hands. He looked like a cross between the local handyman and a Hell’s Angel. His carry-on—eight cartons of duty-free cigarettes—marked him as a regular traveler to Libya.
“Can’t get decent fags in Libya,” he explained with a North England burr. “Can’t get decent anything in Libya. Got forty-seven kilos of canned food in me check-through.”
Jim Stead said he worked as a diver on an oil installation near Tripoli. He had been there eight years because he liked the “green stuff,” the money. “Not much else to like about the place,” he said. As the plane lifted off over the Mediterranean, he chatted amiably about the oil business, about his week’s R and R in Italy, and about his former profession: killing people.
“Mercenary for eight years, I was,” Stead said flatly. “Cyprus, Belgian Congo, few other bad spots.” He laughed. “See the world, kill people.”
He showed me his right hand, tattooed with a skull and crossbones and the words “Death or Glory.” He called it a “mercenary’s badge.” His left hand bore another tattoo, of a samurai with a sword through his head. “Can’t remember what that one means,” he said. “Too pissed on gin the night I got it.”
There were other badges of his trade: a bullet wound in his left arm, another in his right leg, and a bayonet scar on his shoulder. “Didn’t get the bloke who gave me that scratch,” he said, shaking his head the way a fisherman does when recalling the big one that got away. But plenty of others hadn’t escaped.
“For my money, a crossbow’s best, ’least for assassinations,” he went on. “For one, it’s quiet. Don’t hear it, d’you?” He smiled, winking slightly. “Main thing, though, you can shoot through glass. A bullet, now glass deflects bullets. You can aim for the head and get a shoulder instead. But an arrow cuts clean through glass. Take a head shot, get a head shot.”
I nodded. Take a head shot, get a head shot. And what kind of gun did he prefer?
“Different jobs demand different guns,” Stead said. “Now an AK-47, it’s got better range than your M-16. An Uzi is good for a tight job, if you’ve got to take out a bunch. But for a single target, well, can’t beat a Kalashnikov.”
I nodded again, trying to remember every word; I didn’t want to clam him up by taking out a notebook. How about knives?
“Speaking for myself, don’t like knife jobs,” he said. “Too close. Now there’s some blokes, born killers, now they might be an ace with a knife. But I’m more of a crack machine gunner.”
He paused as a steward came down the aisle with soft drinks. “Thing is,” he said thoughtfully, sipping orange soda, “no matter what the weapon, you got to have the right personality, know what I mean? You got to be inhuman. You can’t start thinking about the politics, about what you’re doing, or what they’re going to do to you. That’s when you get careless.”
I asked him if he ever thought of getting back into the business. He shook his head. “You’d want seven hundred quid a week for it now. But the demand’s gone. No one gives a monkey anymore about doing the killing themselves.”
Steward
s came down the aisle again, this time with landing cards, which were printed only in Arabic. Qaddafi regarded European languages as a corrupt influence on his pure Arab state and had banned their use on official forms, street signs, even soda bottles. The landing card included the usual questions: name, nationality, date of birth, religion. Up until now, I’d never seen any reason to conceal my religion. But I’d never flown into the world’s most fanatically anti-Zionist country, without a visa, to a capital where the U.S. embassy had been sacked and American diplomats withdrawn some years before. Writing in “Jew” seemed a recipe for expulsion, or at the very least, a way to attract unwelcome attention.
“What do you reckon?” Geraldine asked, staring at the question as well. “Buddhist? Infidel?”
I put down “Quaker,” having attended a Friends school for eight years. Who could kick out a Quaker? I didn’t let Stead see. Somehow I didn’t imagine he’d have much use for Quakers.
Stead scribbled down his address at a camp outside Tripoli and invited us to come out and “get pissed” on the weekend. “Me and me mates brew one hundred and eighty liters of beer every week,” he said. “And we drink it all.” He was the friendliest mercenary I’d ever met.
* * *
We arrived at Tripoli’s airport to be greeted with discouraging news. The first planeload of journalists had been issued visas and allowed in. But the second, arriving several hours before ours, had been sent straight back to Rome. We sat in a corner of the terminal, waiting for what we assumed was to be the same fate.
The airport was unadorned, except for the bewildering messages scrawled on the walls. The prohibition of English apparently didn’t extend to the pronouncements of Colonel Qaddafi. Not that this made them any easier to understand.
PEOPLES ARE ONLY HARMONIOUS WITH THEIR OWN ARTS AND HERITAGES.
DEMOCRACY MEANS POPULAR RULE, NOT POPULAR EXPRESSION.
IN NEED, DEMOCRACY IS LATENT
The slogans were the first clue to the wackiness of Libya—or rather, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya. Jamahiriya was a word coined by Qaddafi, meaning, roughly, “republic of the masses.” He had added the “Great” after the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in 1986, an event which, in the inverted logic of Libyan propaganda, constituted a glorious victory.
The second sign of mental disorder was the comment of the official who appeared with our passports. He had stamped each one with a seven-day visa. I asked him why the plane before ours had been turned away.
“Zachma,” he said, which means “crowded.” This failed, of course, to explain why the fifty reporters on board our flight had been allowed in. But I was learning to go with the Libyan flow. Logicians need not apply.
A bus carried us through the dark empty avenues of Tripoli and deposited us at El-Kabir, the Grand Hotel, on Revolution Street. At the Rome airport, a rumor had swept the press corps that credit cards and dollars were unacceptable to the Libyans and that we should change all our money into Italian lire instead. Several had, at unfavorable airport rates, boarding the plane with lira-stuffed satchels. At the Grand Hotel we were quickly informed that lire were worthless; only dollars were accepted, and the hotel wanted us to pay the bill for our one-week visit in advance, at a rate of $125 a night.
“Fucking typical,” groaned a TV reporter, who ended up lending out all his money. TV reporters always travel with thousands of dollars in cash, like drug dealers. This makes them easy prey for strapped print journalists.
One hundred and twenty-five dollars at El-Kabir bought a not-very-grand room with a television blurrily broadcasting a reading of Qaddafi’s Green Book, a Sahara-like compendium of the colonel’s thoughts. Qaddafi had consigned communism to the dustheap of history, along with capitalism, as a failed ideology superseded by his own “Third International Theory.” But with typical contrariness, the colonel borrowed freely from Marxist and Maoist symbolism. He had authored his own Green Book—green being the color of Islam—and launched his own Cultural Revolution, to purge Libya of non-Islamic influence. Tripoli, like Moscow, has at its center a revolutionary square—Green Square, not Red. Officially, the state had wilted away; the masses ruled directly through organs such as the General Secretariat of the General People’s Congress for Information. Even Libya’s embassies had been taken over by the masses and renamed People’s Bureaus. In a nation of only 3.5 million citizens, many of them still seminomadic, it seemed incredible that there were enough souls to staff all the People’s Committees, People’s Congresses and People’s Secretariats.
* * *
At midnight the word went out that we were to gather in the lobby at eight in the morning for “the program.” In controlled situations such as this, Arab information ministries always had a “program.” And like every other, this one was to begin with a bus pulling up at the hotel early in the morning—presumably to take us to the Rabta plant.
“Any minute it comes,” one of our escorts said, at eight o’clock.
“It is coming now, any minute,” he said at nine.
By ten, having ingested the hotel’s entire supply of nicotine and coffee, the press corps was becoming mutinous. Pack journalism is never pretty, but it is never so ugly as when the pack has nothing to feed on. Starved for facts, reporters inevitably begin devouring one another.
Floodlights illuminated a corner of the hotel lobby, and the pack surged forward to see what was happening. It was a bored television crew, reporting nothing. “Phil,” the producer yelled to his cameraman, “give me a ‘reporters in the lobby’ shot.” Drifting away, the pack spotted a solitary journalist speaking to an Arab-looking man—and barged in once again.
“Do you think they’re making gas at Rabta?” someone shouted.
The man looked bewildered. “Lunch begins at one o’clock,” he said. He was a waiter at the hotel.
When someone did score a shred of information—a veiled comment by one of our escorts, or a ninth-hand rumor picked up from another journalist—the pack circled again, pens poised, taking down details that were now tenth-hand.
“How do I source that one?”
“Dunno. ‘Observers said’?”
“Informed Western sources?”
“Informed Western sources, I like that.” The reporter chuckled, composing the lead for his story. “Informed Western sources in Tripoli said today that they knew absolutely zip about a poison gas plant in Rabta . . . .”
I passed the time reading that day’s English translation of Jamahiriya News (JANA), Libya’s official organ of information. JANA pumped out the pulpiest propaganda fiction I’d yet seen in the Middle East, which was saying a lot.
“MORE CONDEMNATIONS AND DENUNCIATIONS OF U.S. AGGRESSION, THREATS AND PROVOCATIONS CONTINUE THE WORLD OVER!” screamed the lead headline. “The world over” included “prominent political figures and organizations” such as:
The Chairman of the National Congress in the Canary Islands!
The Secretary General of the Workers’ Union of Malta!
President Didier Ratsiraka of Madagascar!
Muslim Authors Organization in Tanzania!
General Noriega of Panama sent a cable of support, as did Abu Mousa, a breakaway PLO leader, who praised Libya’s “revolution against all attempts to harm the nationalist stance rejecting Imperialist-Zionist-Reactionary plots!”
Reading JANA was a bit like scanning supermarket tabloids. I imagined the JANA “journalists” with certain interchangeable epithets already keyed into their computers, each ending in exclamation points: “IMPERIALIST CRIMINAL!” “ARROGANT SUPERPOWER!” “COLONIAL STOOGE!” All they had to do was reshuffle the insults, punch in a source—from a list of obscure revolutionary movements—and print the story in the biggest typeface available.
THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE VANGUARDS OF PEOPLES LIBERATION WAR DECLARED THAT AMERICA WANTS JAMAHIRIYA TO BE A PUPPET TOOL SUBJECTED TO ITS DOMINATION AND CONTROL!
Geraldine returned with bad news. She had run into an Englishman who happened to work with Jim Stead. “Jim Stead,” the man told her, “is the biggest bullshit artist who ever breathed.”
* * *
At midday, when the pack seemed ready to run amok through Tripoli, two buses pulled up in front of the hotel. “We are going out of the city,” one of the Ministry of Information officials announced, and the horde of gullible journalists clambered aboard.
We were, indeed, headed out of the city, past cinder-block apartments and onto a highway south. The two government escorts on our bus claimed they had no idea where we were headed, though they assured us we’d be there “in one hour.” Reporters with maps followed the bus’s progress, calling out every few minutes: “South” (the direction of Rabta). “East.” “South.” “East.” “East.” “Still East.”
“What the fuck?”
“They’re taking us to see Qaddafi.”
“They’re taking us to another plant.”
And most optimistically, “They’re taking us to the airport!”
In fifteen minutes we were out of the city and into a pleasant landscape of rolling hills, blanketed with olive and palm. The view surprised me; I’d somehow expected all of Libya to be a huge hot sandbox with towns resembling some drab suburb of Warsaw. The beauty of the scenery, however, couldn’t distract from the fact that we were now headed northeast, in the opposite direction from Rabta. One of our escorts came down the aisle to break the news. “You are very lucky because we take you today to someplace very special.” He paused dramatically. “We go to Leptis Magna.”
