Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  “Leprous what?”

  “Leptis Magna,” he repeated. “Finest Roman ruin in North Africa. You like?”

  A collective groan reverberated down the aisle. We were going fifty miles the wrong way, to sight-see. Gazing disconsolately out the window, the reporter beside me spotted a flock of sheep grazing on the roadside. “Look!” he shouted. “Another group of journalists!”

  And the chorus went up across the bus—“Baa, baa, baa”—as the pack rolled on through the countryside to the finest Roman ruin in Africa.

  * * *

  On day two, “the program” began just as it had on day one, with an official circulating through the lobby, telling reporters to be out front at eight sharp for the bus. At ten o’clock, when the program seemed set for another long intermission, I left Geraldine to keep watch for the buses and wandered out for a walk through Tripoli. Gathering street “color” was, for me, always the best part of Middle East reporting. It was also the easiest. Except in Iraq, I rarely walked five minutes in any Arab country without being approached by students, shopkeepers or passersby who wanted to practice their English, offer me tea, peddle black-market goods, or just study me in the same way that I was studying them. No matter how difficult it might be to extract official information in an Arab country, it was usually easy to take the pulse of the streets.

  In Tripoli, though, there was no pulse to take; walking through the city was like holding a finger to a mummy’s wrist. It was Saturday morning, the beginning of the Arab week and usually the busiest day, yet there was almost no one at all on the streets.

  The few people I did encounter weren’t Libyan. As in other oil-rich and underskilled countries, Libya imported laborers, mostly Palestinians, Sudanese, Lebanese and other migratory serfs. I pitied them for washing up here.

  “It is always like this, my friend,” said a Lebanese engineer named Hakim, hanging out at an empty intersection. “It is like cemetery.” Hakim had come a week before from Beirut, in search of work, and was waiting for a man who had promised him a job. Hakim had been waiting there every morning, for three days running, and the man still hadn’t appeared. “Maybe he is dead,” Hakim said.

  I asked him where everyone was.

  “You know, the peoples of Libya are very busy. People’s Committees. People’s Bureaus. People’s Prisons.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Really, this is all bullshit. Mostly the peoples do nothing.”

  Hakim did the same. Tripoli wasn’t a happening sort of town for a single young Lebanese in tight blue jeans and Ray-Bans. There were no bars or nightclubs in Tripoli. There were two tattered movie theaters, offering a Bruce Lee film and a B-grade Indian flick. “I see them nine times,” Hakim confessed. And in a metropolis of one million people, there was nothing at all going down on the streets, day or night.

  “It is crazy, I know, but I miss Lebanon,” Hakim said, smiling wanly. “In Beirut, always there is action.”

  * * *

  Tripoli could never be mistaken for a capital swimming in the international mainstream. There was no American or British embassy, but there were missions for Nicaragua, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as a run-down building labeled “The International Secretariat for Solidarity with the Arab People and Their Central Cause Palestine.” Intrigued, I looked for an entrance, but couldn’t find one. There were tattered posters showing black men in green berets, clutching submachine guns, or bloodied women of indeterminate ethnicity, waving clenched fists. A short list of the insurgencies to which Qaddafi lent his support included the IRA, Basque separatists, Kanak rebels in New Guinea, radical Aborigines in Australia, Tamil Tigers, Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council, and assorted rebel cells in Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali and Senegal. If Tripoli was anything to judge by, the victory of all these liberation movements would make for a very dull globe.

  I went to the souk, the liveliest quarter of any Arab city and the easiest in which to make chat. Here, at least, there were Libyans: women with henna painted on their faces and baskets balanced on their heads, and men clad in Qaddafi-style ensembles of woolen cloaks and caps. Narrow alleys wound between whitewashed homes and workshops where men with tiny hammers beat brass into urns and platters. There was even the requisite fortress, perched by the Mediterranean, a reminder of the days when America had sent battleships to the shores of Tripoli to put down the pirates of what was then the Barbary Coast.

  But the market was oddly unspirited, a kind of wax-museum casbah. All the elements were there—except for the hustle, the stink of saffron and sweat, and the untidy business of buying and selling wares. Everyone seemed unnaturally subdued, as though reserving whatever energy he or she possessed for the stage-managed, fist-waving frenzies I’d seen on television.

  One reason for the quiet was the lack of things to buy and sell. Qaddafi dolloped up generous servings of Semtex explosives to his revolutionary allies. But to his own people, “Brother Leader” offered little except sacks of Cuban sugar and cans of Bulgarian cooking oil.

  Qaddafi’s mercurial edicts also discouraged whatever entrepreneurial spirit might once have existed in Libya. The year before, in a characteristic burst of ideological insanity, he’d decreed that it would henceforth be illegal to employ anyone but family members, as the wage system was exploitative. PARTNERS NOT WAGE EARNERS! was one of his favorite slogans. Shopkeepers were barred from selling “decadent” goods that they hadn’t produced with their own hands. Bakers were about the only ones left with wares to sell. There was also talk of abolishing currency and restoring the barter system. Not surprisingly, private commerce in Libya shut down overnight.

  All these decrees had since been rescinded or forgotten, in the Libyan fashion, but there remained a tentative air to the souk, as though merchants expected a People’s Committee to sweep through at any moment with some new and even more bizarre regulation.

  “When I read about Americans complaining that their economy is too regulated, I have to laugh,” said Ali Eshbini, sipping tea at his empty metal shop. He planned to shut down as soon as he’d sold his remaining goods: three sheets of dented aluminum siding.

  Eshbini proved to be the only merchant I could engage in conversation. At each shop, I’d pick something up, ask its price, then exhaust my limited stock of overblown Arab pleasantries: about the fineness of the day and the fineness of Libya, praise Allah. And at each shop the merchant would nod politely, or offer a meager half-smile, and return to his tea, or to rearranging the meager merchandise on his shelves. In two hours of walking, I encountered not one “Where you from?”; not a single “Is you English man?”; not even a “Welcome, my friend. For you I make special deal.” I had anticipated suspicion, even rabid hostility, toward Enemy Number One, but all I got was stony, uninterested silence.

  Fear was undoubtedly a factor, though the security presence in Tripoli was as muted as its populace. There was none of the police-state apparatus that I’d come to accept as part of the scenery in Arab capitals, like palm trees and minarets. No soldiers poking submachine guns through car windows; no guards slumped over AK-47s in front of government buildings; no trucks full of soldiers straddling main intersections and coup routes. In fact, apart from a few policemen directing nonexistent traffic, there were no guns or soldiers at all. Qaddafi had either killed, exiled or imprisoned every dissident in sight, or else the population was too somnambulant to require any vigilance.

  Glorification of Brother Leader was also restrained. There were entire bookstores devoted to Qaddafi’s Green Book, and to the “commentaries” that had grown like Talmud around the original text. But the Leader’s face wasn’t plastered on every wall and billboard, as was the custom in other one-man regimes. The one exception was Green Square, a vast spread of asphalt covered in cracking green paint, overlooked by a painting of the colonel in dark glasses and military uniform. The portrait was big but not towering, nothing to compare with the ubiquitous pictures of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. As in Iraq, Big Brot
her was watching, but there really wasn’t much to keep an eye on. Apart from two Polish engineers’ wives with Polaroids, and a beggar from Ghana—all of whom I interviewed, in desperation—there was no one at all in the square.

  * * *

  I returned to the hotel with about a paragraph of “color,” wondering what in the world I could write. Suddenly several cars screeched to a halt and a phalanx of brawny men in green fatigues jumped out. One tall head of black curls poked up from the huddle. It was the colonel himself. I rushed up against the bodyguards and was swept with them through the door and into the hotel lobby.

  Qaddafi’s visit was unannounced and caught the pack lounging about the lobby, still waiting for the program to begin. Within seconds, two hundred journalists leaped to their feet, discarded lit cigarettes and swarmed around the colonel in a riot of floodlights, microphones and shouted questions.

  “When will we go to Rabta?”

  “Are you making gas?”

  “Colonel, what can you say about Italian-Libyan relations?”

  Ignoring the tumult, Qaddafi promenaded from one end of the lobby to the other, chin raised high, eyes trained on the middle distance, like a prince on a tour of his realm. He was, as always, sartorially resplendent, in a togalike cloak slung across a braided vest and tartan sweater, with a red woolen cap perched atop his coal-black curls. Designer dictator.

  The pack surged behind him, desperate to get within camera and microphone range. TV men hoisted each other on their shoulders, radio men thrust microphones between bodies, print journalists positioned their pads against the backs of the people in front of them. At one point the crush was so great that I felt myself lifted off my feet. And as soon as the pack had positioned itself, however uncomfortably, Qaddafi wheeled around and ambled off the other way, with his bodyguards running interference in a rough scrum of thrust elbows and raised knees.

  Finally, when the crowd became so dense that Qaddafi couldn’t move, one of his retainers addressed the pack.

  “He would like to drink some coffee, that is all,” the man said, as the Leader gazed distractedly at the crowd. “He did not think you were here.”

  The colonel, apparently, just happened to be passing the El-Kabir and thought he’d pop in for a quiet cup of coffee. Only to find two hundred reporters who had been waiting frantically for thirty-two hours for something to justify their plane bill, their hotel bill, their planned layovers in Rome on the return trip. Qaddafi, for all his madness, knew how to get the media’s attention.

  He meandered several feet more, paused in front of a portrait of himself and wearily consented to answer a few questions, though only in Arabic. This was logical. Ninety-nine percent of the assembled journalists spoke English, as did Qaddafi himself, having gone to Britain as a young officer for military training. Perhaps two percent of the pack spoke decent Arabic, though even they struggled with Libyan accents, considered the most difficult in the Arab world. And just to ensure that even this small group wouldn’t understand a word, Qaddafi spoke in an almost inaudible whisper.

  I had witnessed Qaddafi’s perversity once before, at an Arab summit in Algiers. Flanked by female bodyguards, he’d worn a single white glove, like Michael Jackson, to avoid tainting his flesh when greeting Morocco’s King Hassan, who had once shaken hands with the Zionist Shimon Peres. Standing before five hundred journalists, Qaddafi had insisted on taking all the group’s questions before answering any of them. After listening to each, and taking careful notes on a pad of paper, he proceeded to deliver a rambling, almost incoherent speech in Arabic that had nothing to do with any of the questions.

  This time, at least, I had a front-row view, having clung close to the bodyguards. From a distance, Qaddafi matched his imperial TV presence: chiseled features, fixed gaze and upturned chin. Close up, under the glare of TV lights, he was shrunken and strange. The dashing twenty-eight-year-old who had seized power twenty years before and terrorized the West ever since seemed now a dissipated and unimpressive figure, pushing fifty. Skin hung in folds from his creased and oddly bloated face. Sweat gathered on his upper lip. His dark brown eyes seemed blank and his voice was toneless, as though Brother Leader, like the People he commanded, was in a vague sort of lithium stupor.

  Perhaps he had mouthed the same words so many times that they were putting him to sleep.

  “Libya is facing official terrorism from the United States . . . . America is full of terrorists, and Israel, too . . . . Libya will continue to fight for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea . . . America is the imperialist aggressor, and we are just a little nation, seeking peace . . . .”

  Qaddafi’s vocabulary was the same as JANA’s, consisting of interchangeable slogans and insults, to be recited over and over like verses from the Koran, as if the repetition might somehow make them true.

  Qaddafi spoke for perhaps twenty minutes and then he was gone, hustled out the door and into a small white Peugeot, which he drove himself, without passengers. When an aide came too close as Qaddafi climbed into the car, the colonel scowled and slapped the man across the face. Then, without blinking, he broke into a broad and engaging smile for the crowd that had gathered, miraculously, all along the comiche, chanting “Down down U.S.A!”

  As I watched him drive off, waving gaily through his open window, I tried to imagine any other Middle East leader—any American or European leader, for that matter—driving himself through the streets of a capital city, in a modest sedan, with virtually no security. It was either another bit of Qaddafi stagecraft or a clear sign that the man was much more secure in his power than the West liked to think.

  “Qaddafi, he is my love,” said one woman bystander, whom I’d run up to interview, desperate for an animated, English-speaking Libyan. She clutched her heart as she spoke.

  “And what do you think of Reagan?” I asked.

  She laughed, pantomiming automatic weapon fire. “What you call this? Machine gun? I say machine-gun Reagan. He is crazy man. Not like Qaddafi.”

  In the twenty minutes Qaddafi spent at El-Kabir, the pack had laid waste to the lobby, upending plants and ashtrays and leaving a trail of broken glass and furniture across the floor. A French woman had been taken to the hospital with trample wounds. It was one of those scenes that make you proud to be a member of the fourth estate.

  Bruised but happy, the pack was now fighting to get in line for the telex machines.

  Copy, copy, we’ve got copy! Don’t know what it is yet, but Allah be praised, we’ve got a story to send!

  * * *

  At four in the afternoon, when the lobby was deserted for the first time in two days, three buses pulled up in front of the hotel and handlers jumped out to shepherd us aboard.

  “The program goes now to Rabta,” one of the men declared. His tone was clipped and officious, as though we were right on schedule, although thirty-two hours had passed since the original announcement that journalists were to gather in the lobby. The pack scoured maps to make sure there wasn’t some other Rabta off in the desert—the site of a Saracen fortress, say, or the birthplace of an obscure ninth-century sheik—and reluctantly boarded the buses.

  We drove southwest through a semiarid plain and toward a chain of low-lying hills. We passed radar and surface-to-air missile emplacements, and continued on toward a bright glow emanating from what looked like the gray outline of a factory complex. The pack stirred from its propaganda-induced slumber.

  Rabta! The light at the end of the program!

  None of us had any way of confirming that this was actually Rabta. All we knew about the plant was what we’d been fed by diplomats and U.S. intelligence: that satellite photos of Rabta matched aerial pictures of poison-gas plants in Iraq; that there had been suspicious shipments of chemicals not normally used for pharmaceuticals; and that intercepted phone calls had caught panicky Libyans quizzing German chemists about how to handle a toxic spill at the plant. The whiff of must
ard gas seemed incontrovertible.

  “American media, why so cynical?” asked a handler who sat across the aisle from me, listening in on the journalists’ patter. He was an amiable young man named Abdullah who said he worked for “the Center for Resistance Against Zionism, Imperialism and Reactionary Plots.”

  I told him that the Libyans hadn’t offered much evidence to counter the U.S. allegations. In response, Abdullah unfurled a copy of that day’s Jamahiriya News and read a statement by the Syrian Health Minister upon his visit to Rabta. He hailed Rabta as a great contribution to Arab medicine, and his opinion was echoed by the Libyan demonstrators camped out by the plant. The paper reported:

  “It is one of the factories decided to establish by the basic People’s Congresses to make available medicines! They have declared their readiness to defend this civilized monument at any cost!”

  Abdullah stopped reading and said, “You see, it is all American fabrication, these lies about poison gas.”

  I explained that by the standards of the American press, the Syrian Health Minister hardly qualified as an objective source.

  “What means ‘source’?”

  “Source of information. You know, some person or document you can rely on for the truth.”

  “But Qaddafi has spoken. So has our Syrian brother. Why you need more source?”

  I hadn’t thought it possible that anyone actually believed what was said by JANA, or by Qaddafi, or by Libya’s fellow outlaws. But it gradually dawned on me that this earnest twenty-five-year-old from the Center for Resistance Against Zionism, Imperialism and Reactionary Plots was absolutely sincere. And why shouldn’t he be? After all, he’d been five when Qaddafi seized power. His entire sentient life had been set to a chorus of Qaddafi’s thoughts, beginning with recitals of The Green Book in grade school and continuing with nightly readings on the radio and television.