In the heat of afternoon, men lined the waterfront and stared off over the Mediterranean, clothes flapping like loose rags in the wind. Sub-Saharan immigrants crouched on roadsides, dark faces cut from bone. Behind them stretched dull, sagging market stalls, and dusk drew the fading light back out to sea. Yet the streets were gaudy with strings of light, and shop windows twinkled with sparkling party dresses. A mask of whimsy sweetened the anguish of isolation and sanctions, but there was something unsettling about it, like the beachfront high-rises somebody had erected without plumbing or electricity. The party dresses looked as if they had been copied from some other place, a land that worked, as if people had been left on their own so long, cut off from the world, that they’d started to imitate their imaginations and memories of other realities.
Nobody in Libya talks about Moammar Qaddafi. There is only the Leader, and when Libyans talk about the Leader, you hear the invisible capital letter. The Leader is a man of mysterious motives and sweeping decrees. The Leader rose to power in 1969 through a small, quiet military coup that, like all small, quiet military coups in the Arab world, is officially referred to as a “revolution.” Since then, he has luxuriated at the core of a personality cult that would make Stalin blush while his regime squashed all political back-talk with a campaign of imprisonments, torture, and disappearances.
When Qaddafi wanted to play tough, he liquidated enemies and slaughtered political prisoners. His relatives and top officials put state-sponsored terrorism to use, bombing passenger planes in midair. When he grew cranky with his “Arab brothers” and decided Libya would focus on being an African country instead, he offered a cash payout to any Libyan who would marry a black African. In a flourish of empire, he sliced his nation with a vast waterworks project, the Great Man-Made River. The Leader woke up feeling whimsical one day, and changed the names of the months. February is “flowers,” and April “bird.” September, the month in which the Leader grabbed the throne, is fatah, or “conquest.” When the United States invaded Iraq, he suggested Libyans dig trenches in their yards.
The Leader’s favorite color is green, and so Libya is resplendent with green. Even the Leader’s political manifesto is entitled the Green Book. The Leader also invented a name for his country: the Jamahariyah. The word is a mash of Arabic loosely translated to “ruled by the masses”; it was born in the crackle of synapses and free associations in the Leader’s mysterious mind. In truth, it means only Libya.
One fine morning in that sagging seaside city, the woman I’d come to regard as my head minder marched into the hotel. She had smooth, black hair and a youthful face, and she never allowed herself to smile at me. She shuffled me from one appointment to the next in the diligent, pained manner of a governess with a bad hangover. This morning, she announced, she was taking me to the World Center for Studies and Researches of the Green Book. This is Libya’s version of a think tank, a sun-dappled library dedicated to studying the fickle philosophies of the man who invents the country as he goes along. Every table, chair, door, and shelf glows with fresh green paint. Tucked into the shelves are copies of the Green Book translated into twenty-five languages, and scholars huddle at verdant tables to pore over every speech and proclamation Qaddafi has made, divining the direction of the country from the muddle of his words. Bars sealed the windows, and only the turning of pages broke the silence of cold, quiet rooms. Students looked up with wary frowns.
When I sat in a green den with a pair of government analysts, I was prepared for almost anything except what I heard.
“We learned how vulnerable a country like Libya can be. Everything had to be thought afresh,” one of them said. “We have a defunct system here. It is not working.”
The men went on: Libya has made mistakes. Libya is flawed. Libya has decided to reinvent itself. Libya did not understand how the world worked. Libya had been a little naive—even stupid. I was shocked. He just called the Leader stupid.
These men were the first to tell me unequivocally that the Bush administration would soon lift sanctions against Libya. Negotiations had been going on for months, they said, and although Libya refused to acknowledge its guilt, it had agreed to pay cash to the families of victims killed on the bombed airplanes. U.S. oil firms were drooling to get back into Libyan fields, and had promised to convince Congress to vote in Libya’s favor. The Libyans were confident that the Bush administration would get its way at home. “The Americans do what they don’t say, and they don’t say what they do,” one of the men said.
“The war in Iraq?” I asked Miloud Mehadbi, the center’s director of foreign relations. “What was the lesson there?”
He didn’t miss a beat.
“It showed there is no democracy, no international law, no human rights. It’s your own selfish interests you should pursue. You should not give a damn about anything else.”
His eyes were hard.
“No one is in the position of being apologetic to the regime of Saddam Hussein. They see what’s taking place and the picture is very gloomy. Unless you give in to the United States and its interests, then consider Iraq. The Leader was clear that we’re paying money to buy our safety, to avoid a confrontation with mad, runaway U.S. power.”
He wasn’t talking only about money for the victims, but about purchasing a place in this new, post–September 11 world. Libya had realized there was no more patience for a country like Libya. The Cold War was over. Two Palestinian intifadas had failed. And then September 11 fixed American attention on terrorism. As I talked to people in Tripoli, I began to understand that Qaddafi had embarked on his second revolution, an image rehabilitation on a grand scale. The UN had lifted sanctions after those first payouts to the terror victims, leaving only American sanctions to dispel.
Anybody who believes Qaddafi is addled by madness should consider his clever maneuvers after the invasion of Iraq. The fate of Saddam Hussein was a morality play writ large across Arabian skies. If Saddam had been the tyrant, Qaddafi would be the model pupil. He would bring Libya back into the world, and bring the world back to Libya. And Qaddafi, arguably the most terror-friendly ruler in all the Arab lands, would use the war on terror to get it done. It was cynical and hard-bitten. It was brilliant.
Over and over in Libya, I heard a repudiation of the past, and the cocky brag that the country would buy its way back into good standing. This was the conclusion dawning on many Arab despots: that Saddam had been forced into hiding because he refused to play along, not because of democracy, human rights, political prisoners, or press repression. The reasons Saddam Hussein no longer deserved to rule—the torment of his own people; the cruelty of his prisons; the midnight disappearances; the megalomaniacal grip on power—also existed under Qaddafi. But in Libya, not only were such offenses not casus belli, they were forgivable traits to be brushed aside while patching up bad relations with an oil-rich state.
“They think we’re a purist country. No, we were practical. We had to buy peace,” Prime Minister Shukri Ghanim told me.
“By some of our estimates, we lost more than $30 billion because of sanctions. For us, it’s an economic venture. We’re sick and tired of this. If it’s only money at the end of the day, we have to pay money. The United States has the means and the power and they will not hesitate to use them. What can we do?”
He looked at me, the visiting American.
“You can change the rules in the middle of the game,” he said, “so what can we do?”
“Do you like my ass?” The girl in the tight white pants had her face up to my ear; she was hollering.
We’d been watching her dance for the past half hour, shaking her hips alone and half drunk in a circle of men. She and I were the only women. I laughed. We were drinking illegal red wine.
“Your ass is fantastic!” I yelled into the dark cave of her blow-dried mane. “Just like Jennifer Lopez!”
She cooed, touched my cheek, and staggered back to dance some more.
“She does look like Jennifer Lopez,”
Nabil* mused. The party had been thrown by his cousins in the sprawling family estate on the outskirts of Tripoli. The ceiling beams had been imported from Italy. Albino peacocks roamed sandy gardens. Muhammad Ali’s autograph was still visible on the bar, the ghost of a long-gone day when Tripoli glittered fashionably.
Nabil had dropped into my life fortuitously, introduced by a mutual friend as I headed into Libya. When I finished the official interviews and bid good-night to my stern minders, Nabil and his cousin picked me up and we plunged into Tripoli. We watched a soccer game at sunset, ate ice cream and smoked sheeshas in the old Italian plaza, and trolled the beachside shantytowns to buy black-market booze. The government knew, of course. They knew everything. One of the minders sat in a stuffed chair in the hotel lobby, watching me come and go. Nobody ever discussed it, but he sat there and slid his eyes after me.
“I like house music, crazy,” a skinny young guy was yelling now. He wiggled his head and rolled his glassy eyes. He kept slipping off into the darkness and stumbling back more stoned. We were sitting out under the stars.
“We’re not terrorists here, you know,” the guy said.
“I know.”
The music pounded, and he bounced in place. There were only a handful of guests, and they clustered around; it seemed significant to them that I was there. Sanctions had turned this ancient Mediterranean capital, roved for centuries by Romans and Africans and Greeks, into a shadowland. At least now commercial flights could land at the airport again. For years, Libyans got out of the country by hopping a ferry to Malta, or crossing the excruciating deserts of North Africa by bus, driving all day and all night to reach Cairo. Still they were eager to tell me of the countries they had visited, to display their urbanity, their hunger for the world. They wanted to tell me about Rome and Paris and London, about everything under the sun except for the one thing I had come to write about—their lives at home, under Qaddafi.
Here is the mental rearrangement: People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It’s what they don’t say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the thing itself. If you accumulate everything that is unmentionable, feared, stamped out, then you have an idea of just how much terror people have swallowed over the years. You begin to grade the repression on a spectrum. Egyptian politics have been languishing in a torture cell for decades, for example, but people on the street still gripe about the government and roll their eyes at the president.
Not in Libya. The people I met in Libya were locked in the basement of an asylum. Social interaction was all nervous smiles, evasive answers, and cups of tea. Nobody wanted to talk about the Leader. When I tried to interview fans in the soccer stadium, they stared in mute panic and skittered away. A Libyan oil worker agreed to talk, but only in his car. We spun down empty streets on a blazing afternoon and he delivered a long monologue, filled my ears with stories of mass executions, corruption among Qaddafi’s children, and torture, and I wrote it all down, knowing that I could never quote him. When I met a young Libyan official for coffee, he glanced over both shoulders before confessing his hope that Libya could become a “normal country”—in spite of the Leader. I was filling my notebooks with scraps and bits, and it all added up to fear.
“I’m sorry,” one of the men said gently. He leaned closer and murmured: “I have already been twice to jail.”
The hotel telephone shrilled at midnight.
“We want to talk to you,” the man ordered in broken English. “Come downstairs now, please.”
“It’s very late,” I said. “I’m just going to bed.”
“Now, please.” And the line went dead.
I stood up and struggled into my clothes, disoriented. I must be in trouble. They’re angry because I’ve been hanging around with Nabil and his family. I pulled on my jeans.
The men waited in the lobby. “Dr. Giuma wants to see you.” This was the official who had issued my visa. They marched me out and drove me wordlessly through the darkened streets. Dark waves tumbled onto the shore and sizzled to flatness on the sands.
Lights blazed in the information ministry. Dr. Giuma was all toothy smiles. He served me a little glass of tea. He wanted to know if I was happy, was there anything I needed? I began to relax, to chat.
Then he got very cold, very fast. It had come to his attention, he said, that I’d been complaining about his staff, saying that they were not sufficiently helpful.
“On the contrary,” I told him. “I’ve been very pleased.” It was true. I wondered if this was a meeting he held out of habit.
“We have reports,” he said.
“I don’t know where you are getting your information,” I said, flushing but trying to speak slowly, clearly. “But it’s wrong. I haven’t complained to anybody. So your information is wrong.” Even to my own ears, I sounded guilty. Guilty of what, I wondered.
“You know, we were not expecting you to come now,” Dr. Giuma pressed on. “We had a program for the journalists. It was before. You were not here. We are trying to do our best for you although we did not expect you now.”
“I know,” I told him. “And really, I am most grateful for your trouble.”
Then, the sugar-crusted bottom of the tea glass, and a sudden standing up, a thank you, a tacit invitation to leave. There was no explanation or apology. No acknowledgment that it was strange, hauling me down here in the middle of the night to make me squirm. They were through with me. We had talked about nothing.
Back within the dry, bright walls of my hotel room, I sat very still and listened to the blood rage through my ears. I was wide awake.
The doctor swept into the lobby clutching a little bouquet of tea roses from his garden. “On behalf of the Libyan-American Friendship Association, welcome to Libya,” he said officiously, dipping into a little bow as he handed over the flowers. He was most delighted to make my acquaintance, and his wife sent her very best regards.
“Do we have time for a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“Of course!” he said grandly. “We have plenty of time.”
The Libyan-American Friendship Association had caught me by surprise. I’d called the doctor because I’d heard the hospitals were falling apart under sanctions, that medicine and sheets were in short supply, that the entire medical infrastructure was on the edge of collapse.
The condition of the hospitals was relevant because of the Bulgarian nurses. Six foreign nurses and two doctors had been languishing in jail, reportedly under torture, for four years already, accused of injecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV-tainted blood. The children were sick; that much was undeniable. But the government’s insistence that it was an Israeli conspiracy, that the hapless nurses were in fact Mossad agents, sounded insane. I suspected it was easier to blame Israel than to own up to the truth: that the Leader’s great revolution was a bust, that the Jamahiriya was a land where incompetent and cash-strapped hospitals pumped people full of bad blood.
The doctor had concocted a plan: He’d pick me up on my last day in town, take me for a tour of the hospital where he worked, and then drop me at the airport. If we got caught together, we’d say he had offered me a lift to the airport. The idea that we’d elude the notice of the government was quixotic, even semi-delusional, but it was all we had.
“So what is this friendship association exactly?” I asked him, studying his calling card. It was red, white, blue, and, of course, green. We were sitting over cappuccino in the café off the hotel lobby.
“Some of the American wives here, like my wife,” he said. “They just like to get together. We celebrate, like, the Fourth of July.”
“So your wife is American?” I was intrigued. “How does she get along here?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, she is very happy,” he said. “It’s better her
e than where she comes from.”
“How so?”
His wife, he explained, had been a local teenager from a hardscrabble background in West Virginia, where he’d been sent for medical training.
“I met her when she was nineteen. We got married when she was twenty-one,” he said. “We live in a farm outside Tripoli. She has freedom here. She has whatever she needs. We have two daughters and a son.
“She’s happy here,” he said again. “She’d be very interested to meet you, if you ever come back to Libya.”
We had finished our coffee. Shall we? We shall.
The car was an aging sedan, rusted and streaked, sagging wearily down on its wheels. With a grunt, the doctor gallantly hoisted my suitcase into the trunk. The car bounced and settled, taken aback by the weight. We arranged ourselves in the front seat, slammed the doors, and began to bake like a pair of hams.
“Let’s see,” he muttered nervously.
He turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. He clenched his jaw and tried again, throwing a little shoulder into it. The car sat, implacable.
“Heh, heh. I don’t know why I brought this car. I have other cars at home,” he said. His embarrassment was palpable. I caught it like a yawn.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him lamely. “I’m just so grateful that you’re trying to help me.”
Finally, with a wheeze, the engine rolled reluctantly over. “There we are,” my host said briskly. We eased out of the hotel parking lot, toward the coast. The entire city was frozen in a swoon of heat. Even the waves seemed exhausted, as if the water had grown heavier, straining to heave themselves onto the sands. Sun glinted evilly on the sea, tinting the Mediterranean a sickly turquoise.
The car rattled, shuddered, then found its gear again, jolting like a child’s toy car sent skittering along a racetrack. The other cars screamed past, wild and fearless, swerving around our limping rattletrap. The windows opened just a crack. My cotton blouse was as wet as a used washcloth; I pushed damp tendrils of hair behind ringing ears.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 10
