A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  As foreigners in this highly charged atmosphere we needed to be very careful. We had the blindfolds and they had the guns.

  The interrogators understood immediately what ‘foreign journalist’ was, but when the Belgian man behind us told them he was a museum curator, there was a pause. ‘What’s your job?’ one shouted.

  This will be interesting, I thought: a Belgian man speaking English and wearing a blindfold, trying to explain to Egyptian soldiers who speak Arabic what a curator does.

  ‘I look out for interesting pieces of art then bring them together in exhibitions,’ he replied.

  The soldiers obviously decided it was easier to concentrate on the journalists. I remember thinking, somewhat bizarrely, that should I ever be kidnapped again I’d want to describe myself as a museum curator.

  ‘You like Mubarak or you like opposition?’ one asked me.

  ‘I do not take sides, I just report what is in front of me,’ I said.

  There was no physical abuse of the foreigners, but the Egyptian in front of us – who had been caught taking photographs – was assaulted. He seemed to be going crazy. The soldiers shouted at him in Arabic and he shouted back. Each time he did, I heard a dreadful sound; I found out later they were bashing his forehead with the butts of their guns. He was in a completely different category from us and I felt a deep pity for him. We had a foreign government behind us, and that meant something; this man, being an Egyptian, was completely powerless.

  About two hours into the questioning there was a dramatic change of tone. In the time since the German journalist called her embassy, German security services had managed to track us through our phones. Although the police had taken them, they had not removed the batteries – which meant the German Embassy had been able to track us and, through them, so had Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia’s Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, told me later he personally intervened that night, phoning Egyptian officials and telling them: ‘I say to you very clearly – no harm is to come to the Australian and German journalists your army is holding and you should release them immediately.’

  The German and Australian intervention presumably explained why the aggressive tone of our interrogators had suddenly softened.

  ‘You realise we have brought you here for your own safety?’ one soldier said. ‘Cairo is a dangerous place at the moment. As foreigners you are in particular danger. We’ve got you here to protect you.’

  ‘Thank you for helping us,’ I replied. It went against the grain but this was a time to be low-key, not angry.

  The soldiers took off our blindfolds and electrical cord but left them on the Egyptian. I could now see he had blood all over his forehead.

  Around 2am, we were driven back into Cairo. That was when I saw one of the worst things I’ve ever witnessed.

  Approaching central Cairo, we drove down a side street blocked by a Mubarak mob carrying Mubarak posters and armed with machetes and baseball bats, who had set bins alight. Seeing our bus slow down, the mob ran towards us. The seven soldiers on the bus jumped off, holding their guns in the air. The mob backed away.

  One of the soldiers then grabbed the Egyptian man by the back of the shirt and dragged him off the bus. He was bent over and still tied up and blindfolded. The soldier pushed him towards the mob. I couldn’t hear what was said but I surmised that the soldier was telling them the man was anti-Mubarak. The soldier then pushed him into the crowd.

  The last thing I saw as the bus drove off was the mob kicking the blindfolded man. Here was a man who had probably just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had absolutely no protection. He was probably killed within minutes. In Mubarak’s Egypt, life and death could be that fickle.

  My Australian colleague Hamish Macdonald – one of the best foreign correspondents I’ve seen in action – put the treatment of foreign journalists into sharp relief. ‘The attacks on journalists these past days are probably just a small window into what this 30-year-old regime is capable of, and the kind of treatment that has been meted out for decades on Hosni Mubarak’s own people,’ he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.1

  That night, I saw up close the ugliness and unpredictability of the Middle East. No one in Cairo was safe. The rule of law no longer existed – but it had got to the point where the critical mass of opposition and anger was so strong that it overwhelmed even the apparatus of a dictatorship. Thirty years of pent-up anger, frustration and fear were finding an outlet.

  The soldiers took us into the centre of Cairo and dropped us off somewhere a few blocks from our hotel, saying, ‘OK, you can go now.’ I said to the soldiers, ‘Could one of you escort us back to our hotel? You’ve been telling us how dangerous Cairo is and now you want us to walk the streets at 2am.’

  Weirdly, one of the men who’d blindfolded us then escorted Jason and me several blocks back to the Semiramis.

  Jason and I separately rang our editors in Australia, who said they wanted us to write the story of what had happened.

  I stayed in Cairo for another few days after that. The Australian’s Managing Editor, Louise Evans, offered me a security escort, but I said to her, ‘The last thing I want is a guy with a gun hanging around. There are enough guns here. It’s not going to help.’ In that situation, you’re better off as a smaller target. The offer from my paper highlighted to me the different situation I was in compared to Egyptian journalists and citizens. Twelve journalists in Egypt had been killed since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and according to human rights groups scores of others were imprisoned and tortured during this period. I had the backup of a newspaper and foreign government – they had nothing.

  Within 12 days, Mubarak would step down, yet the popular protests that toppled him would cause a vacuum into which Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood would rush.

  I would go back in October to cover the period leading up to the first elections Egypt had had for four decades. It was a very busy, vibrant atmosphere, and there was a sense of excitement among the public that they could finally vote.

  But the newly reinstated Muslim Brotherhood was obviously well prepared and had very good networks, even though it had been banned for 50 years. It was very active in getting young people to vote. I went to a hospital where I interviewed a doctor who was one of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders. He told me that there would be a strong social welfare element, and that they would invest in schools and hospitals.

  A lot of Egyptians were practising Muslims who felt that Mubarak hadn’t been in any way religious. There was a strong sense we’d noticed even before the revolution of wanting to get back to Islamic traditions. Secular Egyptians obviously didn’t like that. The Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, ran on a platform that was a hybrid of democracy and sharia law.

  There were plenty of Egyptians who didn’t want an Islamic country, but the Brotherhood had a strong constituency and they won the election. Morsi was elected President in June 2012.

  However, Morsi made some terrible judgments and that allowed the army to run a counter-campaign against him, backed by public demonstrations, and launch a coup that saw him deposed a year later. In Egypt, the army is all-powerful and if you alienate the army then you are in trouble. One of the triggers for the army to move against Morsi was that he allowed jihadist groups to go into the Sinai without providing strong enough backing for the army there. Some soldiers turned up to Morsi’s office, kidnapped him at gunpoint, took him to an unknown location, and he has been in prison ever since. The Muslim Brotherhood was immediately declared a terrorist organisation.

  Having launched a coup, the army then wanted to cloak its actions in legitimacy. By banning the largest political party – the Muslim Brotherhood – from running in elections, the victory of their candidate, army general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was guaranteed. In 2014, el-Sisi was elected the new President. It had been a masterclass in how the army retains power in a country such as Egypt. The crackdown on freedoms and huma
n rights under el-Sisi was just as bad, if not worse, than it had been under Hosni Mubarak.

  The more things change …

  CHAPTER 10

  Colonel Gaddafi’s Gangster Regime

  February 2011

  WITHIN DAYS OF RETURNING TO ISRAEL AFTER MY ARMY interrogation in Cairo, I was off to cover the implosion of yet another Middle East dictatorship: the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Egypt’s Mubarak regime had been appalling – but to me the Libyan one had an added element of cruelty to it.

  Even in a region of bloodshed, Libya stood out under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He and his family ruled Libya – a small but extremely oil-rich country – for 42 years. Like many dictators, he put his sons into key positions. His second son, Saif al-Islam, was a playboy. But inside Libya the atrocities were extraordinary.

  Gaddafi’s reputation was as bad as that of Mubarak, so it was no surprise that any crackdown would be just as brutal. My Editor said to me: ‘Libya looks like the next domino to fall, can you go there?’

  It was very hard to fly in directly. So I flew into Cairo and then I got a public bus to near the border with Libya and stayed at a little hotel there. I met two Indian journalists who said they were driving into Libya the next day, so the three of us drove into Libya together.

  There was no one at the border when we crossed. Gaddafi’s border guards had all fled. No one could get into the capital, Tripoli, so most journalists, like us, were going in from Egypt and travelling via Tobruk to Benghazi, on Libya’s northeast coast.

  Benghazi is a historic seafarers’ port with old markets. It was strongly fundamentalist. The eastern part of Libya had always been anti-Gaddafi and Bengahzi had become the capital of the uprising. Gaddafi had the view ‘Benghazi hates me’, therefore he starved it of money. Over time it had fuelled hatred and hostility.

  Some of the people I talked to told stories about gunfights going on around Benghazi between Gaddafi’s army and the anti-Gaddafi militia. In fact, the anti-Gaddafi forces had been so strong that they had forced the Gaddafi soldiers out of Benghazi.

  At breakfast in my hotel, which was right on the water, one of the other journalists said to me, ‘There’s a body floating up onto the shore.’ When I went back to my hotel room, I could see it.

  Gaddafi began as a charismatic leader with enormous public support. Many Libyans were proud of how this nationalist stood up to the powerful United States. For a country of seven million people, Libya punched well above its weight. Gaddafi saw himself as a great Arab socialist who would share the spoils of Libya. During his first 10 or 15 years in power, he spent a lot of the money on schools and hospitals and aged-care centres. Libya today is almost Soviet in its appearance, full of Gaddafi architecture that resembles East Germany of the 1960s.

  But then Gaddafi appeared to become delusional, even psychopathic – he would brutally dispense with his enemies without flinching. He banned English from being taught in schools and universities to hermetically seal off his little kingdom from contact with the outside world.

  One incident showed me the cruelty of his regime.

  It was 6 June 1984 and Gaddafi wanted to deliver a message to his opponents. About 6000 students aged from six to 18 were taken to a covered basketball stadium in Benghazi. A long, thin curtain hung from the roof.

  In a scene broadcast live on State TV, seven judges appeared and put on trial 30-year-old Sadiq Shwehdi, accused of being disloyal to the regime. He was quickly found guilty and the curtain dropped to reveal a noose. Some in the crowd, sensing what was about to happen, shouted, ‘No!’

  The noose was put around Shwehdi’s neck and the rope was pulled up until he was hanging. But without any trapdoor or sudden fall, it did not break his neck. One of Gaddafi’s supporters, a woman called Huda Ben Amer, began swinging on his legs. Still this was not enough.

  He was taken to a hospital where a doctor injected him with poison. Still he would not die. A doctor filled a sock with sand and pushed it down his throat while holding his nose. Finally, he died.

  I learnt the details of this story from the man’s brother, who joined the 2011 protests against Gaddafi. The brother himself is in a wheelchair, having had his legs broken by the regime.

  This is just one of hundreds of stories that reveal the darkness of the Gaddafi years. People would tell many stories of opponents of the regime found around Benghazi, strung up from traffic lights or soccer goalposts. Wherever I travelled in Libya, I saw fear.

  Like a lot of dictators in the region, Gaddafi didn’t fall quickly. There was a strong rear-guard action.

  The situation in Benghazi was volatile. The word had gone out that my hotel was full of foreign journalists and Gaddafi opponents. One morning when I got up, the glass in the foyer of the hotel had been smashed; someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail. Another time, two men with Kalashnikovs had come in during the night, knocked on the door and taken away a doctor at gunpoint, probably to go and tend a wounded fighter from one of the militia groups.

  I vividly remember the night when we thought Gaddafi was coming to Benghazi. One of the security men from Sky News said to me, ‘We’re flying out tomorrow because we think the Gaddafi troops are moving in. If I were you I’d get out.’ I could see foreign media crews preparing to leave.

  I’d become friendly with various journalists, including a couple of reporters from Turkey. They said, ‘We’ve got to get out of this hotel, it’s become a real target.’ So I asked, ‘Can I come with you?’

  We left together and tried to get into another hotel. We couldn’t get into the hotel across the river, or any other hotel, and it was too dangerous to go travelling into the night. So they rang the Turkish Consul General in Benghazi who said they could stay there, and that I could stay as well.

  The Consul General was welcoming and organised dinner for us. One of the Turkish journalists and I slept on the floor of his office under a huge portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. I remember lying there looking up at Ataturk as the sound of gunfire could be heard around Benghazi – the sound of civil war. I felt extremely grateful to the Turks. Gaddafi’s supporters had indeed made their way into Benghazi and the city was probably within 48 hours of falling. On 17 March the UN authorised a no-fly zone over Libya, which had the effect of pushing back the Gaddafi forces and, in my view, almost certainly headed off a massacre in Benghazi.

  The fighting was going to go on and on and there was no resolution in sight. I flew back to Israel.

  Some regimes would survive the Arab Spring. In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah used force and a lot of money: he gave out US$130 billion in salary increases and spending on religious institutions. In Jordan, another King Abdullah used moderate force and moderate money. In Morocco, King Mohammed VI gave more rights to the parliament. But Gaddafi had built up so much hatred that the number of people who wanted him gone was overwhelming.

  The uprising in Libya would ultimately fail, however, for two main reasons: the opposition fractured and there were no alternative institutions to replace the dictatorship.

  Disillusionment quickly set in. Many of the anti-Gaddafi units began using their weapons for criminal activities. One man who had fought against Gaddafi lamented: ‘Gaddafi was horrible, but I never knew of him capturing the relative of somebody if they could not find the person they wanted.’ The man added: ‘After 42 years of Gaddafi mentality, there’s a little Gaddafi in all Libyans.’

  This situation – replicated around the country after Gaddafi – reflected Libya’s crisis. Gaddafi had been replaced by warring tribes. From a gangster regime to a gang culture. The country will take many years to find stability.

  The chaos has unleashed a massive new supply of weapons throughout the Middle East. According to a European diplomat who specialises in weapons, many of the arms from Libya flowed through Egypt into Gaza.

  In August 2011, the net began closing on Muammar Gaddafi. He’d gone into hiding, but special forces intelligence teams from the US, Britain, Jordan and Qatar had joined the hunt
. Expecting that he might be caught any moment, journalists from around the world – including me – scrambled to get back into the country.

  The journey to Tripoli was eventful. For part of it I was accompanied by Hamish Macdonald from Network Ten, then later ABC America. After a couple of days Hamish went in a different direction and I continued with some French journalists towards Tripoli. There I was driving through the desert of Libya and watching tracer fire shoot across the night sky. The unnerving thing about tracer fire is that it’s hard to tell how close the shooters are. Someone with obvious firepower could be five minutes away. Or the darkness might be playing tricks on you: they could be 50 kilometres from you.

  It’s interesting how we adapt to our environment: after a while the group I was travelling with – mainly French journalists – barely looked up when another burst of fire appeared overhead.

  We were forced to stop in the middle of the desert with a flat tyre. I set up my laptop on the back of the car with my BGAN – the machine that connects you to a satellite and gives you internet. I filed a story for The Australian as tracer fire raced across the sky.

  There was one moment of farce. I hadn’t brought a flak jacket: travelling with one means you can spend hours being questioned by airport authorities. I prefer to be able to move quickly. But as we drove into Tripoli our driver warned us of snipers. The French journalists put on their flak jackets. All I had that was metallic was my MacBook Air. I had no idea whether, ballistically, a laptop would slow or deflect a bullet, but I clutched it in front of me and hoped for the best. This greatly amused the French journalists. Of all the ideas Steve Jobs had for the MacBook Air, this surely would not have been one of them.

  Our humour ceased when we heard that a car driving along this road earlier had been stopped by armed men who’d shot the Libyan driver dead and abducted his passengers. The three Italian journalists would eventually be released – no doubt after handing over money.