Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

And Qaddafi has become, for most Libyans, simply a fact of life. Three-quarters of Libya’s citizens have been born since he came to power. During that period, the cult of personality has sparked and dimmed in a way that has a certain congruence with the phases of Soviet leadership: a heady moment of Leninist-style revolution when many people believed in the ideals; a Stalinist period of cruel repression and deliberate violence; a long Khrushchev period of mild thaw; and now a Brezhnev-style period of corruption, chaos, and factionalism. Many of Saif Qaddafi’s admirers hope that he will prove to be the reforming Gorbachev of the story.

That an essentially repressive society can be characterized as being in the midst of reform reflects just how grim things used to be there. In Tripoli, I heard stories about life inside prison from many people whose only offense against the Jamahiriya was to be critical of it. In 2002, a former government official who publicly called for free elections and a free press was jailed; he was released in early 2004—only to be sent back to prison two weeks later for criticizing the regime to foreign reporters. There is no opposition press; an Internet journalist who had published stories critical of the government spent several months in prison last year on trumped-up charges. “Social rehabilitation” facilities—effectively, detention centers—are supposedly for the protection of women who have broken the laws against adultery and fornication, some of whom are in fact rape victims rejected by their families. A woman in these compounds can leave only if a male relative or fiancé takes her into his custody.

More widely covered is the case of five Bulgarian nurses who were accused in 1999 of deliberately infecting 426 children in a Benghazi hospital with HIV. The nurses were tortured until they confessed, then sentenced to death in May 2004. Among people outside Libya, the accusations seem bizarre and concocted; among most Libyans, it’s taken for granted that the children were deliberately infected and that the Bulgarians are the likeliest culprits. (Whereas Western investigators have blamed the infections on poor sanitation, a Libyan doctor close to the case maintains that only children on the ward where the convicted nurses worked were infected, and that the infections ceased when the Bulgarians left, even though sanitary conditions in all the wards remain far from ideal.) Saif has said that the convictions were unjust, a brave stand given how important it is that he not appear to be capitulating to Western pressure. “Sure, the Big Guy let Saif say the nurses were innocent—to see how it would play,” a junior government official explained. “And it played badly.” A few months later, Qaddafi reaffirmed the hard line, declaring that the infections were caused by “an organization aiming to destroy Libya.” Negotiations with the Bulgarians are ongoing, however, and Libya’s supreme court has granted the defendants a new trial, which is to begin in May. (NB: They were finally extradited to Bulgaria in 2007, where they were pardoned.)

Qaddafi is no Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin. He has been brutal and capricious, but he has not killed a large part of his own population. It is illegal to slander the Leader and Law 71 makes a capital offense of any group activity opposed to the revolution, but this rule has been less strictly enforced lately. Libya has signed the UN Convention against Torture, and the minister of justice has said that he will bring Libyan law in line with international human-rights standards. Some of this is window dressing. “They closed the People’s Prisons, where all our political prisoners were,” one Tripolitan lawyer told me. “And what happened? The political prisoners got reassigned to other prisons.” The foreign minister, Abdurrahman Shalgham, told me with pride that four hundred policemen had been arrested for human-rights abuses—then admitted that none has been found guilty.

Last year, Omar Alkikli, a highly regarded fiction writer who was a political prisoner for ten years in the seventies and early eighties, sued the Libyan government for excluding former prisoners from the Libyan Writers’ League. “I lost, and I knew I would lose,” he said. “But I made my point.” Hasan Agili, a medical student at Tripoli’s Al-Fateh University, told me, “Okay, they’ve fixed maybe four percent of our serious problems, but I guess it’s something.” An official in Benghazi said, “The laws that were made of stone are now made of wood.”