BENGHAZI- Across North Africa's Roman coast, a vast, complex migration is
taking place. The transfer of people and ideas has turned a group of
stultified, neighboring autocracies into a fluid continuum in which one can
merely speculate what new transformation the next day will bring.
A late model tour bus pulled into a roadside truck stop restaurant and a group
of distinctive Gangetic women with bejeweled noses, shalwar kameezes and
South Asian-styled hijabs stepped into the sandy parking lot as if from
another dimension.
Behind them were their husbands, an affable group of Indian university
professors who were fleeing Libya courtesy of the Indian Embassy in Egypt,
which was sending them all the way to Mumbai, all expenses paid. India was
stepping into the Libyan
crisis and rescuing its citizens, using a soft form of power projection in the
process.
The professors described how Indian diplomats in Cairo had saved the day and
soon they would return to their respective states and cities. Though Libyan
banks around Benghazi where they'd lived and prospered for years, had reopened,
individuals fleeing were only allowed to withdraw 200 dinars (about US$165)
irrespective of the thousands of dinars they had in their savings.
The crisis of the Indians in Libya gave Delhi an opportunity to display its
self-sufficiency in the same way it refused aid during the 2004 Boxing Day
tsunami. A rising India not only did not need help, but was now in a position
to help others. The small South and East Asian diasporas, though notable, are
almost insignificant when compared to the estimated one and a half million
Egyptian men who are hemorrhaging out of Libya's borders into vulnerable,
post-revolutionary neighbors.
In contrast to those who had made it to safety in Egypt proper, the scene at
Egypt's immigration bureau was one of pure chaos. An untold number of
unskilled, mostly Bangladeshi migrant workers, all male and appearing anywhere
between the ages of 18-30, crowded in cold squalor turning what was once a
quiet, obscure international border into an ad hoc hostel for instant refugees.
Dhaka was either unaware or unwilling to help its stranded young men caught in
political limbo a continent away while South Korea had young men in suits
efficiently managing their expatriate workers through the scrum. Clean-cut
Koreans were being ushered around by their compatriots in an act of face-saving
while Bangladeshis and lesser numbers of sub-Saharan Africans, Filipinos and
Nepalis sorted themselves out by language and commonality, huddling in filthy
blankets and kicking rubbish off the floor to clear space to lay their heads.
The spirit of Tunisia's social media powered revolution ousting president Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali initially bypassed isolated Libya and wafted into Cairo's
Tahrir Square, sweeping Hosni Mubarak into an unexpected retirement in Sharm
el-Sheik. Tunisia and Egypt were tired autocracies but have economies where
tourism, much of it from the West, is a core component of their respective
country's economic lifeblood.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, with its history of sanctions and self-imposed
petro-isolationism, where getting an individual tourist visa took the patience
of a stalactite, is a very different case from the recently departed
suit-and-tie dictators to Tripoli's east and west.
Passing through post-revolutionary Cairo and Alexandria, it was business as
usual minus the once ubiquitous Mubarak visages that peppered the landscape of
everyday Egyptian life. The Libyan revolt, I knew, would be a very different
story. Gaddafi would not be getting on a jet to Saudi Arabia, since he'd be
persona non grata following an alleged assassination attempt against King
Abdullah in 2003, and quietly retiring to a Libyan beach resort was an unlikely
prospect after he turned the army's guns on his own citizenry.
Arriving at the wind-blown frontier of newly liberated eastern Libya's border,
I was greeted by a burly Kevlar-clad Libyan revolutionary with a massive
Soviet-era AK-74 rifle slung round his back who looked a cross between a shaggy
Rambo and an out-of-shape baseball player.
After crossing what seeming like a good few kilometers of no-man's land between
the two countries, I didn't quite know what to expect. Thinking it the type of
situation where a smile goes a long way, I began a grin, trying to appear as
non-threatening as possible.
The burly gunman returned the advance by throwing up a peace sign and insisting
I share a bulky orange with him and celebrate al-thawra jedida, the new
revolution. After the exchange of a good amount of Arabic pleasantries and
declining to look at my passport, Rambo commanded a pliable cadre and
instructed him to drive me to Tobruk, the nearest city some 140 kilometers
away.
The slight culture shock came when we pulled up at the next checkpoint and a
female cadre in a form-fitting brown motorcycle jacket with a short shock of
black hair issued the driver terse instructions to take me to a specific hotel
when we arrived in Tobruk.
In every town my Egyptian microbus sped through between Alexandria and the
border, virtually every adult woman marched about in a billowing abaya and
niqab combination giving them the appearance of black Rorshach ink blots
fading into the simmering desert horizon.
The emancipated revolutionary woman I encountered after crossing the border was
clearly a product of the gender equality promulgated in Gaddafi's Arab
socialist-nationalist wedge of the Sahara. His version of progress, of which
some was significant in terms of gender equality and infrastructure, was,
however, coupled by over four decades of permanent revolutionary rhetoric that
was unraveling by the hour and a freedom deficit on a scale of which I'd only
encountered in the late Saparmurat Nizayov's Turkmenistan.
Then we were off, blasting 150 kilometers an hour down a faded asphalt ribbon
to Tobruk, a city claimed by everyone from Roman expeditionaries to Nazi Field
Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps.
Tobruk had fallen to what was being loosely termed "anti-Gaddafi forces", or
more simply, "rebels". A few kilometers outside of the city we were greeted by
a group of said rebels controlling an entrance above the harbor. They were clad
in camouflage in every imaginable color, pattern and combination of the two.
After some dialogue with my driver, who did not seem to be clear on precisely
where the hotel was, the rebels hurried me into another car, stuffed a wad of
dinars in the new driver's shirt pocket and directed us to the Internet-less,
five-star hotel on the outskirts of downtown Tobruk. These so-called rebels had
the logistics of managing the stream of foreign journalists down to a tee.
Having been in many war zones and de facto states over the past decade, I'd
never been handled so efficiently and quickly.
The flight of Gaddafi's foreign workers belched chaos into already destabilized
Tunisia and Egypt, which created an immediate test for both nascent,
transitional governments as well as the international community, Western and
Arab journalists were funneling into Libya in the opposite direction at a rapid
pace.
The following morning with the sun bouncing off a deep azure Mediterranean on
the Gulf of Bomba, I was bundled into the back of a dusty KIA minivan with a
group of Egyptians working for a Sweden-based group that monitors human rights
in the Arab world.
We bound down a litter-strewn desert highway across the Sahara's northern
reaches past hulks of rusting cars and trucks whose drivers looked to have
fared no better than unlucky Red Army tank operators in the 1980s in northern
Afghanistan.
Our steadfast driver was undeterred and we blew by convoys of Egyptians fleeing
with all of their worldly belongings bound to the back of cramped vehicles of
every stripe making a beeline for the Egyptian frontier. After hours on the
road, stopping at the odd roadside cappuccino stand to talk politics and
regroup, we descended into the verdant agricultural tracts at the base of the
al-Jebel al-Akhdar, the Green Mountains, of western Cyrenaica, where stiff
dromedaries gave way to stout donkeys. We made our way toward Benghazi, Libya's
second city and the capital of eastern Libya's not yet clearly defined
revolution.
While the major powers debated instituting an Iraq-style no-fly zone to prevent
Gaddafi's air force pilots who have yet defected to Malta from bombing fellow
Libyans, eastern Libya's rebel forces manned Soviet-era anti-aircraft guns in
the middle of buzzing roundabouts, trying to remain vigilant in the midday sun.
Pulling into downtown Benghazi at dusk after two non-stop days of travel,
trashed government buildings and crude anti-Gaddafi graffiti greet visitors.
After checking into a hotel buzzing with journalists, I take a dusk stroll
through a cityscape somewhat reminiscent of Baghdad's halcyon days in late
April 2003 before Iraq turned from fawda, anarchy, to fitna,
internecine war that choked central Iraq for years.
There is a relative calm in Benghazi in the very immediate present but no one
seems to quite know what the next step for North Africa's unfinished revolution
is. There has been talk of the structuring of a unified rebel command, but
there is scant information on just what such an organization might do
offensively or defensively vis-a-vis Gaddafi's loyalist forces who still
control some of the most politically significant territory in neighboring
Tripolitania.
Walking by a small mosque, a couple of local middle-aged men stopped me before
heading in for sunset prayers. They began praising US President Barack Obama
and the Clintons, both former president Bill and Secretary of State Hillary,
leaving out the Republican father and son Bushes who bookended the
aforementioned administrations, and told me with confidence that the almost
42-year-long reign of Gaddafi would meet its now certain end.
"Gaddafi khalas," Gaddafi is finished, they uttered, before thanking me
for coming to their country, sliding off their creased leather loafers and
ducking into the mosque in a partially free Libya.
Returning to the hotel, a CNN correspondent was practically shouting off a
blaring flat screen TV in the mezzanine showcasing a dog-and-pony show piece
he'd been allowed to do after the network was shrewdly invited to Tripoli by
the regime, desperate to project an image of control over a capital many in the
rest of the country believe to be under siege.
More cities are falling under rebel control and locals speak of the revolution
on the one hand as a high-minded ushering-in of freedom and democratic
principles led by intellectuals and enlightened military officers, and on the
other as a devolution into tribalism in which Gaddafi's al-Qaddhafa tribe is
pitted against the rest of the populace, particularly those in the east who
have rebelled against invaders from time immemorial and who will settle for
nothing less then his imminent overthrow.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist specializing in the Middle
East and South and Central Asia.
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