by Tony Horwitz
“It is something like a joke, this paper,” he said, staring disconsolately at the riverside fields, hemmed in by sentry posts and security fences. “We can make the desert bloom, but not minefields. If the Arabs want it back, they can have it.”
And so the drive went, all the way through the Jordan Valley; a fanatic, a liberal, a cynic, a fanatic again. If I had two hitchhikers at the same time, they were almost sure to disagree. If I had one, he was sure to disagree with me. It was exhausting, and after a few hours I accelerated past the long lines of hitchhikers. Why should I feel guilt problems?
Late in the afternoon I pulled in at a kibbutz called Kfar Ruppin, the closest Israeli settlement to the Jordan River. It seemed like the logical place to gather a counterpoint to the bedouin, Khalaf Ghoblan, whom I'd interviewed on the Jordanian side of the river. A gardener named Micha Hellman put down his trowel and offered to show me around. He was a handsome, square-jawed kibbutznik my own age, with clear blue eyes and blue work clothes that stank of manure. Like Ghoblan, he'd spent his whole life by the river, and he toured the bank with a proprietorial air. “I know the history of every stone in this place,” he said of the fifty-year-old kibbutz. “I either put it there myself or I know who did.”
Hellman showed me the underground bunker where he slept as a child. After the 1967 war, Palestinian commandos roamed the opposite bank and often shelled Kfar Ruppin, killing several people. Hellman and the other children at riverside kibbutzim slept below-ground for three years, becoming known in Israel as “shelter kids.”
“In the morning we boys would come out and collect missile tails,” he said. Then the missiles were traded, like baseball cards. “One-twenty-one-millimeter shells were the best. They made nice candle holders. Sometimes the incoming shells turned up shards of Byzantine pottery and Roman coins as well.
To defend against terrorists, the Israelis mined the river's bank. In 1970, they added an electrified fence and a graded strip of sand, which soldiers checked daily for footprints. Though the border was now peaceful, cows at Kfar Ruppin occasionally stepped on unexploded mines and blew themselves up.
Hellman walked me to the fence and pointed through the wire at a small patch of muddy Jordan, just visible between tall reeds. “Kids grow up here now without ever putting a toe in the water,” he said.
Jordanian farmers picked oranges in a grove just on the other side of the river. Hellman said they sometimes shouted at their Israeli neighbors, but because he didn't know Arabic he couldn't understand what they said. Technically, Israel and Jordan were still at war. Even telephoning across the narrow divide was impossible.
At sunset we sat on a bluff overlooking the river valley. A Jordanian village was clearly visible on the other bank, and the evening call to prayer wafted across in the twilight. “I have sat here almost every day of my life, watching them do the same work as us, wake up with us, go to sleep with us,” Hellman said. “And I do not even know their names. I do not even know the name of their village.” He went silent for a moment, then turned and asked, “Do you think neighbors anywhere else in the world live like this?”
I rolled along the Israeli side of the river for two more days before returning to Jerusalem through the occupied West Bank. At the Palestinian village of Marj al-Naja I pulled over to balance my story with one more Arab voice. The village was as run-down and unprosperous as the kibbutzim to the north were lush and fertile. A hunched farmer named Mohammed Abu-Helal was carrying his eggplants in from the field and stopped to exchange pleasantries. He invited me for a cup of tea at his home, a windowless one-room hovel that he shared with his wife and six children. It was so cramped that the family rolled out mattresses each night, then rolled them back up to make living space in the morning.
Mohammed's English was poor, so one of his boys ran off to find the village schoolteacher to translate. I sat there awkwardly, swatting flies, and looking around the cramped room. I couldn't help wondering about the couple's sex life. Did they have none? Did the children just lie there in the dark and listen?
The boy returned with a twenty-five-year-old named Ahmed who had bitterness oozing from his pores. He introduced himself by saying that he'd spent several months in an Israeli prison for painting pro-PLO slogans.
Taking out my notebook, I asked Mohammed about his life by the river, and he launched into a rambling monologue. I picked up a few words; it was mostly about sheep and goats and oranges. I turned to Ahmed for a complete translation.
“He says for you that Palestine was once a paradise, but now the Jews make us live like donkeys.” This was all Ahmed said.
I asked Mohammed whether he had family on the river's east bank and how often he saw them. Again, the farmer's answer was amiable and long-winded, and he often pointed to one of his boys with pride. I turned to Ahmed.
“He says for you, the West Bank and Jordan used to be one big village. Now the river is one wall in a big Palestinian prison.”
After half an hour I abandoned the interview. I'd learned that the government subsidized kibbutz water but not that of Palestinian settlements; there was no electricity in Marj al-Naja and one toilet for the school's one hundred fifty students. The land was so poor that villagers worked as day laborers in neighboring Jewish fields. But I had learned very little about Mohammed's view of life by the river.
Ahmed walked me to my car. “Listen to what he says for you,” Ahmed said, jabbing a finger at my notebook. He was bothered that I hadn't taken down every syllable of his tirade against the Israeli occupation. “He says for you, there will be bloodshed unless the Zionists leave our land.”
I reached Jerusalem at sunset and sat in a café by the Damascus Gate, sipping Turkish coffee and watching the stones of the old city glow pink and orange in the fading autumn light. Greek Orthodox monks scurried past in their long brown robes. At sunset, a siren's blast announced the Jewish Sabbath, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer from the city's minarets. It was, for the moment at least, a peaceful and harmonious vision.
I tapped out my article, giving it a hopeful spin. There was the young Jordanian farmer who had told me, “You must say hello to your neighbor, whether you like him or not.” There was the Israeli artist who had begun sculpting the word “PEACE,” in Arabic, on a bluff facing Jordan. As a counterpoint, I included the story of Mohammed Abu-Helal, the poor Palestinian farmer, though I treaded cautiously on the bits Ahmed had claimed “he says for you.” Overall, it seemed to me that residents of both banks were weary of conflict and eager to get on with their lives, in peace.
Three weeks later, the occupied territories exploded in violence. The intifada had begun. An editor returned my Jordan River feature, which hadn't yet run, and suggested I consider a rewrite. When I returned to Jerusalem, along with hundreds of other journalists, the cobbled alleys of the old city echoed with the high-pitched pop of rubber bullets. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, I watched an Israeli patrol beat an old woman until she crumpled to the ground. Five minutes after driving into the Gaza Strip, a chunk of concrete crunched through the window of my rented car. And I realized too late that I should have been listening to what fiery-eyed Ahmed had been saying for me.
10—LIBYA—Colonel's Big Con
Woman is a female and man is a male.
—MUAMMAR QADDAFI, The Green Book
The summons came, like so many others, on a bad phone line in the middle of the night. America had shot down two Libyan warplanes over the Mediterranean earlier that day, and after dialing twenty times, a colleague in Cairo finally got through to Tripoli.
“Please,” the Libyan official shouted through the static, “tell all journalists, come.” Then the line went dead.
“That's it?” Geraldine asked when a correspondent called us to share the news. “ 'Please, all journalists, come'?”
“That's it.” There was a flight to Italy in the morning, he said, and a connection to Libya in the afternoon. “If we're lucky, we'll all get stranded in Rome.”
T
ales of journalistic woe in Libya were legendary. Not-so-secret police shadowed your every step. There were no decent phones. No one to talk to. And worst of all, no booze. “You feel depressed all the time, and followed in your depression,” said a Yugoslav reporter named Bosko. “Libya is the Romania of the Middle East.”
Libya was also one of those Middle Eastern countries—Iran and Saudi Arabia were two others—that routinely ignored journalists' visa requests for months, then granted entry with a few hours' warning, to everyone. But even by these minimalist standards, the invitation to Libya seemed thin.
The Italian agent issuing my ticket to Tripoli was skeptical. “American journalist?” he asked, checking my passport in Rome. “Horwitz? No visa?” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Buona fortuna. I wish you much luck.”
Twenty reporters were already at the airport bar, taking on liquids in preparation for the thirsty days ahead. The Middle East press corps, at least at the time of my tour, had its share of old-school hard drinkers.
“In a few hours you'll be dreaming of this,” declared one veteran Englishman, holding aloft a glass of white wine. The only booze available in Libya, he added, was bathtub gin called “flash.”
“First you get drunk, then you go blind.” He chuckled, refilling his glass. “Then the Libyans give you eighty-lashes.”
The Jerusalem-based press corps was rather more sober, searching bags and pockets for stray shekels, El Al stickers and forgotten laundry receipts written in Hebrew. Libya wasn't the sort of place where you wanted to arrive carrying any evidence of contact with die Zionist entity.
Not that an American passport was anything to crow about. Qaddafi liked to call the United States “Enemy Number One of Humanity,” and he had once advised young soldiers to “drink the blood” of Zionists and Americans. Now, to make the relationship even worse, the United States was claiming that a factory in Rabta, south of Tripoli, was about to produce poison gas; there was even talk of an American air strike on the plant. The Libyans were apparently letting us in to present their side—that the Rabta plant made medicines.
“Aspirin, extra-strength,” quipped a half-drunk reporter. “And deodorant.”
“Spray-on,” a companion chimed in. “The kind you wear a gas mask while using.”
I made the naïve suggestion that if the Libyans were really producing mustard gas, they'd be crazy to let us in to document the fact. An Australian across the table looked at me incredulously.
“Mate,” he said, splashing more wine in my glass, “this is Libya. Logic doesn't apply.”
Waiting in line to board the Libya Air plane, I gravitated toward the one passenger who wasn't wearing rumpled khakis and the besotted grin of a foreign correspondent. He was slight and balding, clad in tight jeans with a black leather belt and fierce tattoos on both hands. He looked like a cross between the local handyman and a Hell's Angel. His carry-on—eight cartons of duty-free cigarettes—marked him as a regular traveler to Libya.
“Can't get decent fags in Libya,” he explained with a North England burr. “Can't get decent anything in Libya, Got forty-seven kilos of canned food in me check-through.”
Jim Stead said he worked as a diver on an oil installation near Tripoli. He had been there eight years because he liked the “green stuff,” the money. “Not much else to like about the place,” he said. As the plane lifted off over the Mediter-; ranean, he chatted amiably about the oil business, about his week's R and R in Italy, and about his former profession: killing people.
“Mercenary for eight years, I was,” Stead said flatly. “Cyprus, Belgian Congo, few other bad spots.” He laughed. “See the world, kill people.”
He showed me his right hand, tattooed with a skull and crossbones and the words “Death or Glory.” He called it a “mercenary's badge.” His left hand bore another tattoo, of a samurai with a sword through his head. “Can't remember what that one means,” he said. “Too pissed on gin the night I got it.”
There were other badges of his trade: a bullet wound in his left arm, another in his right leg, and a bayonet scar on his shoulder. “Didn't get the bloke who gave me that scratch,” he said, shaking his head the way a fisherman does when recalling the big one that got away. But plenty of others hadn't escaped.
“For my money, a crossbow's best, 'least for assassinations,” he went on. “For one, it's quiet. Don't hear it, d'you?” He smiled, winking slightly. “Main thing, though, you can shoot through glass. A bullet, now glass deflects bullets. You can aim for the head and get a shoulder instead. But an arrow cuts clean through glass. Take a head shot, get a head shot.”
I nodded. Take a head shot, get a head shot. And what kind of gun did he prefer?
“Different jobs demand different guns,” Stead said. “Now an AK-47, it's got better range than your M-16. An Uzi is good for a tight job, if you've got to take out a bunch. But for a single target, well, can't beat a Kalashnikov.”
I nodded again, trying to remember every word; I didn't want to clam him up by taking out a notebook. How about knives?
“Speaking for myself, don't like knife jobs,”-he said. “Too close. Now there's some blokes, born killers, now they might be an ace with a knife. But I'm more of a crack machine gunner.”
He paused as a steward came down the aisle with soft drinks. “Thing is,” he said thoughtfully, sipping orange soda, “no matter what the weapon, you got to have the right personality, know what I mean? You got to be inhuman. You can't start thinking about the politics, about what you're doing, or what they're going to do to you., That's when you get careless.”
I asked him if he ever thought of getting back into the business. He shook his head. “You'd want seven hundred quid a week for it now. But the demand's gone. No one gives a monkey anymore about doing the killing themselves.”
Stewards came down the aisle again, this time with landing cards, which were printed only in Arabic. Qaddafi regarded European languages as a corrupt influence on his pure Arab state and had banned their use on official forms, street signs, even soda bottles. The landing card included the usual questions: name, nationality, date of birth, religion. Up until now, I'd never seen any reason to conceal my religion. But I'd never flown into the world's most fanatically anti-Zionist country, without a visa, to a capital where the U.S. embassy had been sacked and American diplomats withdrawn some years before. Writing in “Jew” seemed a recipe for expulsion, or at the very least, a way to attract unwelcome attention.
“What do you reckon?” Geraldine aske&rstar'mg at the question as well. “Buddhist? Infidel?”
I put down “Quaker,” having attended a Friends school for eight years. Who could kick out a Quaker? I didn't let Stead see. Somehow I didn't imagine he'd have much use for Quakers.
Stead scribbled down his address at a camp outside Tripoli and invited us to come out and “get pissed” on the weekend. “Me and me mates brew one hundred and eighty liters of beer every week,” he said. “And we drink it all.” He was the friendliest mercenary I'd ever met.
We arrived at Tripoli's airport to be greeted with discouraging news. The first planeload of journalists had been issued visas and allowed in. But the second, arriving several hours before ours, had been sent straight back to Rome. We sat in a corner of the terminal, waiting for what we assumed was to be the same fate.
The airport was unadorned, except for the bewildering messages scrawled on the walls. The prohibition of English apparently didn't extend to the pronouncements of Colonel Qaddafi. Not that this made them any easier to understand.
PEOPLES ARE ONLY HARMONIOUS WITH THEIR OWN ARTS AND HERITAGES.
DEMOCRACY MEANS POPULAR RULE, NOT POPULAR EXPRESSION.
IN NEED, DEMOCRACY IS LATENT
The slogans were the first clue to the wackiness of Libya—or rather, the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya.
Jamabiriya was a word coined by Qaddafi, meaning, roughly, “republic of the masses.” He had added the “Great” after the U.S. bombing of Tripol
i in 1986, an event which, in the inverted logic of Libyan propaganda, constituted a glorious victory.
The second sign of mental disorder was the comment of the official who appeared with our passports. He had stamped each one with a seven-day visa. I asked him why the plane before ours had been turned away.
“Zachma,” he said, which means “crowded.” This failed, of course, to explain why the fifty reporters on board our flight had been allowed in. But I was learning to go with the Libyan flow. Logicians need not apply.
A bus carried us through the dark empty avenues of Tripoli and deposited us at El-Kabir, the Grand Hotel, on Revolution Street. At the Rome airport, a rumor had swept the press corps that credit cards and dollars were unacceptable to the Libyans and that we should change all our money into Italian lire instead. Several had, at unfavorable airport rates, boarding the plane with lira-stuffed satchels. At the Grand Hotel we were quickly informed that lire were worthless; only dollars were accepted, and the hotel wanted us to pay the bill for our one-week visit in advance, at a rate of $125 a night.
“Fucking typical,” groaned a TV reporter, who ended up lending out all his money. TV reporters always travel with thousands of dollars in cash, like drug dealers. This makes them easy prey for strapped print journalists.
One hundred and twenty-five dollars at El-Kabir bought a not-very-grand room with a television blurrily broadcasting a reading of Qaddafi's Green Book, a Sahara-like compendium of the colonel's thoughts. Qaddafi had consigned communism to the dustheap of history, along with capitalism, as a failed ideology superseded by his own “Third International Theory.” But with typical contrariness, the colonel borrowed freely from Marxist and Maoist symbolism. He had authored his own Green Book—green being the color of Islam—and launched his own Cultural Revolution, to purge Libya of non-Islamic influence. Tripoli, like Moscow, has at its center a revolutionary square—Green Square, not Red. Officially, the state had wilted away; the masses ruled directly through organs such as the General Secretariat of the General People's Congress for Information. Even Libya's embassies had been taken over by the masses and renamed People's Bureaus. In a nation of only 3.5 million citizens, many of them still seminomadic, it seemed incredible that there were enough souls to staff all the People's Committees, People's Congresses and People's Secretariats.