The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  4.

  For ethnologists, friendship is the most impenetrable of social institutions. They frequently admit that having spent however many years studying some remote people, they leave having formed no intimate friendships at all; they wonder if for such a people, the institution of friendship, as understood in the West, actually exists. Friendship, after all, like marriage or kinship or blood brotherhood, is a culturally conditioned institution. The ethnologists wonder if simple affection can ever transcend the vast social abyss between the observer and the observed; between rich and poor; between the one who can leave at will and the one who must remain.

  In leaving Haiti, I find myself in very much the opposite situation. The Haitian people seem to have a particular capacity for friendship. “With all of their ineptitude for certain concepts that the Anglo-Saxon holds sacred, the Haitian people have a tremendous talent for getting themselves loved,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston, who visited Haiti in the 1930s. I can say that I also succumbed. I left behind a number of Haitian friends for whom I feel only the warmest and most sympathetic emotions.

  Barthélemy, the most cynical of observers, proposes that la séduction is simply another tactic of the Haitian peasant to disarm the potentially aggressive outsider; the charm, the vivacity, the wit, and the kindness of my Haitian friends just some “strategy of dissuasion” meant to keep me always at a remove. I have found in my Haitian friends, he argues, only the interlocutors that I was seeking, their apparent friendship nothing but a “shining veil” obscuring the violent, unknowable Haitian heart.

  Barthélemy might well be right—it is his country, after all. We know our own family in a way no interloper ever will: we see in a transient gesture what a foreigner will never see at all. A Haitian proverb says, “When the dog smiles, he’s not happy.” The Haitian smile might only be so many bared and yellow teeth. But wouldn’t it be lovely to imagine that, just this once, Barthélemy is wrong? I was the recipient in Haiti of a tremendous amount of kindness and generosity, and was the witness to many remarkable displays of courage and grace. For all of that I remain enduringly grateful.

  —March 22, 2012

  1. Metropolitan, 2012, p. 3.

  2. Gerard Barthélemy, Le Pays en Dehors (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henry Deschamps/CIDIHCA, 1989), pp. 49–50 (translation mine).

  3. Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid, and Drug Trafficking (Booksurge, 2008).

  27

  Is Libya Cracking Up?

  Nicolas Pelham

  Sometimes it is better just to enjoy the party. The fall of Muammar Qaddafi was reason enough to rejoice. So was the release from dreadful captivity of countless men and women who were tortured for no other reason than that they spoke their minds, or just happened to annoy someone in power, or were unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. State terror is often random.

  Benghazi escaped from possible annihilation. Tripoli was freer than it had ever been before. Good men were trying to establish a better order in Libya.

  But once the party is over, the problems begin to appear. Wars have consequences, and can spill across borders. Order is hard to establish in a country riven by factions and clans. Revolutionaries do not willingly surrender their arms. Qaddafi was lynched by a violent mob, not a harbinger of justice and peace. Less than three months after this article was written voicing concern about potential violence in Libya, four US citizens were killed as a result of an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Among the dead was US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

  —I.B.

  EIGHT MONTHS AFTER Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow, journalists seeking wars in Libya have to journey deep into the Sahara and beyond the horizons of most Libyans to find them. A senior official of Libya’s temporary ruling body, the National Transitional Council (NTC), flippantly waved away an invitation to leave his residence at the Rixos, Qaddafi’s palatial Tripoli hotel, to join a fact-finding delegation to Kufra, a trading post 1,300 kilometers to the southeast, near Sudan and Chad. “Isn’t it Africa?” he asks.

  Yet for Libya’s new governors, the turbulent south—home to Libya’s wells of water and oil—is unnerving. Since Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the NTC chairman, declared an end to the civil war last October, the violence in the south is worse than it was during the struggle to oust Qaddafi. Hundreds have been killed, thousands injured, and, according to UN figures, tens of thousands displaced in ethnic feuding. Without its dictator to keep the lid on, the country, it seems, is boiling over the sides.

  Kufra, some six hundred kilometers from the nearest Libyan town, epitomizes the postwar neglect. Several on the NTC’s nine-man mission I accompanied in late April were making their first visit there. The air of exuberance we felt flying aboard Qaddafi’s private jet and breakfasting on salmon-filled omelets cooked by his dashing stewardess, clad in a scarlet uniform, vanished as we began our descent. How much protection could we expect from the two members of the mission who had been included to protect the group and who had been recruited for the journey from the Kufra’s two fighting tribes—the Arab Zuwayy and the black Toubou? A NTC official criticized the pilot for approaching the runway from the town, where we made an easy target, not the desert. The airfield was deserted.

  “We have a tradition of welcoming our guests,” said the Zuwayy’s tribal sheikh, Mohammed Suleiman, in less than welcoming tones, once we had found his mansion. “But we’re cursing this government for abandoning us to the Africans.” A room full of sixty tribesmen echoed his rebuke; since the revolution, members of the Toubou tribe had swarmed into the town and were threatening to wrest control of the oil fields nearby, he said. For the sheikh, the only solution was to expel them.

  The catalyst for the fighting had been the NTC’s appointment of a Toubou leader to guard the Chad frontier, thus putting him in control of trans-Saharan smuggling, apparently as a reward for his support in the revolution. Gasoline, which in Libya is cheaper than water, subsidized flour, and guns go out; whisky and migrants come in. Though the Zuwayy had ten times as many Mercedes trucks as the Toubou, their incomes had plummeted. As animosities rose, the two tribes divided their mixed town of Kufra into fortified zones and fired mortars at each other’s houses. In fighting that followed this spring, 150 were killed.

  After a communal meal of lambs’ heads served on vast tin trays, we crossed town to the Toubou quarter. Red-tiled Swiss-style villas gave way to African cinder-block shanties, some blackened by bombing. Tarmac roads led into sandy tracks. Where the Zuwayy had served us a feast on thick blood-red carpets, the Toubou poured glasses of goat yogurt. The Zuwayy had chandeliers; the Toubou had a flickering neon strip and sporadic blackouts. “The air-conditioning is broken,” their spokesmen apologized. The NTC delegates, who sat silently during the Zuwayys’ browbeating, now seemed like feudal lords chiding troublesome peasants; as we left they said the Toubou border guards were outlaws. The next day fighting flared. At a gathering of Libya’s many militias in Benghazi, nearly a thousand kilometers to the north, startled UN officials ducked for cover as Zuwayy and Toubou gunmen faced off in the corridors.

  Some nine hundred kilometers west of Kufra as the crow or plane flies—for there are no roads—Sabha, the provincial capital of the southwestern Fezzan, also suffered from ethnic strife. On March 27, in the midst of a heated session of a local military council meeting to discuss the allocation of payments to former fighters, the representative of the Awlad Suleiman, another Arab tribe, shot three Toubou councilors dead. As the fighting spread, Arab snipers took to their villa rooftops and lobbed Katyusha rockets across the tin wall separating their neighborhood from the Toubou shantytown of Tayuri. Footage on their mobile phones shows tribesmen parking their tanks at Tayuri’s entrance and shelling its shacks. When the firing subsided three days later, the Toubou counted seventy-six dead in the shantytown alone. Scores more were killed on the roads.

  Like the Toubou, North Africa’s indigenous Berbers—or Imazighen as the
y prefer to call themselves—depict Qaddafi’s rule as four decades of unremitting Arabization. To erase their ethnicity, they say, Qaddafi labeled them mountain Arabs, replaced their historic place-names with Arab ones, and suppressed the Ibadi school of Islam that many Imazighen follow on account of its more egalitarian bent. Unlike Sunnis, the mainstream Ibadi school opens up leadership of the Muslim community to all ethnic groups, not only the Quraish, the Prophet Muhammad’s Arab tribe. Qaddafi accused mothers who spoke the Amazigh tongue, Tifinagh, at home of feeding poison to their children.

  While the Toubou number several tens of thousands, Amazigh leaders estimate—somewhat optimistically—that they make up 25 percent of Libya’s six million people. From the desert in the south, where they are called Tuareg, to the Berber town of Zwara on the coast, they have been more successful than the Toubou in sloughing off Qaddafi’s lingering Arabization. In Zwara, the brightly colored Amazigh flag flies from the lampposts and shops sport freshly painted signs in Tifinagh, their hitherto illicit script. Zwara’s Berber militias have seized control of the nearby Tunisian border and rampaged through Riqdaleen, a neighboring Arab town where the shopfronts remaikn stubbornly green, the color of Qaddafi’s regime. After Qaddafi’s son Khamis fled Tripoli at the head of his praetorian guard, the 32nd Brigade, in mid-August last year, he briefly found a safe haven in Riqdaleen. Even today, only 30 percent of the town supported the revolution, a member of the local council told me. He works as a Total oil field manager.

  Riqdaleen’s Arabs have tried to fight back, not least for their border and its contraband profits. Last month, fighters in Riqdaleen captured twenty-nine Zwaran militiamen patrolling the border and beat them up, claiming they were trespassing. Only after the two towns had engaged in the ritual of lobbing missiles at each other’s houses, killing a few dozen people, and only after marauding Zwarans had destroyed Riqdaleen’s engineering college and torched several shops, did Zwara secure their release.

  Both sides speak of arming for the battle ahead. Photographs of mutilated cadavers displayed on mobile phones ensure that the scars remain open. The graffiti that raiding Zwarans left on Riqdaleen’s walls threatened to turn the town into a “second Tuwagha,” the site inhabited by pro-Qaddafi black Libyans that militiamen from Misrata, further east, ethnically cleansed in the fall. “We don’t see a new Libya,” the Riqdaleen town councilor told me. “We’re starting to regret. The Berbers want us out.”

  In what Riqdaleen fears is a precedent, Zwarans have evicted some seven hundred Arab workers from the housing compound of their chemical factory, Abu Kammash, saying the workers were complicit in Qaddafi’s plot to wipe their Berber town off the map. Since its opening in the 1980s—atop what Zwarans say is an old Amazigh graveyard—the plant employing these workers had spewed mercury and acid into the sea, poisoning the Zwarans’ fishing waters and population. The compound’s few remaining Arab residents cower from the Zwaran squatters who have taken over the empty houses, and wonder when their turn for eviction will come. They say Zwarans—violating Muslim law—spend their nights drunk on contraband whisky and frolicking with Tunisian prostitutes, as well as firing their guns into the sky. “They claim they are revolutionaries and therefore untouchable,” explains a teenage boy. Nasr, a former factory technician who has found refuge in Riqdaleen, says he has nightmares about Berber militiamen sleeping in his bed and wearing his clothes. “If this is the price we have to pay for freedom, it’s not worth it,” he says.

  While separately none of the communal battles alone poses an immediate threat to Libya’s unity, the border skirmishes risk stirring broader upheavals that could pick apart Libya and its neighbors. Riqdaleen sees itself as a potential bridgehead for tens of thousands of Qaddafi supporters who have sought refuge in Tunisia and may return. Kufra’s feuding parties are attracting supporters from opposite ends of the Sahara, from the Mediterranean to the northern scrub land of Chad. Arab militiamen in Benghazi see a cause and an opportunity to fly the Prophet Muhammad’s black flag of jihad; the Toubou in Chad are anxious to repel an Arab attack on their fellow tribesmen. As the contents of Qaddafi’s armories spread across the region, gun markets are sprouting across middle-class Tunisia and fueling the low-level insurgency that Sinai’s Bedouin are waging against their Egyptian overseers. Equipped with their extensive bullion, Qaddafi’s surviving children—his son Saadi in Niamey, Niger, and daughter Aisha, in Algiers—stir up their old followers. Libya’s turmoil is acquiring continental significance.

  Of all the ethnic movements that have surfaced since Qaddafi’s overthrow, that of the Imazighen has the greatest reach. In two months of travels across North Africa I repeatedly crossed paths with Fathi Khalifa, a highly articulate Berber from Zwara, wearing a silver suit and tie, who heads the World Amazigh Congress, a Paris-based organization promoting a pan–North African Berber revival. At an Amazigh gathering in Morocco I heard him advocating the revival of Tamazgha, the fabled Amazigh homeland stretching from the Canary Islands to Siwa, an Egyptian oasis. In Tripoli’s Martyrs’ Square, I met him leading a rally celebrating Tafsaweet, the Amazigh spring, and demanding official recognition of Tifinagh, the Amazigh language, by the new Libya. At a tribal feast in Sabha, I found him wooing the Warfalla, Libya’s largest tribe—estimated at one million strong—with an etymological lesson on the Amazigh roots of their name.

  Despite the obvious threat to their preeminence, many Arabs appear remarkably tolerant of ethnic rivals. Arab civil servants hire private teachers to learn Tifinagh. Arabic radio stations invite Khalifa to appear on chat shows. A civil rights movement staging an anti-militia protest at the same time and place as Khalifa’s rally in Tripoli invited Amazigh activists onto the podium to show their flags and address their supporters. Even when a protester cried (in Arabic) that one day Libyans would speak no tongue but Tifinagh, the hosts cheered. At one of Khalifa’s lectures in a public hall in Sabha, garlanded in Amazigh flags and pictures of such Berber icons as the Algerian soccer player Zinedine Zidane, Arabs almost outnumbered Imazighen.

  Even so, there are limits. When Khalifa described Arabism as a foreign implant, there were gasps. When he described the seventh-century advent of Islam as a ghazu, or invasion, some walked out. Several heckled after he called the Islamic crescent on Libya’s flag “a relic of Turkish colonialism” and proposed replacing it with a trident, an Amazigh symbol. His backing for the Amazigh declaration of a separate homeland—Azawad—in northern Mali sparked fears that he had similar plans for Libya. Though he denied it, his Tuareg bodyguard told me that the arms he smuggled to Mali would one day help to push the borders of his Azawad homeland from Timbuktu north via Sabha to Spain. “Can’t you put your dreams on hold while we all get Libya back on its feet?” asked one of five imposing Arabs who confronted Khalifa as we sat in a Tripoli café sipping macchiatos.

  If the periphery is fraying, the center, at first sight, has taken serious steps to set up an authority that its architects hope will sooner or later radiate out to the provinces. As under Qaddafi, Tripoli displays the best that revolutionary Libya has to offer. Utilities work. Air-conditioners cool tempers. Civil servants clock in at ministries. Banks have lifted wartime restrictions on cash withdrawals. International airlines unload their cargoes of oil prospectors and businessmen for the latest trade fair. Government coffers are flush with oil revenues of $5 billion a month. Unlike Baghdad’s quick turn to insurgency after the US ousted Saddam Hussein, Tripoli has resumed business. Tripolitanians fail to understand their bad press.

  The presence of militiamen is receding as well. The checkpoints manned by irregulars that once crisscrossed the capital are gone, and their heavy weapons have fallen silent. Tripoli’s professionals nervously speak of the last of the Misratans, the militia from the large town of Misrata that fought in Tripoli. Despite the prevalence of weapons—some 20 million guns are estimated to be circulating in Libya—crime levels in Tripoli are said to be lower than in many Western capitals. Store managers have whitewashed away the
obsessive green, the color of the book Qaddafi wrote to reveal his Third Universal Theory, perhaps the world’s wackiest personality cult. Salafis troop into the former cathedral, now a mosque, for a lecture on the virtues of polygamy. Otherwise, for a moment, it might be Europe.

  In the People’s Congress where delegates waited for the Great Leader to raise his hand before voting, the halls buzz with a plethora of community organizations criticizing the NTC’s management. New radio stations offer traffic updates, a novelty in a country where Qaddafi banned reports of car accidents and traffic jams lest they stain his utopia. On Ozone Radio you hear, “Sexy girl, I like the way you’re grooving”—another novelty, since Qaddafi also banned Western pop. In place of a melodramatic megalomaniac, the country has for a leader a soft-spoken professor, Prime Minister Abdurrahim al-Keib. When I talked with him on his arrival from the United Arab Emirates in Tripoli in August 2011, he shed some tears in a handkerchief when the rebel victory became clear. Later he offered to be my guide, driving me around the capital. So long had he spent in exile that he had to stop to ask for directions to the Corinthia Hotel, the capital’s bulkiest landmark.

  For all his kindness, al-Keib’s self-effacing nature makes him vulnerable. For many Libyans, he seems too small and retiring to step into the Great Leader’s shoes. That he has no accompanying goons around him only makes him seem weak. In addition, a rapid changeover of governments has confounded efforts to make plans. Ministers say their only mandate is to prepare for the ballot for an elected assembly in June. Officials use the formula “not before the elections,” insisting that only an elected authority would have the legitimacy to undertake substantial change.

  The result is that the part of the bureaucracy that continues to function largely belongs to the old Qaddafi order. Visas remain as hard to come by for foreign journalists as under Qaddafi. And minorities detect signs in government ministries that the colonel’s promotion of the Arab cause is making a comeback. Only after a month of protests did the government appoint an Amazigh minister. The old ways persist. The NTC has been under heavy pressure from workers striking to uphold their right to elect their own bosses, in accordance with the Third Universal Theory. Children at birthday parties still clamor for green balloons. Revolutionaries struggle—often in vain—to coin a post-Qaddafi terminology and method for their new institutions.