Libya: liberation, at a terrible cost
People in Libya’s Zawiyah, a town near Tripoli, are marvelling at their liberation – but it has come at a terrible cost, writes Jonathan Rugman from Libya.
The town of Zawiyah, just 30 miles west of Tripoli, is marvelling at the miracle of its own liberation. In the town square yesterday, thousands of people were chanting “Down, Down with the regime!” – the same chant which has helped topple dictatorships in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt. Posters of Libya’s leader have been torn down, the police station is a smouldering wreck, and copies of Gaddafi’s infamous “Green Book” – his manifesto for 41 years of dictatorship – lie torn and abandoned amid the debris of several days of ferocious fighting.
Zawiyah’s square is ringed by tanks and anti-aircraft batteries, manned by soldiers who defected after refusing to shoot their own people dead. But freedom here has come at terrible cost, with a doctor telling me more than 30 people have been killed by Gaddafi’s forces since anti-Government protests intensified last Thursday.
“I saw 24 of them myself,” Dr Yusuf Mustafa said. “They were killed by bullets in the head, chest and neck, some by heavy guns for shooting aircraft.”
Patients injured by bullet wounds are still being treated in a makeshift clinic in the main mosque. Many of those shot in the last few days have not been taken to hospital outside town, out of fear that Gaddafi loyalists would kill them as they lay in their beds.
We were shown the graves of five protestors, with the casings of anti-aircraft bullets propped up in the muddy earth nearby to commemorate their loss. Eyewitnesses said some of those killed had been shot by soldiers positioned in high buildings, including a minaret.
Survivors showed us photographs and mobile phone footage of those killed, and many said they would rather die themselves than let Colonel Gaddafi return.
“I keep thinking I am in a dream, but this is reality,” said one man, close to tears.
“After 41 years, it is unbelievable. Let’s hope Gaddafi burns in hell. No, that is too good for him.”
On the outskirts of town we saw the Soviet built T72 tanks and machine gun emplacements of Libya’s elite 32nd brigade, commanded by Khamis Gaddafi, the Colonel’s son. Some protestors said they feared the Government’s decision to let the foreign press into Zawiyah would be the prelude for a new military offensive to take the town back from the defectors from the regular army who defend it.
The Government’s decision to let us visit Zawiyah may turn out to have been a spectacular own goal: before we left Tripoli, our official minders had told us the town was held by al-Qaeda sympathisers and terrorists, and that we should see it for ourselves. The minders had apparently fallen for Colonel Gaddafi’s own propaganda, and we saw no evidence of radical Islamist fighters at all.
Realising their PR blunder afterwards, we were quickly escorted to a pro-Gaddafi rally on the outskirts of Zawiya. “The people want the Colonel!” the crowd of fewer than 200 chanted, some accusing terrorists from Afghanistan of being the source of all the trouble. Our visit was clearly anticipated, and it is hardly surprising that the regime still has its supporters, given that 70 per cent of the Libyan workforce is employed by the state.
But in Zawiyah itself, a ragged but vast rebel flag is flying over what they are already calling Martyrs’ Square. The writ of Colonel Gaddafi does not run here, and the people are praying that he never returns.