Libya: lies and spin in Gaddafi's Tripoli

I’m in a Libyan Government bus again, this time, heading for the Tunisian border, through checkpoint after endless checkpoint, manned by regulars and paramilitaries, faces grim-set, serious, fingers on triggers.

We’re leaving, and although I’d love to be reporting on the downfall of this nasty regime, I’m tired and I’ll be glad to see the back of the obstructive and aggressive Government minders who seem to exist only to make our lives difficult and unpleasant. 

Maybe Gaddafi will hang on in there for a while yet, grinding down successive teams of foreign journalists as they rotate through, frustrated by their inability to tell the story of what is really happening, unable to talk to dissenters who no longer dare to stick their heads above the parapet.

“Follow the money, man, if you want to know what’s really going on,2 an American newspaper correspondent said to me this morning. On Tripoli’s black market, the dinar to dollar exchange rate doubled in a week. “They’re not betting on Gaddafi being here for long,” he said.

Maybe I’ll get back here in time to see him go. For now, another Correspondent, my colleague Jonathan Rugman, has taken over. Reporting from Libya has tested my professional impartiality and objectivity to the very limit.

“Sahafi! Sahafi!” the minder in the front seat shouts, as we approach a checkpoint.

“Foreign journalists – this is an Information Ministry bus.” We stop. The soldiers glare in at us. We do not smile or nod or wave or say hello. They are unfriendly; you can see it in their eyes, you can hear it in their tone.

“Where are they from?” one asks.

“All over the world,” another minder yells over the raucous patriotic music blasting on the radio. He’s sitting right behind me, his knees digging into my back. There are eight of us in the bus — Europeans, an Iraqi, one Jordanian.

“Pull over. On the right.” Our chain-smoking, gum-chewing driver cuts the engine.

The door opens. “Show them the missile,” a soldier in green camouflage shouts over to a paramilitary sporting a Gaddafi baseball cap and jeans, and cradling a Kalashnikov. He has a Gaddafi-green cloth tied around his lower face and looks like a highway robber.

The soldier turns to the minder behind me on the bus.

“Tell them this is what we get because of their reporting,” he shouts. Everything is shouted here.

“Tell them to take it back to where it came from.”

We manage to pull away before the baseball cap man could load any shards of Tomahawk Cruise missile in beside us. We’re on the western outskirts of Zawiya, the town whose uprising was crushed by tanks and bullets just three weeks ago.

Read more in the Channel 4 News Special Report on Libya

There’s a checkpoint every 100 metres now. The town is half-deserted. Every building bears the scars of battle. There are gaping holes in houses from mortar rounds and tank shells. Walls and shutters peppered and pockmarked with gunfire. Journalists have not been back here for more than two weeks now.

We’ve left a capital abuzz with rumour and awash with Government lies and propaganda. I’d woken early to news on the television that rebel forces had over-run Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte in the small hours of the morning. I called three journalist friends who’d arrived in Sirte last night.

No, they said, Government soldiers were still in the streets, promising to fight to the death. But Sirte, they said, was seemingly not heavily defended.

In Tripoli, we’ve lived in a bubble for a fortnight now, unable to leave the hotel without risking immediate arrest – and that’s if you made it past the armed guards at the gates. We cannot phone our local contacts because journalists’ SIM cards have been confiscated and those they’d called, visited – and, in some cases, we believe, arrested.

The lies and spin and obfuscation are boundless. Not just about how the Libyan Armed Forces are continuing to observe the ceasefire, or about how they have full contol of Misrata, but about a story that burst into my life on Saturday and has left me soured and sickened.

Read more: around the Arab world in four uprisings

Eman al-Obeidi, the young woman who claimed to have been gang-raped by Gaddafi’s militiamen, only to be dragged away by state security, was intitially said by the Government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, to be drunk or mentally unbalanced.

He had no evidence at all for this, having not even seen her dramatic plea for help in front of foreign journalists who were eating breakfast in the hotel dining room. Nor had he any evidence, it seems, to back his claims, on Sunday, that she was a known prostitute – and so had brought misfortune on her own head.

Last night, at a hostile news conference, we challenged Moussa Ibrahim on this. He would not retract his comments, but neither would he re-state publically his assertion that Eman al-Obeidi was a prostitute. He was on live TV and he said it was not appropriate in a Muslim country to discuss this – and anyway it might compromise the legal process, he added, before storming out.

Moussa doesn’t get much work-life balance these days and he spends his stressful life in anguished, argumentative crisis talks or on his iPhone or being harrassed by journalists.

He’d spent 15 years living in the UK, knows our programme well, and holds a PhD in Media Studies from a London university. I think he ended up doing what he’s doing because he’s a friend of Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, the Leader’s son – the Chosen One. He’s not forthcoming about things personal either – but mostly because he has more important things to do like to defend the clearly indefensible.

In different circumstances, I actually think Moussa would be quite a nice bloke. But in that claustrophobic Tripoli hotel, where he lives and works and spins and lies day in, day out, Moussa Ibrahim has become the face of the regime he’s paid to front.

I’ve been poisoned by my two-and-a-half weeks in Gaddafi’s Libya. I was here 18 months ago for the return of the Lockerbie Bomber and for the party celebrating the Brother Leader’s 40 years in power. Back then, Gaddafi struck me as an unpredictable, eccentric egomaniac. Now I’ve seen the ruthlessness of his repressive totalitarian regime as well.

I will not miss it, but cannot help but think of the millions of ordinary Libyan people, perhaps like Eman al-Obeidi – who, by the way is understood to be a law student – who revile their leader but cannot, like me, leave.

Half an hour ago, as I was writing, we drove through the town of Zuwara. It too, lies half-destroyed, its streets, three-quarters empty, its inhabitants perhaps just lying low, in hiding, in jail, or gone.

We’re on the last stretch before the border and our replacement team’s just called to say they’re on the Libyan side and waiting. Jonathan Rugman was here when the frangrant scent of revolution still hung in the desert air. How quickly things have changed. How quickly might they change again?