Libya: staying sane in insane situations

I know I am back in the gilded cage that is the Tripoli international media centre when the Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister cracks something approaching a joke.

“Today I have good news for you,” he says as the press conference begins at 10pm (this bizarre timing is so normal now, if anything a little early, that nobody seems to comment on it any more).We journalists all look up with keen interest. Is the minister about to give us a new headline? A stunning reversal on the battlefield, perhaps? A victory by pro-Gaddafi forces against rebels in the east?

“The Libyan national team just scored one goal,” he says delightedly. “Against Comoros in Mali.”

Our heads are downcast again. I am back in Tripoli, in the same hotel room I was in a fortnight ago. With the same government minders in leather jackets lurking in the lobby, and the same minder in the room above mine, from which I can hear state television loudly broadcasting what I assume must be increasingly desperate messages of support for Colonel Gaddafi.

Everything is the same here and yet nothing is. Independent reporting was tough enough during my first stint; now my colleagues, those who have risked their sanity by staying this past month or more, tell me solo journalism is virtually impossible, with reporters frequently scooped up by police and returned to the hotel compound if they try to escape on anything other than an official bus tour.

This is my first night back, and the distant crump of enemy air strikes is rattling my bedroom windows. Libya is at war: not just with its rebels, but with foreign jets, warships and submarines.

A one-sided war, because if Libya had the strength to respond, other than with antiquated displays of anti-aircraft fire, it would have done so by now.

Instead, Libya’s Deputy Foreign Minister tells us the “national team” football score. Putting on a brave face when we all know his country is divided into two warring factions, when many of the journalists in front of him are from countries which have sided with one faction and are bombing the regime he supports and defends.

I was acutely aware that my country had all but declared war when I crossed into Libya this afternoon after a three day wait for visas in the Tunisian town of Sfax. (Never have more faxes been sent from Sfax to secure our Libyan visas, but that is another story.)

Libyan guards kindly offered our TV crew, with its many items of luggage, a lift across the border in a pick-up truck. And although a couple of my neatly pressed jackets mysteriously went astray in transit, this seemed a small price to pay for somebody like me from London, the scene today of an international conference on Libya’s future, convened by the British government, to which the government of Libya isn’t even invited.

“Gaddafi is good”

We drove beneath the green bunting which still celebrates Gaddafi’s 1969 revolution and past a large poster of the Colonel in tribal head dress. (The alternative poster, the one with the Colonel in sunglasses and peaked cap and wearing so many military medals that his chest can barely fit them all in, is a rarer and more valuable find.)

“Libya is good,” one of the immigration officials told me, the kind of nonsensical statement one must get used to here. As with the national team’s football score, officials will go to great lengths to suggest that everything is normal, when we all know it is not.

There was then a two hour wait for some Chinese journalists who were late in joining our party for the official bus ride to Tripoli. We all know how important the Chinese are these days, but China’s decision to abstain from, and not veto, UN resolution 1973 on “all necessary measures” to protect civilians was so critical that the Libyans must be desperate to show the Chinese the consequences of foreign military intervention.

As we waited for the Chinese, the sun began to set, and one official said he was nervous about driving us in the dark, presumably because the bombing begins at night. “Don’t say that in from of them!” another official exploded, pointing to us. As I have explained, nobody wants to admit that anything is wrong here.

Watching the Zs

We drove fast through the town of Zuwarah, but not too fast for me not to notice the gaping holes in buildings caused by tank or artillery shelling. Or the anti-Gaddafi graffiti which had been whitewashed over in almost every settlement we passed. Or the fact that every Gaddafi poster by the roadside, stretching for miles, had been ripped down and not replaced. A reminder that there was a rebellion in the West a month or so ago, and though it was crushed, it may re-ignite if rebel gains in the East provide any kind of inspiration.

Libyan rebels claim the town of Zintan was hit by government grade rockets on Monday morning, and the “Zs” are the towns in the West to watch: Zintan, Zuwarah, Zawiyah, all potential powder kegs of revolt.

Yet I saw just one tank in a journey of well over two hours. That tank, dug in and beneath a tree, besides an anti-aircraft gun. On the same road, a few weeks before, I saw scores of tanks, mostly old Soviet T72s, which had me wondering whether their commanders were now hiding them from possible NATO air attacks.

Those attacks came too late to aid civilians and rebels in Libya’s western population centres. These densely populated concrete jungles are easy hiding places for armour and artillery, and far harder to hit and spot from the air than tanks moving across the eastern desert.

Another big difference on the road was the queues for petrol at the few petrol stations that were open. A clue to how the balance of power is shifting here; Libya’s energy, most of it, is in the East, hence the importance of the oil ports of Brega and Ras-Lanouf which were recaptured by rebels over the weekend. And the way to rid Libya of Colonel Gaddafi is surely not just through military action, but by dividing him, and his more loyal subjects, from their oil wealth, which the rebels seem to be in the process of doing.

Yet as I listen to the minibus radio on the way back to Tripoli, I can hear a child who can be no more than five years old chanting a familar refrain here: “There is only God, Muammar (Gadaffi) and Libya alone”.

The rebels and their supporters will tell you that this is empty propaganda, that nobody loves Gaddafi any more. It is an open question how many do support him, and how much in Tripoli and western Libya his personality cult endures. And we may only know the answer to that question when and if Gaddafi falls.