Libya's revolution, and its Rambo
Lindsey Hilsum meets the Libyan revolution’s Rambo – and others who fear for their lives if Gaddafi tries to re-take the east of the country.
Every revolution has its Rambo, and we met ours just across the border. The Egyptian side had endless checkpoints manned by functionaries whose writ ran for the next 20 yards, before another demanded passports, press cards and a cursory glance into the glove compartment.
But once into Libya, the cast of characters changed. Rambo had long, curling black tresses, a red bandanna, a white hygienic mask around his neck, and a swagger stick. Alarmingly, he wore a pristine dark blue flak jacket, of the kind used by journalists – I can only assume it was the price some other crew paid for entry into “Free Libya”, the part of the country no longer controlled by Colonel Gaddafi. Rambo was accompanied by a chap who can’t have been much over 5 foot, wearing civvies, and sporting a fedora.
They were our escorts, in a dark blue Hyundai with no number plates, speeding up the road to Tobruk, the first town to fall as the Arab Revolt spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya.
We were waved through checkpoints, each displaying the old tri-colour flag which Gaddafi had changed to plain green when he seized power in 1969. The low, mud coloured buildings along the roadside all seemed to have green window frames and doors. I guess it was an easy way to show loyalty, or maybe no-one dared stock paint in any other colour.
Our guides came to a halt by a small building which had been the Revolutionary Committee headquarters of some small desert village. In front, we saw a pile of green rubble, all that remained of three concrete blocks painted green to represent the Green Book, the three volume treatise on life, the universe and eveything which Colonel Ghadaffi forced every Libyan to follow. Like a cross between Mao’s Little Red Book and Mein Kampf, it expressed his idiosyncratic political philosophy. All over eastern Libya, people have been taking a sldege-hammer to such monuments.
They know they cannot afford to lose, because if they do, retribution will be truly terrible. One man I met at a noisy anti-Gaddafi demonstration in Tobruk drew his finger across his throat to tell me what would happen to him if Gaddafi regained power here.
“I die!” he said. “If he sees me on TV, I die.”
At the hospital, doctors clustered round to tell horror stories of death and injury further along the road, at Al Beyda and Benghazi. We saw two patients with serious head injuries from bullets, tended by a Filipina and a Ukrainain nurse. A man who popped up to help us translate turned out to be from Sierra Leone. One third of Libya’s 7 million people are said to be migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa.
They live happily here but now everyone is talking of the African mercenaries Colonel Gaddafi has brought in to keep him in power. While Libyan soldiers and pilots are refusing to kill their own people, soldiers of fortune are doing the job. An Egyptian worker, fleeing the terror, told me of a town where the people had caught 30 mercenaries and were holding them in a mosque.
Such stories can’t be verified, but “liberated” eastern Libya feels pretty volatile. In Tobruk they shoot in the air, and chant in excitement – free at last, free after 42 years of dictatorship. But rumours abound that Gaddafi will send more bombers tomorrow, that more mercenaries are coming in, that he’s determined to retake the east. Rambo may not have finished fighting yet.