Rebel graves bulldozed over in Zawiyah

Our government press coach pulled into Zawiyah last night and the scene through the coach driver’s windscreen was exactly as I had come to expect: the town square was thronging with cheering people holding pictures of Muammar Gaddafi. 

A propaganda tableau intended for our arriving cameras and, far more importantly, for those of Libyan state television.

We filmed their cameraman sitting on top of a satellite truck, conducting the crowd with his hands, ensuring that the live broadcast of non-stop personality cult adulation was never less than perfect.

I saw a small boy waving a plastic gun out of a car window in celebration. “Everything is good here, everyone loves Muammar Gaddafi” one man told me, as if his life depended on it, and perhaps it did. “There was fighting here”, I pointed out to him. “That was Bin Laden,” he explained.

Those who strayed too far from the scene we were bussed in to film were stopped at gunpoint and turned back. 

Soldiers sat warily on the roofs of buildings which had been smashed with tank and mortar shells in the ferocious last few days of fighting.  Lamp posts had been flattened by tanks.

Much of the downtown population in a shuttered town of 200,000 people appeared to have fled the devastation.

One large office block had its side ripped away, but the worst of the damage – and a painted rebel flag, several metres high – had been covered up with vast billowing sheets of green and white bunting.

Old men averted their frightened eyes when I approached them to ask them what had happened, and whether the macabre scenes of jubilation reflected what people really felt.  

And most shockingly of all, the graves of 20 rebel fighters scattered amid the trees and benches of a little park had been flattened with bulldozers and covered with builders’ sand.

I saw the tracks the bulldozers had left behind. And I know there were 20 graves, because I counted them last weekend, when Zawiyah was still in rebel hands.

Those rebels have now vanished. The hospital where we filmed a week ago, full of men close to death from the fighting, is now a no-go zone under the army’s control.

The doctors who once gave me heart-rending accounts of scores shot dead no longer dare speak to the press.

But the apparent desecration of the graves is what disturbs me most.  I asked a man with deadened eyes where the dead people had gone. “No people,” he insisted repeatedly, before walking away.

An American reporter at the scene was told the rebels had taken the bodies and that they were Algerians or Saudis affiliated with Al Qaeda. 

What is obvious is that any UN investigation into war crimes needs to head to Zawiyah as soon as possible, before more of the evidence is buried. Assuming the Libyans let investigators in.

Yesterday was my third visit to Zawiyah. There were five further attempts on top of that, each one turned back at police or army checkpoints, where our cameras were stolen and our drivers were threatened.

On the previous successful visits, anti-government protestors and the rebels protecting them controlled the town square.

A fortnight ago I saw thousands of people calling for the downfall of the regime, clearly intoxicated by the prospect of liberation.

One man told me he found it so hard to believe that Colonel Gaddafi really had gone that he thought he must be dreaming.

It turns out he was right. While the rebellion in Eastern Libya continues, it has been brutally crushed in Zawiyah, just 30 miles from Tripoli, and the regime’s back yard.

I have been privileged enough to witness the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya at the beginning of this extraordinary year. It has been a story, above all, about the conquest of fear.

The fear which has kept so much of the Middle East and North Africa silent and submissive for decades. The fear which has to be overcome to  confront brutal regimes in police states.

In Zawiyah, too, protestors were unafraid of death.

But Libya’s army and state militia have either killed them or sent them scattering into hiding. And the old fear is stalking the streets once again.