Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller describes the journey across the border from Tunisia to Libya and the dramas along the way.
The UN-imposed, Nato-patrolled No-Fly Zone over Libya means the blue skies over Tripoli are unstained by vapour trails. The international airport – where thousands of foreign workers once languished, hoping in vain to cadge a flight home – is now a no-passenger, no-plane zone.
The only way in and out of the country is by road and because the rebels control the wild east, journalists heading in and out of Tripoli must ply the long desert highways either side of the Tunisian frontier. On the Libyan side, this means boarding the dreaded government bus.
Two weeks ago, I headed out on this route. Two hours to the border, then hassle, hassle, hassle and then out to the still jasmine revolutionary-scented air on the Tunisian side, where the revolts that have rolled across the Arab world first sparked in January. From the border, it had been a nine-hour drive to Tunis.
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This time, we did it the other way round; me, my camerawoman Philippa Collins and prodcuer, Helene Cacace. We hit the Tunisian side of the border at about midday. There were still big tented encampments where some of the thousands of foreign workers, who’d fled Libya six weeks ago, remain stranded in the gathering heat of the Saharan spring.
Unfortunately one of the airlines we’d flown to get to Tunisia had managed to lose our critically-acclaimed pneumatic-wheeled, steel-reinforced trolley, which has saved the backs of Channel 4 News TV crews as they cart kit around the planet. The airline shall remain nameless, but unforgiven.
Ahead of us, the prospect of having to now manhandle all our camera and editing kit, three heavy packs of body armour and helmets plus our personal bags, through two sets of passport control and customs and across about 800m of no-man’s-land between the two border posts.
It’s not that I’m particularly sore about this matter, or that we expect compensation for back-injuries incurred in this migration, but having Philippa’s precious trolley would have made life a lot easier. (Are you reading this, British Airways?) Oh, sorry.
Our incredibly dull journey across the border is documented in the accompanying, embedded video blog. Yes, it’s a bit navel-gazing, but this is a glimpse of the reality of life for foreign correspondents and their teams before we can get to the exotic locations from which we end up reporting.
One thing we couldn’t film: the arrival of the junior Libyan Olympic football team in a big bus with a Gaddafi picture plastered onto the front window. Their Serbian coach, Mr Blanco, sat there laconically as his team ventured out in their Gaddafi-green shirts to stretch their legs.
The No-Fly Zone meant that they’d had to drive to Tunis to catch a flight to Morocco and then another to Mali for their 2012 qualifier against South Africa in Bamako. They’d drawn 0-0 and were excited to be home. We had a conversation with their striker which went along the lines of:
“You Brittania?”
“Yes.”
“Crouch, good. Ashley Cole, good. Cameron, no good. Thank you.”
“See you in London, 2012,” I said.
“Inshallah.”
It took an hour and a half of sitting around swatting flies on the Libyan side before our passports came back, their contents pored over, eyebrows raised over stamps bearing testimony to past trips to trouble spots and natural disaster zones all over the world.
A few foreign workers, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, wandered out in the opposite direction, carrying huge, unwieldy suitcases on their heads. One man had an injured leg. He manoeuvered himself along on his bottom, one foot held in the air. His friend had two suitcases on his head.
Outside a fly-blown coffee shop with a sordid loo and a TV from which Gaddafi TV blared incessantly, we hitched up with and successfully swapped with our out-going Channel 4 News crew. Jonathan Rugman and his cameraman, Ray Queally, looked very relieved to be going.
“That hotel drives you mental,” said Jonathan.
And so, with a new Jonathan, refuelled and refreshed heading in, we boarded the Libyan government bus for Tripoli, which came – as ever — with government minders attached.
Their job is to ensure you don’t see anything they don’t want you to see along the way. Our job is to film these things. Our two sets of job descriptions are fundamentally juxtaposed and this is a recipe for daily conflict.
Hence the heated exchange between Philippa and the boys up front, when she poked her camera out for a look at some of the scores of military checkpoints or the shell-damaged shops and homes in Zuwara and Zahwiya towns.
At one point we were overtaken by a police car which pulled dramatically across our path, blocking the bus. The police got out and shouted at Philippa. We all shouted back and they went away and then our minders shouted at Philippa. Philippa’s pretty good at giving as good as she gets. They gave up.
There were fewer checkpoints than there had been on the same road when I’d exited two weeks ago. They were now manned by uniformed police and soldiers – rather than the threatening bandana’d paramilitaries who had glared into our bus on the way out.
More shops were open now (although the majority remain closed) and there were more people out on the streets (although it still doesn’t look normal).
We passed a few anti-aircraft guns mounted on pick-ups; we passed huge queues of cars at petrol stations; we passed fruit and vegetable markets, which actually looked pretty well stocked to me.
Finally, five hours later (and many hours longer than we needed to have been) we turned into Tripoli’s Rixos al-Nasr Hotel. There’s a contingent of blue-uniformed soldiers at the gate. They have a dual function: to stop any normal people getting in and to stop any journalist getting out.
The entrance was now bedecked with a vast poster. This was new. It was not a portrait of the Brother Leader, but of gory photographs of bloodied people. “Civilian Victims of Nato Airtrikes,” it read.
Welcome Home. Gaddafi Groundhog Day One.
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