Chanel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum meets the idealistic students, teachers and war rookies making up the ranks of Libya’s rebels.
He was a 21-year-old economics student, and he said he’d never handled a weapon before. He was standing at the side of the road leaning on a shoulder-launched rocket which, he said, had “a bit missing”. He said he wouldn’t go to the front until the bit arrived, but that didn’t make me worry about him any less.
His friend, a 23-year old student of civil engineering, had no weapon at all. I asked if he wasn’t being foolhardy, plunging into battle unarmed.
“As Shakespeare says, the question is: to be or not to be,” he replied.
My fear is that he’s right, and that many of these idealistic young men will lose their lives in the battle to oust Colonel Gaddafi.
Jabala Ben Holam, an English teacher armed with a Kalashnikov, said he wasn’t worried.
“Why should I think myself better than my brothers?” he asked. “I believe that you shouldn’t ask what your country does for you, but what you can do for your country.”
The quotations have universal power, and that’s why they’ve stuck in the minds of these young Libyans. Ideas of human rights and freedom are cited here alongside the belief that Allah is on their side, their fate lies in his hands, and to be martyred is glorious. But as we stand in the desert, looking at the rudimentary defences this rebel force is building, with ancient anti-aircraft guns and the occasional tank dug into sandbanks, listening to young men talking of their hopes for democracy and peace, I find myself thinking of other lines from history and poetry.
Of the young British, German and Italian men who fought here in the North African desert in 1942, in the punishing El Alamein campaign. And, a quarter century earlier, of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who chronicled the waste of young lives in the trenches of Flanders and the Somme. The pity of war, the pity war distils. Dolce et Decorum est.
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