Five weeks after the first civilian demonstrators took to the streets in Libya, dictator Muammar Gaddafi seems prepared to fight to the bitter end to defend his 42-year regime. Hot Press spoke to eye-witnesses to the terrible conflict on the ground in Libya.

The wave of social and political unrest that has swept the Arab world since December took observers across the globe by surprise. To the outside world, the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt appeared secure, the people of the region obedient. The sudden outbreak of demands for democracy and the toppling of these rulers has seemed, to the West, to come from nowhere.
Thus, while in Egypt and Tunisia, unpopular governments tumbled within weeks, the popular uprising in Libya has been met with the bloodiest of clampdowns. The dictator Colonel Gaddafi has so far stalled the attempted revolution in Libya, leaving the country trapped in a dangerous stalemate. The National Interim Council, the political face of the uprising, controls the western half of the country, centred on the city of Benghazi. But from his eastern stronghold – the capital city, Tripoli – Gaddafi holds the rest of the country in an iron grip. As the conflict intensifies, the death toll is now believed to be in the thousands and rising rapidly.
It is against this backdrop that Western powers, specifically France, Britain and the US, have decided to intervene. Fighter planes from these and other countries are providing air support to the rebels, bombing Gaddafi’s military bases, including the compound where he lives. Meanwhile, French aircraft are preventing Gaddafi’s forces from approaching the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
It was in Benghazi that the Libyan demonstrations began on February 15. At first, the demonstrators numbered only in their hundreds but within days, thousands were on the streets.
Dr Idris Founas, a medical doctor living in Ireland, was in Benghazi for his father’s funeral when the first large-scale protest took place on February 17. The crackdown by Gaddafi’s forces against the Libya-wide ‘Day of Revolt’ was brutal.
“He didn’t use any rubber bullets, he shot with heavy weapons. I went to the hospital and saw things I couldn’t believe,” says Dr Idris.
“People were shot in the head and chest. People came in with half a head or in two pieces, or some it was only a hand or an arm. Some doctors were in hysterical shock. There were very high casualties.
“It was very sad. One man wanted to recognise [identify] his son. He didn’t know if he’d been killed or not. I showed him the boy. I said he should be proud his son had died for freedom, but he said ‘I wish I had been killed before him’.
“Around 270 young people were killed in four days and there was a high number of injured. People came in with nothing in their hands, no weapons, no knives. I saw one with a knife, but most had nothing. I say to them, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They say, ‘We need our freedom back’.”
What had started as a peaceful protest movement quickly turned into violent confrontation, as unequal clashes broke out across the country between the discontented population and Gaddafi’s military.
“It changed from peaceful demonstrations. They tried to use miniature bombs, using oil and kerosene. I took a car to where there was fighting between the army and the people. All of them were young people; maybe some were in their 40s,” says Dr Idris.
The anti-Gaddafi movement fanned out from Benghazi to take control of nearby towns and cities to the west. Meanwhile, Gaddafi began his fightback in earnest, attacking towns held by the rebels from the air and moving his military forces on the ground towards the areas held by his opponents. There are widespread reports that Gaddafi has supplemented his forces with mercenary soldiers from other African countries – a disturbing development which Libyans fear will make the fighting all the more bloody.
Dr Abdelaly Abeidi arrived in Benghazi on February 23 to work in the intensive care unit of the hospital there. He then travelled west to the areas where the rebels were fighting Gaddafi’s forces.
“It was very bad on the front line,” he says. “In Brega, it wasn’t too bad 70 kilometres from the front. But I moved to Ras Lanuf and I was in the hospital there and I recovered five bodies and there were 32 casualties, some very serious. I told them I needed to go in the ambulance and take a young boy who got shrapnel in the front of his head and I took him to Ishnabia to have surgery. I don’t think he was ok, all the front lobe of his brain was shattered. As we travelled, the ambulance was being bombed from the air.”
Hot Press has seen horrifying photographs taken by Dr Abdelal in Al Jala Hospital in Benghazi, that show young men literally blown into pieces, limbs separated from torsos. These men were attacked with heavy artillery by Gaddafi’s forces as they demonstrated outside his Benghazi headquarters.
Gaddafi’s desperate attempts to quell the opposition, as well as being characterised by extreme violence, have proved to be complex and insidious. From the early days of the protests, the Libyan authorities have cut access to outside TV networks like Al Jazeera, leaving the propagandist, pro-Gaddafi State media as the sole source of news in many parts of the country. Internet and mobile phone networks have also been cut. Satellite phones and satellite internet are the only safe way to get information into or out of Libya, but most people do not have access to them. As a result, Libyans have found it difficult to convey evidence of Gaddafi’s atrocities, like that brought back to Ireland by Dr Abdelaly, to the outside world.
School teacher Alilah Ali, who is half-Irish, left Tripoli on February 26 with her three children, aged 9, 7 and 5. Since then, she has struggled to keep in touch with her husband and friends, as international calls are often barred and landlines are under surveillance by the regime’s internal security.
“It’s very hard to get information over the phone, as of two weeks ago. People are afraid to give information over the phone. They say ‘Oh, everything is ok’ and they say it in such a way that it takes the opposite meaning of what they are saying,” says Amilah.
“We’ve only heard the tip of the iceberg because it’s very hard to get information out. I was talking to my husband today and he said people are being killed for talking on their mobile phones. With Gaddafi, anything is possible.”
Amilah decided to leave the capital city when Gaddafi’s protection of his stronghold became so extreme that the city became effectively a “prison,” where meetings of more than a few people are violently quelled. Gaddafi’s forces control every street and approach road. After Gaddafi’s forces shot down protestors in Tripoli’s Green Square, the situation in the city became even more tense.
“At the beginning in Tripoli, people were going out and trying to get into groups. From that night on, there was a real clampdown. There is an unspoken curfew as soon as dusk falls. In places just to the east of Tripoli there are a lot of problems, there are mercenaries going around in cars and men go out to protect the streets and put burning rubbish bins to stop them going up.
“I saw all the tanks sent out to surround Tripoli and block all the exits to get into Tripoli from Zawiya. On one stretch of road, I counted 32 or 33 tanks.”
Amilah and her husband queued for hours that day to get petrol only to find the pumps were empty, so they set off for another filling station.
“We went down another road. All the shops were empty. The foreign shops had taken their clothes and stock and put it away because they were afraid it would be looted, as has happened in other countries. And down that road, we found military personnel all over the place. Army personnel were going up and down the roads, shouting and beeping. They weren’t military, they were just normal people who had been given uniforms and Kalashnikovs.”
Many of Gaddafi’s fighters are believed to have been forced to join the military on threat of their families being killed.
“You have people whose families have been taken and they have to fight or their family will be killed. They found a man handcuffed to the inside of a tank. The ones who are not firing at the freedom fighters will themselves be shot,” says Amilah.
That said, there is also a dwindling but hardcore minority who genuinely support the regime.
“Most people hate him but like with all dictators in the past, they will have people who worship them and will fight for them to the end. I don’t know what makes those people tick. I’d love to have a psychologist analyse these people and find out,” says Amilah.
The UN Security Council engaged in a protracted debate about whether to intervene in Libya, with Russia and China strongly opposed to the authorisation of a no-fly zone. Numerous high-profile commentators, including Noam Chomsky, have criticised the decision of the western powers to intervene in what is now a civil war. But the Libyan people Hot Press spoke to welcomed the no-fly zone as the only way to counterbalance Gaddafi’s vastly superior military strength. If anything, Libyans feel outside intervention should have come sooner.
“We are very grateful. It is appreciated. He has people from other countries fighting for him, support from non-democratic countries and from oil companies. We don’t have anything so we need help,” says Dr Idris.
He adds that the UN debate almost certainly cost lives.
“In those three days, he [Gaddafi] killed a lot of people. So the people were angry. They said, ‘Where is the UN to help us?’ Why this international delay to help the people? During the delay, we lost a lot of people: honest people, civilian people.”
The Libyan diaspora in Ireland and worldwide are now lobbying to have the Benghazi-based interim government recognised as Libya’s legitimate leadership. Hussein Hamad, who ran as a candidate in Dublin South in the recent general election, has been at the forefront of this campaign.
He likens the diplomatic limbo Libya’s National Interim Council currently finds itself in to Ireland’s position in the early 20th century, when the first Dáil attempted (and failed) to achieve recognition from other countries in the months leading up to the War of Independence.
“It’s like what happened in Ireland, we are a new State in the making,” says Hussein.
He is echoed by Dr Idris.
“It’s good for Ireland to support freedom. Everyone knows Gaddafi is a dictator and we know the Council is coming from the people and they are moderate and modern. We know their motives are good.”
Why have the Libyan people decided to rise up now, after 42 years of Gaddafi’s dictatorship? Dr Abdelal believes the key difference now is the internet. Access to the web may have been cut off since the protests began but, unfortunately for Gaddafi, not before it had given young Libyans a glimpse at the civil liberties enjoyed elsewhere, and of the civil disobedience sweeping across other Arab countries.
“You might ask why they didn’t do it a long time ago,” says Dr Abdelal. “There have been many attempts but because they were in small groups, they were killed or put in gaol without trial forever. Plus, if you try and criticise the regime, it’s not only you that’s punished. Your family will be punished for it, your brother, sister, mother, wife: anyone related to you will be tortured. The old generation, they were executed in the street, hanged in the street, put in gaol for ever, suppressed.
“But the young generation are on Facebook and Twitter. The world has become very small. Young people see how people outside the country can talk and criticise the government and they are motivated by Tunisia and Egypt.”
Events are moving so rapidly, it’s difficult to know what the outcome of the conflict in Libya will be, and at what cost to human life. But both doctors say they take heart from the positive mood they felt in Benghazi in the days after Gaddafi’s state apparatus was removed and the checkpoints, surveillance and other restrictions that had circumscribed daily life under the dictatorship were removed.
“In just 24 hours, people became very happy, very helpful, very organised,” says Dr Idris.
“One [man] brought a lorry with a lot of food to the hospital. He said, ‘That is my shop’. He brought his shop, because Gaddafi was gone, the army was gone, so the people were running the hospital themselves.
“The freedom I tasted in those days, I didn’t taste in 42 years, even in Ireland. I saw the confidence of my people for the first time.”
At the time of going to press, reports are breaking of pro-Gaddafi forces killing civilian protestors in the rebel-held city of Misrata. It seems extremely unlikely that Gaddafi will give up without fighting to the bitter end. But Dr Abdelal says the rebels are just as determined, and they have been galvanised by the brutality of the attacks on them.
“They went out and expressed themselves. The first thing they got was live ammunition and then, when they started to throw stones, they got back high velocity machine guns and anti aircraft guns. People were shattered to pieces.
“The Libyan people have a case to fight for and after all the bloodshed, I don’t think they will give up. We want freedom and justice.”