Kate Ahearne

Jean
Posted October 21, 2011 at 8:12 am | Permalink | Edit
Gaddafi shoots someone without trial = murderous dictator.
Someone shoots Gaddafi without trial = noble freedom fighter.

So let’s fire our guns in the air, shout something about Allah, put the women in bin-liners, and onward to democracy!!!

Dear Jean,

Thank you for encapsulating in so few words so many of the attitudes that grieve me.

I have lived in Libya during two periods of my life. In 1980 I travelled to Benghazi with my family and worked there for two years, as an English teacher at Garyounis University. More recently, in March of 2009, I returned alone to Libya, where I taught for six months at the Police Academy in Tripoli and for a short stint at the Police Academy in Benghazi. (The Academy complex in Benghazi was reportedly destroyed in the early days of the uprising.) There followed a 2-month stretch in Kuwait, then home for a few months followed by six months in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.

As you might imagine, I have been watching the unfolding of The Arab Spring with my heart in my throat.

When I got up this morning on the gorgeous north coast of Tasmania and turned on the radio, I heard that Muammar Gaddafi had been killed.

I am neither ashamed nor embarrassed to say that I was overcome with a sensation of joy.

Almost immediately, of course, I began to wonder if this could be another ‘mistake’ in the media-reporting of the conflict in Libya, like the death and/or capture of the various Gaddafi sons and henchmen who, as it transpired, hadn’t been killed or captured at all, or perhaps had later been freed by Gaddafi loyalists lurking among the freedom fighters.

For the next few enthralling hours I listened to the radio and surfed the internet. The photos of the dead person purporting to be Gaddafi might have been clearer, but it sure looked like him. I began to relax into a quieter, more moderate joy, and a hope tinged with sadness at all the lives that had been lost or spoiled during the 42 years of tyranny and these last 8 months of defiance.

And I am affected, not just by the lives of the innocent and courageous, and the grief of their families, but also by all those other lives that had been seduced and corrupted by the sheer personal power of the man, the stranglehold of the regime, and the privilege it could, and did confer on those who were loyal to it. The grief of their families, too.

How could we really blame or pass judgement on those who had hitched their wagons to the Gaddafi juggernaut, when opposition seemed, and indeed was, pointless and deadly, and when there was no other way out of the pit of poverty and hopelessness? For 42 years, the doubters had been hanged, or lined up and shot, sometimes even ‘live’ on national television. Even during the years that Gaddafi was being courted by ‘the west’, when the average Libyan was living on the equivalent of $2 a day and the billions flowed freely into Gaddafi’s pockets, dissent was being murdered. And we knew.

How profound was the courage of those who rose up against it?

Which of us could truly say what we would have done in a similar situation? Not me anyway, unchallenged and untried as I have always been – enjoying the freedom and peace, opportunity and privilege that my parents’ generation fought for, killed and died for, during the Second World War.

Well, not exactly untried. Tried, and found wanting, I think.

There were times during my life in Libya when I might have shown some courage, and there were times when I did show a little bit. But when it came, in 1982, to being followed around by the secret police everywhere I went, because I was trying to help a Polish woman and her daughter escape to Australia, I became so frightened that I had to hand the whole mess over to my more courageous then-husband and flee. At that time, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, and Polish doctors, nurses and technicians were being put onto non-stop flights back to Warsaw at the end of their contracts in Libya. I heard later that Sofia and her daughter had settled in Perth, WA. I hope they are still happy and well.

So when I returned to Libya in 2009, I looked and listened, of course, and noticed things, but said nothing, and nobody said anything to me. Not once in 6 months did I hear the word ‘Gaddafi’ from the lips of any Libyan person. That’s how it was, and how it had to be. Fear rules, or so it seemed. I was relieved when my contract came to an end.

If you had asked me then if Gaddafi could be overthrown, I would have said ‘no’. I could not have imagined it.

Now, I think about my students and wonder. Who is still alive and who is dead? There is only one student, because of his presence on Facebook, that I know to be alive.

I think about the classroom full of students who were bussed in every day from Al Zowia. They were in the Elementary class. How many of their eager faces are smiling today? How many of them are shooting their rifles at the sky in jubilation, wantonly wasting their ammunition? I have no way of knowing, but the fighting was so fierce and so prolonged in and around their hometown that I can only accept that some, and maybe many of them are gone now– men and women, girls and boys.

Libya has been in a state of war during these last 8 months. The rules of war apply, as does a little understanding about the 42 years that went before. How many of us would have quibbled if someone had shot Hitler? Gaddafi was a combatant, self-declared. He had vowed to fight to the death, to flush out the ‘rats’ and kill them all. (The wonderful irony of his having been found like a rat hiding in a sewer has not been overlooked by the media, and will go down in history.) He was the leader of a rotten regime. It has been reported that up until just a few hours before he died, Gaddafi was busy recruiting yet more sub-Saharan African mercenaries to come to his support so that he could be reinstated to his ‘rightful’ position.

If he had been captured alive and put on trial, would the fighting have stopped? Or would his followers have continued to hope and just kept on with the war? And of course there is the possibility that he might have escaped, as others have quite mysteriously escaped , including at least one and probably two of his sons during the battle for Tripoli. As the saying goes – where there’s life, there’s hope.

In war, Jean, we do kill the fighters on the other side. And if the leader of the enemy troops comes into our sights, we shoot him if we can. We’ll probably never know all the fascinating details about just what happened, and we don’t need to. Was it murder or was it an act of war? Is it really an either/or proposition? Whatever else it was, it was certainly a legitimate act of war.

As I write this, Libya’s interim leaders continue the debate about where to bury Gaddafi. They know how powerful he is, even in death. How and where can he be buried without his grave becoming a mini-Mecca for those who believe as he did?

We are all going to be disappointed, one way or another, by the way things work out in Libya. The future might look rosy now, but it won’t be rosy. Not all of the rebels are angels or saints. Some of them are thugs and some are simply misguided, just like we are. Many of those who defected from the Gaddafi camp during these last few months were genuine. But there must be some, at least, who thought they were backing a new winner.

Self-interest is human. It is not self-interest that has been killed, and it will never go away. It will fly into Tripoli and Benghazi on corporate jets. It is already there, on the ground, has always been there, the incomers greeted with handshakes and great big smiles, just like we do it down here in beautiful Tasmania. And, of course, the oil will flow again, and with it, wealth. We can only hope that a goodly proportion of that wealth will now flow to its rightful owners.

Reconstruction is in almost everyone’s interest, and will happen. But reconciliation might not.

So let’s get down off our smug little high-horse and consider. There will still be skirmishes, of course – more lives will be tragically lost before order is established in Libya, if it ever is or ever can be. But let’s think for a quiet moment about all those lives that will not have to be lost, now that Gaddafi is dead.

The shot that killed Gaddafi was the shot that ended this particular war. It will resound throughout the region – Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria in particular. Dictators will not take heart from it, but the people will.

And by the way, Jean. The ‘something’ that is shouted about Allah translates as ‘God is Great.’ And Libyan women don’t wear garbage bags, bin-liners or even pillar boxes, although Muslim/Arab women do cover themselves top to bottom except for their eyes in some other countries. In Yemen, where I have also lived and worked, almost all the women wear the ‘pillar box’. In Libya, though, the married women used to wear the birka – a kind of white sheet thing that wrapped the whole body and was held by the hand or in the teeth so that you looked at one eye, and one eye looked back at you, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. Always curious. Now, nearly all women wear the headscarf, and look you in the face. And, modesty permitting, they wear whatever else they want to wear, or can afford, within reason, under the circumstances.

Kate Ahearne

Sorry for the confusion. I read your piece and the comments that followed, including Jean’s. I was quite upset about what she said. The ‘lengthy statement from someone else’ is, in fact, from me. The reason I copied and pasted Jean’s comment is that there had been quite a few comments posted, and mine was just going to be too far away from Jean’s. I’m afraid I am deeply ignorant about this whole process.

No, you don’t need to respond.

Kate Ahearne

Thanks for your help. I’ll keep an eye on your work in future, with interest. In the meantime, let’s conduct ourselves with a little decorum and show some respect for the Libyan people and all they have endured. Yes, atrocities have occurred, probably on both sides, and the perpetrators must be brought to account. However, the killing of Gaddafi, as distasteful as some aspects of the event may have been, was not a war crime.

By the way, I can’t see ‘b-quote’. Where is it?

Kate Ahearne

That must be the little box next to Post a Comment. Anyway, interesting to note that among those calling for an investigation into Gaddafi’s death, is his family. For goodness sake! I really hope this matter will not be pursued. After all, the ins-and-outs of Osama Bin Laden’s death, despite calls for a thorough investigation at the time, have not been pursued, at least not in any public/punitive way. (Although the wheels that grind exceedingly slow may well be grinding off-stage.) Bin Laden’s death was a much more cold-blooded affair, orchestrated from the White House itself, while the death of Gaddafi occurred in the heat of battle and in the heat of the moment.

It’s so tempting for the likes off us, comfortable in our privileged ‘lifestyles’ to pontificate and find fault and even make fun. It would be good if the extraordinary events that have been sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East these last many months could touch the rest of us a little more deeply and truly than we have sometimes allowed them to do.

So thanks for your interest and your help. There will be times when I will notice things in the media which you might have missed – you can’t be awake and on the job 24/7, as they say. So I hope you won’t mind if I make a comment sometimes.

Kate Ahearne

You’re very kind. I’ve just been trying to get an article to you that came into my inbox from Google. By Charles Ronan. Motions on Line. The Official student Newspaper of the San Diego School of Law. Killing Al-Awlaki: Was it Legal? Was it Right? I did mange to ‘tweet’ it, whatever that means, but wasn’t able to get it directly to you. Also, tried to post a comment without success. Never mind. Maybe next time. Ronan’s article is a really good, sane piece. I thought I might use it as a jumping-off point for my next effort.
Back to the drawing board.