'We Don't Want Our Revolution Stolen': On the Ground in Libya

[EFerrari]

Libyans understand that their aspirations for freedom and justice might coincide with the cynical motives of empire.

Alter Net / By Anjali Kamat
May 22, 2011

Every evening just after four, Benghazi’s main thoroughfare is overtaken by a raucous group of some 200 cheering women and children and gun-toting men headed toward a sunset gathering in front of the city’s dilapidated courthouse on the Mediterranean. It is the loudest moment of the day, with passing cars blaring their horns, and intermittent gunfire let off by trigger-happy young men in four-wheel-drive vehicles. The women raise spirited chants against Gadhafi, urging people to stay steadfast in their resistance.

Seventeen-year-old Hanin Gheriani, giddy with a newfound fearlessness, says she has no doubt life will be better in the new Libya. “We used to be so afraid to speak, now we can say whatever we want. We are finally free.” The mood is light, even festive.

But this brief daily spectacle of celebration is deceptive. As the Libyan uprising enters its fourth month, people in the liberated eastern part of the country are playing a waiting game, and for many, patience is running thin. The spontaneous jubilation that marked the early days of the revolution is all but gone. In its place, an unmistakable sense of weariness and uncertainty fills the cool springtime air.

Concerns of a civil war or an Islamist takeover do not predominate here; most people laugh these off as overblown Western fears that are not grounded in Libyan realities. “Civil war, tribal loyalties, Al Qaeda, these are all bogeymen raised by Gaddafi and his son, Saif al-Islam in the early days of the uprising. This is not what people in Libya are afraid of,” asserts Naim Ali, a former correspondent with the independent news website Libya Today, who now directs Al Jazeera Arabic’s Benghazi office. Now that the fate of the uprising is almost wholly in the hands of those with the best weapons, foremost on people’s minds is how much longer they must wait for the regime to fall.

http://www.alternet.org/world/151038/%27we_don%27t_want_our_revolution_stolen%27:_on_the_ground_in_libya/?page=entire

[ReturnoftheDjedi]

1. Good thing Obama kept Gaddafi from stealing it.

[EFerrari]

2. This is actually a very well done article.

You should read it. :)

[PurityOfEssence]

3. What a depressing situation

We're really working hard to make it better, too.

Great article; it bears reminding that the prisoners killed at Abu Salim were mostly Islamist Revolutionaries who had killed soldiers and policemen, failed in an assassination attempt on Qaddafi, swore that his death was the most important thing after following Islam and they were killed following a prison riot of their own initiation where they took hostages and killed at least one. No, there's no Islamist component to all this, though.

There's a feckless throughline to all this, too: the expectation that others will do their work for them. They threaten countries to stand with them or lose oil access, carp for money, complain that things just aren't happening, yet don't take any responsibility for starting an armed insurrection with obviously inadequate support. Even with massive foreign air and logistic support, they can't get it together.

The mendacity of the coverage of this episode is amazing.