News and vignettes
Traveling back into Libya. An armed soldier mans the Tobruk - Ajdabiya desert highway.
Yesterday, Ajdabiya was re-taken from Qaddafi loyalists by rebel fighters. I couldn’t help but remember that this was the same road where a good friend of mine was kidnapped by the loyalists just a week previously.
A group of Chadian men queue at the Egyptian border at Sallum having fled the escalating conflict in Libya. These men had left their country to find work and stability in their northern neighbour, but now find themselves stranded at the border without any proper accommodation. They are waiting to regularise their papers in order to be able to return home to Chad. In the meantime, cardboard roofs offer their only shelter.
His hands covered in thick bandages, an eye glassed over and with puss oozing from the peeling skin on his severely burned head, Mohamed el-Mahdi looks the ...
The vast majority of Libyans that one meets in the east of Libya, or fleeing across to Egypt, are adamantly anti-Qaddafi. But that’s not to say they don’t have an intrinsic respect for him and his apparatus, albeit one born of fear.
This man, wishing only to be described as “Gh.B.” was incredibly paranoid about speaking to us, for fear of retribution by the Libyan security services. “They can know you based on just a small part of your body, or your voice” he says. Whilst he said this, I adjusted the focus on my lens, rendering his silhouette out of focus to as not to provide a detailed profile as he sat in the apartment being lent to him in Marsa Matrouh. Two days previously, he was reluctant about having even his shadow photographed.
Gh.B. has reason to fear the Libyan security. He claims to already have a “political file” in the country and having suffered imprisonment. Despite being “under surveillance”, he decided to take part in the protests that marked the start of the Libyan revolution. But due to what he describes as “political intimidation”, he had to take the hard decision of leaving behind Libya, and his family there. “I asked my mother to leave with me” he says, talking of the day he left, “but she is old, and could not travel such long distances”. She is now staying with Gh.B.’s brother.
“I am so worried about my family - I can’t call them, we cannot communicate” he says. His fear is born of both the war, and of the Qaddafi agents remaining in Benghazi.
Unsure of when he will be able to return to Libya, he says “I feel there is no future for us; it is so dark for us now”.
Abd el-Mawla reckons his age to be around 85. He has lived his whole life in Libya, but three days ago, two days after the start of the Nato bombing campaign on Libya, Abd left his home in Tobruk with his eleven daughters, coming across the Egyptian border and settling in the coastal town of Marsa Matrouh.
Fighting has intensified in Eastern Libya as Qaddafi troops made huge advances towards Tripoli just under a week ago, forcing many to flee further east to the oil-town of Tobruk. For families like Abd’s, the risk was too great.
But in post-revolution Egypt, Libyans are finding are warm welcome. A local religious group in Marsa Matrouh, led by a sheikh here, is providing humanitarian assistance to families fleeing the violence. The sheikh, also a local landowner, is offering apartments to those coming across, as well as coordinating with the local hospital.
Whilst many Libyans have ties with this Egyptian town, it is not a long-term solution. They want to return to their country. “I don’t have any idea of what I will do” Abd says. “We will stay here as long as there is a war.” And for the time being, that seems to be the foreseeable future.
