Driving around Benghazi a couple of weeks ago, we (the Arab News correspondent and his invaluable and remarkably well-connected driver Awad) noticed a small group of men being photographed beside a newly planted tree in one of the city’s main squares. Two of the men were in army uniform. Clearly there had to be story there.
We stopped and went over and asked what was happening. A palm tree was being planted in memory of local young men who had been killed in the fight to overthrow strongman Muammar Qaddafi. It was Mohamed Yusif Nabbous’ idea. He runs a popular café in the center of the square called Hud-Hud, after the bird in the Qur'an that took King Solomon’s invitation to Bilqees, queen of Sheba.
The café owner has a love of trees and plants. He has filled the area around the café with them and carefully tends and waters them each day. Those attending the simple tree planting ceremony were friends, including a paratroop commander, together with habitués at the café. We were all invited across the road to the café afterward for coffee.
The choice of the tree, a date palm, was symbolic. “We throw stones at the palm tree, dates fall and people are fed,” Nabbous explained. The young men who died had initially thrown stones at the Qaddafi forces, he said, and freedom had fallen into the people’s hands — freedom which also feeds them. A striking metaphor.
This was not the only tree planned. There was another little island a few meters away in the square where nothing grew. A tree would be planted there, in memory of Nabbous’ cousin.
Also called Mohammed, he is one of great heroes of the revolution. Before it happened he was a local businessman and journalist. On Feb. 19, four days after the pro-democracy uprising broke out, he launched the first independent TV station, Libya Al-Hurra (Free Libya).
Nabbous was determined the world should know exactly what was going on in the early days of the struggle for freedom. He was passionate about getting the news out.
Tragically, exactly four weeks later, two days after the UN voted for the no-fly zone and just hours before French planes started to bomb Qaddafi forces heading to Benghazi, he was shot dead by a sniper while reporting on attacks on civilians by the Qaddafi forces and exposing the lie that those forces were observing a cease-fire.
He knew beforehand that he might die. "Libyan lives to Qaddafi are very cheap,” he had said. But he accepted it. “I am not afraid to die, I am afraid to lose the battle," he had said.
His bravery has been an inspiration to Libyans. His wife, Perditta, gave birth to their daughter Mayar a couple of months after he died.
The next day, we drove to the square again. But the tree was no longer there. We screeched to a halt and rushed over to the café to find out what had happened. Apparently, someone who lived in the area planned to open his own café on the piece of land where the tree had been planted and had ripped it out; he had already dumped a load of building blocks and bags of cement there.
A suspicion grew that this might have been one of the reasons for planting it in the first place. Mohammed Yusif was at that moment at the police station lodging a formal complaint. Later we learned that the police had gone and warned the would-be competitor not to try to build a rival café.
Whether the warning is effective remains to be seen. It must be hoped so. Mohammed Yusif has worked hard to build up his business over the years. But like so many rules at present, property laws are in chaos in revolutionary Libya.
Around the country, people are taking over houses and buildings deserted by departed Qaddafi supporters; in Tripoli a few days later, we saw that people had already moved into houses at the Qaddafi’s blitzed Bab Al-Aziziya barracks. Elsewhere, others are staking claims to property seized from them by Qaddafi years ago. Signs appear on buildings saying: “This belongs to so-and-so.” In Benghazi, in estate agents’ shop windows, properties are for sale at bargain basement prices. A three-hectare beachfront property near Benghazi is available for just $65,000. The trouble is that there is no guarantee that it belongs to the people selling it or that someone else it not going to come along afterward and claim it as his.
Property ownership is going to be a major headache for the new authorities, given the amount of land Qaddafi seized.
A few days later in downtown Tripoli another story leapt off the street. While parking the car round the corner from the old Catholic cathedral that is now the Gamal Abdel Nasser Mosque, Arab News’ driver there, Adli, asked: “Do you want to meet a man whose brother was executed by Qaddafi? His shop’s across the road.” It was a pizza parlor. “Of course,” I said.
In May 1984, the Libyan opposition launched a raid on the Bab Al-Aziziya barracks hoping to kill Qaddafi. It failed. Those who took part were either killed on the spot or hunted down. Over 2,000 people were arrested in the days that followed. Eight were executed, among them 30-year-old Salem Al-Ghilali. (Also executed at the time, though almost certainly not involved in the plot, was Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy; see ).
Salem’s brother, Abdulrahman, runs the pizza parlor with his son Ibrahim.
As we shook hands, Abdulrahman dropped a bombshell. His brother’s body, he announced, had just been found in a secret mortuary, 27 years after he was killed. “Allah-o-Akbar,” he cried. Adli embraced him. “Allah-o-Akbar,” he replied, deeply moved.
“But how?” we asked.
Abdulrahman had gone to the mortuary after the announcement of its discovery, full of bodies, was made on the Libyan National Salvation Front website. Suspicions had been raised about it after the fall of Tripoli. No one had ever been allowed entry except on the express orders of Qaddafi himself. It was broken into on Sept. 16.
Abdulrahman had gone because Salem’s body had never been returned to the family and after all these years he still needed to know what had happened to it. He is convinced he has now found it. “I’m 90 percent sure it is him. It looks very like him, but it is not totally clear after all those years being frozen,” he said. A DNA test is being done.
The mortuary is also believed to contain the body of Abbas Badreddine, the Lebanese journalist who disappeared along with Lebanese preacher Musa Al-Sadr and another colleague in Libya in 1978. Al-Sadr is believed to have been murdered by Qaddafi after he accused the Libyan leader in a heated argument of being “an infidel.”
Everywhere there are stories waiting to be discovered — like the Amazaigh (Berber) flags waving in Tripoli’s renamed Martyr’s Square borne aloft by young enthusiasts who it turns out cannot speak a word of the language that is now, in effect, the co-official language alongside Arabic.
Or the exhibition of paintings in the square showing jet planes bombing Qaddafi forces in their tanks and jeeps. Except that in all the painting the planes do not have French or British insignia but the Libyan tricolor flag. It looks like someone else is trying to rewrite Libyan history.
Or the marble plaque on the castle high above where Qaddafi used to make his speeches for the past 41 years, showing St. George — the patron saint of England, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Ethiopia, Portugal — slaying his dragon.
It has been there for at least 90 years. How it managed to survive the Qaddafi years is a mystery. He had the nearby statue of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a Libyan from nearby Leptis Magna, removed. But then that was probably jealousy. Severus was something Qaddafi could never be, a world ruler. Qaddafi awarded himself the pompous title “King of Kings of Africa” and squandered his country’s wealth meddling in Africa. But he was never accepted.
There too, across the Sahara, there must be a wealth of Qaddafi stories just waiting to be discovered.
