Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

Leaving Libya

2007-05-11T08:16:00.000+02:00

It is three years to the day since I arrived in Tripoli and one year to the day since I left. Twelve more hours and I will be three years since I landed in the baking hair-dryer heat of Tripoli airport and was taken by company mini-van to the Baab Al-Bahar Hotel, where I gazed out of my lonely hotel room on the eighth floor. The view was a familiar one　- the dull blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea, tufted and ruffled slightly by balmy winds. I would have preferred a city view. In truth, the sight of the Mediterranean Sea bored me, though I was not that bothered. And so I looked out at a familiar sight from my past as I thought about my future in Libya.
What was on my mind that day? Certainly, there was trepidation. I really did not know what I was getting myself into. There is a lot in the guidebooks about Leptis Magna, Ghadames, the Sahara, the Medina, the history of Libya but as to day- to-day life, what my life was actually going to be like, what my job would be like for the next two years, I knew almost nothing.I had spoken to an Egyptian acquaintance who had lived in Tripoli about what to expect. He paused before replying “As long as you have a good job and live in a good place then it doesn`t matter where you are.” It wasn`t really the reassurance I had been expecting but I suppose, on reflection, a response not without its wisdom, as diplomatically phrased as it was. Another person who had lived in Tripoli told me not to worry. “It is not as if you are going to prison.” I am not sure if it is just my imagination or if he really added: “Not quite.” I had made a determined resolution though, that no matter how bad it was, I would stick it out.
And how did I feel just one year ago to this day? I can`t lie. I felt excited to be going. At the same time though, it was genuinely hard to be leaving. There was a sad, confounding feeling of dislocation that I had not even contemplated possible when I sat alone in my room at the Baab Al-Bahar. Is this really much of a life to live? To go to places and meet people and accept their hospitality and friendship and then, when it suits us, to up and leave forever? Finish the jigsaw and then break it up again and put it back in the box? It seems so heartless in a way, so ungrateful. Basim, to my astonishment, had even cried the day I left work for the last time. A year ago yesterday. Basim, an Everest of a mountain of a bear of a man and he cried because I was leaving? Clearly, he was insane but I was moved and patted him on the back and lied and said that I would see him again.
I went home and gave the rest of the stuff I couldn`t take to the maintenance men in orange boiler suits (a video, cheapo electric keyboard and portable radio) and packed my bags. The next morning, I gave the rest of my Libyan money to a welcome and unprotesting Mustafa and he waved me off as I caught a taxi to the airport.It is so hard to look back.
It feels like it was just a dream. Especially now I am so far away. I sometimes close my eyes and run a film in my head to try to imagine what is happening in all the places I have lived and loved and try to picture it just as I remembered it. And in Tripoli right now, another glorious sun has risen but the city is mostly still sleeping. The few people on the streets are in their traditional garb for the Friday prayers. Flowing white and brown embroidered robes and those matching brimless hats that Muslims wear. Perhaps packs of dogs pick at rubbish heaps in the Medina, the hawkers wheel their stalls into place at the Friday market, yellow taxis blaze past the fish stalls by the old lighthouse, suitcases are loaded onto the tops of minivans and buses heading south to Sebha, west to Tunis, east as far as Egypt even. Confused, aging, head-scratching, tourists stumble into the sunshine, fanning themselves with guidebooks.
And what about the place where I used to live, my flat inside the compound? Maybe yesterday morning at this time, someone was standing outside my company flat in the same place I used to stand waiting for our driver to take him to go to work to sit at my desk and do my job. But right now, presumably he is sleeping in my bed. These things are hardly the greatest mysteries of the cosmos but their strangeness can sometimes be hard to take in, to really accept as reality.
I thought it would be easier to reflect on Libya if I gave myself some time to allow my thoughts to sink in, to somehow melt into the mental stew of experience, to get a clearer sense of perspective. But in truth it is harder.
So hard now to believe that all that happened, that those people and things existed, far too many things to mention; the markets with monkeys, that office with the maps with Israel blacked out, Ali skulking in the corner, beaming Basim carrying desks on his back, the headless mannequins in boutique windows, the air-conditioner hose dripping into an over-flowing plastic jerry-can, talks with anguished Mustafa outside his internet cafe, barbecues at farmhouses on the outskirts of the city, dust, concrete, the blaring call to prayers, the shifty expat crowd and the good ones too, camels by the roadside, a Roman city to myself on a June afternoon, the Sahara desert stretching out into infinity, wedding dishes of camel meat and couscous the size of satellite dishes, satellite dishes like little suns on top of concrete houses in the orange haze of impossible, unreasonable suns that yield no mercy and then drop away so quickly like half-parried pinballs, into the abyss of the sea. All those warm, sometimes weary, smiles and handshakes, the sometimes unbearable kindness of strangers, the unremitting, sometimes unfathomable warmth, the maddening driving, living, working practices of the delightfully crazed Libyan people.
A people who sadly share the lot of all people born with the misfortune of being ruled by a tenured crackpot. To live in a sort of limbo of their own contemporary prehistory, waiting, much more in hope than expectation, for when their time will come to really join the modern world. And a people who for the most part carry that burden with such well-humoured resignation.
There was something bizarre happening on the streets of Tripoli on this day three years ago. Swarms of locusts had landed on Tripoli`s downtown streets. Clearly having detached themselves and taken a wrong turning from the rest of the swarm, they were hazily darting into windscreens like kamikaze pilots and wilting on the pavements. More than a few just missed my head as I made my way across the patch of wild wasteland outside the hotel and walked along the coast road. There were locusts everywhere; alarming little yellow winged beasts as big as humming birds everywhere you looked.

It is all so hard to come to try and understand all of it now. I was only in Libya for two years, a few drops in time. In truth, I may have put the pieces back in the box but I never came close to finishing the jigsaw. It is hard to make sense of these things as I sit here and my eyes wander to look through a new window at kids all decked out in white uniforms and caps on a terracotta baseball pitch at a new desk in what is still a new life in Japan.

Mustafa and Fatima

2006-05-10T12:01:00.000+02:00

Mustafa had a preoccupation which was torturing him night and day. A teenage problem really, but in the Arab world, puberty seems to arrive ten years later. Or maybe not. Mustafa said that he was the only one from all his friends who was still a virgin. He said that it wasn't so much that he wanted to have sex but that he didn't want to be the only one left out. He said that all of his friends had had sex but I just didn't believe him. I would not normally be so dismissive a young person's account of what his own generation is up to, but when it comes to sex, you have to be wary. Lies are the nasty cold that sex caught and just can't shake off. People lie about sex, people lie to get sex and then lie and then say that they haven't had sex. Some even lie during sex. But more commonly people lie and say that they have had sex when they haven't. This is the most favoured lie amongst young men and it is a lie that is virtually one of the necessary pains of growing into adulthood. I told Mustafa that all young men lied about sex. I told him that it was the same in my day, that all the boys lied, that I lied, that everyone lied and lies about sex, that even several Presidents of the United States had lied about sex but he didn't seem to believe me.

Fatima, who cleaned my flat every week, can not lie. She is not a virgin. Young men love to speculate about which girls or aren't virgins, but unless you are actually the mother of God, childbirth settles the argument incontrovertibly. We know for sure that Fatima has had sex at least once. Fatima's daughter, Selma, is six. I asked Fatima if she was married and once she told me that she was divorced and another time she told me that her husband had died in a traffic accident. I don't think she wanted to lie; it is just that she was ashamed. The truth emerged later. Extremely rare in the Muslim world, and so hard to believe of Fatima, who is so pious and god-fearing, Selma was born outside marriage.

So great is the taboo on sex outside marriage that in Libya, women who are, to use the official terminology "vulnerable to engaging in moral misconduct" are locked up indefinitely in rehabilitation centres, described by Human Rights Watch as "de facto prisons." The moral misconduct that these women and girls, some as young as 16, are guilty of is invariably that of having had sex, sometimes without consent. Disowned by their families, their fate falls into the hands of the state, which is itself criminally inept and insensitive to delicate social issues. Upon admission to these centres, the girls are subjected to virginity inspections. So after being raped, they are disowned, they then have their vaginas inspected and then, when they have been stripped of every shred of human dignity, they are imprisoned.

Only God knows the limits of suffering that can be inflicted by those who really believe that they are serving the greater good, and whether such misguided fools actually inflict any less pain than truly evil men. But while there are no corresponding institutions for men who have engaged in illicit sexual activity, it is not only the women who suffer.

A friend told me about a Libyan work-mate who had discovered that his unmarried daughter was pregnant. He walked to the roof of the three-story building where they worked and jumped off, head first. Miraculously, he survived. After many months he recovered and finally returned to work where he promptly did the same thing, this time successfully. They say that in the west, the concept of shame wilted away and died, that it was trampled to death by individualism. In the Arab world, it has never been healthier.

So I have to take it with a pinch of salt when Mustafa tells me about his braggart friends. A few of the more adventurous among them may have visited a Moroccan prostitute or two, but I expect that that is the limit of their collective sexual experience. It is actually a well-known fact that the guards at the compound where I live trade access through the gate for sex with African and Moroccan cleaners. One form of access for another, to put it crudely. But Mustafa's friends boast of having sex with Libyan girls. I asked Mustafa where they would even go to have sex for a start and he went silent. "There are places," he finally protested. I might be wrong but I don't believe that they have sex any more than the boy at school who told me that his father was Batman.

In Fatima's case, her predicament was brought about by sex and though I think that, like seemingly quite a few women by their late 20s, Fatima would be quite happy to put sex behind her. But it refuses to go away. Fatima complained bitterly of harassment from the guards and I told her that I would speak to them about it and she said that if I did that then there was no way they would ever let her into the compound again. And so it continued and then one day Fatima just stopped coming. Maybe she found a full-time job. She always talked about catching a night-boat to Europe and I told her that she would be crazy to as she can not even swim and that they often throw people out miles from the shore. She always pined for home and talked about how much she missed her daughter and kept dropping hints so in a mad fit of generosity I gave her 500 dinars (300 euros) to go to Morocco for Ramadan. To be honest, I felt relieved by the prospect of having some Saturday mornings without the noise of the vacuum cleaner or constantly having to shift rooms like a Bedouin in my own home but sure enough, come Saturday she turned up at 9.oo a.m. sharp as usual saying that she had sent the money to her mother to spend on Selma. At first I felt angry, but then I suppose that once I had given it to her it was her money to do with what she liked. But where she is now, I do not know.
As for Mustafa, he has a girlfriend now. They don't have sex but they meet and sit in the light of the monitor screen at an internet cafe, one of the very few haunts where young men and women can meet like boyfriend and girlfriend. Sometimes they even hold hands. For now, that is enough. It will have to be enough.

Funky Old Medina

2006-05-09T13:30:00.000+02:00

When I first arrived in Libya, the company put me up at the Baab Al-Bahar (Door to the Sea) Hotel in Tripoli. The Baab Al-Bahar is a five star hotel which one must assume beat up a smaller hotel in a fight and took a few stars off it, as not all of its five stars seem to have been acquired through any legitimate means. But despite its modest service, its passable buffet and the unpredictably of its souvenir shop's opening times, it has a location on the Tripoli coastline unenvied even by Tripoli's genuine five star Corinthia Bab Al-Africa (Door to Africa this time). The Corinthia, by far Libya's plushest hotel, is a near-skyscraper of a building with a shadow whose radius reaches and almost hits the Bab Al Bahar and then turns to rest and fade on the Medina as the sun sets.
While some of the Corinthia's residents' windows face the sea, others directly face the ancient limestone walls of the Medina, fronted by the fronds of massive palm trees. What the international business traveller will not be able to see, as he enjoys this pleasant, perhaps exotic, view from his hotel room is that the ground at the top of the ramparts is covered, in places knee deep, with rubbish. Also, there are dogs.
It is almost two years to the day since I left the Baab Al-Bahar to explore the Medina for the first time. As I waved to the receptionist, who unusually for one in his profession did not speak a word of English, those dogs were waiting. I was just a blip on their radar. Perhaps they were slumbering, all curled up at the top of the steps. They were probably in precisely the same position when I next saw the receptionist only fifteen minutes later, as his puzzled eyes settled on the tattered, gnawed hem of my trouser leg, now unraveling from the bermuda type leg wear I had fashioned from the remaining material after an encounter with three large, white dogs at the top of the steps of the Medina wall. They had only drawn a little blood and as concerned and embarrassed onlookers gathered round after I had reached the safety of the ground at the bottom of the steps, I had to laugh. One street hawker remonstrated with a bemused old man at the top of the steps, the owner of the dogs. I told them that it was OK. As I was later to notice the more I used the Medina, it was his area, that bit at the top of the steps. His daytime hangout. Impeding access to a UNESCO Heritage Site, albeit, but his area none the same.
The contrast between the pampered luxury enjoyed by visiting oil company executives at the Corinthia and the extreme poverty in parts of the Medina, just yards away could not be greater in any one place in all of Libya. But the Medina is not a joyless, souless place. Its aging beauty may be crumbling as its veil slips to reveal the scars of the tumbling years, but it is definitely not dead.
Between the narrow western gate and Rashid Street, shouts of "saraf, saraf, change money, change money" compete with the "Sebha Sebha" "Benghazi Benghazi" Tunis Tunis" of taxi drivers. Their roof-racks are slowly loaded with market trader's wares which set off on back-breaking journeys in all directions. The journey starts when the car is full - unless the passengers decide they have waited long enough and agree to split the fare to compensate for the shortfall.
Outside the gate, an impromptu trade in second-hand mobile phones has sprung up during the day, joined by the desperate caravan of the burglars' market at night. You enter the Medina and the first thing that strikes you is the stench of a small mountain of fresh rubbish. As you walk through the narrow, labyrinthine streets, ebony-skinned ladies emerge from black shadows, with babies cradled to their chests. Young girls sit on blanket pitches on the pavement selling Chinese shoe polish, Vaseline, razor blades, plastic combs and matches. As the sun sets, an a cappella muezzin cups his hand to his mouth and booms out the haunting call to prayers.
At its heart, where the copper and gold markets sway to the beat of the smith's hammer and men polish silver in tiny doorways, the Medina is a humming hub of activity, if not of opulence. But then you turn a corner and come face to face with rubbish cascading out of demolished houses like frozen waterfalls. Houses which look like they have just groaned and collapsed and been left to rot and, with bed frames, cookers, fridges and boilers rusting away. Little African markets set up stall in some of the vacant wasteland, selling fake designer gear, second hand clothes, pots and pans but lately these have been moved away and now the rubbish is rising in this space as well, like a man-made fungus that spreads over everything in its way . Here and there are the more permanent African presence of little cave-like barber shops in the walls, decorated almost obligatorily with life-size murals of the near demi-god poet and prophet of sub-Saharan Africa, Bob Marley.
In truth, there is little that is magic about the Medina. There is nothing here which could easily leap into the glossiness of a travel agent's brochure. But then again, magic is just trickery anyway. I am not sure how I feel about the Medina. I love to get lost in it but I do not think I would like to live a life of having my lungs filled with putrid, rotting refuse as I jostle down narrow streets with teams of goats. This was once not only Tripoli's centre but in fact all that Tripoli was and now it is considered the worst part of the city to live in. I feel that there is something unyielding and stubborn about it, perhaps even unwittingly, a refusal to be shaped and bought, gentrified and sanitised by popular ideals. But then the concrete patch-up jobs caked onto layers of clay on limestone will not hold the walls up forever. The heart of the city is certainly not dead yet, but its foundations are slowly slipping away from it. Maybe, in some ways, the Medina is a lot like the person who keeps it the way it is.
There is no magic but I remember once walking through the Medina at dusk during Ramadan and seeing a barefoot toddler run full pelt through the alleys, holding a bag of French loaves aloft like a trophy shouting the Libyanised Italian "mangaria mangaria" just as the naked light bulbs protruding out of masses of wires sagging over the alleys flicked on. I walked down the narrow way that leads past the old Ottoman Harem, later the British Consulate, past the floodlit Aurelian Arch onto the seafront. There was a warm breeze blowing but Tripoli Castle was reflected perfectly in the water. There was not a single soul in sight and it felt like I had the whole city to myself.

Expatriation

2006-04-30T18:24:00.000+02:00

Howard is dead. He didn't look well, it must be said.

I saw him slumped unconscious on a plastic white table at a party a year ago and his face was as red as beetroot. Howard's favourite vegetables were chips and tomato ketchup. His daily intake of water was actually over the recommended amount at a healthy two litres. However, when you consider that this water was taken solely to dilute on a 50/50 ratio with the amount of Flash he consumed, the figure is less impressive. At least health-wise.

Flash is the most common, only slightly ironic, euphemism given to the alcoholic tipple of Western expats who reside in gated camps and compounds all over the ostensibly dry outposts of the Muslim world. Actually, it is less a tipple and more pure, distilled alcohol, diluted with water according to personal requirements in order to decrease its toxicity. I have heard that some of the expats develop such a taste for it that they even make and drink it back home. Which is behaviour which must be something akin to the psychotic-depressive institutionalization of the mind. Or something like that. It is a bit like the cartoon Eskimo who shunts your offer of a cosy, heated and duveted bedroom in order to try and squeeze himself into your freezer. And you can sort of understand it when you have cooked a gourmet meal for the visiting exchange programme Kalahari bushman when he pushes it aside and instead skewers your kids' pet guinea pig on an open flame in the garden.

But while to drink Flash in any circumstances is an act of pitiful self-destruction, unless you are a tractor, to drink it out of choice can only be described as a psychiatric disorder. But Howard will be missed. By some. I will not be a hypocrite. From what I knew of him, he could be a most unpleasant man. But when you looked past his violently xenophobic air of obnoxious righteousness, which really only flared up when he was drunk, albeit very often, he could be a kind man. His xenophobia and racism were in fact, like the best xenophobia and racism, genuinely rooted in a misguided, mythical love of his own race.

Howard was part of the old school, Libyan expat brigade, who descended on Libya during the first oil boom in the 1960s. Most deserted the desert when the Lockerbie sanctions kicked in and some are now returning. But, Howard, one of the ones who was born to live and die as expats, never left. Until now.

Unsurprisingly, for almost all the Western expats I have met in Libya, money is the major motivating factor. For most, there is no dark subtext. But sometimes expatriation is a response to familial breakdown and sometimes can be the cause of it. Constant dark rumours flutter around the compound like bats at dusk of his wife and girlfriend back in Britain, who know nothing of each other or his goings on in Tripoli. Her credit card addiction. His time spend inside. The spats are almost comically endless. At one point four people who live on the same street on my compound were all not speaking to each other for different reasons and each was defensively proclaiming that they could not have wished for a more satisfactory situation. And these are not long streets. Indeed, it can be so exhaustively time-consuming to charter the poisoned diplomatic waters of the expat scene that I have found that the best course of action is to abstain from forming part of the entire movement. Or at least, if one must be on the stage, then to be placed at the wings, as far away as possible when the drama explodes and so much closer to the exit.

At some of the expat gatherings I have been to, it has been obvious that the people assembled had nothing in common with each other but had to force themselves through the grinder of social interaction with each other because of their shared expat identity and the fact that they had no particular reason not to speak to each other. And there we, the rent-a-crowd, socialised so difficultly, like floating pieces of driftwood, gathered together on the bonfire of social interaction and doused in spirit and light in the hope of generating some warmth of human interaction. The spirit usually does the trick.

I have sometimes received invitations to parties which were extended to anyone else I wished to ask, just as long as there were "no Libyans." Yes, in their views, some of expats can be the most depressing people you will ever meet but sometimes this is less of a standard racist knee-jerk than a discomfort at the idea of drinking alcohol in front of Libyans. Who also drink in large numbers, but feel uncomfortable about doing it in front of expats. Like an alcoholic couple who both drink in secret and can not look each other in the bleary eyes. Although I think I know whose eyes are blearier.

While the authorities normally turn a blind eye to expat alcohol consumption, this is not always the case. Earlier this year, two expats were imprisoned after a group grape-treading session in the garden of a villa in Janzour, a suburb of Tripoli, was witnessed by Libyan neighbours. They were reported and the villa was raided, uncovering hundreds of litres of red wine. Both were released on bail. The last I heard, one of them was granted an emergency visa to return home to Britain and of course will never be seen on these shores again. I think he is in Kuwait, hopefully a little wiser and treading his grapes indoors from now on.

Of course there are the toga parties, the fancy dress, the quiz nights and fun runs where new runners are initiated by being made to drink home-made beer out of their shoes. Fun for some, fine for some, but sadly this pre-packaged group merriment is just not in my heart. I do not look down on it. It is just not in my heart. Well, I do look down on it. But because it is not in my heart. I suppose we must all machete our way through the jungle of expat life in the way we know best.

A few expats are just looking to flee unhappiness, often attempted fugitives from a misery they can not escape because they have misdiagnosed its causes as being in their environment when it is actually inside them. It can indeed be hard to distinguish between someone who is truly unhappy because of the world around him and one who is truly unhappy and merely blames the world around him for it. Sometimes it comes back to alcohol. A few are naive enough to land in Libya in the belief that an officially dry Muslim state will be a perfect place for alcohol detoxification. I had a work colleague who came under ths mistaken belief and promptly went AWOL and could not be roused from his flat for days on end, always returning foul-breathed and red-eyed with the sheepish claim that he was suffering from a migraine so intense that he couldn't answer the door.

The sad fact is that those who drink in their own countries do not drink less in a Muslim state, but more. I heard of one person who went to Saudi a moderate, social drinker and returned to Britain a year later a raving alcoholic.

Personally, I have found some solace in exercise, the unusual pratice of interacting with Libyan locals and the companionship of a handful of other non-scene expats. Therein lies the problem with the whole expat scene paradigm. Everyone speaks scornfully of the "expat scene" just in the same way that journalists who are mass-doorstepping some hapless politician or celebrity objectively report that they have discovered the presence of a "media circus", as if they themselves were not part of it. Why is it always someone else who is part of the expat scene? Why is it always, always 'someone else'?
But this is all really just the tittle tattle of the desk-bound, town-based expats. Then there are permanent expats, the rotationers, the riggers and the desert trash, the rugged, lifelong brigade. Although Howard had worked in the town in recent years, he was a desert expat at heart. They spend half their lives in the desert, in places where there are no women for hundreds of miles, although they have committed no crime. No wives, no daughters.

So what future for them, these men? Due to the government's policy of Libyianisation, their numbers fall every year, as technical field positions are increasingly being given to Libyan nationals. Some retire, some seek work elsewhere, in Russia or the North Sea. Some will continue to lead a Quixotic life of retreating behind ever-bigger satellite dishes and bolstering bank accounts, just to drink themselves to death for the grace to be buried in a golden, velvet-lined coffin, draped in the flag of a homeland which they both loved with every beat of their hearts and simultaneously could or would not live in permanently.

For one, I salute them, these misguided, dwindling, romantic, sun burnt, confused, sometimes bigoted and sometimes maddened few. But I will not join them. As a wise man, a man of many stories, took me aside and told me on my first day at the company: "You're young. Spend a couple of years here. Get some experience here and then move on. I've been here 29 years, it's too late for me now. But you can just leave. Don't get stuck here."

Basim and Ali

2006-04-21T17:52:00.000+02:00

Before I knew exactly who or what human beings were and before I had mastered the cognitive skills needed to differentiate between personalities and even genders, estimate ages and judge characters I remember the warm nicotine-scented breath and the bristles of a cheek brushing against my face of a man bending down to hug me as I lay on a bed or maybe even a cot. My since errant, absent father perhaps? Another relative? I don't know who it was. But I think that it was a man like Basim. A large, bearded grizzly bear of a man, Basim is nominally the cleaner at work, but in reality he is a sort of general gopher, no-fixed-job-description, maintenance man, odd-jobber and donkey/dirty worker. Basim is a contract worker, not a direct employee of the company and is therefore not issued with the standard company coveralls and safety boots which normal employees, including desk-bound ones, get. Someone once gave him a green company boiler suit and, though now oil-stained and tattered, it is his uniform to work, though in theory he could wear anything he wanted to. Basim works every day of the week, from 7.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. and is paid 6 dinars (about 4 euros) a day.On a normal day, Basim can be seen pruning roses, hosing the ground to keep the dust down, carrying desks on his back, distributing office stationery with a wheelbarrow, emptying the bins, cutting down poles with grinders and spraying the offices with air-freshener at the precise moment that people are getting their sandwiches out for the lunch break. Although only 24, Basim's teeth are a muddy brown on account of the five spoons of sugar that he shovels into his coffee. Like many Libyans, he uses a tablespoon for putting the sugar into the cup but then finds that this spoon will not fit into the cup and has to use a teaspoon for stirring. Maybe this is where he gets his energy, his carbonated enthusiasm, his sunshine smile that seems to suggest that he has been somewhere no-one else has been and seen what no other eyes have seen. Basim is always in a good mood. If you cross his path 15 times a day, he will stop and say hello and, if he is carrying anything, put it down and slap you on the back all 15 times. Basim once tried to hold hands me with as we walked across the hard, the way Arab men often do. I didn't want to be culturally insensitive but that was just one bridge too unbearable to cross. I think he understood.
I once told Basim that a taxi-driver had overcharged me, and Basim earnestly described to me in detail how much the taxi-driver was going to suffer in hell for what he had done. Any conversation with Basim, and indeed any conversation in Libya can quickly take on a theological hue. In the little English that he is keen to practise, Basim told me that while the Prophet Mohammed was unquestionably his "number one", the Leader of the Revolution, Muamar Ghadaffi was equally undoubtedly his "number two." These are perpetually the two positions in Basim's league table. Others may concur, but certainly not everyone does. Ali definitely does not.
Ali is unusual in that he sometimes tells me that he wishes that America would invade his country. While everyone in Libya I have spoken to is vehemently opposed to the Iraq war, Ali says that if the Americans came they would sort the country out. Ali works in the office and has that universal, crushed, slumped demeanour of the disgruntled office worker. The company sent Ali to Britain to do his MA and he bought a Toyota SUV with the expense money that he saved up. But now, with the trip behind him, he has nothing to look forward to. He hates the work, he hates all the bosses and he also hates Basim, though I don't think Basim realises it. Misery loves company and hates anyone who has what it can't have. I think Ali feels that Basim's mood reflects badly on him. Ali certainly resents the way that Basim feels comfortable in just taking a seat in the office and starting to banter and chat when it takes his fancy. He feels that it is not Basim's place and though not openly hostile towards him, he sometimes just ignores him and glowers behind his computer. It confuses Basim that there is somewhere which will not take his charm as a substitute for genuine authority, but if it bothers him then he certainly doesn't let is show.
But more than Basim, Ali is unhappy with how little he is paid. He does two jobs and probably takes home four times as much as Basim a month but this is still not enough to sustain the lifestyle that he aspires to. In a socialist system of government like Libya has, there are undoubtedly some workers who secretly enjoy the fact that their mediocrity will go undetected, that their own inefficiencies will be drowned out by the wider inefficiencies of the system. But Ali is the other type, the one who is frustrated that his perceived talent and superior ability will never be rewarded.
For Basim, I think that within the context of his religious faith, the lack of financial reward does not trouble him greatly. For now, at least. I have no doubt that Basim will make an excellent father one day. With his broad shoulders, love of football and his knowledge of poisonous snakes, one day he will make an excellent playground boast, a lunch-break threat of reprisal.
But Basim is not a father yet. Ali is, though he only gets to see his year-old daughter when he gets home at 8 o'clock in the evening. Ali was hoping that when his wife gave birth in Britain, it might give him a legal right to stay there, but it didn't work out that way. Sometimes Ali's moods are so dark that I really think that he might sliding into serious depression. On some days, all he seems to do is sit there and sigh deeply. I try to talk to him about it, or at least to change the subject. Once I tried talking to him about music and he smiled when he recalled how he used to play the guitar in a band when he was at school. "We were going to play a concert, but it got cancelled, because someone at the top didn't like music," he said and his face reverted back to its defeated frown. Admittedly, among the songs they were going to play were Iron Maiden's "666 - The Number of the Beast" but I don't think that the concert was cancelled because of satanic lyrical content but because of a deeper religious objection to any type of music. This incident seems to sum Ali up. He tried, but they wouldn't let him, so he won't try any more. There isn't really much I can do. I just hope that Ali's situation, or at least his outlook improves before his daughter gets much older. The Americans aren't coming to invade and as I know, children can pick up on these things way before they learn to speak.

The River of Dreams

2006-04-18T17:48:00.000+02:00

Geological surveys in the 1970s confirmed that there was more than 120,000 cubic kilometres of pure fresh water lying under the sand of the Libyan Desert. In an extraordinary session of the General People's Congress in October 1983, the leader of the Revolution suggested transporting this water to Libya's coastal towns and thus started the Great Man Made River Project, the "8th wonder of the world", an engineering project on a scale never seen before in human history.
The pipes, the largest ever made, dwarf the transporters they are carried on and the pre-stressed steel in their manufacture would circle the earth 280 times. The quantity of aggregates used in the construction of the project would build 20 pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Khofu and the pipe transporters will have travelled a distance equivalent to going to the sun and back when the final phase of the project has been completed. It is envisaged that the 13000 wells that have been drilled will pump 6.5 million cubic metres of water per day. While Tripoli and Benghazi, and most of the west of the country are presently served by the Great Man Made River Project, when it is finally completed, it will deliver water to the entire Libyan nation.
The water has been beneath the Libyan Desert for between 14,000 and 38,000 years but at the car park at work, Fawzi just sprays it onto the gravel to keep the dust down. Sometimes he leaves the hosepipe on and goes away and the ground turns to white mud and the water trickles out of the gate and starts to fill the potholes in the road. A road that is strewn with cans and old tyres and empty plastic bottles of mineral water.

The Third Nalut Cultural and Tourism Festival

2006-04-12T18:29:00.000+02:00

Of course, not all Libyans are Arabs. In the south, there are the nomadic Tuareg and the Toubou, who trudge the Saharan plains, often roaming past resented borders into Niger, Algeria and Chad. But small in number, these tribes forge their own path outside the mainstream of Libyan society. Then there are the Berber. Popularly known as Berber, though they prefer the term Amazigh to Berber, which is after all a Latin derivation of barbari, they predate the Arab settlers and their modern day population is spread across Northern Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Some estimate that the Berber make up as much as five per cent of the Libyan population. Precise figures are impossible. Some are not even sure themselves. Last weekend, Mohammed took me to Nalut for the festival. Mohammed's parents are Berber and I asked him if he was also a Berber. He said that he didn't speak the language and that he identified more with being an Arab, having been schooled in Arabic, though he quickly added that he was proud to be a Berber as well. If that is allowed.
Of course, it has always been allowed to be a Berber, though it has not always been permitted to be too vocal about being one. The first Nalut Cultural and Tourism Festival took place in 1975 in the eponymous mountain town perched in the rocky hills of the Jebel Nafuza, the heartland of Berber Libya. The 1976 festival never took place. Hardliners in the revolutionary government fearful that the festival might prove a covert breeding ground for Berber nationalism pulled the plug and it was not until 2005 that the second festival took place. "Finally, the bastards let us have our festival", as a Nalut inhabitant told me bitterly. "We never wanted a country, or even a flag. We only want to celebrate our culture, to let our children see how their grandparents lived." The gulf between how the young people of Nalut live and their grandparents' lifestyles is indeed great. In the two generations between the camel and the Toyota pick-up truck, things have changed almost beyond recognition for the Berbers, just as they have changed for all Libyans.
In Nalut, an imposing qasr, or castle, perched on top of the mountain used to serve as a store for grain, with the town inhabitants' chambers of sizes directly proportional to their wealth. Ingeniously ventilated, it is not hard to imagine how the cold winds must blow through the holes in the chamber walls on winter nights. Of course, the rocky chambers are now empty, but in days gone by, this was the town's bank vault, with its entrance on the top of sheer rock face in order to seriously restrict access by getaway camel for any would-be qasr robbers. When we got there for the festival, the qasr was mobbed with crowd. There were camel trains, wedding party re-enactments, mock circumcision ceremonies, veiled women weaving lambs wool blankets. They said that it takes four of them a month to finish one, which they then sell for 200 dinars. I asked Mohammed about the meagre economic gains and he shrugged and said that it was better than earning nothing, which is what they would get otherwise. "It gives them something to do", he added.
Elsewhere, there were stands selling ornaments carved out of palm wood and Tuareg had come to town to sell garishly coloured artifacts. I bought a leather mobile phone holder with the letters NOKIA stitched into it. Written proof, if any were needed, of the ceaseless march of globalization. All it needs is for some humourless lawyer to sue the beleaguered Tuareg for this copyright infringement and it will really feel like 2006.
In another part of Nalut, caves which once served troglodyte granaries and living quarters were converted into exhibition rooms for dinosaur bones, fossils, local pottery, glass-caged scorpions, iguanas, Berber furniture and assorted artifacts. And then there was the traditional Berber food, like bazin, a popular one with all Libyans, made of unleavened barley to look like mud but taste so much worse. Bseesa, a sickly sweet paste made from crushed seeds. Samel, something like ghee and not trying to hide the fact that it is in fact 100% saturated fat. The festival of Nalut should never have been stopped, but whoever is making this food should be tried for crimes against humanity.
But there was a rare generosity about the people of Nalut which I suppose will be diluted when or if the Libyan tourist industry expands. When we arrived, a friend of Mohammed's unhesitatingly handed over the keys to his house to us and went to stay with his mother and his wife went to stay with hers. As we toured the festival, curiosity seekers joined our entourage one by one and I found the camcorders and mobile phone cameras were being pointed at me. Next, a local television crew approached for an interview. There was no doubt about it. I had become part of the show.
At the evening concert in the main square, we were embarrassingly ushered into front row seats, against a backdrop of a fifty foot high painting of the leader. This is not the place for the faint-hearted or for the more fundamentalist elements, many of whom would have objected to the musical content anyway. Coming as it did, just days before the festival of Milud, Mohammed's birthday, when it is traditional to celebrate through the medium of fireworks, the boys are packing a seemingly endless supply of gunpowder. The way to dance here is to wave and flap your arms as if you are imitating a bird or as if you arms are two wet fish. The feet do not move much and many people can't move their feet anyway because they are standing on plastic chairs which they have stacked up on top of each other to get a better view. Some people go to dance at the front of the stage, in front of the row of VIPs, which the security do not like. An impromptu competition to see who the unlikeliest dancer is emerges. First, the old man, about 80, is pushed to the front of the stage, where he shuffles from one foot to another with soft abandon. Then two children, about five and six, not dissimilar to the old man, but somehow more self-conscious, with their eyes desperately checking for paternal approval like searchlights. Lastly, the man with the crutch, who caps this display of physical comedy by taking it to its natural conclusion and falling over. A belly dancer emerges onto the stage and the acrid smoke which has been going all night intensifies as all the little bangs seem to merge into one long bang. The only woman here, she is a magnet for the eyes of a thousand young men with the heat of 10,000 fireworks in their pockets. One behind me shows his appreciation with a short burst from a make-shift flame-thrower fashioned from a cigarette lighter and a can of fly-spray, though he is quickly disarmed by the security.
There was one image of Nalut which has burned into my subconscious like a cigarette. Outside the granaries, in the glare of the sun, where a three piece Tunisian band beat out a hypnotic rhythm and their dancer gyrated with a pot on fire on his head, there were photos of more recent Nalut history. Fading photos of young men in camouflage fatigues, with Kalashnikovs strapped around them. There was a particular photo of one with an enormous Afro and a massive grin as he posed on a rocky hillside somewhere. The hairstyle reminded me of someone I used to know somewhere, but I can't quite place. These were the photos of the ones who went to fight the Israelis in the 1970s and never came home. There is a sad little irony at play. While the minority Berber people were struggling to find their voice in Arab Libya, Nalut men were fighting for an Arab minority in Palestine. So what were these men, barely out of childhood, when they died so many miles from home? Were they Berbers? Arabs? Libyans? Maybe Muslim more than anything else. How did it all fit in? I didn't like to ask Mohammed as it is a sensitive subject and after all, he probably wouldn't know. Perhaps it was only the people in the photos who could have told me anyway.

Burglars' Market

2006-04-01T09:58:00.000+02:00

Though it only lasts for the few hours leading up to prayer time on Friday afternoon, the Friday Market makes up in scale what it lacks in opening hours. It is a market of such magnitude that it even has a part of Tripoli, aptly Friday Market (Souk il-Gima), named after it. It is a market which snakes its way through two kilometres of massed bodies poring through clothes, fake DVDs, alarms clocks, car accessories, fruit and vegetables, goats and camels. There is in fact very little that you can not buy at the Friday Market. It is good market, but not my favourite.
Also open on Friday mornings is the teeming Fish Market, which is in the harbour by the light-house, just across the road from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps it is because of the crush that women do not attend most markets in Libya, though you see plenty of them actually inside the Medina. At the Fish Market, there is so little space between the stalls that at one point, shambling through it absent-mindedly, I found myself surrounded by fish on every side. I steeled myself and prepared to eat my way out through a pile of octopi, when a Libyan stall-owner came to my rescue. Again, this is a fine market, but not my favourite. I am not that keen on fish. Too many bones.
Moving further down the port, in the open air, there is a pet market, although there are only three types of pets available here. There are fish, birds and dogs. For fish, read goldfish, for birds, doves, budgies and parrots and for dogs, Alsatians. In truth, this is an Alsatian market more than anything. What is the relationship between Libyan men and Alsatians? The bond is a string one, though I think they use them more as guard dogs than as pets. When I told Bashir that it was quite common for people to let their dogs sleep on their beds with them, he thought that it was a deranged, bestial idea. Libyans may not allow dogs onto their beds but there they stand, keenly admiring each other's Alsatians, some on leads, others chained to the wheels of cars or kept inside the cars for viewing. A hundred Alsatians of different sizes, though roughly the same shape. For the connoisseur of Alsatians, this is heaven on gravel. To me, they all look the same.
Then, just up the road, there is the Burglars' Market, stuck in the moonlight between the walls of the crumbling grandeur of the Medina and the Bab Al-Africa Corinthia, Tripoli's only 5 star hotel.
The Burglars' Market, just like burglars, only comes out at night. Despite the name, most of the people with their pitches on the ground here look like they can have burgled no more than the dustbins of not particularly wasteful individuals. The Burglars' Market is a testament to hope and a poem of desperation. It is where the things that no-one wants any more are finally washed up. Indeed some of the stuff here is of negative ownership value. Twisted padlock keys without the padlock? One arm of a chair? A scissor? Not a pair of scissors, just one. Half a can opener. So maybe you buy the scissor and the half a can opener and you have a scissor opener. Maybe not. Some pieces of junk which started high up on the possession chain, like broken picture frames and others, like Gulf Air in-flight magazines, which never had any value even before their pages turned so yellow.
However, it is not all rubbish. This is the ideal place to come if you need a chipped vase, have dropped the LG air-conditioner remote control on the floor too many times, need to replace the fan belt on your 1972 Peugeot 405 or are struck by a sudden desire to read a 1947 Longman Simplified English Series Edition of 'A Tale of Two Cities Printed for the U.A.R. Ministry of Education Only. Still, if this stuff has been burgled, then we are not talking about the Sultan of Brunei's home here. In reality, I think that the Burglars' Market is more a place to be pick-pocketed than to actually procure stolen goods. Although I suppose that pick-pocketing is procuring stolen goods in a sense. Evidently though, some of the merchandise at the Burlgars' Market has in fact been stolen. The relationship that people have with thieves is a strangely contradictory one. While so many can virtually shake with righteous passion when declaring their sacrosanct right to protect their homes from burglars, within the same breath they may not find the prospect of buying a cheap DVD player, with no questions asked such an offensive. George Orwell said that people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. Of course he is right, but what he did not add is that people do not always sleep so peaceably in their beds because other people are prepared to pay rough men to break in steal their things. As is often the case with rough men, you can end up back where you started.
I bought a Sanyyoid portable stereo from the market. I asked the young African boy who was selling it if I would be able to pick up the BBC World Service. With a deft flick of the dial he had it, not a perfect reception, but crackling through. But when I got home, it was gone. I adjusted the dial millimetrically on every band but could not pick it up. I twisted it at every possible angle, threw it, kicked it, but still no World Service. I later discovered that I could get the World Service Radio digitally crystal clear through the satellite dish. The Sanyyoid radio went into the bin when it chewed up a Radiohead cassette. For all I now, it has made it back to the Burglar's Market once again. Maybe it will journey to and from there forever, in a perpetual state of infinite return. If so, it will be joined by a perfectly good glass ashtray which cracked when I used it during a power cut and a bedside lamp which worked for all of six and a half minutes. Perhaps these items were not in fact stolen, but a robbery did take place when they old guy took my money for that lamp. Needless to say, there are no refunds and goods can not be exchanged. At the end of the night, when the market has ended, many of the pitches are left behind for the rubbish men.

Defining Causes

2006-03-24T14:28:00.000+02:00

The riot policeman outside the 11 June stadium seems nervous. He has a baton, which he uses to routinely prod spectators as they file into the ground but there is no real violence in his action. Inside, an aura of gentle, good-natured anarchy is in the air. Green and red flares are propelled towards the pitch to the rhythm of a constant drum beat that reverberates around the ground with the periodic explosions of cherry-bombs, as we prepare for the Tripoli derby. I am surprised to see that the Ahli fans seem to outnumber the Ittihad supporters by about two to one. I choose to sit down in a sort of buffer zone away from the throbbing of supporters. I am surrounded by more Ahli than Ittihad fans though. There are about 30,000 in the green of Ahli to my left and maybe 15,000 Ittihad supporters in red to my right. I decided there and then that I would be an Ahli supporter. There was not that much to distinguish between them as far as I could surmise, but once the choice is made, there is no going back.
Identity is often clearly delineated and established by defining oneself according to someone or something else. Some people define themselves by comparing their lot with the Joneses, although this may not be helpful as the Joneses may be operating in entirely different sets of circumstances. Britain defines itself by looking at Europe and America, though this can be problematic as Britain can not easily be compared to Europe, as it is a continent, or America, as it is a super-power. For Ahli and Ittihad there are no complications in defining themselves. They are defined against each other. Through mutual hatred, they both find a purpose, a reason to exist. They are like mirror images, born miles apart in the port of Tarabulus. They could have been brothers. Like Cain and Abel.
Inside the stadium, a teenage Ahli fan clambers over the fence and the steep trench separating the fans from the pitch and sprints along the running track with the green flag billowing behind him. To the cheers from the Ahli faithful, he charges towards the Ittihad mob, heading headlong into enemy territory, buoyed seemingly with the courage of that Chinese protester stopping a column of tanks of Tiananmen Square. But then a plastic bottle, launched from what must have been forty metres up in the stand, misses him millimetrically. Another lands at his feet. As more rain down, he slows, U-turns and beats a hasty retreat, with the Ahli cheers now drowned out by the Ittihad jeers.
Others follow suit, from both sides. Not quite brave enough to attempt the running track route, most instead head for the pitch itself. Out of range from the plastic bottles and half-dinar rubber mats meant for sitting on, the new game for one Ahli supporter is to leave his flag nestling on top of the goalpost, where the Tihad players are now warming up. Managing the task, he kisses the turf and returns to the warm embrace of the crowd. The Ittihad tribe does not like this. They send their own emissary, who also kisses the pitch, hugs his goalkeeper, displaces the Ahli flag from the roof of the goal, stamps on it and replaces it with a red Ittihad umbrella. As is always the case at football matches at these moments, there is simultaneously a roar and a groan. Soon there are a dozen fans on the pitch, racing around mazily, play-fighting, trying to tear flags out of each other's hands. Players from both teams continue to warm up, seemingly not bothered by the commotion or perhaps wise enough not to intervene. The police look on nonplussed. For now.
There are no women in the stadium and I would say the average supporter age is around 20. The almost exclusively male youth factor gives the crowd a raw energy that is so powerful that when Ahli go 2-1 half-way through the second half, it feels like the stadium is about to collapse. And stadiums have collapsed in Libya before.
As the kick-off nears, a particularly impertinent Ittihad fan appears behind the fence below to bait the Ahli crowd, lewdly grabbing his crotch and slapping the inside of his right elbow with his left palm. When one of the Ahli boys, with his allegiance daubed on his forehead in green paint, runs down to confront him, the Tihad scoundrel takes flight and retreats back to the safety of the red side, like a coward. 'Typical Ittihad' I think to myself. Neither of the boys are older than 10. In fact there are many children here unaccompanied. Some in groups, some on their own.
When Ittihad score a dubious late penalty to give a full-time 2-2 score line, things turn slightly nasty. The referee and his officials make a dash for the tunnel to escape the hail of debris. Moving faster, it must be said, than they did during the game. 'If only they had been a bit faster earlier', I thought to myself 'then maybe they wouldn't have to move so fast now.' Ali, who befriended me at half-time, is incandescent. He shows me an action replay of the penalty incident, which he has incredibly recorded using the camera on his mobile phone, though the picture quality is ridiculously bad. But I don't tell Ali that. He is somewhere else. In a place where people sometimes go when they are drunk or on drugs or angry and you can just not reach them. You can't take a bus or walk there, and you certainly can't use reason. I nod and he slowly calms down and tuts and surveys the emptying stadium. Only a few clusters of fans remain on either side. On the other side of the stadium, we can see some Ittihad fans break pieces of wood from the seats and hurl them at the police, all of who now have the visors down. They charge into the throng, and the crowd scatters up the terraces like a swarm of bees. Ahli fans fifty metres to our left respond by starting little fires. Ali tuts again and I motion to leave but he urges me to stay, saying that something else might happen. Something else at which he will doubtless tut disapprovingly. But there is nothing else, although I am later told that the Ittihad coach was injured by a piece of flying wood. As we finally leave I tell Ali that Ahli played well but he shakes his head. "Ahli are not good any more", he says. "We should beat them easily. In the past, in the 1980s, Ahli were one of the best teams in Africa." At first I thought that maybe I was wrong about Ahli defining itself against Tihad and in his talk of pan-African influence and domination, Ali was beginning to sound like someone else who came into mind. I understood how he felt though, as Ali had travelled from Brega, a ten-hour car journey, to see the game. Ali breathes and lives Ahli. Apart from the absence of an 'h', he actually is Ahli.
There is no use pretending though. Ahli will not reach dizzying heights in African football any time soon. Beating Ittihad is the one that really matters and deep down Ali knows that. I don't think Ali is really that interested in being Africa champions anyway. Africa just happens to be where Libya is, though I sometimes think Libyans wish they could detach their country and sail it somewhere else. Where else though? And what does Libya define itself against? It has borders with Tunisia, Chad, Niger, Sudan, Algeria and Egypt. It is also just 45 minutes from Malta and a bit further from Italy. But I don't think Libya defines itself by looking at any of these nations. Despite all the talk of African unity, Libya looks further east for its role models, to the Gulf states, which have comparative oil revenues and Islam, of course. 'Why are the Tunisians richer than us when they don't even have oil?' 'Why can't we be more like Kuwait?' 'When will we be more like Dubai?' 'When will we get proper roads, like they have in Saudi?' are all common questions which have been put to me. Of course, I can not answer them. Only one person can. He was once asked, in a manner of speaking, inside the 11 June stadium almost exactly 10 years ago when anti-government chanting broke out at the same Ahli-Ittihad fixture. The reply they got was in the form of machine gun bullets and eleven people died.
Some people just stopped going after that. When I asked Abdul Rahman who he supported he sighed and said, "I used to support Ahli, but I don't support anyone any more."

Unfunny

2006-03-17T16:16:00.000+02:00

There are two staple jokes in my boss's comic repertoire, though neither are exactly jokes. The first of his comedic devices is to affect a funny nasal voice. The closest approximation that I can make is Kermit the Frog, though I don't think that Abdul Rahman has ever seen the Muppet Show so it is a funny voice entirely of his own creation. The second, and this works on two levels, is to say 'Good Afternoon' when it is half past seven in the morning and conversely to say 'Good Morning' at three in the afternoon. We finish work at three and do not socialize outside work, so he has not yet had the opportunity to employ the gag to its full, devastatingly funny effect at, say, 10 o'clock in the evening.
Now a great deal of, if not all, humour relies on some form of inversion. A man dressing up as a woman is just one example which springs to mind. Whoever said that sarcasm was the lowest form of humour was wrong. A man in a dress is lower. So I cannot fault Abdul for using a time-honoured comedic tradition. However, there is a general consensus that the very funniness of a joke dissipates with its repetition. This is the tragedy of comedy. It is intrinsically disposable, although this does not account for the way people will continue to double over at the sight of a man wearing women's clothes.However, what Abdul lacks in material, he makes up for with delivery. There is a wide-eyed enthusiasm to the way he says 'Good Afternoon' as I step through the door into work before the sun has come up that seems to suggest that he feels that he has tapped into some way to buck the law of diminishing comedic returns. He is the comedian who has laid the universal, golden joke. The joke that is funny for all people at all times. Of course, with this I cannot agree with him. Where I could once manage a titter, now the best I can do is grin for the duration of his glance to make sure that I am grinning and confirm to himself that the old magic has not deserted.
I don't dislike Abdul though. He is a genuine, honest, warm and conscientious person with only a modicum of the pomposity that comes with seniority in Libya. The best comic moment I have heard from Abdul's superior, Izdeeen, came after I told him that I was going out for a break. 'Have a break, have a Kit-Kat!' he replied. The smugness was written all over his face as he broke into laughter. 'That was a good one,' he was thinking to himself. 'I should be on a stage somewhere'.
And, after all, Abdul does have his funny moments, albeit sometimes unintentional ones. He was recently sent to Britain for a management course and returned with a hairstyle which resembled a member of the Jackson 5 who had just spent the day inside a tumble-dryer. The reason for his bouncing, exaggerated hair-don't was that in Manchester, where he had been doing the course, or at least been enlisted on a course, a haircut would have cost him 25 dinars, while in Tripoli he could get one for 3 dinars. There was no way he was prepared to cut into, or even trim, the generous expense account afforded by the company for the sake of a haircut. To Libyans, this is not a question of greed but often a simple matter of economic survival.
Despite virtually floating on oil and gas, the average salary for the vast majority of Libyan employees has been frozen at an annual 2,500 euros for twenty five years by the universally reviled and despised Law 15. However, companies can send their employees abroad for training where they are able to give them generous expense allowances. As students, they live as frugally as possible and return to Libya with the remainder of the expense money (probably about 95% of it), together with anything else they have managed to rustle up. The expense money is the only real windfall most men are likely to receive in their lifetimes. Women are not normally sent abroad. For some men, being sent abroad by their companies is the only opportunity they will have to save enough money to build a house and get married. Not getting married seems to represent some sort of pariah status and does not bear thinking about. I asked Bashir what you do if there is just no woman prepared to take you. "Then you marry an Egyptian," he said, with a smile, not seeming to countenance the fact that Egyptian women are, after all, women too.
While the sluggish Libyan work ethic can sometimes be exasperating, with salaries barely at a level of subsistence, it is hardly that surprising how little commitment there is at the work place. Work seems to serve more of a social function for many Libyans. Indeed, in the corridor outside my office sometimes they stop to chat and laugh for half an hour at a time. I would say something but normally they are high-ranking management, although joined by a cleaner, driver or whoever happens to be around. With wages so low, seniority becomes extremely important, although it is not a barrier to social interaction at work.
Many Libyans take second jobs, often working in shops that operate with a bare minimum of stock. A few weeks ago I was walking in the medina when I heard my name called out from someone inside a shop off Omar Muhktar Street. It was someone from work and I went in and we talked for a while. After a while I asked him how long he had been working there and he said, "Oh, I don't work here, I work over there", pointing at a mobile phone accessory shop (a particular favourite in Libya at the moment) across the road. The Libyan practise of closing your shop to go and sit in someone else's, or on the pavement, for a chat and a coffee is widespread. In theory, you should sit at on a plastic chair at a vantage point where you are able to monitor any potential customers coming and going. This does not always work though and sometimes you can stand around waiting to be served for five or six minutes, or until you decide to go somewhere else. It is also common to see a shop-keeper glued to a TV set, in an attempt to alleviate the crashing, careening boredom that is an occupational hazard of working in one of the multitude of small Libyan shops. An engineer told me that his wife had told him to leave his job at a prominent oil company and get a job as a taxi driver. But even this is not a guaranteed improvement in income. It costs twenty dinars to rent a taxi for the day, which means that you need to get seven or eight fares before you even start making money, which is not easy when you consider the number of taxis on the road. "I used to be able to charge ten dinars for a fare like this, but now I can only charge three," an older driver told me bitterly. Just as with the shops, there are too many taxis.
Someone sees a gap in the market for, say, an internet cafe and their business thrives until six other internet cafes open up around them, the market is saturated and then the pavement is lined with bored young men sitting in plastic chairs or watching the Arab version of 'Who wants to be a Millionaire?' Not that they would be bored enough to follow the Egyptians and sub-Saharan Africans onto the construction sites.Even though Libyan slaries are so low, expatriate workers are of course competitively remunerated, although not exaggeratedly so. This creates a situation where the manager of a major oil company will earn little more than $250 dollars a month, while his foreign secretary is paid twenty times that amount.It is a situation which I also embarrassingly enjoy in my relationship with Abdul, though it is a taboo subject at work and has never been discussed, or even mentioned. I know that there is another employee who is very bitter about it, though he just stops himself short of saying so. I understand how he feels, but I didn't write Law 15, with its comic inversion which I suspect that even for Abdul, who replies 'Hi Hitler!' when someone says 'Hi!', ceased to be a laughing matter a long time ago.

Orange Men

2006-03-10T15:33:00.000+02:00

I once saw an orange man praying in the shade of a satellite dish. Andy reckons that it was an orange man who stole his two bags of cement. It must have been at least two orange men, as they were big bags. Sometimes orange men set up base in the gardens of disused flats. Sometimes not disused ones. They travel on tractors with trailers attached to the back. One driving, the others in the trailer. There is one orange man outside Peter's house who uses the outside part of his air-conditioner as a clothes rack. When you see the orange men in the shop they are always buying tins of tuna and about twenty bread rolls. I sometimes see orange men out late at night, sitting on a bank of grass under the sodium street lights, which hum like giant mosquitoes. They can look slightly sinister, sitting there with scarves wrapped around their faces like bedouins. I don't think there is anything dangerous about the orange men though, as they slink around the compound in a somnolent slumber. Paula said that someone once found an orange man asleep on their bed when they got home from work. But I don't believe anything Paula says. I think the only difference between me and the orange men is opportunity.
The orange men aren't orange. They are, without exception, black Africans, from Somalia, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan and other sub-Saharan countries. I call them orange men because of their uniform flourescent orange waistcoats. The orange men, and there must be around fifty of them, although it sometimes feels like there are a thousand, are there for the general purposes of security and maintenance. Maintenance includes things like pruning the trees, sweeping the road, setting the lawn sprinklers to water at least part of the grass, but mostly the road and security involves sitting around, staring into space. On my part of the compound, there is more than a fair share of orange men. They sit on pieces of cardboard on the lawn of a vacant flat, eating couscous out of bowls like satellite dishes. This is how everyone eats in Libya; huddled around an enormous bowl, with each diner carving out their hollow in the mass of food. The shape of a starfish emerges, and then the shape contracts into itself, just like a dying star. But most of the time they just sit there watching the world go by, like the audience at an interminably boring play, or perhaps the cast themselves, in Becket's 'Waiting for Godot.'
Hamid was my orange man. Of course, he wasn't in my employment but he seemed to have taken a liking to the area beneath my stairs. I didn't really mind him being there although when I walked out onto my balcony, which is on the first floor, he always seemed to be there and turned his head up, grinned in my direction and gave a wave. Sometimes I didn't really feel like waving back. I started to feel that I was being spied on when Maria told me that she had called round at my flat and Hamid told her that I was out. She asked him when I had gone out and he said something like. "Well, he left by car at 9.00. Then he came back at 10.00. I think he had been shopping. Then he went out again at 11.00. This time he was walking." The funny thing was that I didn't recall seeing Hamid. He had seen me though. I don't know what became of him. One day, he just wasn't around any more. He was a good guy though. He once climbed onto the roof with me to change the position of my satellite dish.
But sometimes I just wish the orange men would take a few weeks off. Just not be around for a while. I know an Irish woman who just got fed up with the orange men lounging on the lawn opposite her flat and snapped and screamed and bawled and chased the orange men away. They only came back later on though. It's not their fault though. There is just not much for them to do.
The shame about the black Africans in Libya is that many of them, at least the ones from Ghana, Nigeria. Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe possess a skill which remains unexploited. A skill which so many upwardly mobile Libyans so dearly covet - they speak English. There is an irony that Libya has an underclass which is able to speak English, while its middle classes spend so much time, effort and money trying to learn it. Maybe not all of Libya's sub-Saharan immigrants are cut out to be English teachers, but it might help Libyans learn English if they just spent a bit more time speaking to them. Instead, they are viewed with deep suspicion and there have been public demonstrations demanding their removal. I caught a taxi outside the African market a while ago and the driver told me that I should stay away from the market, that it was full of thieves. But I have been there twenty times and not been robbed or even seen the slightest hint of trouble. I have been to Rome, the centre of western civilization and the seat of the Catholic Church, once and been robbed once.
Some can be cling-ons though. The barber I go to at the African market is always asking me to help him to get a visa to enter Europe. I try to explain that if I walk into the embassy and say "Hey, I have met this barber down at the African market. Can you give him a visa please?" I will be summarily laughed out the door. There used to be another guy who would sit with my barber in his shop. I asked where he had gone. The barber dramatically pointed towards the sea with his scissors. The route to Europe which requires no visa. I would get him a visa if I could, but he doesn't understand that there is really nothing I can do.
There is much muttering on the compound that you are more likely to have your house robbed by an orange man than a resident. If you want to improve security, get rid of the security, they seem to be saying. I don't know if it's true though I did once see one making off with ِPaul's ladder. I think he was only borrowing it though. But then there is the issue of Andy's cement. There is no proof that it was orange men, but Andy was using it to build a fence on his garden because he was fed up with orange men leaving their pieces of cardboard on his lawn. (Want to improve the rubbish situation? Get rid of the rubbish men.) That they should steal the very materials which were being used to take away what they regard as their territory (virtually all of the area of the compound which is outdoors) would seem to make sense. They had the motive. But while it is highly possible that it was an orange man, it could just as easily have been a white one.

The Vans

2006-03-03T16:16:00.000+02:00

"In Libya, you don't catch buses. The buses catch you!" as Abdul Hamid put it. And on one score, he was certainly right. You could be walking down the pavement, minding you own business, maybe whistling a tune from the new Mohammed Hasan MP3 (maybe you wanted to get the original one and send some money his way, but you just couldn't find it. 'What the hell?' you might think. 'He's got enough money'). And while you are whistling the tune, minding your own business, you may find yourself accosted by the sound of a blaring horn from a driver on the other side of the road, who is actually heading in the opposite direction to the one who are walking in. A quick shake of the head suffices and they take off in another burst of speed, just to slow down at the sight of the next pedestrian.
On another account, though, Abdul Hamid was wrong. They are not exactly buses. There are no buses in Libya. Like many other things in a groaning infrastructure, there used to be buses and I have asked people about them but I have never got a clear answer. There were buses with uniformed drivers, tickets, bells, everything. But one day everyone woke up to find that they were gone. Or so it would seem. Or maybe it was just some hazy dream.
Instead, public transport (although the drivers seem to inhabit that grey area between public and private enterprise) is served by Peugeot 405s, but in the main converted Japanese mini-vans. There are Mitsubishis, Mazdas, Isuzus and Toyotas with as many seats crammed in as is humanly possible. Normally, humans manage about 14, with folding seats springing down from the side when all the others have been taken.
Riding in these vans is a lottery, or as Forrest Gump's mother put it, a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get. At the crowded lower end of the scale, often the doors do not close properly and the windows do not open, particularly bad on summer's days. If you are a bit luckier though, the windows will be broken, wafting hot air into your face, relieving you from the stench of unwashed humanity inside the van. The seats often collapse at the slightest of touches. On one occasion, I sat down to find that my seat had an unusual reclining function. As I leaned back, I realized that my seat seemed to be reclining further back than should be physically possible, as I was at the back of the van. To my horrostonishment, it dawned on me that the back windscreen was open, and I was leaning back towards the surface of the road. I spent the rest of the journey in a forward foetal position, contemplating whether I would have survived the initial contact with the tarmac and if I would be conscious as the incoming traffic drove over me. I suppose falling out of a mini-van would be a slightly humorous way to go though, sort of like having a grand piano fall on top of you as you are walking down the road. I can just imagine the conversation in some faraway scene.
"What happened to that guy, who know what's his name? The guy who went to Libya."
"Oh him. Didn't you hear about him? Dead. He fell out of a van in Tripoli. Anyway, what are you having?"
"That's a shame. I'll have a pint please. And some crisps. Salt and vinegar please."
On another occasion, a mini-van driver who had been chatting on his mobile pulled over to the side of the road mid-journey and ordered everybody out, did a swift u-turn and drove off. He was apologetic, but there was just somewhere else that he needed to be.
As unpredictable as the mini-vans are as a means of transport, it has to be said that they are extremely cheap, at a quarter or half a dinar (about 15 or 30 euro cents) and very regular, with one passing by virtually every two minutes most of the time.
The absence of a bell means that the driver must be verbally requested to stop, with either of the commands "Alla yemin" (to the right) or "Alla genb" (to the side). At least in theory.
In my early days in Tripoli, I boarded an empty mini-van and naively sat in the back window seat, the same type which I was later to nearly fall out of. I anticipated that it would provide greater legroom, which it did, until someone sat in front of me and his seat involuntarily reclined to about six inches from my lap. Indeed, as more people got on, my initial smugness at having bagged the best seat on the van slowly waned and then evaporated as I realized that I would have to dislodge or clamber over at least seven bodies barring my way to the exit of the sliding door. Besides that, poised as I was on crying out "Alla yemin" as we neared my planned destination of the Orange Shop, the words would not come out. I knew that I would have to say it at a volume loud enough to distract the driver, who was deep in conversation with a passenger over the sound of Scorpions on the stereo. I was so conscious that my pronunciation would come under the scrutiny of 13 people probably desperate for a little amusement that I froze as we flew past the Orange Shop and I caught a confused glimpse of the Orange Shop proprietor, sitting as he always does, in a plastic chair on the pavement, with a bottle of mineral water at his feet and his mobile in his lap. In the next life, it was said, the meek shall inherit the earth. In this one, they must sometimes walk the extra mile.
If I had been wiser, I would have opted for the long front seat, shared by the driver. This is the most comfortable of seats though there is one drawback in that the incumbent must take on the responsibility of collecting fares. This seat is sometimes designated by the driver's companion, much in the same way that Maltese bus drivers sometimes have a buddy sitting to their left, to chat to and relieve the boredom and frustration they encounter as they traverse the island's perilous roads. In Libya, the prized front seat is normally up for grabs. I am always impressed by the way drivers strike up immediate friendships with whoever sits beside them. When Libyans complain that Westerners are unfriendly, I used to think that their definition of friendliness was a mis-diagnosis of what is actually an intristic reluctance to talk bullshit with every stranger that you come across in every given situation. However, there is some credence to what they say. Western people are less friendly than they used to be. Even I remember it, and I am not old. When my car broke down in Libya, I was surrounded by swarms of people offering to lend assistance. The very same people who, I have to confess, I would probably have no hesitation driving past if the tables were turned and they were in my predicament. Perhaps even with a smirk. Ah, what have we lost? And how can we ever get it back?
This week, for the first time, as an empty van slowed to pick me up, I decided to take the bull by the horns and sit next to the driver. And this was no ordinary van. It was an 8-seater Hyundai Trajet, in truth more of an SUV than a mini-van and it looked like it had just come out of the factory, replete with plastic covering the upholstery (The plastic still on the furniture/car seats is a common motif in Libya. The driver who takes us to work, Aymen has even fashioned his own plastic covering on his headrests, using polythene). Sitting in the front, in the cockpit, of this fine vehicle, I was more than ready to assume the role of half-dinar collector. I would even bark "Nofs dinar biss!" (only half dinars!) at anyone who gave me a note of denomination that was too large. Sadly, I think the unusual sight of such a grand car put people off. Perhaps they thought it was a taxi. Whatever the reason, despite generous helpings of horn being administered at every pedestrian in sight, no-one got on board. We didn't catch anyone.

Ill Communication

2006-02-18T12:52:00.000+02:00

I recently had the misfortune of helping a Libyan University student of English with an assignment on something called Contrastive Analysis. The Contrastive Analysts were a school of linguists who emerged in the 1950s, buoyed with a familiar, depressingly quixotic idealistic belief that they were going to change the world. The Contrastive Analysts claimed that learning a language could be done by simply identifying the differences between the learner's native language (L1) and the language being learnt (L2) and subtracting them, thus leaving the "differences" as the only thing that needed to be learnt. Thus, if Icelandic was your native tongue, and you wished to learn, say, Ancient Aramaic, then all you needed to do was identify the differences between these two languages, subtract them and thus you would be left with the sum total of all that you needed to learn. I often find myself returning to George Orwell's quote that "only an intellectual could believe that because no-one else could be such a fool" when I come across these sorts of things but to cut a long story short, the days of Contrastive Analysis were heady ones, but they did not last. Indeed, Contrastive Analysis is a complete load of wrong-headed nonsense that was kicked into what must be an overflowing global academic waste-paper bin over fifty years ago. However, that apparently does not seem to merit its exclusion from the English syllabus at Al-Fateh University, the land's highest institution of learning. An institution where it is not uncommon to send your father in to thrash things out when a dispute with a lecturer arises. To avoid such an eventuality, I had a tricky tight-rope to cross in helping someone make an assignment factual, while simultaneously not upsetting whatever time-warped premises the lecturer concerned anchored himself to when he presumably did his PhD many decades ago. Maybe he hasn't stayed abreast, maybe he can't be bothered and maybe he just doesn't know about the fate of the Contrastive Analysts, academically buried alive as they were by newer, more streamlined schools, with the great Noam Chomsky administering the final karate chop of death. Evidently though, Chomsky has not been able to eliminate perhaps the final, clinging outpost at Al-Fateh University, where the last Contrastive Analyst clings to his creed, like a Japanese soldier still fighting the Second World War on some Pacific island while his compatriots are inventing the walkman. Although long since discredited, Contrastive Analysis did identify (and I use identify in the sense that social scientists and other such academics mean it, to give a fancy term to something which everyone already knew existed) the linguistic phenomenon of interference. Interference is the term given to the practice of incorrectly using a linguistic structure in your native language in the language that you are learning. It accounts for an Italian learner of English saying "I have hunger", translating directly from the Italian "Ho fame" and for the English speaker interpreting "Ho Fame" as "I am famous" I don't know if interference may in some part explain a Libyan taxi driver yesterday telling me that "Elton John is no man", adding "And George Michael, no man. Yes? Elton John and George Michael together. Yes? (accompanied by hand gesture). Both no man." Though the language is garbled and broken, you strain your brian and somehow, against all the odds, the message comes through. And an important message it was in this instance.
I have often found this the case even though I think that my main problem with speaking Arabic is not interference. I have no difficulty with the concept of subtracting the differences between the two languages. It is just learning the differences that I have a problem with. Not that I haven't improved. Gone are the tentative attempts of the early days when 'Can you drive me to a vet's?' came out as "Please, you take me to the doctor of the cat and of the dog?' and 'It's raining' was 'The water it comes down from the sky.' An even more desperate attempt went something along the lines of, "The man, the black man, not black man but his clothes it is black, oh or maybe yellow now, maybe even green. This man, the boss, he is not good." Which was my way of trying to say, "The referee was crap." Although many Libyans speak surprisingly good English, these days I find myself able to conduct semi-coherent conversations in Arabic, although about what can sometimes be a problem. The lack of cultural references can be as big a barrier to communication as the language itself. Despite the taxi driver's impressive knowledge of homosexual English pop stars, very few have heard of Elvis, the Beatles and even the name David Beckham will receive blank faces from women. Noel Edmonds is definitely a non-starter.
Religion can be a bore to speak about and indeed, proselytizing is an important tenet of the Muslim faith. Politics is best avoided, although I did once find myself tricked into speaking about it by my friend Bashir, who casually asked if I had seen Saddam Hussein arraigned in court on TV the previous day. I told him that I had and he asked what I thought of him, to which I answered with what I thought was the diplomatic, yet truthful, "I think that he is not a good man." Bashir replied, with some measure of anger, "But what about Sharon? Is he a good man? Why isn't he arrested?" Unwittingly, I had found myself in at the deep end of a heated, unwanted contrastive analysis of the relative merits of Saddam Hussein and Ariel Sharon. Luckily, I had no moral problem with stating that I thought that Sharon was also a bad man, so I managed to find an exit strategy out of the discussion. Often it is not wise to pursue a debate analytically as depth of feeling usually outweighs intellectual discourse. The belief that Ariel Sharon is the devil incarnate is accepted as fact and should not normally be challenged. As the same Bashir put it, in a rather un-Muslim fashion on the eve of Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, "Eid is here and Sharon is dying. It is a great day!"
The Arab trait of replying to a question in the affirmative with the fatalistic "Inshallah" (if God wills it) often incurs the wrath of Westerners, suspicious that it indicates individual willingness to assume personal responsibility. Although I think that is perhaps a slightly paranoid, unfair reading it is not that surprising that the inability to extract the word yes from someone can be frustrating. As I experienced myself when asking a Libyan if next Thursday, Jamahariya Day, was a public holiday.
"Is next Thursday a public holiday?"
"Inshallah"
"Is it definitely a day off?"
"Inshallah"
"OK so, God willing, if HE wills it, next Thursday, we do not have to come into work then?"
"Inshallah"
You just can't win sometimes. Libyan Arabic has many charming traits in its lexicon, such as the common, greeting 'Shini gew?' literally "How is your weather?" You can reply to this by using the pan-Arabic 'miya miya' (one hundred one hundred, or 100 per cent fine). If you wish to go for an extended greeting (and often greetings in Arabic seem to extend from the simple 'How are you?' and 'How's your family?' to the extremities of 'How's you cat?' and 'How's your toaster?') then you can reply to 'Shini gew?' with 'Behhi'(Good), at which point your interlocutor may feel obliged to add 'Gul behhi, jigik is-shehi' (If you are good, your tea will come), which I think is something along the lines of everything comes to he who waits.
If you don't have a car, it is colloquial to say that you have a Renault 11, with the two 1s representing your legs. There is often recourse to some more flowery, purple in expressions like "The sun has melted the butter of the stars" and Arabic is also rich in idioms. 'In the eyes of the monkey's mother, it is a gazelle', a testament to the unwavering power of maternal love, is one of my favourites. In its universality presumably it applies even to Ariel Sharon's mother.
Even Saddam Hussein's.
Even Elton John's.
Even the mother of the Contrastive Analyst at Al-Fateh University.

A Game of Two Halves

2006-02-17T17:17:00.000+02:00

I was walking down the Girgarish Road and on the palm-tree lined grassy knoll, perhaps the only one on this fine road, some kids were playing football with a ball that was so flaccid that they may as well have been kicking a plastic carrier bag. When life gives you a crap football you play a crap game of football, I suppose. Football was indeed in the air and it puzzled me what the boys were doing outside when at that very moment the final of the African Nations Cup was being played out between Egypt and the Ivory Coast. Perhaps the boys just lost interest after Libya so predictably and ignominiously departed the competition in the first round. As Farag said, apparently irony-free, "The national team needs more funding!" 'Hmm,' I thought 'I wonder where they might be able to get that from.' There is no lack of enthusiasm for the game. There is even a football pitch on one of Tripoli's busiest roundabouts. Ball control is to be exercised carefully and Chris Waddle style penalties evidenced in the semi-final of the World Cup are not to be encouraged. But if the kids with the superannuated condom for a ball weren't interested, the rest of Tripoli was gripped. For once the roads were almost empty and as I walked past the strip of take-aways and cheap restaurants where they sell tabunas, schwarmas and folded Libyan pizzas, a horde of Libyan waiters, cooks and chefs who had dubiously switched allegiance to Egypt emerged to taunt the predominantly black African servers in the pizza bar next door. Egypt had scored. Calm was restored until slowly the familiar agonizing realization set in amongst the Libyans via the template of the action replay. The Africans burst out waving their hands above their heads in glee. The goal had been disallowed. In the gloating stakes it was one-one and there was everything to play for.
Of course, not all Libyans had switched their support to Egypt. I think that in their heart of hearts Libyans are first Muslims, then Arabs, then Libyans and finally, reluctantly, Africans. But when it comes to football, they are not always in their heart of hearts and the Libyan identity shoves its way to the top rung. There is some mild bitterness in relations which goes a little deeper than the last three football encounters in recent memory (Egypt won twice and Libya once). Along with sub-Saharan Africans, Egyptians make up the largest part of Libya's migrant grey economy. Egyptians are particularly visible in the construction industry. Last summer, when I remarked to a colleague that I was amazed that the Egyptian workers were toiling away on the construction of a new office block under a 43 degree midday sun, he replied "Well, they built the pyramids, didn't they?" with a chuckle. More recently, a friend Hasan was telling me that violent crime was almost non-existent. I agreed that that seemed to be the case, but pointed out that our driver, Aymen, had that very week been stabbed in the stomach by four evidently drug-crazed youths trying to steal his dilapidated old Roadstar car stereo. "Yes", Hasan replied "But I would bet you that they were Egyptians. There is no way of knowing if this tabloid-without-the-tabloid anti-immigrant knee-jerk reaction is in fact an accurate one as it happened so quickly. Suffice to say that Aymen has made a full recovery and still listens to the Koran on the radio.
The out-sourcing of hard manual labour to people from poorer countries is a global phenomenon. In London there are Czech scaffolders and in the Czech Republic there are Ukranians scaffolders. For all I know, there are Phillipinos and Indians (who are sometimes not too fond of each other) doing the same work in the Ukraine, although I doubt it. It does beg the question, although it isn't one which will need to be answered any time soon, 'What will we do when there are no people poor enough to do our dirty work for us?'
In Tripoli, the Wadi, a dry valley below the Gurgi and Girgarish Road is the de facto job centre for migrant workers. They sit on the pavements in their droves with the tools of their semi-skilled labour at their feet. Some have spades, hoes, jack-hammers, sledge-hammers, screwdrivers, sometimes just a coil of wire and often nothing at all. The Wadi is the place to go if you want some manpower to help with building your house. In Libya, no-one buys a house when they get married - everyone builds one, as it's cheaper. A German friend told me that she knew a man who had confided in her that he was desperate to lose his virginity and was actually married but his father-in-law would not allow them to sleep together until he had finished building his house. I think a Wadi worker gets about ten dinars (about 7 US dollars) for a day's work, when you get a day's work. Living ten to a house on a diet of bread, tuna and couscous, it is a hard life and you can see it on their faces. I asked an Egyptian if he didn't mind the lack of personal space that comes sharing a room with four other people, and he came back with the standard "No, we are all brothers!" reply. A noble sentiment but, personally, I don't particularly want to sleep on top of my brothers.
There will have been some Egyptian smiles (along with a few African grimaces) on Saturday morning though. In the end Egypt won, miraculously rescuing a penalty shoot-out from the jaws of defeat. Despite its unfairness, there is something about the penalty shoot-out which everyone, even those who despise football and refuse to countenance the passion, faith and hope that it gives people, can understand. Everyone has to watch, even the girls with painted faces who wouldn't know the offside rule if it hit them over the head with a corner flag. Everyone has to watch, except for those who just can't bear to.
The Ivory Coast's Didier Drogba, on a reported salary at Chelsea of 5,000,000 euros a year, perhaps Africa's greatest player, had his penalty saved. And how many of the game's most technically gifted players have we seen failing to score in penalty shoot-outs, to complete what is technically the simplest of tasks? Platini, Maradona, Beckham, Baggio; the list is endless. There is something there, something about fallibility, that everyone can understand.

Imagism

2006-02-06T12:53:00.000+02:00

I am not sure what instincts led me to stop off at the Tripoli branch of Lego and sure enough, it was deserted. In fact, I would not be surprised if someone is putting their foot through their son's Lego multi-storey car park right now. Mozarella sales have collapsed. Despite the promixity to Italy, that is where it is imported from apparently. On the other hand, I imagine that exports of that other great Danish export, bacon, have not been so poorly effected.
The newsreader on the BBC said that there have been protests from Lahore to Lebanon about the publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and their subsequent publication in other European countries. Well, I can think another place beginning with L where there have also been organised protests, although not as violent. The businesses in the centre of town closed up early today in anticipation of the gathering crowds.
Sometimes, people seem to forget how wide a swathe Islam cuts across the middle of the planet. Despite the protests, my feeling is that here people are pretty stoical and a little embarrassed by the rabid, hysterically violent over-reactions that have taken place in Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Riding in a taxi yesterday, the driver pointed to a pile-up at the side of the road and said, "This is the problem here, not cartoons," although he did add "What advantage did they want to get from publishing them?" I had no clue how to answer him.
While the word over-reaction is definitely not misplaced, there have been the same colossal breakdowns in communication that always surround these things. It has to be said first of all, that Jyllands-Posten did not publish any cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a pig, although some such cartoons seem to have made their way onto the internet. My boss put a computer print out mock-up of this crude cartoon mock-up on the notice board in the corridor, with Mohammed's head replaced with the head of Jyllands-Posten editor Carsten Juste. Having seen theactual 12 cartoons that were published, I would not even say that the cartoon which has caused the most hysterical ruptures actually portrays Mohammed as a terrorist. My take on the cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb with a lit fuse coming out a turban is to suggest that the teachings of the prophet have been interpreted as a pretext for terrorism.
These subtleties predictably, though understandably did not take long to fly out of the window as the air became thick with paroxysms of anger and indignation. Added to that, of course, is the irony that the offices of a newspaper which suggested that Islam was breeding violent fundamentalist intolerance is now being ear-marked on websites for, er, violent Islamic intolerance. 'How dare you say that Mohammed is the cause of terrorism? We will firebomb you for saying that!' There is no doubt about it - many Muslims, living as they do in overtly religious dictatorships of one sort or another, are not so much the brooding nemesis of free speech as they are sometimes portrayed, but are not quite certain about what it is. When you are conditioned by a media which does not tolerate true freedom of expression, you do not necessarily develop the critical faculties to observe the subtleties of pluralism. Against that background, it is not such an unpardonable crime to assume that other places are the same; that if a Danish newspaper publishes an offensive cartoon, then this reflects the views of all of the Danish people, with a little cloud of suspicion cast over the rest of the western world. It is about as logical as boycotting Maltese goods because you have choked on a Malteser. As a Muslim once put it to me after his football team was thrashed in the World Cup Finals: "The referee was a Christian!" The background noise of persecution mania hums constantly in the Arab world. I secretly think that some actually relish the opportunity to indulge and confirm their paranoia about the west.
Some more fair-minded people here have described the west as hypocritical. "Isn't it in the west that girls aren't allowed to wear hijabs to school? You don't allow us the freedom to express ourselves, but you can?” Mahmoud said. I think it is an engaging counter-argument to pursue, and not completely without substance but, finally, untenable. It seems convenient to overlook the fact that the French ban is also on kippahs and crucifixes.But as much as I disagree that there is some secret Western conspiracy to offend and undermine Islam and, as much as this reaction has brought out the worst, paranoiac instincts that some Arabs harbour, I can not agree that the cartoons should have been published. There are so very many things that are ripe for satire and lampooning in the Arab world, but the image of Mohammed is hardly one of them. Although it must be said, I do not think the cartoons actually set out to portray Mohammed in a truly unsympathetic light. One has him as a lonely shephard against the backdrop of a red sun. I imagine that Mohammed probably did look something like that.
Analogies have been made about the negative, sometimes brutally obscene portrayal of Jews in the Arab media. As condemnable as it may be, I have never heard of a cartoon in a Muslim newspaper actually attacking the articles of the Jewish faith and would find it very hard to believe that there has ever been one. Others have pointed out that Jesus Christ has regularly been at the hands of treatment far more extreme than the picture of Mohammed with a bomb on his head without violent repercussions from Christians. But this is to miss the point. The 12 cartoon layout which the Danish newspaper so deliberately and intentionally chose to detonate on the world was a direct challenge to the deeply held Islamic belief that the representation of Mohammed in pictorial form is blasphemous. The Danish newspaper's question was, 'Are we entitled to free speech?' It is a question that does need to be asked, but what about the question, 'Are they entitled to that belief?' ?
As irrational and illogical as the belief seems coming from my world view, I think that they are entitled to it. It is a belief which could be violated by any child with a crayon at any time. It seems unenforceable, inscrutable, downright bizarre and perplexing. But it is theirs and I believe that they do have a right to it. I fail to see what freedoms are mine they are curtailing through this belief, except in a case where I should calculatedly pursue a course to offend it, which is what has just been done.
The thing with free speech is that it sometimes seems a lofty, high-minded concept when discussed in ivory-tower intellectual circles but loses some of its ethical currency on a street level when it is done without sensitivity. The protesters who marched through London this week with placards proclaiming "7/7 is on its way" were also excercising free speech. To say that 7/7 is coming again could , after all, be construed not an incitement to hatred or violence, but an opinion. But if someone proposed to, say, deliberately march past the house of the relatives of one of the victims of 7/7 with one of those placards then I would defend their rights with as little conviction as I would those who wield free speech as an instrument to ridicule people's most deeply held beliefs and convictions in the name of some kind of intellectual exercise. Free speech was curbed all over the western world after September 11, with scyscrapers being edited out of films and off CD covers. An ironic over-reaction of course, but the underlying notion of sensitivity was not misplaced. The right to express yourself does not necessarily carry with it an incumbent obligation to be sensitive but without it, the scenes we have seen this week are inevitable.
I do understand that Jyllands-Posten's editor Carsten Juste's intention, although it may not have been his only intention, was to explore the boundaries of free speech in Denmark but the image of Mohammed crosses Denmark's borders. In this era of globalization, where the cyberspacial butterfly effect of a cartoon in Scandinavia can be transmitted across the globe in a matter of seconds, it is no use pretending anything else. It is not for the west to try and ram free speech down Islam's throat.
If Juste sincerely did not anticipate the uproar that has been unleashed then he was astonishingly naive. The five dead bodies so far are not his fault, but at least I hope he now has the answers he was looking for and does not feel the need to conduct the same test again any time soon. It's a shame he couldn't have just done a survey or something like that.

Girls and Boys

2006-01-28T11:00:00.000+02:00

Male teenagers are a common evening sight on a typical Libyan thoroughfare pavement. Not gangs, just clusters, gaggles, giggles of friends. They stand there and chat and smoke and laugh and they sometimes throw a rock, a hubcap or a lump of wood at each other. But that is not their main purpose. These are mere interludes from their main business. The main item on their agenda is that of harrassing, or as a Libyan apologist put it "teasing" young females.
Of course, it would be unreasonable to be too po-faced and comdemnatory about such behaviour. Young and not so young men the world over have been known to vocalise their appreciation for the female form in all its splendour since time immemorial. Construction site humour seems to be one of the occupational hazards of womanhood and, however unacceptable some of us may judge it to be, it isn't going anywhere fast.
Indeed, there seem to be at least three behavioural traits that are universal to male teenagers in every known society in the modern world. One is a desire to routinely kick each other in the head. The other is to bleat "There is nothing to do here", often contrived as a valid pretext for the consumption of drugs and alcohol. In fact, to give the sentence its full lustre: "There is nothing to do here except drink and/or take drugs." The third is to make lewd suggestions to women in public places. Thus, when you hear the older Libyan generation bemoan the ways their youths are heading, it is invariably their fighting, drug-taking and "teasing girls" that are carted out as examples of their delinquency.
However, in Libya this sort of female-baiting takes on a bizzare hue. Things are happening in a way they should not happen. Here, the easiest bait of all is girls who choose to eschew the traditional Muslim headscarf, although of course the headscarf, or hijab, has a cultural signifiance that predates Islam. I think that the sight of female hair is not actually the main erotic stimulant, and rarely the part of the female anatomy which the teenage haranguers focus on. Instead, the absence of a headscarf is more of a perceived indication that a girl may be thought to be more liberal and possibly more permissive, more attuned to the proclivites of the Western World, presumably via the emerging channels of the internet and Friends and Oprah on MBC. A Western world where, as all us men from there know, women invariably respond favourably to a cry of "Come over here, you sexy bitch!" when shouted across a busy street.
And here we come to the creation of a devilishly twisted paradox. The young men on the street corners don't want young women to dress conservatively or wear headscarves. But through their behaviour, they often force women into wearing them. Fatma, a Morroccan girl, detests having to wear one and never would back home, but says that she just doesn't want to put up with the hassle over here. Consesequently, the boys act as agents for conservative values they most evidently do not share wholeheartedly. Why would the Koran-bashing fundamentalist mentals need to patrol the streets to enforce the dress code when they have an army of thousands who are unwittingly doing it for them?
Their own worst enemies, it would be easy to be harsh on the young men of Libya and if I was a young woman, I might feel very bitter indeed. What is normally relatively harmless harrassment can sometimes be what would appear to be a flustering and even disturbing experience. I once witnessed a blonde girl walking on the pavement being kerb-crawled by no less than three cars. The combined six or seven drivers and passengers were all shouting suggestive obscenities and wolf-whistling and she just continued to walk on, with her head bowed, lowering her gaze to the ground. Supposedly amusing male humour directed at women can sometimes teeter close to lynch-mob humour. Well, she wasn't wearing a hijab! And she was blonde! She was asking for it!
Having said that, I think, as my Libyan friend said, the general motive, if not effect, is more of a wind-up than an act of harrassment, though there must be some level of real misogyny at play. I am sure that the vast majority of men who whistle at women in the street do not expect it to elicit enthusiastic responses. So what response do they expect? Discomfort and embarrassment, presumably. I really don't know exactly what the expression they hope to see on girls' faces is. Maybe there isn't actually a word for it. There has to be something more than a little bit cowardly in targeting teenage girls of your sneering and bullying, even if you are a brainless teenager yourself.
On the other hand, it is hardly surprising that many young Arab men are not conditioned to deal with women in any meaningful manner. The only thing that they are really taught about women is that you should not go anywhere near them (and are literally policed - you can be pulled over and asked to prove the woman in your passenger seat is a relation) until you marry them, and then the rest will sort itself out. As Najib piously told me: "In front of a woman, we should just be polite and put our heads down to the floor and not even look at them in the face." It is not a code of behaviour I have seen heeded very much and indeed, Najib himself could not have been looking at the floor when he pointed out about a female colleague, "The way she dresses it is like she is saying she wants to have sex." The lady in question does not exactly dress like Cher on Oscar night and always wears a headscarf and has her knees and arms covered. It is useless to point out that the Koran proscribes modesty of dress for both women and men and after all, this admonishing did come a day after Najib had given me an unwelcome, conspiritorially laddish description of a girlfriend he says he has holed away in Tunisia. There is a hypocrisy towards women which is so deeply concealed in the male Arab psyche that I think it would be hard to even get one to acknowlege that it exists. It would not surprise me in the least if most of the female taunters that I see in the street are the first to unfurl their prayer mats once they are behind closed doors. Not that Libyan men are the only people guilty of pious hypocrisy or able to carry around totally contradictory ideas around in their heads.
It is amazing the extent to which women will go in order to preserve their modesty. Although women and families are normally segregated from the single male population on Libyan beaches, you do sometimes see women swimming, fully clothed in their abayas and headscarves.
I was walking in the corridor the other day when some locks of very long, flowing raven hair poked out of the side of an office girl's headscarf. Her female colleague realised and rushed to shield her as if her breast had been exposed.
Not that all Libyan girls are shrinking violets. A Polish-Libyan University student told me that a lot of her fellow students change their clothes and make-up in the toilets as soon as they get to the campus. I think we are talking jeans, rather than miniskirts and hotpants here though.
There is a feisty Libyan girl, Samira, at the company where I work who refuses to a headscarf, and openly discusses her favourite episodes of Sex and the City in the office. Her father died when she was younger, which leaves her with just her brothers to contend with. If a woman is seen to be too independent, her brother is likely to receive flak from his friends, on the grounds that he is not able to "control" his own sister, as it was put to me. I think that Samira's brothers must tear their hair out in trying to deal with her and, even though I have heard some men in the company say that she "must be a whore", another girl in the office confessed to me that she wished she could be a bit more like her.

Fear and Loathing in the Sahara Desert

2006-01-14T14:43:00.000+02:00

I have been in the desert for four days now and every night I settle down in the evening to read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in America, a collection of his letters from 1968 to 1976, by torchlight. This has made me mindful of the need to create a large enough body of correspondence, in order to support me in my pension years. I am not sure how this will work, as unlike HST I am not a writer, but anyway. Although, obviously HST will not be enjoying the royalties from Fear and Loathing in America as he shot himself to death last year.
Anyway, to that end I am writing this e-mail to you. I arrived in the desert on Monday night and stayed in the Funduq Afriqia and was Range Rovered by my guide/driver/cook/desert expert to the Jebel Acacus the next morning. Here, ancient volcanic rock structures protrude atop orange mountains of sand, like chocolate syrup spooling over the tops of massive scoops of mango ice-cream. No-one in sight for miles and miles around and, when the wind drops, only the sound of the plumbing of your own body. I am not against pickled sharks and silkscreens and elephant dung on canvas but when it comes down to the real thing, the natural world still has the edge on things of beauty that make me want to cry.
On the rock walls ten thousand year old carvings tell the tale of man the hunter to man the shepard and to man the vandal and man the defacer. There are some more recent Tuareg carvings, though of course they lack that subtlety of composition.
My Arab guide, Mohammed Omar, seemed to harbour ambiguous feelings about the Tuareg. Having forgotten to pack sugar, by day two he could no longer bear the horror of withdrawal and set about prowling the parts of the desert where he thought we might meet fellow travellers. We must have driven fifty miles but to no avail, when suddenly we saw a white vehicle maybe half a mile ahead. A frenzied chase ensued until the car, a white Isuzu pick-up, came into clearer view. Mohammed took his foot off the pedal, sighed and cursed, "They are Tuareg. They never give anything. They say they live here so, they don't give anything." There was some bitterness there.
He was a great guide though, even if his selection of road music wasn't quite to my tastes. Maybe Arab wedding music is an acquired taste but when those cats get into a drum groove, you had better hope it is a good one, as the chances are they will still be knocking out the same beat half an hour later. There must be a fearsome amount of repetitive stress injury amongst Arab rhythym sections. Still, the sort of guttral, Turkey-like sound that Arab women make when they are happy, particularly at wedding ceremonies, laid over the top made it a bit more interesting.
There was a nod towards Western music in the form of orchestral versions of Metallica songs and a convenient meeting of cultures half-way in the form of Cat Stevens's greatest hits. Music was also a topic of conversation, though I have to say Mohammed sometimes stretched my musical knowledge to its outer stratospheres. I had dealt with "What is a buffallo soldier?" and "What does 'I sit and drink Penny Royal Tea' mean?" to Mohammed's satisfaction when he hit me with "What is the name of that group, there are three girls and the letter X in their name?" I racked my brains in vain. I could have racked until wrack and ruin. The answer, after repeated questioning: The Cranberries. Jesus Christ! There is no X in the name, and only one fucking woman in the band!! Ah well.
After we left the Acacus, we made our way to the sand dunes. Now it has often been said that the colour of the modern cinema screen is so much realer than the real world. The dunes dispelled that myth for me. The two-tone richness of blue and orange, slowly turning to luminescent, radioactive grey as the moon rose was not just cinematic. It was even better than even better than the real thing. But the real thing at the same time.
I wandered lonely for a while and thought about all those dunes of sand. Almost on cue, a raven flew by going cawing like a rusty old motor and I thought about how these grains of sand were here before me and all my forefathers and they will bury the children of my children's children and maybe one day they will bury the entire human circus. Then again, I thought, I have more cells in my body than there are grains of sand in this whole desert (although I am not sure that is accurate) and the sand has no cells. Not even one. I can dance and sing and play the piano. I can live and love and hate and pray to be a better person. To make a minor correction: I can't sing and dance and my piano playing is not so good either.
The night was painfully cold. I awoke in the night and unzipped the tent and, able to see two hundred metres ahead of me, I surmised that the sun had returned and got unsleepingbagged and dressed to watch it. It transpired that it was merely the strength of the full moon that was giving me the ilusion of visibility almost as strong as the day. I went back to the tent, certain that with the discomfort of that cold, sleep was impossible. When I awoke, the day had broken. The guide told me that a fennec (a funny-looking desert rodent with big ears) had taken the left over chicken that he had left out for the ravens.
Next, we drove down to see the Ubari lakes, oasises in the heart of the Sahara. The oasis of Umm al-Maa ( Omm l-ilma) stood out for me. A shade of aquamarine, surrounded by reeds and bamboo shoots, surrounded by the dunes, it was like the hazy actualiasation of some parallel dream of a childhood imagination spent in the sun-kissed warmth of love and protection. A pity then, when a team of seven Italian scramblers dressed in orange shattered the stillness by charging up and down the dunes on their bikes. After a couple of minutes one of their entourage sensed that they were out of order and rushed out shouting "Basta per oggi. Ora basta!"
The last of the four lakes was Mandara. Here, a village community used to live, in front of a lake whose colours they say used to change from emerald to blue and even to red in places. However, in 1991, the village folk were forcibly removed by Gadaffi, presumably on the reasonable grounds of a lack of proper sanitation. The remains of their buildings still stand, though with walls and roofs caved in in order to stop any ideas of repatriation from the new concrete hamlet of Mandara Jedid, I think the guide said it was called. Not that they would want to move back now. Over the last couple of years, the lake has run dry and evem the reeds are beginning to die. Only a handful of Tuareg remain, selling ornaments and silver to the slow drip of tourists. As we drove off up into the sand, I looked back down on what must have once been such a harmonious scene of man and nature, now reduced to an impossible sadness.
Now I am back in Sebha, the largest Libyan town in the Sahara. My plane back to Tripoli leaves in four hours, so I will wander around until then. The people are not as surly and suspicious as I had been told they would be. There are clusters of black Africans at the roundabout in the centre of town, trying to sell their labour, though demand could never match up with the daily increasing supply that is flooding the route from sub-Saharan Africa to the coast. Still, if they have made it this far, they are only twelve hours by car from Tripoli and then, the other sea awaits. This time of water though, rather than sand. Maybe, if they are lucky, they will make it to Fortress Europe. Or be rewarded with a savage beating at the Hal-Safi detention centre in Malta.
I stayed at the Funduq Afriqia again last night, my last night here. I was watching a James Bond film on MBC2 in my room when the TV suddenly started changing channels on its own, settling on an Egyptian singer warbling a song called 'Salem Alekum', presumably the Arab riposte to Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello'. Not a ghost though. It transpired that there is only one cable connection in the hotel, which is linked to the TV in reception and illegally connected to all the other TV sets. Thus, the receptionist becomes the effective big brother. Not the Orwellian one who views us, but the one who decides, because size and might are right in the jungle of the living room, what we view on TV. In disgust I went out and bought a readily cooked chicken and ate it in my room. There was a restaurant in the hotel and eating a cooked chicken in your room may be against the rules, but I did it anyway. I guess you can take a hobo out of the streets, but you can't take the streets out of the hobo.
So for the few remaining hours I will roam the streets of Sebha and maybe read some more HST under a palm tree. Remember to keep this e-mail for posterity. Actually, maybe I will put in my blog. Yeah, I had forgotten about that. That's what I'll do.

Roads to Excess

2005-07-26T23:15:00.001+02:00

The Gargarish Road stretches four miles from the compound where I live down to the Medina. It slumbers for a while after the rush hour and then after the sunset last call to prayers it returns, with its traffic like water in a sea of glass and metal. Every space is filled as quickly as it was created, sometimes overflowing onto the pavement, threatening somtimes to engulf the hapless pedestrian, already contending with the rubbish plies and the sticky sifting sands. It a road of a thousand chancers a minute and a hundred near misses a second. The horn is wielded mercilessly as a psyhcological tool, designed to break the other driver's nerve, to bend his will. When the moment of impact inevitably comes the drivers emerge, often surprisingly calm, to negotiate and survey the damage. To try and stare it away before settling, shrugging and taking solace in the fact that they had a dent on that side anyway. In effect it is a dent to a bump. Or else it creates a certain pleasing symmetry when you consider the dent to the bump on the other side.
Now I have lived in places where people take a certain pride in how badly they drive. All along the Mediterranean shores there seem to be contenders for the worst drivers in the world accolade. And bad, very bad, as many are, this must be the place where the debate is settled. The Italians are reckless rather than careless and step on the accelerator at the sight of a pedestrian crossing at a pedestrian crossing. The Turks are keen to join the same European school as the Italians but too often woeful town planning has not left them with the room to maneouvere and truly express themselves in all their badness. The Maltese often lay claim to be able to outdo the Italians on the grounds that while the Italians are merely ignoring the rules, they don't know even them. Anyone who has been stuck behind a tractor hogging the fast lane on the Tal-Barrani road can morosely testify that there is some truth to this.
The thing is that it is not that the Libyans don't know the rules. They don't even know that the rules exist. There is one question to the Libyan driving test that needs to be answered correctly. How much do you bribe the examiner?
In Libya it is nothing to reverse back down the motorway towards incoming traffic if you have missed your turning. It is nothing to undertake someone who is already undertaking someone else. Less than nothing. It is nothing at all to drive on the wrong side of the road while the person travelling towards you is also travelling on the wrong side of the road because you are trying to avoid a manhole which is gaping because someone has stolen the cover to make a barbecue out of while he is trying to avoid a collapsed piece of street lighting that has been lying there in the sun for seven years, but to reach an understanding that as long as you are both in the wrong then that's all right because sometimes two wrongs do make a right, even when you are both on the left. It is less than nothing. It is a way of life.
And when you are sitting in a taxi and the driver is slalom-ing past other cars which are themselves driving at 100 miles an hour and the fear outweighs the exhiliration you finally realise that you are no longer young it teaches you something about life. That driving fast is just not funny any more.
But then there is a cult figure in Libya who goes by the name of NaFouzi and CD-Vs of his exploits excite the masses so starved for living local heroes. NaFouzi is a skilled driver, there is no doubt about it. But he also has cheap circus tricks to thank for his following, like putting one leg out of the window while he tearing up the airport road. The word on the street is that the police, appreciative of his talents, asked him to join the force, as a sort of poacher turned game-keeeper, assisting them with their high-speed chases. NaFouzi agreed to join, but only if they could catch him over prearranged route. An unorthodox approach to police recruitment, it could be argued. And not a successful one however, if of course the rumour is to be believed, as they just couldn't catch him.
Perhaps Libyans drive the way they do because it is the one area where they are allowed to do whatever they want. It is a simple truth that they are born into hundreds of rules governing every aspect of their behaviour and by and large they abide by them, because the punishments are real and they are harsh.
I think there is definitely some truth to this. Driving is be a fiercely individualistic pursuit in a society where the individual is constantly coereced to subsume to the greater power of God or people or country. Maybe some just think that if you can't live in freedom then maybe you can die with it. But then perhaps it goes deeper. Maybe the wider sense of civic discipline required to drive with so many strangers jars with the small community bedouin ethos that the Arab people evolved from. Then again, I suppose there is never one neat explanation as to how people behave.
An Iraqi Armenian friend, Jamal, told me about an incident he had back in Baghdad, many years before the present crisis. He had stopped at a red light when someone went into the back of him. Stepping out, he was surprised to find him being the one berated by the other driver. "Why did you stop?", the driver demanded. "Because there was a red light!" Jamal retorted. "Yes", the man replied. "But there was no traffic coming, was there?"
It was a time, I suppose, when Jamal was more inclined to laugh at lawlessness. His brother was shot dead last year. It was nothing political. He was just a successful businessman who had somehow continued to thrive after the occupation. He had just bought a BMW. I remember Jamal telling me about it down by the beach on the compound. I really didn't know what to say to him, except "I don't know what to say", though I sensed that he wanted to speak about it. "I told him not to buy such a flashy car. That it would bring attention to him. But he wouldn't listen."

Barry Manilow

2005-07-16T12:14:00.000+02:00

To start off with, I should point out that I may have to change a few names in order to protect the innocent from the guilty. I don't want to put too fine a point on it but I must tread lightly. Hopefully there is not a room somewhere with a gang of proverbial monkeys typing combinations of website addresses looking for subversive blogs. Not that I aim to be subversive. I just want to describe my life here, though I guess there will have to be some degree of self-censorship. I have not included my name anywhere on the blog.
I feel bad choosing this as the subject for my first blog but I suppose it would be hard to ignore the events in London of last week. I lived in London for four years before coming out here, so it has been on my mind a lot.
As I am sure most educated, informed people are aware, the majority of Muslims abhor terrorism in all its forms and Libyans are no different, despite the rather sinister image the country is still trying to shake off. Without exception all the Libyans who have spoken to me about the bombing have expressed genuine shock and sympathy. A few have qualified it by adding, "but the same thing happens in Baghdad and Palestine every day." I have been tempted to reply, "Yes, I suppose there are a lot of Arab terrorists indiscriminately blowing up people in those places as well." I haven't because I know that it would have been unfair, though I was slightly annoyed that they should want to start a debate about politics after I had just told them that I was a bit worried aboiut my brother, who works in Central London. In any event, no-one I know in London has been hurt, though everyone claims to have "just missed it" by two hours or five miles or so. Still, I suppose it's easy for me to be blase. I have never been even that close to being ripped apart by a bomb.
A friend of mine told me that her boss punched the air in delight on September 11 and there is no doubt that the idea that the Americans had it coming to them is quite common currency here. However, after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the senseless nature of terrorism, I think that appetite for taking the war back to the Americans has dissipated on the so-called 'Arab street'. In Iraq it has been other Muslims on the receiving end of the bombs and as a friend of mine, Osama, said to me, "I am as much of a target as you are. I wear jeans. I listen to rap music."
In Libya at least, the authorities seem to have kept a tight lid on any Islamic insurgency.
Esam, who seems to be moving in the direction of fundamentalism (he stopped watching television two months ago), told me that he doesn't go to the same mosque every day to avoid being a target for the authorities on the look-out for extremists. At first it seemed incredible to me that religious persecution against Muslims could exist in Libya, but it is a very really fear for anyone whose beard is too long. "They don't drop by your house and explain where they are taking you and let you pick up some things. They just take you and you're gone," Esam said.
Of course, while some Arabs may have expressed some satisfaction on September 11, there is also a popular theory that it was "the Jews" who bombed the World Trade Centre. What would, in Europe at least, normally qualify as wacko conspiracy theories formulated by nutcases on the margins of society can sometimes form the basis of mainstream thinking here, at least where the Jews are concerned. One person actually tried to explain to me how the Jews were responsible for the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. There was a lot about force fields and magnets and nuclear scientists and other such things and his English wasn't very good so I wasn't able to grasp the finer points of his argument. I decided to be charitable and point out that Barry Manilow, who sang the song 'The Bermuda Triangle' was actually Jewish and so there might be something to his theory. He accepted my point gratefully. Another time someone said something innocuous in the office, like "What is the capital of Israel?" and a Libyan replied, "We do not accept that that place, the one that you mentioned, exists." And indeed they don't. All the pages relating to Israel in the atlases have been ripped out and it has been blacked out with a marker pen on the maps of the world.
There is some real hatred towards the west though and sadly it is not that hard to understand. I was once in the office of Haj Mohammed, a normally gentle, good-natured sort of man, who was sort of a glorified photocopying boy, since retired. He was on his laptop looking at a website featuring images of Iraqis being tortured by American soldiers. No words, just pictures, dozens of them. Besides the familiar ones, including the ones faked by The Daily Mirror, there was one of an old woman wearing a hijab having her clothes torn off. "One day we will get together and come and kill you all," he said to me, with tears in his eyes. He never mentioned it again and the next time I saw him he was back to his usual, affable self, joking about jamming the photocopier so that he wouldn't have to do any work.
In Saudi the insurgents were getting a lot of bad press because they were breaking into compounds, much like the one I live on, and just killing anyone they came across. Inevitably, some Muslims got shot as well, which lost them support even amongst their grassroot supporters. So the next time they went on a similar raid, they asked their victims two questions: 'Are you a Muslim?' and 'Can you speak Arabic?' If you gave the wrong answer you got shot. While I am still struggling with my Arabic, I have mustered up enough to understand and answer those two questions.