Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (51 page)

The fear of radical Islam helps explain why authorities cracked down so forcefully when, in February, protests erupted in Benghazi over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the decision of an Italian cabinet minister to wear a T-shirt featuring those images. Eleven people were killed by the police, and violence spread to at least two other cities in the eastern part of the country, where Qaddafi’s hold on power has always been relatively weak. Saif gave local
voice to international opinion, saying, “The protest was a mistake, and the police intervention against the demonstrators was an even bigger mistake.” His father, too, repudiated the “backwardness” of the police response, but mainly wanted to insist that the riots hadn’t arisen from Islamic fervor, much less from discontent with his regime. Rather, they were spurred by anger at the history of Italian colonialism. (More than a quarter of a million Libyans—perhaps a third of the population—are estimated to have perished as a result of the Italian occupation, many in concentration camps.) “Unfortunately, there could be more Benghazis,” or even “attacks in Italy,” if Rome didn’t offer reparations, Qaddafi warned, saying that he would be mollified if Italy were to build a highway across Libya, for some 3 billion euros. The Italian foreign minister, Gianfranco Fini, said that this was “a not too veiled threat,” adding, “We have already said that we want to put the colonial past definitely behind us in our relations with Libya. We maintain this position in a clear and transparent way. We expect a similarly coherent position from the Libyan leader.”

When I read this statement to a Libyan acquaintance, he burst out laughing and said, “Good luck, Mr. Fini!” Expatriate opposition leaders have claimed that Qaddafi staged the riots to extract concessions from Europe, but that they escalated out of control. In Libya, the issue was widely seen to be economic—a disgruntled population of unemployed youth needed an outlet for their anger.

The most immediate sequel to the riots was the dismissal of Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem. (He was given a post at the National Oil Company.) I had already heard rumors in Tripoli that Ghanem was going to lose his job in a cabinet reshuffle; the openness that seemed so refreshing when we met had not pleased the Leader. “He made three basic mistakes,” one Qaddafi adviser said to me. “First, he associated reform with his own name and complained publicly about the Leadership. In Libya, if you want to accomplish things, you make yourself invisible, you sublimate your ego. Second, he thought that a strong position with the West would guarantee his hold on power and didn’t understand that the West counts for very little here. Third, he failed to win over the Libyan people; he never seemed to be concerned about their suffering. . . . In the street, there is relief that he is gone—though
there is no affection for the alternative.” Ghanem’s successor was the taciturn hard-liner Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi. “For the Leadership, it will be easier to make economic adjustments now that the reform will come clearly and directly from the Leadership and not be seen as admissions that the Leader was wrong, as concessions to some kind of competition.”

The change of prime ministers was a reassertion of Qaddafi’s power: more tumbling of the rats. Several ministries—including oil and energy—were shaken up, with people removed from jobs they had held for decades. The US State Department’s decision, in late March 2006, to keep Libya on its terrorism list both reflects the problem and contributes to it and has outraged Libyans in and out of power.

Because Ghanem’s strong suit was supposed to be his ease with Western powers, his failure to get Libya removed from the US terrorism list helped ensure his replacement by a hard-liner. Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi has been described to me as financially corrupt but wily, calculating, and extremely industrious. He is “a technocrat out of the Revolutionary Committees who works hard to glorify the Leader’s policies,” a Libyan American academic said. “Will reform slow? Well, Shukri Ghanem talked a good line about reform but accomplished so little that there’s not much backsliding to do. Mahmoudi realizes that economic reform has to move forward and will do that for the Leader. He has absolutely no interest in political or social reform, and he will leave it to the Leader to have a relationship with the West.” It has been suggested that, with the appointment of a hard-liner, some of the infighting will subside.

“Ahmed Ibrahim’s power will wane, too,” one of Saif’s advisers told me hopefully, referring to the deputy speaker of the General People’s Congress. Saif will be his own man: “He’s old enough to carry that off.”

“We call the world close to the Leader ‘the Circle of Fire,’” one Libyan intellectual said. “Get close and it warms you up; get too close and you go down in flames. The Circle of Fire includes both reformers
and hard-liners; Qaddafi likes the chaos that creates.” The man spoke with irony, almost disdain, yet he was not above warming himself at the fire. The class of educated Libyans—which includes poets, archaeologists, professors, ministers, doctors, businessmen, and civil servants—is tiny. Given the way that tribalism intersects with class alliances and political identities, social relationships exist in Libya among people who in a larger society would probably be kept apart by mutual opposition. Political enmity is often crosshatched with social amity. In Tripoli, I had dinner at the home of the poet and physician Dr. Ashur Etwebi, who spoke passionately of the injustices of the Qaddafi regime in both its absolutism and its new capitalism. “He has to go,” Etwebi said. “This colonel has eaten the best years of my life, poisoned my soul and my existence, murdered the people I loved. I hate him more than I love my wife. He and his government and everyone who has anything to do with him must go. Enough is enough. We have no souls left. Do not let yourself be fooled by this talk of reform. What kind of reform is it when this man is still sitting in Tripoli? I cannot say it to you enough times. He must go. He must go. He must go.” A few minutes later, when I mentioned a high-ranking member of the regime whom I hoped to interview, Etwebi said, “Ah, he was here for dinner earlier this week.” He added with a shrug, “I don’t agree with him, but I like him.”

The coziness between the authorities and many of those who railed against them continually surprised me. Some of this was simple pragmatism, but not all; it was more intimate than that. A person’s network of loyalties and connections was never predictable. I had a drink (of nonalcoholic beer) in the Tripoli planetarium with a professor who had previously claimed that the prime minister and Saif got drunk together and raped the country—and they were the good guys. We had joked about the government’s inefficiencies, and he had said darkly that no one who wasn’t Libyan had any good reason to endure such chaos. He had asked how I could hold on to my sanity when I was dealing with government offices.

Now he was beaming. “Hey, I’ve been given a job with the ministry.” He raised a hand up over his head in a gesture of pride and triumph.

I was surprised that he was so eager to join a regime that he loathed.

“Well,” he replied, “it also happens to be the only game in town.”

Of the many lessons I’ve learned against optimism, none other has been so bitter as Libya’s descent into chaos following Qaddafi’s ignoble end. The problem, it would seem, was not that the West supported the overthrow of Qaddafi. The problem was that we did not seek to ascertain or shape what would ensue. The elimination of a great evil achieves little without some coherent good to fill the vacuum. The murder of US ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and two CIA contractors in Benghazi on September 12, 2012, came as a rude awakening to just how dysfunctional Libya had become. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, was criticized for having denied requests for increased security in Benghazi, where she wished to maintain a low profile, apparently as a misguided show of faith in the incipient Libyan democracy. Since then, militants from ISIL (also known as ISIS or Daesh) have captured Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte and slaughtered Christians there. Armed conflicts have emerged in Benghazi, Derna, Tripoli, Warshafana, the Nafusa Mountains, and other areas. In the south, the Tuareg and Tebu ethnicities are slaughtering each other. People from sub-Saharan Africa flood through the uncontrolled desert borders hoping to cross the Mediterranean and settle illegally in Europe, usually under the supervision of human traffickers. Amnesty International maintains that among the hundreds of people assassinated by Islamist groups are atheists, security officials, state employees, religious leaders, agnostics, activists, journalists, judges, and prosecutors. There is no functioning legal system. Even my closest friend from Tripoli, Ashur Etwebi, who wanted to help build the new Libya at almost any cost, has fled with his family to Norway. Hasan Agili has gained UN refugee status—though not a residence visa or a work permit—in Lebanon. Those who can get out, no matter how much they love
their country, are out. This misery is Qaddafi’s legacy; he had so destroyed his society that no human structures were left to sustain government without him.

In the primitive south of the country, tribal warfare is unbridled; in the anarchic north, kidnapping is a commonplace. The elected government—the House of Representatives (HOR)—which enjoys international recognition, has fled Tripoli and taken refuge in Tobruk, in the eastern area of the country. A competing government primarily of Islamists—the General National Congress (GNC)—has declared itself in Tripoli, which means Libya has, in the words of the French foreign minister, “two governments, two parliaments, and complete confusion.” The influence of the Islamic State is growing, and the UN’s attempts to form a GNC and HOR “unity government” will surely strengthen the Islamists, whose predecessor, the Libyan Islamic Brotherhood, lost roundly in the last two elections. The West supported the overthrow of elected Islamists in Egypt; the West now supports a role for Islamists in Libya, where they have never been elected. General Khalifa Haftar, the renegade who leads the HOR army, has threatened to form a third government wing of his own under the banner of Karama (Dignity), focused primarily on the fight against Islamists.

Wagging his finger like a disappointed nanny, Saif Qaddafi warned as the revolution against his father began in 2011, “There will be civil war in Libya. . . . We will kill one another in the streets.” Now such killing is rampant. Saif himself, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, is imprisoned in Zintan; his captors have amputated the digits he used when reprimanding his country’s citizens. Though he was sentenced to death in the summer of 2015 by GNC-controlled courts, he is unlikely to be executed anytime soon; he is a useful bargaining chip for those who hold him. Indeed, the whole sentencing appeared to be a gesture of defiance by the GNC against the international community that wants Saif Qaddafi sent to The Hague. In August 2015, pro-Qaddafi demonstrators took to the streets for the first time, chanting, “Zintan, Zintan, free Saif al-Islam.” From a distance, that old horror had begun to look attractive, especially to anti-Islamists in Benghazi, Sebha, and Tripoli.

Travel + Leisure
, October 2005

Pleasure comes at a cost, and I gained eleven pounds on this monthlong eating trip. At the end of our sybaritic stay, during a foray to the trendy 798 area of Beijing where many of my artist friends had studios, my partner, John, and I stumbled on a boutique with an elegant mandarin jacket in its window display. I asked the saleswoman, “Would you have that in my size?” She looked at me with a respectful expression and said extremely politely, “Ah, no. I am so sorry. We make clothes for thin people here.”

B
efore my first trip to China, in 1982, I was warned that the food would be terrible, and it more than met expectations: greasy, gristly, dismal, prepared with that brutal indifference Communism seemed to celebrate, and served up gray and ugly. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore kept alive the Chinese culinary tradition, three tiny candles standing in for the greatest bonfire in the world. By the early nineties, the situation was somewhat better, as long as you stuck with simple things or ate in people’s homes. In the past five years, Chinese cooking has risen phoenix-like from the ashes, and divine food is now to be found in the country’s unnumbered restaurants. It is hard to understand how the Chinese have retained some semblance of sanity in a country so utterly transformed, because the China of
today is as dissimilar to the China I first visited as Oz is to Kansas. Where miserable-looking people in tattered uniforms once tilled depleted fields while unconvincing workers celebrated the Communist state in unbearable factory performances, one now finds a level of efficiency and sophistication in the cities that leaves me feeling that New York is quite nearly a provincial backwater. Of course legions of peasants still labor in poverty, but the advances in China have spread through a broader swath of society than those in Russia. The improvement in the food reflects a profound social transformation: what was once reliably unpleasant is now often thrilling. While these changes are most obvious in Beijing’s and Shanghai’s smartest restaurants, they can also be found in country inns and at street dumpling stands.

I had the good fortune to do a culinary tour with the fashion designer Han Feng, who is warm and glamorous and sparkling with life, and who led us to both the fanciest restaurants in China and the best street food imaginable. “You won’t believe it,” she said on our second day in Shanghai as we drew near to Jia-Jia Juicy Dumplings, in the old Yu Yuan district, a grungy-looking stand where a huge meal costs about a dollar. Seated on plastic stools on the sidewalk, we gorged on dumplings filled with soup and pork, shrimp, or hairy crab (a regional delicacy). You dip them in rice vinegar with ginger, and when you bite down, first the warm soup floods your mouth, then you experience the smooth skin and the rich meaty filling. Mobs descend on the place in all sorts of weather, and the eight women who work there are crowded so close together that you wonder how they can move their arms. A great steamer sits outside, piled high with bamboo baskets, watched over by a woman whose face is constantly shrouded in vapor. But everyone smiles and laughs. “How can this be so good?” Han Feng asked us, glowing with pride.