Searching for mercenaries in Libya

I was in Benghazi, Libya’s second city, liberated from the tyranny of Muammar Gaddafi for a week now, and had sought out its poorest neighbourhood, Luheishi, to get a haircut. It is an old ploy. Like eating – slowly – whatever comes to hand, slurping tea, or getting your shoes shined. Any transaction that helps you blend into the street. And there are few things you can do with strangers as intimate, as conducive to shared confidences, as to bare your throat to their strop. Besides, I needed it, and a barber in the Middle East will shave you, clip and tweak your facial hair, give you a short back and sides and rub your shoulders and still give you change from five bucks.

Most of the barbers shops in Luheishi had been run by Egyptians who even as I walked past their shuttered doors were at that moment headed back home through the border post at Salloum, 400 miles to the west. But one was open and staffed by young men from the neighbourhood. Luheishi has the reputation in Benghazi of being rough and sha’abi, working class. The kind of place cabbies sometimes refuse to take you to, especially at night. And there were a couple of young toughs hanging around inside the barbers, all taut faces and jerky body language. But it was the middle of the day and everyone was sober and polite.

Wael was taking a long time with my hair cut because he was busy explaining how he had been among the thousands of protesters who had overrun the Fadhil Bu Omar building, the headquarters of Gaddafi’s dreaded Katiba security apparatus for the whole of eastern Libya, just ten days before. He would break off for hand gestures, the revolutionary guards levelling their rifles at them, them lobbing Molotov cocktails inside the battlements and baring their chests to machine guns.

Then this man wearing a military jacket walked in, searching for a socket to recharge his mobile. I watched him through the mirror as he took an empty seat between the others and lit a cigarette. I never learnt his name.

“He was there!” exclaimed Wael with a big grin. “He was at katiba. Weren’t you?”

The vibe had changed. The new man nodded curtly at Wael’s words but nothing about him seemed rebel. He had a thin, military moustache, was older, perhaps in his early thirties, and full of self-important bustle, ordering tea, fiddling with his phone. But surely Wael could not mean he fought on the other side? Over two hundred people died in that battle, not five miles away in the centre of town, including two of Wael’s friends. They could hardly be exchanging pleasantries a few days later.

“Well I only fired in the air, and the Africans were behind me with a gun to my head,” said the other guy. “I fled as soon as I could.”

So, yes, the other side. And still wearing fatigues. I wondered what the deal was but it didn’t seem my place to ask. Military Man got up and went outside to stretch his legs for a moment.

“Fired in the air… gun to his head… fled when he could,” muttered Wael as he ran the shaver over the back of my neck, clearly disgruntled.

“What, you don’t believe him?” I asked.

Wael started a little at my question and instantly switched discourse.

“Oh yes, of course I do. He is from the neighbourhood, we know him well. He’s not bad like the others,” he replied.

Wael carried on cutting my hair while Military Man, back on the bench, talked about all the weapons that had been snatched from the army depots when the rebels overran them. And thousands of regular prisoners – criminals – released from jail overnight.

“That’s the real danger,” he said, shaking his head woefully. “Frightening.” Nobody said a word.

Later, one of the lads from the barber’s shop invited me back to lunch at his house round the corner. Ali, just 20, was repeating to his father Mahmoud the story of how the guy walked in and he and Wael had exchanged words, kind of, and how I found the whole thing hard to understand.

His father yelled. “He had nothing to do with it!” A little shocking as Mahmoud was a gentle man, the overwhelming impression he gave being one of grief for a wife that had recently died, as Ali had told me. “They didn’t like Gaddafi! Nobody liked Gaddafi!”, he shouted.

At that moment Mahmoud did not seem to care about the truth of the man’s guilt or innocence. The story of the murtazaqat, Gaddafi’s African mercenaries holding a gun to every Libyan head, were a release valve, a way for everyone to live together afterwards. All it took was one meddling outsider like me to plant a seed of doubt and a cycle of retribution could begin. And then who knew where it might end?

It put the obsessive nature of the search for the mercenaries in a new light. It was the supposedly ubiquitous presence of foreign mercenaries that gave Gaddafi’s men a huge, collective alibi, that allowed the rebels to forgive all but the most egregious cases of brutality among their fellow Libyans. Blame the outsider, it always works.

Earlier, sitting in the courthouse in the centre of town with a colleague, we had met another of Gaddafi’s fighters, a Libyan, who blamed the African mercenaries big-time. We sat in one of the hundreds of small offices of the sprawling complex, on the second floor, overlooking a winter’s storm on the Mediterranean 100 yards through the window, white-tipped waves crashing against the seafront, watching a team of prosecutors, mostly women, grapple with a case load of possible war crimes cases that was expanding by the minute. Clerks brought files and scribbled notes, whispered exchanges were followed by hurried exits. It was one of those revolutionary moments, beautiful to the reporter, where the new newsmakers are too polite and inexperienced to realise they should just kick us the hell out. Instead they offer us tea and biscuits and, because they don’t want to deliver any African mercenaries to interview, give us one of Gaddafi’s special forces instead.

He comes in with a blanket over his head. No photos, no name, he says, not even his age. One of the prosecutors leaves him in a side room with us and a couple of volunteers, rebels in their early 20s, dressed casual, with the ease of young men who know they are on the right side of history.

Our man takes his blanket off his head, revealing a shaved head, tired, slightly buzzed eyes, mid-20s, both rib cage skinny and built. His voice deep and slightly cracked. Wired but with no sign of ill treatment. He is anxious to tell us how much he loves the revolution. Flashes a V-sign, picks up the pre-Gaddafi flag on the table and waves it. There is no pressure from his guards to do this since they, endearingly, have nothing to prove and are leaning forward to catch a kind of conversation they don’t normally access. The door opens and close every minute or so, someone looking for someone not here. Nobody yet knows who is using which room for what.

Talk us through it, we say.

“Nothing much to say,” he shrugs. “Major General Abu Bakr Younis saluted the forces of the revolution in the main square on the 20th February.”

But you, we ask. How were you taken?

“I wasn’t taken,” he said, chin out, lips out. “Nobody took me. I was there at the katiba on the Friday. The Africans were at my back. A gun here,” he points to his temple. “Then the shabaab, the rebels, they overran the camp. I changed into civilian clothes, took my gun, went home and stayed at home. Then I came here and handed over my weapon.” He nods to the guards, as though they should nod back.

He makes a show of bumming a cigarette off one of the heads that poke round the door. Every little ingratiation a complicity, a tiny step further away from the status of enemy. What did you do during the four days of fighting, we ask. He takes my pen to draw a diagram, showing how far back he was from the front line.

“I shot in the air mostly. But I shot someone in the leg. That’s why I’m here. I came to hand in my weapon and confess” he said.

Tell us about life in the revolutionary guards, we say. He talks of three years away in Tripoli although he is a local lad, from Benghazi, learning how to handle weapons. “You can’t step forward and use the Betrayer, just like that,” he says, clicking his fingers.

The Betrayer? Erm, machine gun, he says. Why Betrayer? Because if you don’t know how to handle it, it can jump, fall on the floor and fire randomly or blow up. You wouldn’t want to be there when that happens.

Did you ever meet Gaddafi? “He came to the parade ground twice. I saw him. But I didn’t like him. He was a liar and a cheat. It was all bullshit.”

Why did you join? Because I didn’t have a job, he says, genuinely surprised at the question. How much did you earn? He appraises his guard-friends. Oh I don’t know, he says, 320, 380 dinars a month, something like that. The pay of police, or regular army, or an average civil servant, about $300. Even though we’re hearing the special forces and revolutionary guards and intelligence – the fellow travellers – make twice that.

Do the murtazaqat, the African mercenaries, speak Arabic, we ask. Oh no, he replies. Then how can they be telling you what to do? With the gun, he says, fingers to the temple again. But that’s a yes-no option, I say. They can use a gun to make you carry on doing that thing you both already know they want you to do – like shooting into the crowd. They can’t use the gun to make you understand new orders: retreat to this point, maintain radio silence, look to the left. How would the murtazaqat actually command Libyan forces. Erm… translators, he says. They use translators. A few.

We leave him after an hour. He’s anxious to please and would talk all day. After all, the people who will decide his fate put him in the room with us. But his own personal story is already tightly formed. And ultimately, he’s just some bloke who ended up in Gaddafi’s special forces. We’ve got what we can.

Outside, I ask Azzedine al-Awami, one of the prosecutors handling his case, what might happen to him. He says the law provides up to three years in jail for cases of bodily harm like shooting someone in the leg – “If we believe his story.” And if not?

“Under the old criminal code, which we are referring to,” he replied, “premeditated murder carries the death sentence.”

Awami also arranges for us to meet some Africans who are being held on the top floor of the court complex. There’s a throng at the entrance to the building, trying to get in for all sorts of reasons. Every so often a new African is brought in amid tumult, roughed up, sometimes bloodied.

Inside, though, the treatment we see is gruff but correct. We are shown into an empty room and shortly afterwards four young Africans are herded in, Ethiopians and Eritreans. We all sit on blankets on the floor while Awami takes the swivel chair.
They are all young construction workers, trying to save money. In a story I’m to hear repeated over the days, the Eritreans can’t go home because they are part Oromo – part Ethiopian in other words, caught in the middle of another big man’s quarrel, since Ethiopia and Eritrea are still at war. Awami explains their stories are being checked out. When they are confirmed, they will go free.

“He’s already free to go,” he says, pointing to Ermias Degefa, an Ethiopian. “Our investigations are complete. But he doesn’t want to be back on the streets.”

Degefa nods. The Africans are all worried about being photographed. If their pictures get onto the Net as detainees – suspected mercenaries – they may never be safe again.

They’re tired and stressed, probably not sleeping or eating well, or getting the chance to wash. Their life has just nose dived and they know it. They have no jobs to go back to and their savings are gone. But they show no signs of abuse and are not cowed. Salah Jaber, from Eritrea, speaks Arabic and asks Awami directly why he can’t phone his friends just to let them know he is OK. You can, says Awami, nobody’s stopping you. But they smashed my phone when they took me in, Salah replies. Why don’t you lend him your phone, I ask Awami, who is sitting on a swivel chair above us. He hands it over and Salah retreats to a corner of the room and makes a call.

There is no definitive picture to be drawn, of course, but I am convinced that Awami and the other prosecutors I met are committed to legal process. Later, accounts from other reporters and the Human Rights Watch representative give similar impressions. It’s hardly pretty. But a new leadership is fast emerging from the ranks of Benghazi’s lawyers, engineers, doctors, and businessmen which is as constitutionalist as it is revolutionary. And at that moment, these professional elders have the ear of the street.

As I was to discover, in Libya, in fact, to be constitutionalist is to be revolutionary. For thirty years, since Gaddafi introduced the Green Book, he has cynically maintained tyranny through a combination of puerile, Che-like personality cult and a form of supposed anarcho-syndicalism. To be in favour of system, to support institutions with declared, and therefore circumscribed, remits, is to be against Gaddafi’s system of no system. The Great Libyan Socialist Arab Jamhiriyya, c’est moi.