From the shores of Tripoli

I arrived in Tripoli yesterday.  Things here are much less “normal” than in Benghazi:  there are lots of young men with guns on the street.  Detonations happen, some more than just the usual “celebratory” AK 47 rounds.  Procedures at Mitiga airport are haphazard, security at the Radisson (where lots of business is conducted) is tight.  The internet is agonizingly slow, especially once the journalists start trying to file in the evening.

But everyone agrees that things are improving.  Water and electricity are flowing.  Many stores and restaurants are now open, traffic is getting more congested.  Lots of people are on the street–often with children (a clear sign of feeling relatively secure).

The Western journalists I talked with last night were on the gloomy side:  they worry about Qaddafi being at large, the three major towns still holding out against the Transitional National Council (TNC), jockeying for position among the many militias that control different parts of Tripoli, rascist incidents and slurs against black Libyans, especially those who once supported Qaddafi.  All those problems are real.

But I’m far cheerier, because I managed somehow to strike up a conversation last night with a group of young doctors, dentists and engineers trying to preserve the spirit of their jihad (that’s struggle in English, with spiritual but not necessarily specifically religious connotations) against the Qaddafi regime.  These people in their 20s spent months caring for wounded demonstrators in their homes to avoid sending them to hospitals, where they would have been arrested (or in some cases killed).

They have organized themselves as Free Doctors’ Forum, Free Generation, Libya Youth Forum and the like in an effort to “bring Libya back to life.”  They fear that others may attempt to hijack their revolution.  They are cautious about politics–the only politicians they have ever known were Qaddafi and his cronies, so they distrust politicians and political parties even though they want a free political system.  The parallel to America’s founding fathers, who likewise feared their revolution would be hijacked and corrupted if political parties formed, is hard to miss.  The Libyans want the revolution they just went through to be the last the country will ever need.

Freedom is the word Libyans associate most with their February 17 revolution.  Freedom to speak their minds, to associate in groups as they please, to read and view what they want, and to form their own opinions.  The young people I met distrust power.  They accept NTC chair Jalil as a transition leader but look forward to a day when they can choose their own.  They plan to monitor and evaluate the performance of their leaders through independent organizations. They did not use the term “civil society” with me.  But they somehow have reinvented the concept.  Nor did they know what USAID is (though they had already met with European assistance providers).  What a pleasure to discover revolutionaries before they’ve learned the international vocabulary!

The young people I talked with are mildly suspicious about big international organizations–they rightly fear that some of them would rather provide medical services themselves rather than support a Libyan organization that provides medical service.  They will resist being hired away from their own nascent service providers to work for the internationals.  I wished them fortitude in this, as I’ve seen it happen all too often:  the internationals come in under the banner of supporting civil society and quickly destroy the indigenous institutions by hiring away their personnel as translators and drivers.

I ran down to Martyrs’ (formerly Green) Square this morning along the Tripoli shoreline, which U.S. marines failed to reach (they got only as far as Derna) in their effort to suppress Berber (Barbary) attacks on American shipping in 1804.  The town was about as quiet as it gets at 9 am Friday, as people sleep late on a day that begins the Muslim weekend.  Street sweepers were cleaning up the square after whatever happened there last night.  I got a few quizzical looks and one “good morning!”  I’ll try later today to talk with people coming out of a mosque, hoping to get a picture of how more religious people regard the revolution and future prospects.