Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [41]
Nobody in the world drives like Libyans. They slam the doors, turn the key in the ignition, and press the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. They shred the highways, scream through backstreets, hurtle like mad fish chased by some unseen shark. There is no middle speed. Never mind that the economy was almost dead, that nobody I met ever had anything to do. They were going nowhere at breakneck speed.
In the heat of afternoon, men lined the waterfront and stared off over the Mediterranean, clothes flapping like loose rags in the wind. Sub-Saharan immigrants crouched on roadsides, dark faces cut from bone. Behind them stretched dull, sagging market stalls, and dusk drew the fading light back out to sea. Yet the streets were gaudy with strings of light, and shop windows twinkled with sparkling party dresses. A mask of whimsy sweetened the anguish of isolation and sanctions, but there was something unsettling about it, like the beachfront high-rises somebody had erected without plumbing or electricity. The party dresses looked as if they had been copied from some other place, a land that worked, as if people had been left on their own so long, cut off from the world, that they’d started to imitate their imaginations and memories of other realities.
Nobody in Libya talks about Moammar Qaddafi. There is only the Leader, and when Libyans talk about the Leader, you hear the invisible capital letter. The Leader is a man of mysterious motives and sweeping decrees. The Leader rose to power in 1969 through a small, quiet military coup that, like all small, quiet military coups in the Arab world, is officially referred to as a “revolution.” Since then, he has luxuriated at the core of a personality cult that would make Stalin blush while his regime squashed all political back-talk with a campaign of imprisonments, torture, and disappearances.
When Qaddafi wanted to play tough, he liquidated enemies and slaughtered political prisoners. His relatives and top officials put state-sponsored terrorism to use, bombing passenger planes in midair. When he grew cranky with his “Arab brothers” and decided Libya would focus on being an African country instead, he offered a cash payout to any Libyan who would marry a black African. In a flourish of empire, he sliced his nation with a vast waterworks project, the Great Man-Made River. The Leader woke up feeling whimsical one day, and changed the names of the months. February is “flowers,” and April “bird.” September, the month in which the Leader grabbed the throne, is fatah, or “conquest.” When the United States invaded Iraq, he suggested Libyans dig trenches in their yards.
The Leader’s favorite color is green, and so Libya is resplendent with green. Even the Leader’s political manifesto is entitled the Green Book. The Leader also invented a name for his country: the Jamahariyah. The word is a mash of Arabic loosely translated to “ruled by the masses”; it was born in the crackle of synapses and free associations in the Leader’s mysterious mind. In truth, it means only Libya.
One fine morning in that sagging seaside city, the woman I’d come to regard as my head minder marched into the hotel. She had smooth, black hair and a youthful face, and she never allowed herself to smile at me. She shuffled me from one appointment to the next in the diligent, pained manner of a governess with a bad hangover. This morning, she announced, she was taking me to the World Center for Studies and Researches of the Green Book. This is Libya’s version of a think tank, a sun-dappled library dedicated to studying the fickle philosophies of the man