Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [43]
“They think we’re a purist country. No, we were practical. We had to buy peace,” Prime Minister Shukri Ghanim told me.
“By some of our estimates, we lost more than $30 billion because of sanctions. For us, it’s an economic venture. We’re sick and tired of this. If it’s only money at the end of the day, we have to pay money. The United States has the means and the power and they will not hesitate to use them. What can we do?”
He looked at me, the visiting American.
“You can change the rules in the middle of the game,” he said, “so what can we do?”
“Do you like my ass?” The girl in the tight white pants had her face up to my ear; she was hollering.
We’d been watching her dance for the past half hour, shaking her hips alone and half drunk in a circle of men. She and I were the only women. I laughed. We were drinking illegal red wine.
“Your ass is fantastic!” I yelled into the dark cave of her blow-dried mane. “Just like Jennifer Lopez!”
She cooed, touched my cheek, and staggered back to dance some more.
“She does look like Jennifer Lopez,” Nabil* mused. The party had been thrown by his cousins in the sprawling family estate on the outskirts of Tripoli. The ceiling beams had been imported from Italy. Albino peacocks roamed sandy gardens. Muhammad Ali’s autograph was still visible on the bar, the ghost of a long-gone day when Tripoli glittered fashionably.
Nabil had dropped into my life fortuitously, introduced by a mutual friend as I headed into Libya. When I finished the official interviews and bid good-night to my stern minders, Nabil and his cousin picked me up and we plunged into Tripoli. We watched a soccer game at sunset, ate ice cream and smoked sheeshas in the old Italian plaza, and trolled the beachside shantytowns to buy black-market booze. The government knew, of course. They knew everything. One of the minders sat in a stuffed chair in the hotel lobby, watching me come and go. Nobody ever discussed it, but he sat there and slid his eyes after me.
“I like house music, crazy,” a skinny young guy was yelling now. He wiggled his head and rolled his glassy eyes. He kept slipping off into the darkness and stumbling back more stoned. We were sitting out under the stars.
“We’re not terrorists here, you know,” the guy said.
“I know.”
The music pounded, and he bounced in place. There were only a handful of guests, and they clustered around; it seemed significant to them that I was there. Sanctions had turned this ancient Mediterranean capital, roved for centuries by Romans and Africans and Greeks, into a shadowland. At least now commercial flights could land at the airport again. For years, Libyans got out of the country by hopping a ferry to Malta, or crossing the excruciating deserts of North Africa by bus, driving all day and all night to reach Cairo. Still they were eager to tell me of the countries they had visited, to display their urbanity, their hunger for the world. They wanted to tell me about Rome and Paris and London, about everything under the sun except for the one thing I had come to write about—their lives at home, under Qaddafi.
Here is the mental rearrangement: People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It’s what they don’t say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the thing itself. If you accumulate everything that is unmentionable, feared, stamped out, then you have an idea of just how much terror people have swallowed over the years. You begin to grade the repression on a spectrum. Egyptian politics have been languishing in a torture cell for decades, for example, but people on the street still gripe about the government and roll their eyes at the president.
Not in Libya. The people I met in Libya were locked in the basement of an asylum. Social interaction was all nervous smiles, evasive answers, and cups of tea. Nobody