7 More Great Reads on Libya
The Economist gives an overview of the military intervention so far, Stewart Patrick writes on what the decision means for humanitarian foreign policy, Elizabeth Ferris points out the impending refugee crisis, and Mohammed ElBaradei and Yoweri Museveni give their impressions of Moammar Gaddafi.
AP Photo (3); Getty Images
1. Into the Unknown, The Economist
The Economist has a rundown of the Libya intervention so far and all the disagreements that threaten to stymie it. There's disagreement over whether NATO or a Franco-British command will lead the coalition, disagreement within NATO over what the objectives are, and disagreement among the rebels over whether they ought to push for Gaddafi's ouster or accept a temporary stalemate and partition. Many questions remain open, including whether the rebels have access to oil reserves, whether Col. Gaddafi has huge amounts of gold stashed away in Tripoli, how determined the army is to support Gaddafi, and how determined the rebels are to take him down. But the place to watch seems to Misurata, where Gaddafi's forces are currently entrenched. If airstrikes and rebel assaults can't dislodge loyalists there, it would show the limits of the coalition and the rebel forces, and effectively draw the line of partition—unless Gaddafi's government collapses from within.
2. A New Lease on Life for Humanitarianism, by Stewart Patrick, Foreign Affairs
Stewart Patrick lauds the decision to intervene in Libya for its revival of humanitarian foreign policy, but he says the allies are now obliged to see their intervention through. He writes that the U.N. resolution resuscitated a moribund policy called the “responsibility to protect,” a norm endorsed in the 2005 World Summit that “makes a state’s presumed right of nonintervention contingent on its ability and willingness to protect its citizens,” but which repeatedly failed to stop mass atrocities like those in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “In invoking 'the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population' in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which prompted Operation Odyssey Dawn” writes Patrick, “the Security Council has seemingly given RtoP a new lease on life.” But how long that lease is good for depends on Odyssey Dawn's success, and to succeed, you need clear goals. On this count, “the United States and its partners’ dithering over Operation Odyssey Dawn’s aims is disturbing.” Patrick thinks the coalition ought to stop dithering and decide that “The “responsibility to protect” implies a responsibility to rebuild once the shooting stops.” Despite the U.N. resolution's explicit rejection of an occupation of Libya, Patrick says stabilization will require a longterm multinational peacekeeping force.
With Odyssey Dawn, Bruce Ackerman argues, Obama has taken the precedent of unilateral executive action even farther than George W. Bush.
3. Libya: The Humanitarian Emergency We See and the One We Don't, by Elizabeth Ferris, The Brookings Institution
As everyone focuses on the armed struggle between Gaddafi's forces and the rebels, a new humanitarian crisis is developing, warns Elizabeth Ferris. Around 350,000 people have fled Libya in the last month, most of them Egyptian and Tunisian migrant workers trying to get home. But other groups are trying to escape as well, including large numbers of African migrants who report being attacked by rebels who mistake them for Gaddafi's mercenaries. A similar humanitarian crisis is developing inside the country, where reports say tens of thousands of Libyans have left their homes in search of safety. How has the international community responded to this less visible crisis? Aid organizations have done what they can to help refugees, positioning supplies in neighboring countries and helping transport migrant workers back home, but they haven't yet figured out how to operate safely within Libya's borders. Meanwhile, Europe regards the impending influx of refugees as a security threat. Italy's foreign minister warned about “a wave of 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants,” and France, in Ferris' words, has “called on the Italian government to act responsibly—and prevent the migrants from moving out of Italy into, say, France.”
4. Libya's Ragtag Rebels: Why They Fight, by Bobby Ghosh, Time
Time's Bobby Ghosh sizes up the rebels and finds them to be a ragtag band of amateur and poorly armed soldiers following a handful of different leaders—or none at all. Civilians use megaphones to rally people at the front, where people come to watch the air raids and talk about suicide missions, though they have no explosives. “The next attack will take place when the driver of one of the vehicles gets a rush of blood to his head and roars off in the direction of Ajdabiyah,” writes Ghosh. There are a few professional fighters among them, but they seem unable to rally and direct the partisans, who distrust them for once fighting for Gaddafi and worry they may change sides once more.
5. Qaddafi Unplugged, by Mohamed ElBaradei, Vanity Fair
Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency and leading figure in the Egyptian revolution, thinks back on his past meetings with Gaddafi, and the impression the ruler gave of being out of touch with international politics. In one meeting, Gaddafi asks ElBaradei whether he's a Nasser fan and, “Why does the Egyptian government hate you?” But it's when Gaddafi whips out a notebook and pencil to take notes on how NATO works that ElBaradei “realized that Qaddafi was less than fully informed on global security alliances and structures.” ElBaradei touches on some of Gaddafi's quirks, like his ban on barbershops and penchant for meeting world leaders in tents, but mostly he sticks to anecdotes that show the gulf between how the world sees Libya and how Gaddafi and his son Saif would like to be seen.
6. The Qaddafi I Know, by Yoweri Museveni, Foreign Policy
Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, lists the things he likes and dislikes about the Libyan ruler. Dislikes include Gaddafi's backing Idi Amin against Uganda, pushing for a United States of Africa instead of a less formal economic community, interfering with other country's politics, ignoring the crisis in Sudan, and being too close with terrorists. On the other hand, Museveni likes that Gaddafi is “independent minded” rather than a “puppet.” He also likes that Gaddafi raised the price of oil, built infrastructure within Libya, and is secular. Calling the rebels “insurrectionists” rather than demonstrators, Museveni goes on to list the reasons why the U.N. was wrong to get involved, arguing, among other things, that it's hypocritical not to impose a no-fly zone over Bahrain or Yemen (or China), that the airstrikes have prevented an African Union mission from arriving, and that the rebels were doing fine on their own. “I only had 27 rifles. To be puppets is not good,” writes Museveni.
7. Obama's Unconstitutional War, by Bruce Ackerman, Foreign Policy
With Odyssey Dawn, Bruce Ackerman argues, Obama has taken the precedent of unilateral executive action even farther than George W. Bush. Obama may have secured a U.N. Resolution, “But the U.N. Charter is not a substitute for the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power 'to declare war.'” After the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which allows the president to act without congressional approval for 60 days in response to a "national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." But no U.S. forces were attacked by Gaddafi. Because the Libya campaign is being run with existing funds, Obama goes even further than the precedent set by Clinton in 1999 when he bombed Kosovo on the argument that Congress' approval of funding was tacit approval of the war. Obama could argue, as Truman did with Korea, that the president has the right to wage war without congressional approval, but Ackerman finds this argument dubious, and thinks Congress should deny funding after three months and launch an investigation into presidential power.
Josh Dzieza is an editorial assistant at The Daily Beast.
Toward African freedom in Libya and beyond
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by Molefi Kete Asante
There are several rationales that have been advanced in the public for the reason for the assault on Libya. The attackers have said that Gaddafi has used force against his own people. They say that they are trying to prevent revenge attacks on the people who have risen against the leader of Libya. They also say that Gaddafi’s government has lost its legitimacy. None of these arguments make much sense in reality, and they conceal the attempt at exploitation, appropriation of Libyan petroleum and colonial incursion to demonstrate the will of the West in Africa.
We have yet to have a clear view of the attacks made upon the Libyan people by their government. If anything, the actions of the Libyan government in Tripoli appear restrained despite the agitation caused by a vocal minority. In the United States in 1965, when I was a young college student, I witnessed the actions of the National Guard on the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Nearly 40 people were killed in a confrontation with American government authorities.
Governments fight to maintain their legitimacy; this is the law of sustaining power. When President Bush reached the lowest point of his popularity among the American people, he was still considered the president. Gaddafi has not lost any legitimacy because groups of his people, influenced by social media, went to the streets to demonstrate against him. Popularity has rarely been the standard by which governments must be overthrown.
Furthermore, there were no African mercenaries fighting against the people of Libya as reported by the media; the Black people that the Western media experts saw were Libyans.
Although we can and should argue about the need for what Ron Daniels calls the “act of internal criticism” in African governments, there can be no argument about the necessity for Africans to solve their own problems. We must be clear that the attack on Libya is an attack on Africa.
One of the reasons that the French, the Americans and the British could not reach an agreement with the African Union to bomb Libya is because the political intelligence of African leaders has grown tremendously since the crises in Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Tunisia and Egypt. The African Union knows that Gaddafi’s leadership on questions of African unity is among the most prominent.
We must be clear that the attack on Libya is an attack on Africa.
Few African leaders have been as active in assisting the continent economically and administratively as Gaddafi. He has used his country’s wealth to create a strong economy in Libya as well as to support civil servants in other African nations. We must not be beguiled by the Western media in its rush to remove one of the strongest African leaders from his post.
Gaddafi has minced no words about his support for and belief in the United States of Africa. Indeed, he knows that if Africa is divided between Northern and Southern states, or if Africa keeps existing as 54 independent states, the Western nations and the North American nations of Canada and United States will eat each part of Africa alive. They will not be able to swallow a continent that is united, firm in its convictions and dedicated to the liberty of its territory.
If Africa is divided between Northern and Southern states, or if Africa keeps existing as 54 independent states, the West will eat each part of Africa alive.
No one has shouted any louder than Gaddafi that Africa must be for the Africans. In this he reminds us of the clarion voice of Marcus Garvey.
With the fall of Tunisia, Libya and possibly Morocco and Algeria, France will have succeeded in its major plan to bring those states, especially oil-producing Libya, into a grand Mediterranean Basin clique. In such a scenario, the northern part of Africa will be declared the southern ridge of the European nation to the north. Gaddafi has been one of the major opponents of this neo-hegemony over African territory.
A United Africa would be a step toward overcoming disease, transportation problems, famine and land disputes. In our judgment we should not be so fast to criticize Gaddafi just because Western governments call for such an action. If they say that he is punishing his people, denying them free speech and keeping them from education, this must be proven.
Furthermore, why hasn’t the Western world rolled into Israel or the West Bank and saved the Palestinian people who suffer true slaughter and discrimination at the hands of Israel? What is Gaza, if not the pits of hell? When shall we hear high-sounding words from the leaders of the Western world in support of those Arabs? Africans must beware of the gifts of Europe.
No African nation was among those who came out to attack Libya on March 19. President Sarkozy of France has reported that some Arab nations supported the campaign against Libya, but even if that proves to be so, one must not read too much into this without some appreciation of the Arab distress with Gaddafi’s pro-African stance.
Transformations are produced by those who are focused on long-term goals, not by those who make convenient alliances with the enemies of their people. As Nkrumah was fond of saying, “We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”
It has been Gaddafi who has made Nkrumah’s mantra his own: “Africa must unite or perish.” Why would this language threaten the West? The Libyan leader has encountered, and continues to encounter, attempted setbacks and hurdles.
The work of the Brother Leader, as he is sometimes called, has been to raise African consciousness to the point that some of the nations on the continent of Africa begin to reject the loyalty they hold for their colonial masters. Some African leaders seem to fear other Africans.
Gaddafi has proposed that Africa do away with travel restrictions, create a common currency and ease trade tariffs and barriers. This African solidarity is not only a threat to the West – some who identify as Arabs have a difficult time accepting the Africanity promoted by Gaddafi.
With the proper safeguards and cooperation of the African world, the Libyan people can sort out their own internal squabbles. The great danger of the attacks on Libya is that they are being used by the U.S. to test the effectiveness of AFRICOM, the African Command, and this adventure will open the door to direct military intervention in Africa. We already know that the U.S. and the former colonial powers of France and England are re-inventing Cold War policies to enlarge and protect their economic interests on the continent.
The great danger of the attacks on Libya is that they are being used by the U.S. to test the effectiveness of AFRICOM, the African Command, and this adventure will open the door to direct military intervention in Africa.
The attack on Libya is also a challenge to Brazil, Venezuela, China, Iran and Russia for influence on the continent. However, beyond the economic argument is the moral argument for African people.
Why should a group of dissidents be able to challenge their state and cause international hegemonic forces to invade their land? Who is to blame for this political folly? We do not see the collapse of the Libyan government, and we support the masses of Libyan people against the tyranny of a minority.
When Africa needed Gaddafi, he was always present. Now that Libya needs Africa, let it be said that Africa will be present on the side of the legitimate government of the people of Libya.
Molefi Kete Asante is international representative of Afrocentricity International, professor of African American studies at Temple University, and author of “The History of Africa” and over 70 other books. He can be reached through his website, http://www.asante.net. This story previously appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, a legendary Black newspaper founded in 1909.
>via: http://sfbayview.com/2011/toward-african-freedom-in-libya-and-beyond/
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Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited "around 25" men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya".
Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".
His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".
Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan". He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.
US and British government sources said Mr al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.
Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the United States military's West Point academy has said the two share an "increasingly co-operative relationship". In 2007, documents captured by allied forces from the town of Sinjar, showed LIFG emmbers made up the second-largest cohort of foreign fighters in Iraq, after Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this month, al-Qaeda issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan rebellion, which it said would lead to the imposition of "the stage of Islam" in the country.
British Islamists have also backed the rebellion, with the former head of the banned al-Muhajiroun proclaiming that the call for "Islam, the Shariah and jihad from Libya" had "shaken the enemies of Islam and the Muslims more than the tsunami that Allah sent against their friends, the Japanese".
>via: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8407047/...
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The women fighting, organising, feeding and healing Libya’s revolution
Last Updated: Mar 25, 2011
In a bare, shabby side room in Benghazi's central courthouse, the hub of pro-democracy Libyan operations, Salwa Bugaighis talks animatedly, hardly flinching as gunshots ring out from the raucous crowds outside. They, like her, are in a mood that veers between celebration and defiance to anxiety. They flood the area of the seafront, which is littered with boards displaying caricatures of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and stalls selling souvenirs since the eastern part of the country was liberated on February 20.
The 44-year-old lawyer, an elegant woman dressed in black trousers and jacket, her eyes neatly lined with kohl, was on the steps of the courthouse at the first protest on February 15, when a group of legal professionals and academics gathered to protest the arrest of a colleague and to call for legal reforms, including a constitution. She has barely left the building since. By February 17 the government's vicious reaction had led to calls for regime change, and just three days later rebels claimed control of the city, Libya's second largest after the capital Tripoli.
"There is so much to do," Bugaighis says as she strides down the corridor lined with graffiti, her jacket flying out behind her. "We had no idea we would get rid of Qaddafi in just a few days and we were left with nothing, no institutions at all. We had to quickly work out how to organise everything for ourselves."
For her, that means an amorphous job running logistical operations and acting as a liaison between the street and the National Transitional Council, the interim governing body led by Qaddafi's former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, that heads a number of city councils around the east. This morning she has been talking to young people on the street, relaying their messages to the council's members. Later, she will meet with the military committee to discuss how to prepare Benghazi against an attack - government forces were then quickly heading east, though the new UN-imposed no-fly zone has lessened the threat - while fielding calls about arriving food shipments.
Bugaighis, a mother of three, is just one of a group of women who have been at the vanguard of Benghazi's uprising. Away from the front lines where the east's men are battling to hold off pro-Qaddafi forces, women work side-by-side with men to keep the rebels fighting, society and the economy functioning and the uprising visible.
Day jobs have been shed, replaced by a spirit of volunteerism that has led to ad hoc committees and fledgling democratic institutions. Some, like Bugaighis, are members of the organisational institutions centred in the courthouse. She is joined by her sister Iman Bugaighis, a professor-turned-spokeswoman for the rebels, and by Salwa el Deghali, the women's representative on the council. But, as was the case in Egypt and Tunisia, women were involved in the protests from the start, and Libyan women across all classes and levels of education are now playing a role from providing food to keeping up numbers in the streets, regardless of the outcome of the rebellion.
The uprising of which Bugaighis was part began with calls for protests on February 17, leading to the pro-democracy Libyans being dubbed the "February 17 rebels". But it sparked two days earlier when Fathi Terbil, a fellow lawyer, was arrested. He is representing the families of the victims of the massacre in Abu Salim, a notorious Tripoli prison where human rights organisations say some 1,200 people, mainly political prisoners, were killed after they rose up in 1996 - yet many of the wives and mothers weren't told of the deaths until 2009.
This, says Bugaighis, was the final straw. "For 42 years we have not been able to say what we want," she says. But small fires - fuelled by Benghazi's lawyers, many of them women - were burning long before. In September last year, Bugaighis and others took to the streets when the head of the legal union - a Qaddafi appointment - failed to step down long after the end of his term.
"We took chairs and tables outside and held our meeting there," says Bugaighis. "Everyone in Libya was talking about it because such actions are - were - rare here." Now the lawyers are trying to give some semblance of order to the vacuum that resulted, guiding the formation of a governing structure. "We are presenting our services to the population," she says. "We have no political experience, but I think we are doing a great job."
Liberating Benghazi was no easy task. According to Benghazi's medical committee at least 228 civlians were killed and 1,932 wounded in the struggle for this city of one million people. Many were shot by snipers from the Kateeba barracks, the base of one of Qaddafi's extensive groups of security and military apparatus. Rebel fighters rapidly filled Benghazi's hopitals as the fighting intensified.
Doctor Jasmine Sherif, 27, says she never imagined she would be treating patients with such extreme injuries a year after she graduated from Garyounis University in Benghazi. For several days and nights she has not left Benghazi's Al Hawaree Hospital. When her duties as a doctor end, she volunteers to do nursing care, changing dressings and running bags of blood between wards.
Many of the nurses were foreign and fled the country as the violence broke out, leading to a shortage of staff. Today Sherif is treating Ibrahim Imraja, a young man of 21. He came in with a bullet in his head and one that went through his back, cutting his spinal cord between two lumbar vertebrae. He will never walk again, Sherif says. Others have come in with limbs missing. She fears something similar - or worse - will happen to her brother, who is fighting, but says she encouraged him to go.
"We have broken through the fear barrier," she says. "I see people my age dying every day. It is so hard, but we must keep Libya free and that involves sacrifice."
Engaged to a fellow doctor, she has no idea when or if they will wed. When she went to study medicine, it was a path to a better life.
"There is some discrimination against women in our personal life, but at work I am equal," she says. "This means I can at least help to make people strong and hope we have enough people to face Qaddafi's forces. I am sure there is worse to come."
Thousands of Libya's women such as Sherif are in position to help after having received a good education thanks to people such as Mufeeda al Masri, a rotund, jovial 50-year-old. Back in 2008 al Masri decided that girls needed more access to education, and she founded Al Irtiqua ("progress" in Arabic) school. Today that school, located in a sunny central courtyard in Benghazi, has been transformed into a mass kitchen churning out over 1,000 meals a day to feed the rebels on the front line. The school's clinic has become a food store where sacks of potatoes slump against the wall, and classrooms have been turned into makeshift kitchens with desks used as work surfaces. Huge metal pots dot the floor as children run around the women's legs. Since the first delivery on February 20, the school has been full every day with more than 100 women peeling, chopping, cooking and packing rice, chicken and salad into aluminium containers. Others slice rolls, as many as 4,000 a day, passing them along a human conveyor belt to be filled and wrapped. From school pupils to widows of the Abu Salim massacre, the women work from morning until late afternoon when trucks arrives to ferry the food to the front.
"The day I saw the bloodshed at Kateeba I decided I had to do something to support the revolution," says al Masri. Her husband was a colonel in the air force and defected, refusing to fight for Qaddafi against the rebels. Support has been easy, she says: a steady flow of people come with food and monetary donations. Businessmen hand over wads of cash, she says, pulling a fistful of banknotes from her pocket, and small children proffer the remains of their savings. Preparations are interrupted by phone calls. One woman receives a call from her son at the front - the rebels have pushed back Qaddafi's forces. Trilling breaks out as the women celebrate the news. But they are aware the victories may be only temporary, though the no-fly zone now has renewed their hopes.
"We will do this until we die," says Najwa Sahly, a 51-year-old biology teacher whose husband, a professor of chemistry, was killed in Abu Salim. "I have lost my husband, what more do I have to be afraid of?"
Others who have sons and husbands on the front lines know they have a lot to lose. Khiria Abdul Salam, 42, spends half the day protesting and praying outside courthouse - flooded with as many women as men - and the other half propped up against a cushion in her living room glued to the Al Jazeera news channel. In her simple house on the fifth floor of a run-down area a 10-minute drive along the sea front from central Benghazi, there is a semblance of normality: her two daughters play, she cooks, relatives come in to ask for news. But she is afraid. Her husband went out on the first day to protest and she knew he would join the fighters. Abdul Salam says she has not heard from her husband since he left for the front three weeks ago.
"He worked for 20 years for the army before becoming a guard for a company. He earns 250LYD (Dh735) a month and his two grown-up sons have no work. That is why he went," she says. The couple wed through a traditional, arranged marriage 21 years ago, then the norm in Libyan society. They have three sons and two daughters.
"He was good to me, a good person," she says, crying softly. She knows soon her two elder sons - 18 and 19 - will go, too. So far they haven't as they have no military expertise. But as the rebels lose bodies they are becoming an increasingly ragtag bunch. Young boys have been heading to the front lines, eager to help counter Qaddafi's superior firepower with sheer numbers.
In front of the Benghazi courthouse, Abdul Salam is joined by many like her. A small area of the pavement is cordoned off for women, with men milling around behind. In a covered area, older women sit huddled in blankets, and some pray on rugs with the tricolour - the national flag from before Qaddafi took power and that now flies proudly across the east - laid out at the head. Women wander over to the wall of photographs of those killed in Abu Salim, or at posters of Mahdi Ziu. Ziu is one of the heroes of Bengahzi's liberation, however long it may last. A father, he drove his car loaded with gas cylinders into the Kateeba gates on February 20, breaking the government forces' protection; a pivotal moment in the battle for the city.
The mood changes almost daily. During protests, the women are defiant, some speaking from the window on the upper floor of the courthouse to the crowds below. On days when the rebels advance, they approach journalists in panic, telling stories of the children they fear Qaddafi's forces will kill if they retake Benghazi. Threats are going round. Text messages - the two mobile phone companies are owned by the Qaddafi family - have been received saying only "Soon".
Around the crowds, marshals in fluorescent jackets distribute water and food. One, Rosanna Ramadan, 23, thrusts bottles into outstretched hands. An English student at Garyounis University, she is now volunteering in order to keep the women on the streets.
"Women want to have their voice heard so we have a special area to make sure everyone is comfortable enough to come out," she says. But the protests have broken down barriers in a way never seen before. Girls say they are allowed out until late and are working together with men. "We all have the same ideas and are one right now," says Ramadan. "I think this will transform the lot for women afterwards when all of Libya is free."
The transformation has occurred in the home, too. Suzanne Himmi, 35, says she has found her voice and her way of helping the revolution. The former housewife and mother of five came out to protest on the first days because "my father-in-law died in prison and many more of my relatives have been hurt by Qaddafi". Living close to the courthouse, she was witness to everything that was happening. "I decided to write it down and collect people's stories," she says. Now she writes daily for the newspaper Libya, one of the new media outlets to pop up in Benghazi.
"It is important that people know what is going on so they are not scared," says Himmi. From tales of what the rebels are facing on the front lines to how locals in Benghazi are reacting, writing came naturally to her, she says. "I had, like everyone else, a fire inside. And writing is my way of letting it out."
Women have also assisted media that have flooded in. Journalists arriving in Benghazi were met with a slick operation: within hours they were registered and paired with a local fixer equipped with a car and a command of English.
"When journalists started coming we realised we had a responsibility to look after them because they were key to telling the world what was going on," says Najla el Mangoush, a 35-year-old divorced mother of two who switched jobs from being a legal adviser to working as a media assistant in the Ouzu Hotel, a hub for rebels and journalists. Born in the UK, she and a number of colleagues gathered together to form one of Benghazi's many volunteer committees, this one to work with the media. Manghoush says she has barely seen her two daughters, Gaida, 10, and Raghad, five, since the uprising. But they are used to it, she adds. A lawyer like Bugaighis before the uprising, she worked mornings as a legal adviser at the Benghazi Medical Centre, a public hospital, and afternoons as a lecturer in criminal law at Garyounis University. Poverty, she says, is one of the reasons why so many of Benghazi's women work - and why so many joined the uprising. Earning just 300LYD a month at her regular job, she had to take a second.
"This is one of the reasons Benghazi fell," says Manghoush. "Both men and women, educated and not, were being humiliated. Now we are all rebuilding it together."
The comments and developments described here are representative of the situation in Benghazi before the UN-imposed no-fly zone began on March 19. They may not reflect the current, changing climate.
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