Dispatch: Libya

One family’s struggle to escape Tripoli and return to Pakistan

KARACHI:

I recently travelled to Tripoli, Libya, for my summer vacations. My father had been working and living there for quite some time and according to him, the crisis in the country had been highly exaggerated. Things in the capital seemed calm enough, but it was an uneasy calm. At the other end of the country, things in Benghazi were getting worse with each day.

In Tripoli, we stayed in our home most of the time as we were foreigners and we had heard that it wasn’t safe to roam around. However, we still managed to visit the beach twice before the parliamentary elections and were entranced by the beauty and clear blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

In June, as the elections neared, my father thought it would be wise to leave the country and so, we started applying for visas. It wasn’t easy. Neighbouring Tunisia required at least a month to process applications. After all US citizens and UN officials had been evacuated from the country, many embassies pulled out their officials.

At a dead end, we applied for a Turkish visa, said to be a quicker process than the others. In Turkey, there were none of the restrictions we had faced as ‘tourists’ in Libya. We woke early, visited tourist attractions, ate anywhere. The last two days of our visit coincided with the month of Ramazan. We then headed back to Libya.

Upon our return, we learned that the Islamist party, the party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and who had been in power since Muammar Al Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, were losing the election. Only 1.5m people had registered to vote and turnout was only 630,000, according to officials. The election was marred by violence and the murder of the country’s most prominent human rights activist, Salwa Bugaighis. Islamist parties like the Justice and Construction Party were angered, but none of us could have imagined the lengths to which they would go to get power.

This was the start of a truly dark time for us, the Libyans, and anyone related to Libya.

One day, we heard the sound of gunfire while we were in our home. We didn’t know it was gunfire at first. The fireworks in Libya have a strange property: they sound exactly like gunfire. When my father had first arrived in Tripoli, he had explained this to us during video calls when we would hear the sound of fireworks. We had heard this sound so many times that we took no notice of it anymore. But when my father returned from work early, we found out the nature of the sounds we had been hearing: Tripoli International Airport had been attacked. The airport was closed and all flights to Tripoli terminated.

Now to understand the nature of this attack you will have to understand a bit of the history of Libya. After the ‘Revolution’ had taken place in Egypt and President Hosni Mubarak had been overthrown, the idea spread across North Africa like wildfire. Soon, the Libyans were dissatisfied with their dictatorial leadership and weapons were distributed to everyone, and by everyone I mean everyone. There had been many militias before this but under Gaddafi, they had remained quiet. In the fever of the ‘Revolution’, they united against a common enemy: Gaddafi.

So followed the ‘Revolution’ and Gaddafi was overthrown, but now there was a new problem: who was to rule, and how were national assets going to be divided? The Libyan nation had grown to despise anyone with ties to Gaddafi and hence anyone associated with Gaddafi could not be a part of the government. In one fell swoop, all experienced politicians were cut out.

The militias had been very busy in this time. All revenue-generating areas like the airport and oilfields were captured and remain under the militias’ control to this day. A militia with a comparatively liberal mindset had controlled the airport until the attack in mid-July. Now, the Misurata-based Islamist militia group attacked the airport to wrest control of it.

When we learned this, we panicked. With reports of unrest in the city, we had been thinking of leaving Libya. Now, we couldn’t leave even if we wanted to. We felt we had stepped into a trap after we returned to Libya from Turkey.

After the attack, we all stayed home. The day was spent listening to the sound of gunshots or bombings. The sound was so intense it felt as though the buildings next to us were under attack. We were terrified. My parents tried to act normally, but what was the use? We weren’t two-year-olds.

By August, intense fighting between rival armed groups and militias in Tripoli and Benghazi killed 214 people and injured 981, according to the Ministry of Health. Every day my father made plans to get out of Libya. All searches for tickets were fruitless. For any plan to succeed, we needed visas and no embassy was open in Libya. After many tries, my father got his hands on Turkish visas. We could finally go home.

Only three airlines operated in Libya at the time - Libyan airlines, Afriqiya Airways and Turkish airlines - and that too at an irregular schedule. My father entrusted our passports to a staff member of a bank in order to get us tickets. We packed our bags and waited. My father said we could have to leave at any moment, as we did not know what time the flight could arrive. My father stayed up all night, waiting for a call telling him we could escape this ghost town.

We waited 24 hours and finally got a call. After customary checks at the makeshift airport, we departed after a mere 30 minutes. On the airplane, we heaved a sigh of relief. However, the relief was short-lived. After an hour, an announcement was made in Arabic – we couldn’t understand head or tail of it – and we landed in an unknown area. As we waited, the worst scenarios ran through our minds. Finally, someone explained that the plane had landed to refuel. After an anxious wait, we set off again, headed finally for Pakistan.

(The writer is a student of Class 10 at the CAS School in Karachi)

Published in The Express Tribune, August 30^th, 2014.