Libya

The always informative Michael Totten writes about his Libyan vacation. Not a place that I plan on visiting anytime soon.

The freeway continued as far as I could see without any way for me to cross it. Traffic was relentless, and I didn’t dare wade into it without knowing the rules. I could have just bolted in front of the cars and they would have stopped. But I hadn’t been in the country for even two hours. I didn’t know how anything worked yet. So I went back to the hotel and ordered some dinner.

I’d say that was my mistake, but I did have to eat.

At the restaurant, there was no sign that said “Please Wait To Be Seated.” Should I seat myself? Who knew? I felt ridiculous just standing there at the entrance. So I found a table.

A waiter finally came over.

“Are you a tourist?” he said.

“Yes,” I lied. Libya is a total-surveillance police state. One person in six works for the secret police. Best, I thought, to keep my journalistic intentions to myself.

“For tourists we have fish,” he said. He did not give me a menu. I didn’t see a single menu anywhere in the country. In Libyan restaurants, you sit down and eat whatever they give you.

“What kind of fish?”

“Eh,” he said, taken aback by the question. “Fish. Fish. You know, fish.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll have the fish.”

He brought me two small fish the size of my hand, each fried in a pan. Heads, fins and eyeballs were still attached. Bones and guts were inside. They tasted bad and smelled worse. The businessmen at the tables around me drank nonalcoholic Becks “beer.” But all I got was a bottle of water.

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So I did what I could to find out. I smiled at everyone who walked past. You can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York, people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.

I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from one single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.


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“And Qaddafi is our president,” he said. “About him, no comment.” He laughed, but I don’t think he thought it was funny.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Comment away. I don’t live here.”

He thought about that. For a long drawn-out moment, he calculated the odds and weighed the consequences. Then the dam burst.

“We hate that fucking bastard, we have nothing to do with him. Nothing. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We do our jobs, we go home. If I talk, they will take me out of my house in the night and put me in prison.

“Qaddafi steals,” he told me. “He steals from us.” He spoke rapidly now, twice as fast as before, as though he had been holding back all his life. He wiped sweat off his forehead with trembling hands. “The oil money goes to his friends. Tunisians next door are richer and they don’t even have any oil.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“We get three or four hundred dinars each month to live on. Our families are huge, we have five or six children. It is a really big problem. We don’t make enough to take care of them. I want to live in Lebanon. Beirut is the second Paris. It is civilized! Women and men mix freely in Lebanon.”

Read the entire thing. Fascinating. It's always refreshing to read a work about the Middle Easterners that isn't soley about Islamo-fascists, terrorists, the despotic leaders, and how everyone there hates us. People are people, even in the Middle East.