Hello everyone,
On occasional Saturdays, I will write more personal and reflective pieces about experiences I’ve had as a journalist that may be emblematic of some of the reasons I started Proximities in the first place: international media coverage that frames the world through a Western lens, orientalist reporting, white lives being treated as more important than non-white lives, and so on.
Another issue we’ve often touched on is the short attention span of major international news organizations and how quickly their heads can be turned by the next shiny thing that comes along.
Today, I’m going into my archives to resurface a story from my time covering the Libya war in 2011. The piece first appeared in 2013 in a now-defunct publication called Beacon Reader, which was scrubbed from the internet a decade ago.
When I wrote it, the international media had stopped covering Libya as a top story and it had steadily slipped from the headlines. With Muammar Gaddafi dead, the (for desperate want of a better term) glamor of the story was gone. Now, the harder part had begun: the thorny work of state-building in a country split between several rival armed groups with competing interests.
Libya quickly descended into chaos and it remains there today. Those armed groups are still there, controlling fiefdoms and competing for resources.
And there are two competing governments, the Government of National Unity in the west and the Government of National Stability in the east. Yes, really.
If you’d like to know more, this article in the New Arab is useful.
My piece below is about how, in real-time, I watched interest in the story fade.
I hope you enjoy it.
Until next Saturday,
Barry.
***
Gaddafi’s spokesman, on the run and on the phone
In the beginning he spoke without taking a breath and we listened.
Terrorists had taken over Libya with the support of the West. Al Qaeda were going to control a country they could use as a base from which to attack Europe. Muammar Gaddafi, now on the run after a motley crew of rebels had easily captured Tripoli, was a hero. He would retake the country and he could fight for a decade if he had to.
His voice, down a crackly line from an unknown location, was always raised and he always spoke fast, his well-enunciated English with a hint of time spent in the UK spitting scorn on London, Paris, Washington, Al Qaeda, NATO, Qatar, the rebels, Amnesty International and anyone else he saw as standing against his boss.
He was scattergun, trenchant and articulate. And he was angry – always, always angry. Sometimes he talked pure propaganda. But sometimes he had a point.
“Look at Palestine – more than 60 years legitimate struggle for a state and still nobody wants to hear the case of the Palestinian people to have a seat at the U.N.,” he told me one day.
“Yet some armed gangs, supported by NATO, get their flag raised at the U.N. before they’re even in control of the whole country. The Libyan people didn’t vote for that flag. It’s all through violence and rockets and bombs.”
The first time I saw Moussa Ibrahim’s name flash up on one of the phones in the office, I was so excited I fumbled and sent the handset spinning across the table into the hands of one of my editors.
“Hello, Mr. Ibrahim,” he said calmly. “How are you today?”
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