Exit the Colonel (34 page)

Saif 's emissary left, only to return half an hour later with Saif 's response which was that any and all demands must be put to the General People's Congress for consideration.

At some point during the course of February 17, the Benghazi Rubicon was crossed. Protestors gathered along the corniche and around Al Manar, the city's distinctive lighthouse building. “Chants are loud and organized!” reported Libya17Info, a blog that emerged as one of the principal sources of information on events in Benghazi.
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The scenes that followed were both chaotic and disturbing—as children were seen jumping off the Guiliana Bridge to escape the grasp of security forces, paid thugs drove around in cars shooting at demonstrators, and people were taken from their homes
and hospital beds—during the nights of February 17 and 18.
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While breaking into the local headquarters of the interior ministry, protestors discovered a document, signed by Abdullah Senussi, ordering an attack on them early on the morning of February 19. The attack was to use four hundred members of the security forces from the Katibat Fadeel (the Katiba), known as “fist of Gaddafi,” a massive security complex in the middle of the city that housed what one resident called Gaddafi's “occupying army,” noting, “You did not want to go near that area on foot or by car, as those who entered rarely came out alive.”
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Mismari described the courage of ordinary people, the youth in particular:

On February 18, soldiers opened fire on a funeral procession of four hundred to five hundred people as it passed the Katiba. There were cries of “the regime must fall” and a melee ensued. One witness said, “The people could not be ‘calm' until they had avenged themselves on the Katiba, and seized its secrets. . . .
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A volcano erupted in every corner of Libya.”
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Between five hundred and six hundred protestors gathered in front of the police headquarters in Benghazi and fought with security services, leaving thirty-eight injured.
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In Al Baida and Zintan (Western Libya), hundreds of protestors chanted for Gaddafi to go, and set fire to police and security installations. In Zintan, protestors set up tents to express “peaceful protest.” In Benghazi hundreds congregated in Maidan Al Shajara, where they were initially scattered by water cannon.
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Yet, Mismari said, ordinary people kept coming out into the streets, “
like butterflies to the flame
.”
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According to Dr. Adbelnasser Saadi, an attending surgeon at Benghazi Medical Center, one of 6 medical facilities in the city, he and his colleagues saw more than 2,000 injured patients from the 17th to the 20th, and that of 580 admitted to the hospital, 110 died. He described the situation in the city as absolute, bloody chaos.
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One of the most singularly heroic acts of the Benghazi uprising occurred on the afternoon of February 20. Mehdi Ziu, forty-nine, an oil engineer and father of two, had participated in protests the day before when he apparently had the idea of filling a car with propane tanks and gelatina (explosives used typically in blast fishing) and ramming it into the walls of the Katiba, which was filled with hundreds of soldiers and the antiaircraft batteries firing on demonstrators. Cellphone video captured the explosion as Ziu's bombing created a breach that allowed the Benghazi masses to rush in, followed by trucks and bulldozers. Many people died.
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Rebels then burned police stations and army barracks and looted government arsenals.

Within a few days of the start of the uprising, the 17th February Coalition [the precursor to the NTC] issued some specific demands on behalf of the movement, including fulfilling Saif 's promises of a constitution and some limited reforms.
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Soon thereafter, “the ceiling [of demands] was raised” to include Gaddafi's removal from power and a full amnesty for revolutionaries. A week later, the Coalition felt it needed to publish a formal statement, or bayan, of goals for the revolution as a whole.

Members of the 17th February Coalition helped shape the nucleus of a rebel governing body by establishing temporary committees to address specific urgent needs related to provisioning, relief, and military affairs (the
majlis askari
), the local governing councils in the liberated towns and cities, and ultimately, the transitional council (
majlis intiqali
) itself.

Baja describes the circumstances of writing the
Bayan
:

As many recalled several months later, during the preparation of the postrevolutionary draft constitution, the coalition's
Bayan
explicitly stated the founders' hopes and intention to create a democratic and unified state. Around this time, Abdelhafiz Ghoga was chosen as the coalition's official spokesman; he requested the
bayan
be given to “citizen reporter”
Mohammed Nabbous (later killed by the regime) so he could send it to Al Jazeera. A senior US diplomat later said that it was this document, written by Baja, Mohammed Al Mufti, and Saleh Al Ghazaal, that gave outside powers (the US in particular) some measure of confidence that there was an “organization” at work, there were legitimate interlocutors, and that they could be trusted.
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On the evening of February 20, Saif Al Islam, the reformist son, negotiator, compromiser, and his father's foil, appeared on state television, transformed. Unshaven, he wore an ill-fitting suit and mismatched tie. To most Libyans, the meaning of the words he spoke was irrelevant. Saif had gone, apparently overnight, from being the compensator for his father's lunacy, to a replica of it, expressing himself in the same disorganized, rambling fashion. In a disjointed forty-minute discourse, Saif played good cop—“I will tell you the truth only. . . . We want . . . freedom, democracy and real reform”—fearful cop—“What is happening in Al Beida and Benghazi is very sad. How do you who live in Benghazi, will you visit Tripoli with a visa?”—conspiratorial cop—“There are those who sit and drink coffee and watch TV and laugh at us when they see us burn our country”—and bad cop—“Instead of mourning eighty-four, we will be mourning hundreds of thousands . . . and the oil will stop.”
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While it is difficult to know exactly what Saif was thinking, the performance had a distinctively harried and improvised air to it. Had he indeed just lost a heated argument with his brother Mu'tassim and his father, and been ordered to toe the family line, as some of his former associates would claim? Was there any truth to the rumor that he had tried to escape the country just two days before, and been apprehended and dragged back to Tripoli on his father's orders?
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Professor David Held, Saif 's part-time adviser at the London School of Economics, said, “Watching Saif give that speech—looking so exhausted, nervous and, frankly, terrible—was the stuff of Shakespeare and of Freud: a young man torn by a struggle between loyalty to his father and his family, and the beliefs he had come to hold for reform, democracy and the rule of law. The man giving that speech wasn't the Saif I had got to know well over those years.”
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The reaction to Saif 's speech, predictably, was abysmal. His crowd of erstwhile acolytes tried to distance themselves and their bank accounts from
Saif. Some of the first to turn on him were, of course, those who profited most from the relationship: former supporters at the London School of Economics, such as Held. Cherie Blair was another; one observer said she looked as if she wanted to run when Saif 's name was mentioned. A scant few stood up for him in print. Benjamin Barber was one, though only after removing himself from the governing board of Saif 's charity on February 22.
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It is unclear what exactly had happened in Tripoli in the late afternoon of February 20. Saif apparently did meet with a group of his closest friends outside Bab Al Azziziya earlier that evening and gave them the impression that he would confront his father, with the aim of getting him to agree it was time for him to go into a “respected retirement.”
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Saif 's friends said they drove with Saif to Bab Al Azziziya, watched him enter the compound, and could even see Saif speaking with the assembled siblings and his father. The next time they saw Saif, he was on television delivering the now-famous, rambling finger-wagging diatribe. Others in Saif 's former inner circle asserted they were fired upon as they tried to leave the compound and narrowly escaped with their lives.
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One of these individuals wound up giving preliminary testimony against Saif before the International Criminal Court (ICC), after the international body issued warrants in late June 2011 for the arrest of Gaddafi, Senussi, and Saif on charges of crimes against humanity.
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We can only speculate about what actually happened during that family séance at Bab Al Azziziya. Indications are that had Saif even attempted to propose alternate scenarios, his brothers—and Gaddafi—would have been very much opposed. Another question is whether Saif, at this point, had any choice. He was the family spokesman. Perhaps the assembled relatives felt that both the Libyan people and the West would respond better to a strong message from Saif—it appears very possible that the others were too distraught or otherwise incapacitated to speak publicly. As noted, the speech was Saif's Rubicon. For whatever reasons, he presumably understood that there was for him, as for the rebels, no turning back.

Mohammed Al Houni, Saif 's confidante and one of the Libyans who facilitated his introductions to the rich and famous in Europe, told the Arabic press in the days after the speech about an “alternate speech,” which Houni had written in the preceding days, expressing deep regret for the loss of life in the East and laying out a specific program for expedited reform, à la what the leaders of Morocco and Jordan had done. However, an article in
Vanity Fair
by European lawyer Phillipe Sands casts doubt on
this last-minute scenario, quoting International Criminal Court sources as saying Saif had chosen his path days if not weeks before, when he allegedly helped procure African mercenaries to keep Tripoli and Benghazi under Gaddafi rule.
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According to this view, Saif 's speech, and his refusal to call off Abdullah Senussi from his using Katiba troops to suppress Benghazi, were part of a consistent, premeditated pattern of behavior. ICC Chief Prosecutor José Luis Moreno Ocampo asked specifically if he thought the speech could have gone differently, responded, “No, that is not what my evidence is saying. The information shows that he was involved well before that, that he was involved from the beginning, in the planning before the 15th of February.”
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Saif, according to this view, had made his mind up long before.

News of the events unfolding in Benghazi spread through Tripoli like wildfire. Residents were initially emboldened to stage their own impromptu demonstrations, with impunity; on February 17, 18, and 19, Tripoli residents staged protests in and around Green Square, with no police or army in sight. Just before February 20, the date of Saif 's speech, however, Gaddafi's forces seemed to have recovered from their initial paralysis, and members of the Revolutionary Guards and army troops were sent into the streets of Tripoli to crack down on the protestors. As in the Green Revolution in Iran just a few years before, pictures were taken of crowds, and sophisticated e-mail, voice, and social network filtering and face-recognition software were used to identify some of the participants.

The crackdown soon became absolute. Snipers drove around Tripoli in cars and taxicabs, shooting at anyone who looked like they might be a rebel sympathizer. According to Dr. Issam Hajjaji, a noted Libyan physician who supported the relief effort by running clandestine treatment centers, “We all thought the regime would fall within days. However, Gaddafi had a mercenary army in Tripoli. They quickly quelled demonstrations there and in Zawiya [the third largest city] by firing directly at crowds. People taken to hospitals or private clinics were arrested if their injuries were firearms related.”
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There were many reports of snipers shooting at those who came to collect dead bodies from the street. Tear gas and live ammunition were used in at least one mosque in Tripoli after Friday prayers. Per Kusa's alleged instructions, “Roving patrols of mercenaries and militia used live fire to clear and control streets and prevent demonstrations from forming.”
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Asharq Al Awsat
reported that Gaddafi loyalists drove into anti-Gaddafi
neighborhoods like Fashloum (a poorer neighborhood in Tripoli) with cars draped in the monarchy flag; when residents assembled to express sympathy, loyalists sprayed them with bullets.
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