Abdel Salam al Mismari described the core group of Benghazi lawyers' early efforts to reach out to Commander Abdelfattah Younes, who at that point had not formally thrown in his lot with the rebels.
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The group entreated Younes to use the
sa'aiqa
, crack troops under his command, to take down the Katiba and defend the people from Gaddafi's militias and mercenaries. Many Benghaziites credit Younes with doing this, others said his role was more marginal, and yet others continued to suspect that he was still aiding the regime.
On February 22, one of the Abu Selim lawyers entered the Benghazi courthouse, which had become the rebel organizational center, the
matbah
or kitchen, of the revolution, to announce that Younes had promised he would protect the Libyan people and would not waver from this obligation (
wajib
). The group had said, effectively, it was time for Younes to “make the right decision, and in an open way,” said Mismari. He was aware that Gaddafi had infiltrated the protest movement, and that someone within it had been tasked with killing Younes, as a means of “sowing chaos between the tribes and the revolutionaries.” Within two days, the lawyers' group discussed with Younes a strategy for setting up a national army. They questioned his delay in joining the revolutionary cause. Mismari noted that Younes gave a convincing answer: he [Younes] said he wanted to avert a bloodbath in Benghazi, and Gaddafi was preparing through various channels to send more mercenaries and
Keta'ib
[militias] to Benghazi by air. According to Mismari, Younes told National Transitional Council members that he had tricked Gaddafi, telling him he could contain Benghazi with the forces available to him, without reinforcements, and had requested the immediate evacuation or standing down of forces sent by Gaddafi from outside, as they were a dangerous provocation.
Widespread Defections/Resignations/International Sanctions
On February 21, Libyan representatives to the UN threw their support behind the rebels and called on the Libyan army to help unseat the “tyrant” Muammar Gaddafi.” The first Libyan ministers to resign were Ali Errishi, minister for immigration and expatriates, on February 20; Mustafa Abdeljalil, justice minister, followed on February 21; and Abdelfattah Younes, interior
minister, on February 22. Ahmed Gaddafadam, a close cousin and aide of Gaddafi, resigned two days later, on February 24. Libya's chief prosecutor, Abdelrahman Al Aybbar, resigned on February 25.
The Libyan ambassadors to India, the Arab League, Belgium, US, France, Sweden, and Poland, and the head of the mission to the EU, left their posts in protest on February 22; on February 25, the Libyan ambassador to Portugal, Bangladesh, Belgium, China, France, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, and Sweden did the same.
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Abdelsalam Al Jelloud, had apparently by this point already escaped to Rome. During the start of the uprising, Ahmed Ibrahim Fagih, a member of the Libyan delegation to the Arab League, was in Tripoli. He rounded up his family and went to the airport, where he found a scene of mass chaos. Fagih managed to board a plane to Istanbul. Abdelmonem El Houni, then Head of the Libyan delegation to the League, based in Cairo, had made the decision to go over to the Rebel side, and polled individual delegation members whether or not they would join him.
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The Arab League barred Libya officially from its meetings on February 22 for “crimes against the current peaceful popular protests and demonstrations.”
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Former Egyptian minister of culture Dr. Jaber Usfoor declared on February 26 that he was giving back the â¬50,000 citation he had received from the Gaddafi World Literature Prize in 2010 in protest to “the massacres which it [the regime] had committed.”
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The UN General Assembly and Security Council voted strict sanctions on the Libyan regime and referral of key individuals to the International Criminal Court, under suspicion of crimes against humanity, also on February 26.
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The UN decisions were followed by EU sanctions on individuals within the regime, and an arms and travel ban. On March 1, the UN Human Rights Council suspended Libya's membership.
A senior Libyan government spokesman, in an exercise of supreme understatement, admitted during a press conference that the government's “handling of the first days of the rebellion was a big failure for the government diplomatically and with media also.” Yet in parallel with the compromising words, the regime consolidated its hold over the capital in raw, brutal fashion. When even these efforts failed to stop the momentum of the unrest, Gaddafi senior sent Khamis and his 32nd Brigade to forcibly
quash the now open rebellions in Misurata and Benghazi, and to back up the Benghazi barracks, the Katiba.
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Underscoring the spirit of no compromise, Gaddafi himself appeared in Green Square on February 22 to deliver what became famous as the “
zenga zenga
” speech, after a memorable passage in which he uses the term, Libyan slang for “neighborhood street or alley.” Whether due to the camera angles or dim lights, Gaddafi gave the impression of being isolated and weak. The defiant speech, however, was vintage Gaddafi:
You are presenting to the world, the true picture of the Libyan people, gathered around the revolution without exception . . . and you from the Green Square, present the truth which transforms/changes the apparatus of betrayal, the brokerage houses, the depraved, and the regressive and cowardly elements that surround it and distort your image in front of the world.
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From there, he proceeded to describe how much the world respected and considered Libya a beacon:
And today when you say “Libya” they say to you ah, Libya of Al-Gaddafi; Libya of the Revolution. All the peoples of Africa, and the peoples of Latin America, and Asia, consider Libya their
qibla
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. . . and the governments of the world, all of them including the big nuclear powers, look up to Libya, to your country, to Tripoli, Sirte and Benghazi.
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Gaddafi hit all the expected notes, evoking the image of Omar Al Mokhtar, a symbol of resistance against the Italians. He criticized the traitorous Americans (who, he said, had tried to assassinate him many times), castigated Berlusconi's government for its perfidy, and said that the various tribes of Libya would stand united against the enemy:
Libya will become a new Afghanistan, there will be a civil war. . . . I and millions will cleanse Libya inch by inch, abode by abode, house by house, alley by alley [
zenga zenga
], person by person, until you [sic] have cleaned the country from filth and contaminants.
He ends with a call to action: “
ila amam, ila amam, thowra, thowra
. . . [forward, forward, revolution, revolution].” (Gaddafi might have thought later about being more preciseâ
which
revolution exactly?)
Humanitarian Crisis
By the end of February, thousands of people had converged on Tripoli's international airportâbusinessmen, diplomats, African day laborers, and workers from the Philippines, Korea, and Turkey. Within days, there were tens of thousands of people. In impromptu camps, they waited for flights that in some cases never came. The Philippine ambassador managed to get ten thousand of his nationals out by boat; fifteen thousand Chinese workers boarded a ferry to Crete. The British Embassy was heavily criticized for its poor organization in evacuating its citizens. Meanwhile, the US sent a ship, the
Maria Dolores
, to evacuate American citizens from Tripoli on February 25.
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Within weeks, medicine and food were becoming scarce.
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Tripoli's residents described an eerie situation in town, where the remaining people attempted to maintain some kind of normalcy by going out to cafés in the evening. Things were relatively quiet in Tripoli until the night of Sunday, February 20, when crowds started forming in public spaces. Several eyewitnesses said they could hear the roar of demonstrators “like a freight train” from miles away.
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Many others, locals and foreigners alike, fled for the Tunisian borders. By February 25, an estimated four thousand people had crossed the border,
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as the International Commission for the Red Cross (ICRC) warned of increasingly dire conditions.
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Rebels and their sympathizers set up a clandestine medical support network in Tripoli to treat those wounded during clashes with regime forces. Issam Hajjaji relates the story of volunteers who supported those who tried to battle the regime there:
(The regime) looked for injured with gunshot wounds, to take them away. A clandestine medical network sprang up, with doctors treating people in their homes or safe houses. Casualties would be sent by members of my extended family, using simple code words on the telephone. The towns of Zintan, in the Nafusa mountains, and Misurata were under siege. I managed, through gunrunners, to smuggle insulin, intravenous fluids, and antibiotics to Nafusa but not to Misurata. This smuggling was widespread.
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Hajjaji credited the Libyan diaspora for helping organize relief efforts: “Expatriate groups organized themselves in the UK, elsewhere to buy
medicine and smuggle them into Libya, across the Tunisian and Egyptian borders, sometimes hidden in the tyres of cars.”
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The apparent ease of Gaddafi's rout left many in shock or disbelief. Within a week of the Benghazi Day of Rage, the regime had effectively lost control of the eastern half of the country, with twenty-two cities along the coast and in the interior caught in the wave of uprisings in Tubruk, the Jebel Nafusa (February 21), Misurata (February 24), and Zawiya (February 26).
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By the end of February, Gaddafi's regime had lost control of large parts of the country, including Benghazi and environs, Misurata, Ras Lanuf, and Marsa Brega.
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At the start of the rebellion, Gaddafi's often-repeated claims that Libya's tribes would rush to his support appeared to be without merit. By February 20, the Touareg, Warfalla, and Hasawna tribes had gone over to the rebel side. In an interview on Al Jazeera, Akram al Warfelli, a leader of the Warfalla, called on Gaddafi to stand down; Sheikh Faraj al Zuway of the Zuwayya tribe, which was positioned to guard the southeastern oil fields, threatened to cut Libya's exports until and unless the regime's violence against opponents ceased.
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Gaddafi's circle attempted to counter these setbacks by holding conferences where members of Libyan tribes publicly offered their support to the regime. French reporter Delphine Minoui, who covered events in Tripoli throughout much of March, recounts the following exchange with a tribal sheikh:
“Whom do you represent, exactly?”
“Uh, we are here under our . . . personal authority. We do not represent our tribes.”
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A pro-Gaddafi website, covered a pro-regime rally, held by the “Libyan Tribal Council,” purporting to speak for “Libya's 2000 Tribes,” one of whose issues was a “complete rejection of what is called the Transitional Council in Benghazi, which hasn't been nominated nor elected by Tribal representatives but rather imposed by NATO.”
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While Gaddafi was struggling for domestic support, the eastern rebels were already moving onto the international stage. The process of assembling a representative body for the nascent rebel movement began with the naming of Abdeljalil as rebel leader on February 17. The Transitional National
Council (TNC) (
al majlis al watani al intiqali
) was hastily formed on February 27 with a base in the Benghazi courthouse, but was officially proclaimed at the Tibesti Hotel in Benghazi on March 5.
One of the more politically astute moves of the new body was the drafting of a statement of principles in late February and early March, which served as a kind of road map for what would come next, and a more formal document in April. Among the first critical acts of the TNC was to call for a no-fly zone and strikes against Gaddafi and his compound, in the process reversing statements the rebels had made just weeks before (prior to Gaddafi's counteroffensive) warning off any outside intervention.
The propaganda machine went into action, attempting to play to traditional Western fears of Al Qaeda and loose weapons. On February 23, Libya's vice minister of foreign affairs claimed that Al Qaeda had established an “Islamic Emirate at Darna [sic],” under the leadership of Abdel Hakim Al Hasadi, also a former Guantanamo prisoner, and that the burka (face covering) would be imposed on Dernawi women.
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On February 28, Gaddafi said Libya had been “betrayed” by Western leaders calling for him to step down.
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In late February, a pro-Gaddafi contingent left Sirte and headed east. It attacked Marsa Brega on March 2, but was repulsed. Community-based youth groups (some vestiges of Gaddafi's Youth Scouts) filled gaps in public services, helping out at hospitals and directing traffic.
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Oil industry workers at eastern facilities like Marsa Brega, the offloading point for European-bound crude oil, threatened to stop work, destroy pipelines, and sabotage facilities if the West did not intervene against Gaddafi.
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At the end of February, many felt it was a matter of days before the regime fell, that the Libyan revolution might mimic that of Tunisia after all, with a reasonably quick removal of Gaddafi and his immediate supporters. However, after a period of confusion and regrouping, the Gaddafi regime staged a comeback that appeared to change the game.