It”s been 15 days since Radi Sherif last spoke to his family, or anyone, in Libya, and he has no idea what to expect the next time he gets through.
The uprising in Libya has touched almost every facet of the 47-year-old Mississippi State University grad student”s life. Things were bad when he came to Mississippi from his teaching position at Al Fateh University in Tripoli to earn his Ph.D. in forestry. Now, two members of his extended family are dead and a cousin is wounded, all at the hands of Moammar Gadhafi”s army.
And that was early in the unrest which has descended on the North African nation.
Sherif”s family members were involved in a peaceful demonstration march in his hometown of Tripoli, headed toward a downtown square, when soldiers opened fire on the protesters from atop a bridge. Two weeks later, the protesters have commandeered multiple cities in an all-out rebellion and Gadhafi”s military is reclaiming each territory by brutal force.
Sherif received news his family members had been shot over the phone from his sister, but the conversation had to be held in a casual tone. Because all communications in Libya are state owned, Sherif is “100-percent” positive government employees are monitoring conversations, so he and his sister guarded their emotions.
Furthermore, Sherif already has a strike against him simply for studying abroad. During an uprising in the 1990s, Sherif said Gadhafi locked up his cousin, a physics professor, for 16 years along with other foreign-educated scholars out of sheer suspicion.
“(Libyan) people who have been educated or lived in other parts of the world have a different mentality,” said Sherif. “(Gadhafi) has killed a lot of innocent students. This guy killed a lot of people just because they were in the U.S.”
Now there are no easy answers for Sherif. Left to wonder if his family and friends are alive and well, he also has to worry about returning to a country ruled by an even more violent and suspicious dictator.
Even if the rebels win, there will be nothing simple about life in Libya post-Gadhafi.
“One of the things Gadhafi did very well was to divide his potential opponents,” said Dr. Rick Travis, an associate professor in political science and public administration at MSU. “Libya did not have a modernized military like you had in Egypt which could pursue its own agenda. The Libyan military has always been divided and the best-equipped divisions tied to (Gadhafi”s) sons.”
Splitting the military along tribal lines means that, without Gadhafi, there is no clear chain of command. Travis said the rebels, who have garnered the support of many factions of the military, could very likely defeat Gadhafi”s military with a little help from the United Nations or NATO, but rebuilding the nation would be a tremendous task. A government would have to be built from the ground up without even a unified military to serve in the interim.
“There is no easy solution post-Gadhafi. That”s the reason the Obama administration and Britain and France have not tackled Libya the way some people want. Because there”s no natural alternative (to Gadhafi),” said Travis.
Due to other nations” unwillingness to get involved, Travis said he wouldn”t be surprised if Gadhafi reclaims the country in a matter of days, followed by mass executions.
Sherif says that kind of brutality is expected from Gadhafi, regardless of the political climate. He says Gadhafi has ordered executions to be televised across Libya in the past, even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and that Gadhafi once had more than 1,000 prisoners executed in three hours at a Libyan prison.
He adds that Gadhafi lives in a perpetual state of fear and narcissism. He outlawed weapons to lessen the chances of revolution or assassination attempts, travels in a 20-car convoy of vehicles fitted with missile launchers and anti-aircraft guns and controls all technology, especially communication. The country is also intentionally homogenous, with very few non-Sunni Muslims and no other races or nationalities.
Gadhafi is so vain, explained Sherif, that when soccer players began to become famous among Libyans, Gadhafi ordered play-by-play announcers to refer to the players only by their numbers.
And the soccer stories only get worse from there.
Once when Gadhafi”s son, Saadi, a professional footballer with questionable athletic ability, was booed by a Libyan crowd during a game in Tripoli, his bodyguards allegedly opened fire on the crowd, killing several spectators.
“Did you think the Libyan people will forget this?” Sherif asked rhetorically. “Did you think it will not effect them for all of their lives, like me?”
With Gadhafi”s bloody past in mind, Travis said the Libyan people seized the trend of revolution which originated in Tunisia and swept through the Middle East and North Africa.
“At some point, it”s the product of bad government that the people get tired of it,” said Travis. “It creates a contagion effect.”
He points to similar instances of spreading rebellion in Africa in the early 1990s when several countries peaceably democratized and in South America in the mid-to-late 1980s.
For Sherif, there”s little more he can do than worry and wait for news from home. He”s carrying on with his studies and his work, but the loss of communication had a profound effect on him early.
“I could not sleep for three days,” he said. “It felt like someone was squeezing my heart.”
Jason Browne was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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