Qunfuz

Steve Bell's Qaddafi

Our Tripolitanian witness is alive and well in an Arab country beyond Libya’s borders. Free to use the internet again, she has sent some old reports. The first is from early March.

Today I went out in my area, Ben Ashour, and all the shops were still closed in the main street. I stopped by the bakery for bread and I found a long line of people waiting; the bakery of my area gives each person a rationed number of loaves so each can have at least some bread by the end of the day. I also went to Fashloom, near my neighborhood, and I noticed a weird silence and only a few people walking in that area, the walls all clean of the anti-Qaddafi graffiti that had covered them earlier. I also noticed two cars belonging to Qaddafi’s thugs parked (and undoubtedly armed) in the corners of the tiny streets of Fashloom. Some thugs were dressed like civilians and yet I could tell who they were by their car. Others were wearing military outfits and standing alertly in front of their cars. A member of my family sadly confirmed to me that some families they know in Fashloom (and other areas) had buried their epic martyrs in the gardens of their houses, for they were scared the bodies would be taken away from them by Qaddafi’s thugs.

In contrast to the false claims of Saif-ul-Islam, life in Tripoli is totally abnormal! Kids don’t go to school and business is at a standstill because most of the direct managers and key decision makers are foreigners and the majority ran away after the two horrific nights of massacres they lived through in Tripoli. I and the whole staff of the company I work for stopped going to work. No one can think straight, live a normal life, or work regularly with all the brutal killing of civilians that is happening in the different cities in the east and the west of Libya. No one feels safe anymore. Parents no longer allow their kids to go out because of the armed mercenaries and snipers crammed in different corners of the city who shoot randomly.

Qaddafi’s forces also enter schools and take kids to Green Square and coerce them to carry his pictures and chant for him. A source told me that the ruthless thugs of Qaddafi managed to go into the orphanages and tempted orphans to go to Green Square and walk around the streets of Tripoli to chant his name, carry his pictures, slogans, and curse al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya channels.

This week, Qaddafi promised to give every Libyan family (not even every Libyan individual) an amount of 500 LYD (400$) every month, and to grant people bank loans with zero interest (an amount of 30,000LYD – around 25,000$). The delusional Qaddafi has lost the plot and now he is trying desperately to buy Libyans with their own money in the cheapest way, and he is still not convinced that he has totally lost his legitimacy and control in Libya. I don’t know whether to laugh at him or break something out of disgust! What is more, he said that if the US and other foreign powers enter Libya (God forbid) a lot of blood will be shed! Does he think that a lot of blood has not already been shed over the last weeks?

By God’s will, Libya will be free and Qaddafi will flee and will be no use for anything except a great academic case study of paranoid schizophrenia!