Libya 1st-Hand: A Journalist Returns to Visit His Prison and His Guards (Abdul-Ahad)

Photo: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (The Guardian)Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist for The Guardian of London, was detained for two weeks in the initial stage of the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi. He has returned to Libya to write a series of articles --- in the first, he  describes the return to his former prison and the reunion with the men who guarded him:

I remembered that Hatem was tall and wore spectacles and had a pudgy, smiling face that didn't seem to fit his profession. But I was not prepared for the warmth he showed. Meeting him again was like encountering an old friend. The questions came tumbling out. "How are you? How did you find me? What happened after you left?"

In the early days of the Libyan revolution, Hatem had been the officer in charge of my custody in during two weeks of solitary confinement inside one of Gaddafi's notorious Tripoli prisons. The last time I saw him we had been separated by an iron door. Only his face and his hands had been visible as he passed food through the tiny hatch.

Outside, the revolution was fermenting in the mountains and the streets of the coastal cities, but inside the prison the officers had been confident. Hatem was angry, frustrated, and sometimes deluded, ranting against the rebels – "the rats", as Gaddafi had dubbed them – the agents of Nato, and the crusaders plotting against his country. He accused journalists of being spies and enemies of Libya.

"What do you want from us?" he would ask every night as he stood outside my cell, drinking coffee. Sometimes, in a sudden burst of generosity, he would pass a small cup through the hatch for me. But he never came inside. "We love Gaddafi. We love him. What's happening is all because of you journalists. It's a plot by Nato and Arab reactionary countries."

Months after I had been released, and after Tripoli had fallen to the rebels, I went to look for Hatem. I wanted to ask him if he believed in what he was telling me or if it was all part of an act. Through him I wanted to tell the story of the security apparatus of the regime in its final days and what's happening to them now.

The mood in Tripoli was jubilant. In Martyrs' Square car horns were honking, children waved flags, women ululated and celebratory bursts of gunfire peppered the sky.

But the signs of the difficult relationship between the old and the new were surfacing. In front of ministries and public buildings there were small demonstrations against old regime officials. In my hotel room I spread my clues out on the bed. I knew what Hatem looked like. I knew he worked in a prison of one of the many security services, but that was it. How do you look for the defeated in the city of victors?

For a city with a single main hospital and one university, Tripoli was well-equipped when it came to prisons. There was the infamous Abu Salim prison, where 1,200 inmates were killed in 1996; the military police prison; the criminal investigation prison. In the last days of the revolution, farms and company offices were converted into prisons and every military or security unit ran its own detention centre.

We drove to the prison of the external security service, where other journalists had been held. The main building was like a dead animal, its spine broken in half by a massive bomb. Around it were manicured lawns and a basketball court and pleasant gardens, smaller white buildings scattered among the shrubs and trees.

With a government guard I went into one of the smaller buildings. Inside, it was efficiently divided into small cells. But they were bigger and lighter than my cell. We walked into another building. During my incarceration I was blindfolded all the time while outside my cell. But I had drawn a map of the place in my mind. I thought I'd recognise it when I saw it. I didn't. Instead, recognition came in flashbacks. I am crouching blindfolded facing a wall, three men in military uniform sifting through our belongings. The room smells of hospital detergent. I can see a man in a surgical mask and rubber gloves. The Brazilian journalist I was captured with [Andrei Netto, who was released a few days later] is led away. A big door slams ...

Now the realisation hits me. I'm in that room again. A few bits of furniture lie overturned on the dark grey, mottled carpet. I can taste the feeling of terror that came over me in this place a few short months ago.

Flashback: three faceless officers interrogating me for hours. "You can tell us what we need to know or we can make you talk."

We walked further, into a long neon-lit corridor, huge black doors lining one side. Behind them lay dark cells with grimy mattresses, filthy, broken toilets. The ghosts of guards and their captives lingered in the air. Here, then. It was here.

I walked into different cells and wondered what had happened to the other inmates: the man who screamed all night, the Egyptian, the Tunisian, the American. "That building was called the Market," a former intelligence officer told me later. "There were food and clothing shops for the members of the service, officers who had to spend weeks without leaving would shop there. Then they converted it into a prison for high-value people, VIPs."

What about torture?, I asked him. "Sometimes they would put the detainees in dog cages, just to scare them. It depended on the officer. Some would go out of their way to harm prisoners."

I was not beaten or tortured but I could hear the sounds of people getting beaten through the walls. The doctor had told me that the foreigners were treated differently. "Where they kept you the treatment was considered luxury compared to the guys who where kept in the back prison or the with the dogs. "The foreigners were not beaten but they beat and tortured the locals. They wouldn't beat the prisoners in front of me, but I did see officers walking with sticks made of palm tree reeds. But even without beating life was horrible, the dark, small dungeons, the fear, the sounds of the dogs. They terrorised the people in these dark cells. You lose your humanity, you lose your respect."

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