Talking back: Exiled Libyans use the Web to push for change
Issue 1, Spring 2007
A typical Internet cafe in Libya. Photograph by Claudia Gazzini.
On a dusty September afternoon in 2006, one of the most high-profile exiled opponents of the Libyan regime, Ali Ramadan Abuzaakuk, paid a short visit home. He landed in Benghazi airport where he was welcomed by dozens of tearful family members. In the following days he removed his grey suit to don a white jalabiyya and a traditional stripy vest, toured the seafront under a mid-day sun and then posed for a snapshot in front of the city's landmark double-domed former cathedral.
Given that it was the first time in 27 years this spectacled man had set foot on Libyan soil, it was bound to be an emotionally-charged and ground-breaking event. But whatever the significance of Abuzaakuk’s visit in signalling a rapprochement between Qaddafi and his long-lasting enemies abroad, the Libyan national news agency took no notice of this famous visitor. The country’s few newspapers bore no trace of the man who helped found the Washington-based American Libyans Freedom Alliance and who now heads the Libya Human and Political Development Forum. Given that Libya’s newspapers and national TV are little more than government mouthpieces, it is hardly surprising that they followed the same editorial line: silence.
It is only through Libyan opposition websites—open forums where ordinary people post their emails and letters—that we can retrace the footsteps of this vocal enemy of the Libyan regime: on one opposition website, Abuzaakuk's excited son in the US wrote that he had just talked on the phone to his father, who was exuberant following his warm welcome at the airport; on the website of UK-based Akhbar Libya, Abuzaakuk himself posted some of photos of the journey; the popular site Libya News and Views posted the transcript of an interview the exiled man gave after his short trip; and on a more critical note in the letters section of Libya Watanona, an anonymous reader questioned the opposition leader on the political implication of his not-so "private" visit.
In Libya, web access is spreading by the day. Two developments underpin this widening access: first, the growth in Internet cafes which has given even the most remote desert towns access to the web; and second, the introduction of satellite Internet connections which enable users to connect to the web through a satellite, thus bypassing state servers and censors. With this enhanced access, Libyans in Libya are increasingly using the websites of the Libyan opposition abroad to communicate directly to the outside world and, more specifically, to their compatriots in exile.
Libyans use these opposition sites in the absence of personal blogs, which are still a novel medium of communication inside this desert country and are, therefore, relatively unknown. There are perhaps a handful of personal blogs written in Arabic which are exclusively dedicated to culture and literature, with no mention to politics whatsoever. [1]
The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi claims to have his own blog, but this multi-lingual website feels more like an official website than an interactive web log.[2] It contains no daily entries, only a few articles and a recording posted when the website was launched in the summer 2006. Although the site claims a bulletin board, one finds no posted readers comments, just the leader’s official views. There are a few English-language blogs on Libya, but they are marginal both in terms of the number of their members (the largest has received a paltry 76 visitors—a tiny audience compared to some Arabic blogs which receive hits in the thousands) and their content, which consists mainly of photographs of Tripoli, some romantic descriptions of the old medina, and very sporadic attempts to write political commentaries.[3] Fear of government repression might be one reason for the overall scarcity of Libyan blogs in Arabic. But after only two years of Internet access in Libya, blogs are clearly yet to catch on.
Young Libyans, even those who are highly IT-literate, are often unfamiliar with blogs. For example, Muhammad, a 26-year-old graduate in computer engineering, looked up the definition of a blog on an Arabic search engine before suggesting that blogs "are something like a chat, but saved on a website." He also attested to the low uptake of blogging in Libya: "I think they have these things in Egypt and Lebanon, but I have never heard of it here."
We must look at the opposition websites, therefore, to find more significant and engaging blog-style interaction. Until a few years ago, when Libya was still a tightly sealed country due to a 20-year-long trade embargo imposed over its suspected terror links, the exiled Libyan community used their websites primarily to create a network of Libyans abroad and to lobby with foreign governments against the ruling establishment in Tripoli. One such website was, and still is, that of the political opposition group known as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.[4]
However, since sanctions were lifted in 2004, a handful of UK-based websites set up by Libyans who fled their country in the 1970s are playing a much greater role in fostering awareness of domestic politics in Libya. They no longer cater only for Libyans in Europe and the US. Today these same websites reach their fellow countrymen in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libyans who are beginning to use the freedom of expression granted by the web to talk about themselves and, in some cases, to push for change.
"Do you realize? It is unprecedented… we forced the government to sack the head of Tripoli University," said Ashur Shams, editor-in-chief of the most important online Libyan paper, Akhbar Libya. For several months now his London-based website—www.akhbar-libya.com—has been waging an anti-corruption campaign against various high-ranking officials of the Tripoli establishment. After receiving a number of letters from students and faculty denouncing the illicit practices of the chief of Tripoli's Al Fateh University, his site published a report that had an immediate impact: she was sacked from her powerful position at Al Fateh.
Akhbar Libya started in the 1980s as a four-page-long newsletter before going online in 2002. Since its transition to the web, it has had over 26 million pages visited. Akhbar Libya has now become an online only newspaper, divided into news articles, editorials and letters to the editor. But given the amount of space dedicated to letters from the general public, Akhbar Libya at times feels like a blog site, where people ventilate their frustrations under the cover of a pseudonym.
According to Shams, the site has begun to wage a fierce anti-corruption campaign inside Libya using letters and reports received from Tripoli or Benghazi. Exile websites have become such a strategic medium for fostering interaction between exiles and their compatriots that the political organization behind Akhbar Libya, the Libya Human and Political Development Forum (LHUDF), has launched a site exclusively dedicated to exposing all forms of corruption in Libya (www.transparency-libya.com). This website uses the Forum’s contacts inside Libya to uncover phoney business deals and institutionalized bribery. These contacts are diverse and growing, and might be "government officials disgruntled by the system," "people in the ministries," or "people who know what is going on due to their role inside the state apparatus but who are sympathetic" to the Forum’s cause.
LHUDF also relies on unsolicited letters from Libyans in Libya to keep abreast of the changing situation on the ground. The people who write rarely sign with their real name, and in most cases use pseudonyms in order to avoid being identified by the government. "Muwatin libi" (a Libyan citizen) is a recurrent signature, but others include "Ahad libi" (A Libyan) or "Ibn Tarablus" (son of Tripoli). In most cases the editors of Akhbar Libya screen the letter and, after cleaning up the syntax and spelling mistakes ("these people are not professional writers, and their Arabic is often so-so" Mr. Shams admits), post it on their site. On some occasions, the editors might attempt to use an insiders' leak to compile a full report and then publish it in an article form, often changing the names of those who disclosed the information in order to protect their identity.
In addition to a team of five in the UK, Akhbar Libya has four "associates" inside Tripoli who function as the site's part-time reporters. "They are not really professional journalists—there is no such thing in Libya—they are just people with a good knowledge of what is happening in the government, because they are inside the system," says Mr. Shams. Their pseudonyms are Tamer Al Zayat, Mrasili Mutawa', Imraja' Al Qara'un and Matrud Al Khmamasi, and they can be read through a direct link on Akhbar Libya's homepage. What these men write amounts to a social and political critique of Libya. At times their entries are long news reports, while at others just a short note, but they are always credible and deeply unsettling. They are the closest thing to a political blog in Arabic that Libya has so far produced.
Writing on Akhbar Libya can be a risky affair. Last year another one of Akhbar Libya's acquaintances dared to write several anti-establishment articles and signed them with his real name—Abd Al Razeq Al Mansuri. He was arrested, accused of propaganda against the government and sentenced to 18 months in jail. Eventually Al Mansuri was released after 14 months, but the experience has left its mark on Akhbar Libya’s editor-in-chief. "It served us as a lesson," Mr. Shams said, "albeit a harsh one."
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Email this article[3] The main English-language blog hub is libyans.blogspot.com, which has two dozen English-speaking members, some of whom live in Tripoli. Among these the only blogger who at times ventures into a very moderate political commetary is a witty girl who goes by the name highlander (lonehighlander.blogspot.com), who claims to be "so far the only Libyan blogger."
[5]http://www.justice4libya.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=721&Itemid=163&limit=1&limitstart=1
[7] The report is available in English at www.stopgaddafi.org/articles/abusleem.html.
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Very good overview of what is happening outside and inside Libya. Well done Claudia.
Salem Mohamed
Salem Mohamed
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