On the Current Troubles: Libya

The Great SPLAJ – the ‘Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’ is a very different country from Egypt. It is twice the size but has one eighth as many people, and the presence of oil has ensured that those people are, on average, four or five times wealthier their Egyptian cousins. The Egyptians are almost all Arabs, while the Libyans are a much intermarried mix of Arabs and Berbers - along with a few Tuaregs and minority groups.

The Waterfront, Tripoli

We visited Libya in 2006, flying to Tripoli and on to Benghazi before driving back to Tripoli along the coast, then south to the oasis town of Ghadames. Ghadames is 300 km south of Tripoli; another 1000 km of desert lie beyond. Most of Libya is uninhabited and uninhabitable, with the vast majority of Libyans living in cities along the coastal strip.

Cyrene

Our trip concentrated not on politics but on the remarkable remains of the Greek cities near Benghazi, - Ptolomais, Apollonia and Cyrene - on the Roman remains near Tripoli - Leptis Magna and Sabratha – the Berber towns of the Jebel Nafousa and the oasis of Ghadames. But politics can never be completely ignored.

Migrant workers await employement while the Colonel looks away, Derj

Libya’s relative wealth drags in migrant workers, few of them legal. In 2010, on the Egyptian coastal road through Mersa Matrouh and on to Alexandria, we saw many packed minibuses, their height doubled by a precarious stack of newly acquired household goods, bringing Egyptian workers home from Libya. In Zliten, a distinctly edgy town 200 km east of Tripoli, we sat discreetly on a park bench beside a roundabout and watched a hundred or more migrant workers, mainly from south of the Sahara, squatting on the pavement, the tools of their trade before them. Occasionally a Honda pick-up would drive round the circle, blowing its horn. Men ran towards the truck, a lucky few would be selected and taken away for a few hours much needed work. Libya has no minimum wage and these were desperate men willing to work for almost nothing; unemployment among Libyans is high.

Looking up the Colonel's nose, Al-Kabir Hotel, Tripoli

Unlike Hosni Mubarak, Colonel Gaddafi set out to generate a personality cult. He intended to make his little green book as ubiquitous in Libya as Mao’s little red book once was in China. He failed, but every Libyan city has its quota of banners bearing his image draped down the sides of buildings. His stance is invariably ramrod straight with his head held back and his nostril flared, reminiscent of Mussolini (Libya was ruled by Italy from 1911 to 1943). No doubt, he believes the pose exemplifies nobility and power, I merely wonder why he wants me to look up his nose.

Gaddafi is unstable and erratic, which is perhaps why his personality cult never took off. The people fear him, with good reason, but we saw plenty of evidence that they do not respect him. When we started joking about the images of Gaddafi, 'A' (our much travelled Berber guide whose experiences included a spell cooking pizzas on Tyneside) was quick to join in. T-shirts bearing the colonel’s image are widely available, but I never saw anybody wearing one. When I bought one the stallholder was well aware that the purchase was made in a spirit of irony rather than awe, and made no effort to hide his contempt for Gaddafi. One floor of the otherwise excellent Jamahiriya Museum in Tripoli is dedicated to Gaddafi memorabilia; his green book translated into many languages (and unread in most), his 1957 Volkswagen, and more photos than even his mother could bear to look at. M, who showed us round Tripoli, sneered as he told us about it. When we got there, the gallery was closed. The museum official charged with conveying that information seemed embarrassed that it existed at all.

The Berber town of Kabaw in the Jebel Nafousa

The Libyan people are largely good-natured and philosophical. They have never had much say in who their rulers are, so they merely shrug their shoulders and get on with it. Many laugh at Gaddafi behind his back, but opposition is neither easy nor safe, so they have tended to work round the problem; that was until last week.

Hosni Mubarak was a bureaucrat whose regime became old and sclerotic, Muammar al-Gaddafi is much more of a classical tyrant. He will fight back harder than Mubarak, and with fewer scruples but, as we have already seen, he cannot rely on personal loyalty. It is time for the Libyan people to consign this monster to the dustbin of history. As A might say, Haway the Berbers.

Lynne at the mudbrick fortified granary of Qasr al-Haj

Cairo Before the Revolution (which might as well have never hapened)

Explanatory Note

This post was written during the 'Arab Spring' about a visit in August the previous year (before I started blogging). Nobody yet knew that the revolution would remove President Mubarak and there would be free and fair elections and a new regime. And that would be where the good news stopped.

Most demonstrators were (I think) hoping for a new liberal, secular Egypt, but that view made little impression at the ballot-box and they got Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi never stood a chance, the levers of power remained in the hands of the military and the Americans wanted another 'strong man' they could deal with. He was deposed in July 2013 in a military coup. General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi became president and regularised his position with the usual fraudulent election. The Revolution was over; everything had changed, and nothing had changed.

Return to Cairo - First Impressions

We spent a week in Cairo last July. It was hot, dusty and crowded, but there was no sign of a revolution. Not since 1980 have we spent more than a day or two in the city, so we saw many changes, some expected, others more surprising.

The 6th of October Bridge

The Cairo of 2010 is a much tidier and neater city. It has far to go before it gleams like Seattle or Guilin, and you still need to watch your feet to avoid falling into holes or tripping over protruding cables, but at least it no longer resembles a building site after a typhoon. The traffic is calmer too, though a first time visitor might find that hard to believe. The standard of driving has improved little, but modern road systems impose their own discipline, and the donkey carts that roamed the streets following a set of rules entirely of their own, have (almost) all gone. You no longer see the foul-smelling heavy green rubbish carts, pulled by tired horses and driven by boys as tired as their horses and malodorous as their cargo. I do not know how modern Cairo deals with its waste, but I hope the sons and daughters of these rubbish boys are now at school, where they ought to be. Dress has changed, too. In 1980, my memory claims that only a minority of woman wore headscarves and there were no veiled faces. Now headscarves are almost universal, while veils are not uncommon. Men, on the other hand, have overwhelmingly taken to western dress, while thirty years ago about a quarter wore Arab costume.

Our room in the Ramses Hilton faced the Nile, but the other side of the building overlooks the 6th of October flyover and the bus station beneath. Although the main action in the last few weeks has been in Tahrir Square, two blocks south, we have seen many television pictures of crowds milling, or charging, under the flyover, and of tanks creating barriers from overturned vehicles. Never have rooms on the ‘wrong’ side of this hotel been so popular.

Ours was an unusual visit to Cairo as we made no attempt to visit the pyramids. We saw them in 2009 and 1980 (and in 1965, in my case) so this time we looked at some of Cairo’s less ancient – though still old - monuments. We could not, though, resist the lure of the Egyptian museum, just beyond the bus station, and prominent in recent TV pictures. The collection is disorganised but magnificent. Building work has started on a new the museum and after the move I hope it will still be magnificent but better organised.

The Cairo Citadel

Cairo’s citadel sits on a rocky outcrop some 3 km southwest of Tahrir Square. The fortified complex was begun by Salah al-Din (Saladin) in the twelfth century, though its crowning glory, the Mohammed Ali Mosque, was built between 1824 and 1848.

The Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

The huge interior was filled with tourists, not all appropriately dressed, and has become a secular space.

Inside the Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

The nearby medieval mosque of Sultan al-Nasir....

Mosque of Sultan al-Nasir, Cairo citadel

....still feels like a religious building and features a magnificent gold and marble mihrab.

The Mihrab and Minbar in the Sultan al-Nasir Mosque,Cairo Citadel

From outside the mosque there is a fine view over Cairo to the pyramids beyond - at least there was on a clear day in 1980, last August the pyramids had disappeared into a smoggy haze, but the view looking down was still good.

Looking down from the citadel at the Sultan Hassan and Al Rifa'i mosques, Cairo

After coffee, where the waiter attempted to pass off an obsolete 25 piastre note (worth 3p) as a 25 Egyptian Pound note (worth £3, if there was such a thing) we inspected the police museum. We saw the cells where the British had once incarcerated Anwar Sadat, and a model of the ‘battle’ of Ismailiya Police Station in 1952, in which Lynne’s father played a small role as a national service squaddie.

The Prison Cells, Police Museum, Cairo Citadel

The Ibn Tulun Mosque

We spent more time haggling over the fare to the Ibn Tulun mosque than we did in the taxi. Built in the ninth and tenth centuries, this massive mosque has an unusual spiral staircase around the outside of its stumpy minaret. The huge central courtyard, open to the sky, is impressive in its simplicity, and also in its quietness – we had the place to ourselves. (For more about the Ibn Tulun Mosque, click here).

Minaret, Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo

The Gayer-Anderson House

Built against the outer wall of the mosque, the Gayer-Anderson House is actually two old houses knocked together by Major Gayer-Anderson, a retired British soldier who lived there from 1935 to 1942. He filled the houses with antiques, including several ornate harem screens, and with a little imagination you can convince yourself you are really in seventeenth century Cairo. The roof terrace, which served as a set in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, affords a fine view of the Mohammed Ali mosque.

The Citadel from the Gayer-Anderson Roof Terrace

Cairo's Coptic Quarter

Cairo’s metro is cheap, clean and efficient. The lines were designed to link Cairenes with their places of work and are generally of less use to those heading for tourist sites, but four stops south from Tahrir Square is Mari Girgis (St George’s), the gateway to Cairo’s Coptic quarter.

Mari Girgis

Some 10% of Egypt’s population are Coptic Christians. Pope Shenouda III* has led the church since 1971 and overseen a revival while keeping good relations with the country’s Islamic leaders. The bomb that killed twenty-one worshippers in an Alexandrian church on New Year’s Eve showed that extremists do exist, but the vast majority of Egyptians, Christian and Muslim, favour peaceful coexistence.

St George's Church in Cairo's Coptic Quarter

In 1980 the Coptic quarter was a warren of narrow streets and high walls, with hidden entrances into ornate churches. Now the visitor is greeted by the extensive grounds of the Coptic Museum and the remains of the Roman castle. The excellent museum covers the long history of the Copts in Egypt, while more literally covering the ground that was home to many thousands of Copts for several hundreds of years.

The Coptic Quarter, Cairo

A small area of narrow streets remain and there you can visit the church in whose undercroft the Holy Family stayed after the flight to Egypt. The Nile now runs 300m away, but used to wash the walls of the castle and, by a happy coincidence, the very spot where the original Moses basket was plucked from the bulrushes lies just behind the church of the Holy Family. You may believe all this, if you wish.

Where Moses was found in the bullrushes (allegedly)

It is sad to see the whole quarter becoming museumised, but it was inevitable. The Copts have chosen to move out of their medieval ghetto - and who can blame them?

Eating in Cairo - Dining with the Expats and Egyptian Middle Classes

Central Cairo offers few eating options, but nobody visits Egypt for the cuisine. Ignoring the overpriced international food at the major hotels, we followed the Rough Guide’s recommendations.

The dimly-lit Estoril, down an equally dingy alley, provided good food at modest prices. The other customers seemed to be expatriate Europeans, while at the brighter Felfela just north of Tahrir Square there was a more mixed crowd of younger middle class Egyptians and foreigners. I can recommend the stuffed vine leaves, spiced meatballs and several variations on the theme of pigeon.

The nearby haven of peace that is the Café Riche serves an older clientele. The future president, Gamal Nasser, plotted the overthrow of King Farouk here in 1952, while last weekend Robert Fisk, the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, retreated to the café from the mayhem outside. Lynne and I used it more than once as a refuge from the midday sun. A waiter in a long blue robe would produce a satisfying bowl of lentil soup and a cold beer, and serve them with a smile.

Sharia Talaat Harb near the Café Riche. Cairo

Eating in Cairo - Kushari and Fuul

All these places serve alcohol but, as Cairo is largely an Islamic city, they are the exception rather than the rule. The restaurants used by most Egyptians are cheap, often crowded, but can be good. At Gad, on 26th of July Street, we walked through the busy take-away and up the stairs to the packed restaurant. I had a long wait for my chilli dusted Alexandrian style liver. It was excellent, but Lynne had finished her fish before I could take my first forkful.

Abou Tarek, which claims to be Cairo’s best kushari restaurant, is also crowded and you expect to share a table. Kushari is a mixture of noodles, lentils and rice topped with caramelised onions. Served with a spicy tomato sauce, the combination of sweetness and carbohydrates makes it the ultimate Egyptian comfort food.

Kushari and fuul are two dishes which should be eaten by every visitor to Egypt, but are often missed. Fuul beans are similar to dried broad beans. Boiled until they start disintegrating they are the breakfast of choice for all Egyptians, whatever their status. Fuul is also popular in Sudan, where for many poorer people it is not just breakfast but lunch and dinner too. In the morning it is eaten with a hard boiled egg or fermented cheese. I like fuul best lightly crushed, mixed with raw onion and cheese and sprinkled with sesame oil and chilli, though perhaps not at breakfast.

Egyptian coffee is always a delight

Words Written Without the Benefit if Hindsight

Hot and noisy, with the continuous blare of car horns, Cairo seemed frenetic but not rebellious, though Egypt is, obviously, a police state. Travelling outside the city involves negotiating regular police roadblocks. Every crossroads has an armed guard with at least one man kneeling behind a heavy metal shield. Parts of Alexandria seem to have more policemen than ordinary citizens. The government is not particularly corrupt, by the standards of its continent, but low-level corruption is endemic. Repression is felt most by the politically aware and Egyptian democracy is not about getting out the vote but controlling the count. With healthy economic growth discontent was muted, but Egypt is not immune to the world’s problems, and people have started to notice what they are missing.

Mubarak will go, he is after all, 82, but that may not happen before September. Egypt may contrive an orderly transition to democracy, or the army may impose their man in the usual fraudulent election.

Harem Screens, Coutyard of the Gayer-Anderson House, Cairo

It is not up to foreigners, or their governments, to tell the Egyptian people what to do, but we should be quietly cheerleading for democracy. The Americans, having bankrolled Mubarak for years, are wavering, reluctant to see the back of a man who brought stability and a pro-American foreign policy. They seem worried by the thought of democracy and in particular by the Muslim Brotherhood; it must be the name, everything the Brotherhood have said over the last few weeks has been a model of moderation. Some American commentators even appear to judge the merit of any potential new government on how good it will be for Israel, not on how good it will be for Egypt.

To support another son-of-a-bitch just because he is ‘our son-of-a-bitch’ would be deeply hypocritical and morally wrong. I think it would also be politically shortsighted.

I hope that when this is over Egypt will emerge with a robust liberal democracy, it is what the people deserve. Whether or not that happens only time will tell. [Yeah, it told.]

*Shenouda III died in March 2012 at the age of 88. He was succeeded by Tawadros II, the 118th man to hold the office which stretches back in an unbroken line to (allegedly) the apostle Mark in the year 33.

Auschwitz

Lynne and I visited Poland in July 2002 and I wrote this soon after and adpated it for this blog in Jnauary 2011. I don't claim any new insight - I doubt there are any left - and Auschwitz has been written about many times before by people better qualified and more eloquent than me, but I could not visit such a place and walk away like it was a country house or a museum; I had to write something, if only to try understand what I had seen.

Kraków

Like all tourists in Kraków we walked up to the castle and the cathedral, strolled along the Vistula, lingered in the magnificent old square and photographed the seminary where Pope John Paul II trained as a priest.

Wawel Cathedral, Krakow

Oświęcim/Auschwitz

The next day we drove fifty kilometres east following signs to Oświęcim. Oświęcim? The name is hardly familiar. Why make a special journey to this small industrial town?

Every part of Poland has spent long years under foreign occupation. Every Polish town has at some time been Russian or German or Austro-Hungarian and has acquired different names in different languages. ‘Oświęcim’ is pleasantly obscure, but its German name is known throughout the world. Oświęcim was once called Auschwitz.

Auschwitz (I)

Today the camp is a museum administered by the Polish government. Beyond the modern visitor centre, we passed beneath the words ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ in wrought iron and entered the camp itself. All around us shoulders hunched, faces took on thoughtful expressions and conversations hushed in half a dozen languages. I was probably not the only one wondering why I was there. Had our visit any more moral validity than slowing down to gawp at a motorway accident?

Entering Auschwitz under Arbeit Mach Frei in wrought iron

At first sight Auschwitz does not seem terrible. Well-built two storey red brick barracks stand beside neat gravel streets lined with shady trees. I had read that the birds no longer sing here; that is not true.

Auschwitz
Once a barracks for the Prussian Army, it was not built to be a place of horror

Entering a building we were faced with photographs stretching the length of the corridor – portrait sized versions of the camp mug shots. They look back at you, some terrified, some defiant but most with carefully guarded expressions. At first the roughly shaven scalps rob them of individuality but moving down the line you begin to see real people staring out from a living hell. Beneath each photograph is a name, an occupation - lecturer, shoemaker, engineer - a date of admission and a date of death. For older men these are often days apart, but generally it took perhaps six months to work a man to death.

Other blocks are as they were in 1944, straw the only bedding, toilet facilities cruelly inadequate. We entered the ‘Death Block’ past the bullet-pocked wall against which those who displeased the authorities were shot. In the basement, where Cyklon B gas was first tested on Russian prisoners of war, a party of Spanish teenagers listened uneasily as their guide explained the events of sixty years before.

Everywhere the shaven headed photographs stared down. Some of the hair was spun into cloth - a bolt of it sits in a glass case at the top of a flight of stairs – but much was stored. It now occupies a gallery in one of the huts. Behind a glass wall is the hair of tens of thousands of human beings. It is impossible not to stare open mouthed. It is impossible not to walk the whole length of the gallery though every step offers the same pitiful view as the step before. When I entered the camp I thought I might grasp some understanding of the suffering endured here, after this I knew I never could. In another hut is a gallery of shoes: men’s and women’s shoes, labourer’s boots and city loafers, broken and lace-less each one a public witness to a personal tragedy. There is a gallery of suitcases stencilled with names and the addresses they would never return to. There is a room of brushes - hairbrushes, shoe brushes, shaving brushes, toothbrushes. There is a mountain of spectacles and a sad display of prosthetic limbs.

Outside there is another world of trees and singing birds. It is hard to decide which world is real. Passing the hospital where Josef Mengele performed his perverted experiments we reached the crematorium. Auschwitz was a work camp, not an extermination camp but for most death was the only release. As the Red Army advanced, the Nazi’s blew up the ovens as though trying to pretend nothing had ever happened.

Auschwitz (II)/Birkenau

If Auschwitz is terrible, a two-minute drive took us to a place that is even worse. We approached Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau, across flat Silesian farmland.

Outside the gates of Birkenau life goes on

The gate-tower and forbidding entrance are familiar from flickering newsreels.

The gate tower at Birkenau seen from inside the camp

We climbed the gate-tower and scanned the vast camp, but it is the railway that attracts the eye. Bisecting the camp it leads a quarter of a mile into the distance. At the end of the line are the gas chambers and crematoria. To the west only the brick chimneys and floors of the wooden huts remain...

The railway and the destroyed huts as soon from the gate tower, Birkenau

...but to the east a section of the huts have been preserved and look much as they did in 1945, except that grass is neatly mown and the people are tourists - well fed and brightly dressed.

Preserved huts, Birkenau

We descended and walked through the camp. A fox strolled past us, as though everything was completely normal.

Fox, Birkenau

We entered one of the huts. If the barracks in Auschwitz could have been comfortable under a different regime with a different purpose, these were designed for misery. At night the inmates huddled on dark wooden shelves, the small stove pathetically inadequate in the vicious Silesian winter.

Inside one of the huts at Birkenau

Birkenau was purpose built for the extermination of the Jewish race. Killing was on an industrial scale. As trains arrived those who could work were taken to the camp where they might survive for weeks or months while the rest - the old, the infirm, mothers with children - went to the gas chambers. If the camp was full whole trainloads were gassed on arrival. In eighteen months two million people were killed. As at Auschwitz the gas chambers were destroyed as the Russians advanced. As at Auschwitz it remains obvious what they were.

The Railhead, Birkenau
The gas chambers and crematoria are just to the right

How did all this happen? The camp forces visitors to face deep questions about the nature of humanity and the presence or absence of God. It would be inappropriate to attempt to deal with such serious topics in a few sentences here.

Kasimierz

Back in Krakow we visited the Kasimierz district, home in 1939 to 70,000 Jewish people.

Lynne outside the Old Synagogue, now a museum, Kasimierz

Today 150 live there but with Krakow’s tourist boom Kazimierz is enjoying a renaissance and restaurants serving Jewish food surround the old square. We sat outside the Café Ariel eating Jellied Carp and Tcholent stew. It was Friday and men wearing yarmulkas strolled in the square greeting friends. As dusk fell they drifted towards the synagogue. I wondered why they had stayed in Krakow. I had neither the language nor the impertinence to ask but I knew that for centuries Poles and Jews had lived here in harmony. Even in the worst days there were oases of sanity, the factory of Oscar Schindler lay just across the river from where we sat.

We dined at the Ariel Restaurant, the square in Kasimierz

As night fell children danced outside the synagogue singing traditional songs in a joyous affirmation of their ancient culture; proof enough that the ‘final solution’ had failed.

I cannot say that I enjoyed visiting Auschwitz, but it was an experience I will remember and it finished with children singing, a note of hope at the end of a dark day.

...and finally

This was not the world's first nor its last genocide; events in Cambodia and Rwanda were the re-emerging tip of an iceberg that will not go away.

Our 2014 visit to Cambodia produced five posts, among them Phnom Penh (2) Killing Fields and Torture Chambers, in which we looked at the events of the 1980s and their aftermath.

None of this makes cheerful reading (or writing), but it is important