Libya with love

As we walked across Martyr’s Square the first time, as we looked for a hotel, I said something about how Libya had better be the epitome of kickass to justify the hassle we’d had to get here. Gerard said I was just making it easy for me to be disappointed. He was wrong. Libya is worth everything we put into getting here: the money, the week queuing outside the Libyan consulate in Alex, the flights up and down the Med, the lot.

 

Tripoli is an easy city to like, with its sea front and proper commercial ships overlooked by the coastal that forms the corner of the tumble down old city. It cleverly manages to combine feeling safer than Tunis with a bit of revolutionary excitement. Everything that could possibly have been painted with the red, black and green of the new flag has been, and there was a small protest in the square when we arrived. By the time we’d dumped our bags it had shrunk, but had some information signs that we checked out. The demonstrators explained they objected to a clause in the current draft of what will one day be a constitution allowing anyone who’d defected by the 20th of March, the day after Gaddafi attacked Benghazi, to hold office. They were all really friendly, interesting and pleased to see us. Unlike the people we talked to in Egypt and Tunisia they, like everyone else in Tripoli, all said the revolution had changed everything and were confident that things would improve dramatically in the coming years. Which is not to say; people aren’t concerned about the future. Everyone says Gaddafi neglected education, and worry about what that will do to the country. People say the Youth have no respect, and a Sufi mystic said the Salafis are bigots with too much power and confidence and not enough knowledge of Islam. But everyone is confident that whatever happens, it’ll be better than Gaddafi. The city feels like its celebrating, and has got out its biros to cross his (gormless) face of the one dinar note, and scratched Jamhariya, his name for Libya’s government, off the car licence plates. The odd burst of celebratory gun fire, fireworks and, worst of all, the sticks that go bang which kids throw all over the place has almost given me post traumatic stress, and I wasn’t there during the war, but Tripoli seems happy. No one, not even the people with touristy shops in the old city, tries to sell us anything. If the national museum wasn’t still dismantling the galleries about Gaddafi and cataloguing what went missing during the war the city would be practically perfect.