• Looking Back On Libya: 'We Were Naive' About The Challenges
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[URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/02/16/277982828/looking-back-on-libya-we-were-naive-of-the-challenges"]NPR Link[/URL] [quote=NPR][B]Libya's Messy War[/B] The battle to come was indeed bloody. An estimated 30,000 people were killed in the civil war. Reporting during that time was a treasure trove for journalists. Libyans were excited to see us after years of isolation from the outside world. They told us their stories: the doctor who lost all his children during the siege of the port city of Misrata; the young medical student who put his engagement and education on hold to treat wounded fighters; the accountant who blew himself up in eastern Libya to breach the base of Gadhafi forces in Benghazi. They were stories of hope and sacrifice for a better future. On the front lines, secular fighters united with hardcore Islamists. During the very first airstrike by Gadhafi forces in 2011, I fled the scene with one fighter. He drove me back from the oil-refinery town of Brega, toward Benghazi. As we chatted, he revealed that he'd fought in Iraq against the American army. "They were occupiers, they were killing Muslims," he told me. He claimed his brother had been a suicide bomber in Fallujah. [B]A Wild New Libya[/B] Today, those first fissures we witnessed in 2011 have blown wide open; battles are tribal, regional, ethnic and at times just personal feuds. The stockpiles of weapons — surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, land mines and other heavy artillery abandoned during the war — were never secured and now they have spread all over Libya and the region. The country has now morphed into the Wild West. The NATO bombing campaign — billed as an urgent human rights intervention — quickly revealed itself to be a campaign aimed at regime change that has had far-reaching consequences. Militias — many former fighters against Gadhafi — act with impunity. The borders are open, and the weapons have made it into the hands of militants in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and into Mali. It is, in the words of many analysts, Libyans and Western observers, "a colossal mess." A state still hasn't emerged, and the only true power is with men with guns. [B]'We Underestimated The Challenges'[/B] Huda Abuzeid returned to Libya in 2011. I first met her in a Tripoli hotel when she was volunteering with the interim leadership. She'd come back for the first time in decades at the start of the uprising. Her father, a Libyan dissident, was murdered in his London grocery store in 1995; it is believed he was stabbed to death by Gadhafi's men. At that time she was filled with hope. Finally, the Libya her father died for would come to fruition. She relocated to Tripoli as a journalist and activist. But the hope she had then is almost gone as Libyans prepare to vote for a constituent assembly this week. She voted for the General National Congress in 2012 in a festive atmosphere. An atmosphere of excitement, that democracy was coming to Libya. "We were naive," she said last week in the same Tripoli hotel where we first met. "We underestimated the challenges." She is nostalgic for that time of unity. Worried that the sacrifices so many people made will go unrewarded. "The people we saw in that period were so inspiring," she said. "And the people who sacrificed themselves, genuinely for nothing more than to bring something back to Libya and get rid of Gadhafi — they were desperately looking for freedom, dignity, all those words we talked about." [/quote]
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