By Murad Fayad
It was February 15, exactly a week after my graduation project presentation. I was again giving my cousin, who lives in Egypt and was here on a visit, reasons why a revolution like the one that had succeeded in Egypt would probably not happen here in Libya. February 17 was the date chosen for the Libyan revolution by activists on Facebook and the closer we got to that Thursday, the more people talked about whether anything would really happen. How little did I realize that my analysis was completely wrong; minutes after a delicious Libyan dinner, we heard that protests had broken out in our city, Benghazi. Little did I know that a new era for Libya was about to start on that ordinary winter night. The revolution had begun two days early and no one could expect what was to come.
Less than a week into the revolution, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi — who had controlled Libya with an iron fist for more than four decades — had lost control over most of the country. At that point, we had no doubt that it was a just a matter of time before we became the next Arab country to bring down its dictator. Again we were wrong.
Citizens in the liberated areas were able to get ahold of weapons from bases evacuated by the regime. The special forces joined the people against the dictator; they were all that was really left of our national army, which Qaddafi had deliberately weakened and replaced with his loyal special brigades. Knowing Qaddafi’s brutality and insanity, people were ready to pick up arms to defend the liberated cities from any military response, but nobody thought that days would turn into weeks and weeks would turn into months.
After almost four months, the nights are no longer cold as they were in that mid-February week. It’s June now, summer is here, and Qaddafi has shown no real intention of leaving power. He has forced a peaceful revolution to become a liberation war. For Libyans, the choice of no return was made a long time ago, but we have had to pay a very high price for freedom just like our grandfathers had to do when they fought fascist Italian colonizers. I keep telling my friends that glory is written for us Libyans, that we always have to pay in a great deal of blood and lives to earn our liberty, despite our small population. We have it in us, however, to be a great example of courage and stand up to extreme tyranny.
During the four months of the revolution, Libyans embraced an extreme sense of patriotism and national spirit that they had missed under the dictatorship. Most people are discovering how they can serve their country in these unique historic times. Many have chosen the battlefield.
On all the main fronts in Libya, you find people from all sectors of Libyan society joining the fight for freedom. University students, doctors, craftsmen, engineers, truck drivers, the unemployed and pretty much any career background you can think of are all there for one cause: to bring down the regime that has prevented their country from living up to its true potential, the regime that murdered many of their family members and friends in the past or more recently, or just because they oppose Qaddafi. Their strong belief in their cause, in the right to live freely, and in God keeps them going. Their motto is that of the historic Libyan revolutionary Omar Mukhtar: “We don’t surrender — we win or we die.” Their belief that they will gain either victory and freedom or God’s eternal paradise gives them enough peace and strength to continue.
As one Norwegian journalist put it, there are few battles in one’s life where a fight is so clear; to fight a known evil that’s harming your country is probably the clearest. When I decided to go to a training center to join the front, I was surprised to find most of my closest friends volunteering that same day. We joked about how we were all guilty of not telling each other. Still, the front is changing. Some have decided to go home, back to their normal lives, or to serve the cause in other ways. Others, like me and my colleague who were working with media and as activists in the new civil society, have newly joined.
I was in Misrata last week and a group of us were sitting on the ground, joking about Qaddafi’s latest audio message and his ridiculous promises of reform and gifts of money and cars if we surrendered. One field commander’s voice suddenly turned serious. “The idiot,” he said, “does he really think we gave away all those men for cars?” Simple statements like that remind you how serious everyone is and that the lives of more than 10,000 martyrs and 30,000 injured cannot have been sacrificed for nothing.
Although none of us know how long this will go on, Libyans believe that victory can’t be too far away now. God only knows how many more lives or whose lives will have to be sacrificed before this is finally over. What we do know is that after the military fight is finished, the longer fight of building a democracy and a prosperous state will be as important as bringing the dictatorship down. Without a doubt, it will all be worth it when we look back many years from now.
Murad Fayad is from Benghazi and is now fighting in Misrata. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with bitterlemons-international.org.
