Akram Elsadawie | Demotix

Free speech in Libya has been transformed in a relatively short period. The initial boom of diverse independent media outlets has been hailed by many observers as one of the major achievements of the Libyan uprising after decades of oppression on the freedom of ordinary people to voice their opinion and dissent.

However the initial euphoria gave way to frustration. It became apparent that developing laws and regulations that achieve the balance between freedom of speech and defamation will not be an easy task. Newly drawn restrictions to freedom when dealing with militant and fundamentalist armed groups and the religious establishment, combined with lawlessness of many parts of the country, is hindering the development of the concept of freedom of speech in post-revolutionary Libya.

In Gaddafi’s Libya, it was difficult for writers and journalists to work and publish outside the state-owned media outlets. Journalists faced banning, harassment, imprisonment, torture and death. Even when the regime attempted to improve its image, through Gaddafi’s son Saif-Islam, in what was dubbed the “Libya Tomorrow” project, the scope of freedom of expression didn’t go beyond criticising some corrupt state officials.

During the uprising independent media outlets became mostly synonymous with “resistance journalism” which focused mainly on rallying the people against the regime and documenting the many violations committed by Gaddafi loyalists.

The ability to write and publish without prior approval or censorship in newspapers, magazines, websites, or on social media was a huge leap for many writers and journalists.

The Libyan uprising produced, for the first time in many decades, hundreds of media outlets free from state control or official censorship. The state regulator and censor that was inherited from the Gaddafi era, and is yet to be dissolved, became an obsolete relic of a bygone age of oppression and censorship.

After the revolutionary fervour settled, and with the country entering a new era of rebuilding and establishing its state institutions, independent newspapers and publications found that adjusting to the new reality of post-revolution Libya wasn’t an easy task.

Many faced closure either because of lack of funding or a lack of professionally experienced journalists and writers to fill their pages, while dozens of television and radio channels found it difficult to attract audience with only revolutionary programming of discussion shows and nationalist songs, as is the case of the two state owned television channels, Al-Wataniya, and Al-Rasmiya that continue to fill their slots with irrelevant talk shows.

Protecting the rights of individuals to express their opinions peacefully and freely faced a challenge when the former National Transitional Council, bowing to pressure from certain exclusionary elements in the country, issued Law 37 to criminalise any “insult to the Libyan people and its institutions”, or glorifying Gaddafi and his regime, or any action that may harm the “Revolution” or Islam, was revoked by the Libyan supreme court and deemed unconstitutional, a decision that was supported and welcomed by many observers of freedom both inside and outside Libya.

In the post-uprising reality, newspapers and television channels that dared investigate claims of corruption and human rights violations, committed mostly by rogue militant and fundamentalist armed groups, face violent attacks; television channels have been vandalised, journalists kidnapped and tortured, or forced into silence or exile, and in some cases imprisoned and prosecuted under Gaddafi-era laws, as in the case of Amara al-Khatabi, who is accused of defaming Libyan judiciary after his newspaper published a list of judges it said were involved in corruption.

The other major challenge is enshrining freedom of expression in the constitution and protecting this right with laws that respect the rights of journalists and writers to report without fear. This could only begin by abolishing all Gaddafi era laws that infringe freedom of speech, some of which are still being used. It is expected that the long awaited constitution would protect freedom of expression and the rights of journalists and writers, and the arduous process of writing this constitution has begun with the members of the national congress (Parliament) to directly elect a 60 member constitutional committee that will be given the task of preparing the document, and is expected to be ready for a general referendum mostly by early 2014.

An official at the Libyan Ministry of Culture told me that the current government is aware of this problem and how old laws are being used to censor, ban and confiscate books, newspapers and other printed materials. But he said that changing these laws is not a priority as the government struggles to build state institutions from scratch.

The internet in general and social media in particular played an important role during the revolution, and it is still considered a major player in consolidating freedom of expression gains, and has so far not been censored or hindered except by its infra-structure which needs to be improved so it can reach more people in the country.

With the number of Facebook users in Libya approaching one million (862,060 according to Social Bakers, as of April 2013) many Libyans, are exercising their rights to criticise and debate any issues or figures in the government or other political elements, though some might argue that the lack of professionalism and accountability in social media is causing more harm than good, by spreading rumours and malicious reporting.

Libya ranked 131st in the World Press Freedom Index 2013, making the most gains in freedom compared to its Arab uprising neighbours, Tunisia and Egypt.

But the challenges ahead are daunting and the concerns that those gains can be lost are real.

Ghazi Gheblawi is a Libyan blogger, activist, author, and physician. He tweets from @Gheblawi

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One spring day in 1973, Colonel Moamer Gaddafi announced to the world the details of his Third International Theory designed to replace both decadent capitalism *and Godless Marxism. The announcement came during an international symposium to which he had invited’ delegations — mostly young people out for a holiday — from many countries. His five-hourlong speech was televised live, ending at about 10 p.m. And it was at that hour that we, front-line soldiers of the revolution, received our orders to go on the attack. The enemy, it seems, had cast doubts on the Islamic roots of the Libyan Cultural Revolution and our instructions were to draft cables in Arabic, English and French to the effect that the Cultural Revolution derived its credo and moral inspiration from no other source but the Holy Qu’ran. These cables were to be sent to newspapers all over the world. The ministry became a beehive of activity as the text was first drafted in Arabic, and then the English version was entrusted to the star translator at the ministry, a young Egyptian in an advanced stage of arthritis. By 2 a.m., the cables had been sent to some 80 newspapers in countries ranging from Afghanistan and Australia to Zaire.

Only then was it discovered that by inserting one negative too many — Arabic English! — the translator had actually said that the revolution derived its credo from anything but the Qu’ran. As it turned out, this minor lapse went practically unnoticed.

Many of the papers to whom the cable was sent had folded years before — the directory from which the list was compiled being hopelessly out of date.

Dangerous books
It was as part of his cultural revolution that Colonel Gaddafi — addressed officially in Libya as al-akh al-aqeed (‘Brother Colonel’) — instructed his Information Minister, a former schoolteacher who had done time in prison for slapping the face of a provincial governor — to cleanse the country of all ‘dangerous books’. The Colonel was not very specific about his definition of a dangerous book but he did speak out vehemently against JeanPaul Sartre. A task force of men from the Ministry was instantly dispatched to crack down on bookshops and public libraries throughout the country. All bookshops and libraries were closed to the public for a few days while the censors went through stacks of printed matter. Their task was not without its hardships, however. For one thing, Libya had a relatively large community of non-Arab foreigners — mostly connected with the oil companies — which meant that some of the bookshops sold English, French, German and Italian books.

Most of the censors were ignorant of foreign languages; quite a few had never read a book even in their mother tongue. At any rate, no book written in a foreign language could really constitute a menace to the morals of the Libyan people who enjoyed a high ratio of illiteracy, and certainly Sartre could boast of few devotees in Gaddafi’s desert republic.

The censors still went through the motions of book-sifting, despite the fact that their brief was very vague. They had been instructed to confiscate and destroy any book considered to be derogatory to Islam or the Arabs, but since that was unlikely to be obvious from the title, a judgment that a certain book was not fit for circulation in Libya could only be arrived at after careful perusal of the book itself. This, clearly, was beyond the intellectual capacity of the ceasors, and so they confiscated, quite arbitrarily, a few books at random before allowing the bookshop or library to re-open.

Long after the men from the ministry had left, there was still prominently displayed in one of translation of a book by S. Y. Agnon. If the censorship committee had been able to decipher the publisher’s note on the back cover, it would have been shocked to learn that Agnon — who had just won the Nobel Prize — was an Israeli, and this would have been reason enough to send the bookshop owner to prison.

By and large, the foreign bookshops escaped relatively lightly, but their owners were so frightened that they became extra careful when ordering a new stock. This extra care did not always help them in weeding out undesirable books, for they were not much superior intellectually to the censors who had invaded their shelves.

Arabic bookshops were naturally subjected to a greater degree of scrutiny, Gaddafi being more explicit about the kind of book to be granted free circulation in Libya To be on the safe side, owners began to stock their bookshops mainly with Arabic classics written many centuries ago.

When it became known in the Arab world what kind of book the Colonel approved of — one can’t say Nvhat he liked reading’, because he does not read books — a few writers, mainly Egyptian, began to write books that were custom-made for Libya. Thus, an Egyptian writer who had begun his career as a free-thinker and existentialist, now declared that he had seen the light of Islam at last and celebrated his dramatic conversion to the true faith by writing a dozen books on the subject. Soon, he was practically the only contemporary Arab author whose books were sold in Libya.

Colonel Gaddafi, as the self-styled disciple and heir to Gamal Abdel Nasser, had laid claim to the Nasserist organisations in Lebanon after his hero’s death. He thus subsidised a daily newspaper and a weekly magazine. These Libyan-subsidised Lebanese papers became virtually the only Arabic-language periodicals on sale in Libya, apart from the Libyan press itself. As for the foreign press, it was generally banned, although when Time magazine chose the Colonel as the subject of its cover-story in 1973, he countermanded the decision of his censorship department by allowing the magazine free circulation — for that edition only. He had approved of the article.

No independent press
While the Libyan people were jealously screened from outside influences and hardly any foreign periodical allowed circulation inside the country, a selection of the leading periodicals of both Eastern and Western blocs was received at the Ministry of Information. There the front-line soldiers of the revolution made a digest of their most important contents for the benefit of the members of the Revolutionary Council — the highest authority in the land — as well as the cabinet. This daily digest — the Bulletin — was the Ministry’s proudest achievement. It was printed on roneo in an edition of about two dozen copies and classified as secret.

When an English Sunday paper began to serialise ‘The Hilton Assignment’, a book by Patrick Seale which purported to relate the plan of Omar Shalhi, an opponent of Gaddafi living in exile, to lead a group of European mercenaries in a landing on the Libyan coast in a bid to overthrow the Colonel, the number of copies of the translation was to be even smaller than that of the daily bulletin; Gaddafi didn’t want too many top people to know about the matter.

In that same fateful spring of 1973, Brother Colonel went on the air to exhort the Libyan masses to take over both the radio and television stations which were, in his view, not revolutionary enough. Within hours, lorries were commandeered to carry indigent Libyans to the offending addresses in order that they put things right. However, listeners and viewers who tuned in that evening hardly noticed any perceptible change in preand post-Cultural Revolution programmes. But the two stations were, it was maintained, firmly in the hands of the masses.

The Libyan press was another matter. When Gaddafi took over in September 1969, he closed all the papers which he considered royalist. Finding, however, that there were no longer any journalists around who were both qualified and revolutionary, Iraq’s academic death toll No single incident exemplifies the state of academic freedom within Iraq more than the assassination in South Yemen of Professor Tawfic Rushdi on 2 June 1979. He was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Aden. His assassins were officials at the Iraqi Embassy there (Guardian 5.6.1979). Though a critic of the Iraqi regime. Professor Rushdi was by no means a political activist. Murdering him was the Ba’athist way of reminding the tens of thousands of Iraqi academics abroad that being an exile provides no safety from physical liquidation, for fear of which they left their homeland. During the past month alone some 150 lecturers at various universities in Iraq were sacked: yet another signal that Saddam Hussain Takriti’s regime has reached an advanced stage in implementing a crash five-year plan to Ba’athisise completely all educational institutions in Iraq. In fact, of the known 4000 people executed or tortured to death since 1968, nearly one quarter were from the academic world. Middle East Currents 30 June 1981 he tried to woo back the so-called royalists. But these, rightly suspecting the Colonel of requiring their services only as long as it would take him to find people who were more to his liking, would not cooperate. Eventually, Gaddafi succeeded in starting his own revolutionary press. It was so revolutionary that it carried little news; instead, it highlighted exhortations for greater revolutionary fervour and self-sacrifice, attacks on the reactionaries and the imperialists — and interminable telegrams of support for the Colonel from various segments of the population. There are no independent papers in the country — all are owned by the state. There are no book-publishers either, for again it is the state alone which publishes books.

Everything is geared to propagate the Colonel’s ideas and theories, for his ambition is to create a new Libya — in his own image. The paradox in the Colonel’s dream of resurrecting ancient Arab glory Is inherent in his own ignorance of the Arab legacy in literature, philosophy and the arts. Indeed, if great Arab thinkers of the past such as Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn-Khaldun, were alive today, their books too would be banned in Libya. F. eHVIanssoury F. el-Manssoury is a Libyan journalist now living in exile in Spain.

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Nobody expected Libya’s protests to amount to much; after 42 years everyone had all but given up on the country.

Even when 17 February was touted as Libya’s day of rage, pretty much everyone believed protest would be quashed, quickly and bloodily.

On 15 February, Fathi Terbli, a human rights lawyer acting on behalf of the families of the Abu Salim prison massacre was arrested in Benghazi, Libya’s second city on the eastern border with Egypt. [Photo, right: via Twitpic, protests outside the Libyan embassy in London].

Worried about recent events in Tunisia and Egypt either side of Libya, the authorities had decided on a pre-emptive strike to try and prevent any possible protests before they started.

Arrests and disappearances were the regime’s favourite way of instilling fear, a method that had kept the populace cowed for over four decades.

This time, however, the arrests actually brought the protests out a day early. Benghazi’s people surrounded the police station where Terbli was detained, refusing to move despite clashes with security forces, and he was soon released.

This first win, inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, spread throughout the east and many western areas, leaving Gaddafi ruthlessly fighting from his remaining stronghold in Tripoli.

Exiled voices
As this was happening I, along with every other Libyan exile, tried to figure out how to help. What could we possibly do from abroad to support the incredible people who were braving snipers, mercenaries and heavy fire to overthrow the Gaddafi regime city by city?

The one thing Gaddafi has been successful at is cutting off Libya from the world. Whilst he was welcomed back into the international community with unseemly haste in 2003, his own people were still not to be seen or heard of without fear of reprisals.

Those who spoke would be quickly silenced, even those safely abroad were warned that their relatives inside the country would be targets if they publicly criticised the newly “reformed” regime. Damned if you spoke, damned if you didn’t.

Limited media
The international media was wrong footed, suddenly trying to cover a country about which little was known, and where they had no journalists or cameras to independently report what was happening.

During the first few days of Libyan protest there was barely any news coming out; the mobile phone clips that would appear online were short and so badly shot that it was difficult to make out what was happening.

The phrases “citizen journalism” and “user generated content” have become popular in the past few years, but when these forms of media were the only news source their limitations became apparent.

The fact that this was a genuinely popular uprising also meant that the go-to Libyan figures abroad didn’t know who was responsible either, so they themselves were struggling to follow events.

As a TV producer I knew that international media coverage was key to breaking through Gaddafi’s wall of silence. Not only would it ensure the world saw what was happening, but more importantly, that news reached those inside Libya watching Al-Jazeera, BBC Arabic and other channels, with the truth about what was happening in other parts of the country.

Libyans abroad could offer the media their perspective from any town or city across Libya, challenging the notion of different tribes who would be unable to unite once Gaddafi went.

Everyone had willing relatives desperate for someone to hear their plight.

We collected numbers and phoned people on the ground, dispassionately questioned them to find out accounts of what was going on and then forwarded on the information to interested media.

When it worked we preferred Skype because it felt more secure than the heavily tapped phone lines. We translated the Libyan dialect being broadcast on a revolutionary radio station in Benghazi and concentrated on feeding the ever-hungry news channels.

Each city that fell to anti-Gaddafi forces emboldened others and as events changed hourly it was of vital importance that networks covered it.

Sadly, in the beginning it was an uphill struggle to get news networks interested. Despite knowing that phone calls from abroad were monitored, many courageous Libyans spoke directly to TV news channels. It took a couple of arrests for the media to stop using their full names. This was not Tunisia or Egypt; this was a regime that had no problem using its full power to keep its people silent.

This was practical tangible work that kept me mentally distracted, until last Tuesday when not one of our compiled telephone numbers worked. Entire cities in Libya were cut off once more from the world.

That was the first day I actually felt a sense of real panic, listening to lines go dead or just ring off. I imagined all manner of horrors being committed. Listening to the fear in people’s voices had been heartbreaking but not hearing anything was terrifying.

It was only when the lines returned and we started to help journalists get into Libya with their satellite phones that the panic began to ease.

The next mission is to collate all that citizen journalism. When no journalist was able to go in, it was the Libyan people who risked their lives to show the world the protests and attacks.

Whilst the regime blithely claimed nobody was injured, the quantity of juddering mobile phone footage of dead bodies exposed the lie. The professionals could no longer ignore the veracity of the uploaded material. Ahum Ahum al libyoun ahum “here we are, the Libyans we are here”.

Huda Abuzeid is a filmmaker and TV producer based in the UK. Follow her on Twitter: @hudduh

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