Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat. Alex Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ any longer. Everyone wants Gaddafi to go.’ He wonders why the West is not helping. ‘How can we do this on our own?’ It’s a question I can’t answer.

      He knows all about Lockerbie and the bombing of the Pan Am jet which ended up killing all on board and landing fatally on the Scottish town. He is ashamed at the link with Libya. ‘Do they all hate us where you come from?’ he asks. ‘What do they think of Libya in the UK?’ I can’t tell him anything too heart-warming and say most of our perceptions are based on Colonel Gaddafi and he has given the world a fairly solid impression of himself as an erratic dictator who is both crazed with power and with keeping it.

      Dr Salah is both charming and determined. He was diagnosed with leukaemia a short while ago but has had treatment and believes he is in remission. Now this young doctor is facing down Gaddafi and his military machine and he isn’t afraid. He has already beaten worse than them.

      Young female nurses come up to us while we are chatting and offer us tea or coffee. I accept the coffee gratefully. Tim and Martin are stirring now and come and join the chat. It’s still early and we have another day of trying to escape from Zawiya. We need to start, and the earlier the better. It’s only when we try to make our early-morning call to London that we realize we have no mobile phone signal. At first I think it’s just my phone or maybe we are in an area of the hospital where there is poor reception. But it’s more serious than that. The network has been cut. The regime is turning the screw.

      One of the kindly nurses turns to me. ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ she says, ‘it will be OK, inshallah.’ I haven’t said anything to her. She has just read the look on my face. ‘Do you want to come into our room, maybe get a coffee?’ I accept, slightly embarrassed by my unguarded expression. She leads me down the corridor with wards on either side to a door which is locked. She knocks. ‘Nabila, open up, it’s just me.’ It takes several knocks and much coaxing before the door is opened by a younger woman. She looks as though she has been crying and she is wiping her eyes with the hijab she is wearing over her head. ‘Come in,’ the first woman says while she hugs her teary friend. ‘You can take off your hijab here,’ she says to me.

      There are just three other women in the room. I have been wearing a scarf over my head as I go through the hospital. I don’t want to upset any of these people by appearing to be disrespectful of their religion or their feelings.

      When I enter, the mood lifts. I can feel it. Now they have a foreigner in their midst and I am their guest. There’s a rush to find coffee grains and milk powder and, oh my goodness, the foreigner wants sugar. Please don’t worry, I will take it as it is, I say, but they will hear none of it. The wish appears to be to maintain a very Libyan stiff upper lip, but all the same they are friendly and curious.

      We’re all worried, all scared, but in this room, just for a few minutes, we can talk and get to know each other a little. It’s brief but we talk about families and our children, exchanging names and ages and anecdotes. We’re not so different after all. I remember Martin and Tim and feel guilty about sipping a much-needed coffee without them.

      ‘I don’t suppose you have two other cups of coffee for my colleagues, do you?’ I ask timidly. Of course, of course, is the answer. I am just walking out with cups in hand when Martin comes into view. A couple of the women seem to physically withdraw. To them he’s a stranger and a non-Muslim one at that. But Martin is soon getting them to giggle and laugh over their coffee-making abilities.

      I find Dr Salah again and tell him I need to go and see the Square. I want to know what is happening there, if anyone has survived. I have to know if the rebels have been beaten into submission or not. I just don’t know what is happening there this morning and we have no communication with anyone. Remarkably, he agrees to take us. His car is in the hospital car park. He knows the routes through the rebel checkpoints and the safest way.

      The doctor takes us along several small roads and through a number of barricades manned by rebels who recognize him as someone from Zawiya. Then we can go no farther. Opposition fighters stop us, there’s a small discussion, and we are asked to get into a small, battered people carrier. It takes us down one of the main roads leading to the Square. As we get closer there are signs of battle everywhere, smouldering ashes, broken barricades, burnt-out cars, debris littering the streets. There are holes punched into the walls from shells and rockets and the buildings are peppered with machine-gun pock-marks. We are all stunned. What a battle. What destruction.

      As we enter the Square the tanks we had seen the day before have been removed and so have the dead bodies of the Gaddafi soldiers lying close to the caterpillar tracks. Where have they gone? Who has taken them? The military convoy we saw entering the Square repeatedly on Saturday afternoon has been in and retrieved its dead, its injured, and its broken military machinery. It wants to leave no evidence of this one-sided battle, this pitiless massacre.

      I am stunned, reeling from this news. There is a small crowd still in the Square and they greet us noisily but wearily as they see us pull up. I fire questions at them. Where did the tanks go? Where are the injured soldiers? What happened the afternoon before, after we left the Square? They reply quickly – the army kept coming back, there was more fighting, more bloodshed, they took their people and their machines and they left.

      Dr Salah has gone into the mosque to try to find out the whereabouts of someone he knows, when another doctor approaches our vehicle. ‘You must leave,’ he says. ‘Leave now. We have word the army is coming back. It is dangerous for you here. Go. Go now.’ We don’t need telling twice. We bolt back into the vehicle. ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ But we are a man down. Dr Salah is still in the mosque. We can’t leave without him.

      We shout for him: ‘Come on! Come on!’ I am filled with fear at the thought of being caught here in the Square again by the regime’s army but appalled at the idea of leaving behind our lovely new young friend to the mercy of the Gaddafi security forces. He only drove us here because I asked him and now we might be abandoning him. No. We can’t go. But, for God’s sake, Dr Salah, hurry up, please hurry up. We’re screaming now. We’re all anxious, very anxious. We don’t want to get caught in the middle of the fighting here again. As the seconds go by, I wonder what we will decide to do if he doesn’t come back soon. Will we be brave enough to stay or will we leave him? He has no way out of here if we go.

      But the decision is taken for us. Dr Salah appears. Relief. Huge relief. He jumps in and we rush to his car and head back to the hospital, hearts pumping.

      I am not sure how long it takes, but it feels like a horribly short time. We are hardly back in the hospital when we hear the noises we have become so familiar with. It’s the dreaded rumble of a large convoy of military vehicles and tanks heading back towards the Square. There are a lot of them – about fifteen or twenty vehicles. Some are trucks just packed with soldiers and, as they are driving along, some are shooting their weapons, spraying bullets along the side of the road. We can’t see what they are shooting at but we soon see the results of the indiscriminate firing. I think about the people still there that we saw just a short time ago and how they will be fighting for their lives now – again. And I think how accurate their warning was to us. How lucky we have been once again. How did they know? Spotters? A tip-off? Instinct?

      We know that many of the rebels have been worried about Gaddafi agents being in their midst, worried about informers posing as Opposition fighters so they can better glean information about battle plans and insurrection which they can then pass on to the regime. If the rebels have been infiltrated, could the Gaddafi military machine also have sympathizers inside its ranks who might be doing some tipping off too? It has certainly worked that way in other conflicts. In Afghanistan the newly trained army and police are constantly being infiltrated by Taliban and militants who use their positions – and training – to turn on their trainers, mentors and ‘colleagues’.

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