Inside a city running on fear

Source: LA Times

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

May 1, 2011
Reporting from Tripoli, Libya—

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During the six weeks I spent as a correspondent in Tripoli, I got a watered-down taste of what it means to live in Libya. In the hotel where we were kept under lock and key and under day-and-night surveillance, we began to go mad.

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Gun turrets aimed at passersby and barbed wire surround the Bab Azizia compound. Inside it looks like a cross between a tacky holiday resort and a military barracks, with soldiers in various uniforms wielding guns on pickups. Floodlights shine on the grassy area where impossibly loud pro-Kadafi pop music plays and government supporters "volunteering" to serve as human shields for the Brother Leader dance and chant frantically.

Most are residents of poor neighborhoods of Tripoli, bused in day after day and paid the equivalent of about $100 to put on a show for the journalists, and perhaps comfort the heart of the old man himself. Stay in Tripoli long enough, and you start seeing the same faces over and over again.

But others, a confidential source explained to me, are pressed into service by security officials in exchange for leniency for an imprisoned brother or son swept up in the recent weeks of protest. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people have gone missing.

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Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-libya-letter-20110501,0,458753,full.storyhttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-libya-letter-20110501,0,458753,full.story

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Warms the heart, how the people love Kadafi in Tripoli.

Read how hopefully the people are waiting for spring.