My escape from Libya - John Harford

My escape from Libya – John Harford

This diary covers the period from Thursday 17th Feb 2011 when protests first started in Benghazi where I was posted to the following Thursday 24th Feb when I managed to leave the country.  For obvious reasons I’ve changed the names of all the people still in Libya or where I’m not 100% sure that they’ve left.

Thursday 17 Feb 2011

When I first came out to Libya in October 2010 I started keeping a journal but got bored with it because it didn’t seem there was anything very interesting about Libya at all.  This was a textbook case of not being careful what you wish for.  Coincidentally it was on this very Thursday that I started the first page of my on-line blog.  I wrote 4 lines in it and was wondering what to write next.

In contrast to entries for subsequent days the entry for this Thursday is written in retrospect.  At the time it didn’t seem to be anything but a normal day.  I knew that there was some sort of demonstration in the town and thought something along the lines of ‘Oh a demo, yeah right on!’  I taught my two English classes as usual.  My students were mostly employees of a company called GECOL, which stands for General Electric Company of Libya.  The following week we were to have the mid-term exams – all the exam papers were due to be printed off and photocopied.  After work I took the usual textbooks and other teaching materials back to the villa in order to prepare lessons for the following week.

But when our driver Abdul came at 3.15 to drive me home he had been hearing tales of there having been a massive demonstration and quite a few deaths.  His own kids he said he’d locked up at home.  Even then I didn’t really think much of it – surely he’s exaggerating I thought.

18 Feb 2011

Benghazi has had demonstrations with thousands on the street.  Not that I’ve seen any of it.  We’ve been held up in the ‘villa’ although George did venture out onto the streets to try and find a phone card.  Pretty well all the shops were closed with just a few groups of kids, young men and old men hanging around and a strange atmosphere pervading.  It’s like a cross between ‘huis clos’ and Red Dwarf here in the villa (yes I’m afraid you have to understand both allusions).  So you have 4 slightly dysfunctional geezers rattling around a villa the size of a star freighter unable to affect anything going on around them but being able to hear the crowds chanting and go up on the roof to see the crowds walking by and the helicopters circulating.  The afternoon call to prayer from the mosque right opposite my window was a furious tirade of sheer anger – ranting and raving for 20 minutes or more with many an angry interjection from the crowd.

Moves were afoot amongst the teachers at Tripoli to see if the lads could do anything by way of appealing to Cambridge (Bell Educational Trust, Cambridge – the company we all have a contract with) to evacuate us from Benghazi.  I say No.  Later on Pete (not actually one of the lads in a strict sense as he doesn’t normally reside at the villa) calls me up to give me his view i.e. that the situation will escalate and that the tribes in this part of the world have been waiting for just such an opportunity to start a civil war. Well we’ll see what tomorrow gives.  Oh I forgot to mention that George had plans – he was going to cycle down to the demos and take pictures as he reckoned that being on his bike and heavily disguised in his cycling helmet that nobody would give him a second look.  I said well Laurence of Arabia didn’t get away with it did he?

19 Feb 2011

Well.  Brent (my boss) rang up from Tripoli with reassurances which turned out to be recycled statements from Seán down the hall who didn’t seem to have heard any of the gunshots, chanting mobs, frenzied calls to prayer or helicopters.  Then I watched the BBC world news which was reporting that anti government forces had taken over large parts of the city.  Gaddafi was sending in special forces but on the other hand some of the army units had gone over to the ‘rebels’.  Sounds like a civil war to me and I rang up Brent and told him so.  Later Brent rings me up and gives us all a choice.  Awardbrand’s recommendation – ‘Awardbrand’ is the name of the company running the language school whom Bell supplies with English teachers - was that we stay where we were or else they’d try to get us to the airport and on a plane to Tripoli if we wanted.  I decided I’d try and get out while I could.  Seán, infathomably, didn’t even consider leaving for a moment.  George reckoned, on a balance of the risk of staying as against the risk of going to the airport, that he’d stay put.  There was indeed a risk as I was to find out.  Mr Mohammed, one of the Awardbrand managers in Benghazi, himself drove me to the airport.  He brought along his wife who sat in the front so that we’d ‘look like a family’.  My luggage all went in the boot.  We came quickly to a crossroads as we left the ‘Pepsi’ district (they used to make Pepsi here) where plain clothes police or militia were directing cars into what turned out to be a road block.  Mr Mohammed promptly turned round, came back and managed to drive down the road he’d wanted to drive down in the first place.  The rest of the journey to the airport passed without incident.  I later learnt that many Turks attempting to get to the airport had been robbed at such roadblocks.

At the airport the flight I was supposed to be getting was choc-a-bloc but Mr Mohammed disappeared with my ticket round the corner for 5 minutes and came back with a boarding pass.  I was then ushered to the departures hall (well scrappy room of some sort).  No check-in for me!  Later on the plane I learn that this was ‘the last plane out of Benghazi’ and indeed the airport was later commandeered for Gaddafi’s crack troops to fly into.  I got to Tripoli naively expecting everything to be back to normal but Tripoli was going downhill rapidly.

20 Feb 2011

Today is Sunday – the first day of the working week in Libya.  We all went into work as usual and throughout the day it gradually dawned on people that the veneer of normality was precisely that.  At the start of the day the Awardbrand line that we hunker down while the events pass over us and the government restores normality seemed just about plausible.  Now everyone wants to leave.  I managed a false start at the BA office trying to rearrange my ticket as I hadn’t got enough cash on me to pay for the necessary upgrade.  The chap serving me was reassuring me that, hey, this is Tripoli and nothing untoward is going to happen.  He seemed half amused and half insulted that the person in front of him was obviously convinced that the country was going to hell in a hand cart.  Will have to try again tomorrow – if I can!

There’s talk of a great crowd of demonstrators converging on Gadaffi’s palace to burn it down.  At the villa there’s much good humour and in the same boat stuff and just a sprinkling of gallows humour.  The most bizarre thing is the air of normality in the capital but everyone went home early like it was Christmas Eve or something – students all left the building during the mid-lesson break.

Later – well what a difference an evening makes to your perspective on things!  With the results in from a number of diverse constituencies such as army units, tribes and religious leaders we could be waking up with a change of government!  Great evening at the villa watching Aljazeera (English) and Pete plus wife Zeynep relaying the latest news from the twitter feeds on their PCs.  So I won’t be off tomorrow except as part of a general evacuation which may well be coming soon!  Up on the roof – well we’re miles from the centre – but you can hear the crowds chanting.  Plenty of nastiness to come to be sure but no doubt about the final outcome.

21 Feb 2011

I decided not to go into to town to try and get a ticket as it seems to me it might have been quite a dangerous thing to do.  Seems likely in retrospect that it wouldn’t have been dangerous but anyway it seems likely I’ll be on a plane tomorrow.  Bit of a morning after the night before really.  Regime didn’t collapse in a tidy heap.  We had Gadaffi’s son Saif on the official Libyan channel wagging his finger at the protesters asking them if they really wanted civil war.  Your finger wagging days are over matey!  More refugees (including Brent) turned up at the villa.  Spirits high albeit frustrated here.  Several of the guys have issues with their exit visas – i.e. they don’t have one.  Without one you can’t leave the country even if the regime is collapsing.  This is resolved later by some sort of agreement of the embassies with the government here.

The villa where most of the teachers live is some 30 kms outside the city centre.  It thus has the status of being something of a ‘safe house’ and indeed many people who usually live in the city centre have moved in.  There’s Brent and Brendan (chief engineer) and of course Pete plus wife.  (Awardbrand, apart from running the language school also seems to be some sort of agency for Engineering personnel or at any rate puts them up and suchlike).  Brendan has a flat in the centre and reports hearing several rounds of machine gun fire last night.

Awardbrand’s major concern however was whether Peter and Zeynep had a room with en-suite so as to preserve their privacy.  Awardbrand had some concern also as to whether, as a couple, their room was remote enough to ‘leave the door open’.  Maybe it’s an Arabic expression.

News from Benghazi is that George and Seán are fine although they had to spend one night without electricity.

Brendan is the chief engineer and knowledgeable about security matters, who seems to be an ‘old hand’ as regards living through trouble spots, is relaxed about the current situation.  He says he would start to worry if foreigners were being targeted or if neighbouring countries were mixing it (they’ve enough issues of their own at the moment) or if looting of private houses was going on.  So mafish mushkilla.

Its twenty to six and we’re sort of wondering when everyone will get out of prayers.  Things usually kick off when the blokes are all prayered up.

Brendan says: ‘ I don’t want to be alarmist but a twitter feed has it that planes may bomb the approach roads targeting crowds going to the centre and stray bombs could fall in the suburbs.  If you hear a bomb go down to the gym in the basement which will be the safest place.  It’s very unlikely.’

What else to note from today?  Well Philip (Bell, Cambridge) manages to send out an email jollying us along to buy tickets and get out and, oh please tell us when you get back to the UK and don’t forget to submit your time sheets (I made that last bit up).  This winds everybody up.  A ‘clarification’ is then issued to the effect that actually Bell will book all our tickets for us.  To be fair Philip is labouring long and hard sorting us out so I get to go out in two days time enshaallah.

Apparently the Chinese, of whom there are many, don’t get to leave at all – says Mike who has a Chinese girlfriend.  Their companies are apparently herding them into huge compounds in the desert.

I find out that P and Z have 200 gig of music which I calculate would take 6 months to listen to i.e. non-stop.  But apparently it’s only 200 gig on disk and is really only 130 gig.

22 Feb 2011

Airport closed.  All glum – both the people who were off this morning and of course the rest of us with flights tomorrow and the day after.  And then … airport open!  The ups and downs are wrenching.  Later in the day we learn that our BMI flights for tomorrow have been cancelled.  It makes for a very glum evening meal.  Peter (the other Peter) very worried now and goes on about how we need to be more proactive or we’ll never get out of here.  An hour later both the BA and BMI flights are reinstated.  About this point I decide to go to bed before they get cancelled again thereby managing to get a decent night’s sleep.

23 and 24 Feb 2011

A nightmare day dawns.  We leave for the airport in convoy – me and Dave driven in by Seraj.  The other driver Salah is taking Brendan, Steve and Basil – a lugubrious engineer from Bosnia.  (He must be used to this sort of thing Rupert reckons).  The aim is for Dave, Steve and me to get the BMI flight in the afternoon, Basil to get the flight to Vienna and Brendan to duck and dive using a portfolio of tickets that he and his wife have been booking all day yesterday.  It should be mentioned that internet and phone use is becoming more and more problematic as the Libyan, or maybe that should be ‘Tripolitanian’, government is doing its damnedest to prevent anyone communicating with anyone.

We get to the airport and it’s chaos as expected.  You can’t drive up to the terminal building so you have to get out at the roundabout, grab your stuff and walk the rest of the way.  We’ve lost Salah, Brendan, Steve and Basil at this point but then Steve finds us having himself lost Brendan and Basil.  We then lose Seraj.  There are actually thousands of people here, many just sitting around with piles of belongings.  These people are mainly Egyptians and mainly men – not a surprise given that there is somewhere between a million and a million and a half Egyptians living and working in Libya.  There are only six and a half million Libyans.  All these people are hoping that a flight’s going to come in and take them home.

The concentration of Egyptians is greatest in front of the terminal building.  There must be over a thousand people here.  We find that the airport officials won’t let you in the building unless your plane is already on the ground and you have a ticket for it and it’s very difficult to approach the doors thoroughly the densely packed crowds of Egyptians.  This huge group of men every so often loudly cheers for no reason that we were ever able to twig.  And every so often they break into a loud and disturbing rhythmic chanting which, but for the lack of spear clashing against shield, would be very reminiscent of the warriors’ war cries from Zulu.

While we were contemplating our options two very British ladies approached us who suggested we go and register for the British evacuation flight i.e. the flight organised by HM government.  All the European consulates had set up shop to the left of the terminal building.  So we ambled over and signed up for what we were assured would be a 6pm departure.  And you had to fill in a form.  Bless.  The form commits you to paying back the 300 pounds it costs the treasury but we’re informed that that won’t be necessary.  We found moreover that the BMI departure, which had already been cancelled and reinstated once, had been cancelled yet again.  However with a 6pm departure looming, or at least a plane turning up at 6pm I felt relaxed for the first time in days.

But this 6pm arrival time turned out to be the first of many bogus events.  The consular staff were put in the position of ever more desperately promising arrival times of not one but two aircraft which for hours on end simply never turned up.  There were two reasons for this.  Firstly the consular staff’s communications with their colleagues and contacts in the UK, whether by phone, satellite phone or internet were severely hampered by the Libyan government’s efforts to frustrate any such transmissions.  Secondly the promised planes were never sent.  They ‘went technical’ or the handler pulled out because the operation was ‘risky’.

Well yes we know it’s ‘risky’.  It’s a civil war.  It’s very risky.  That’s why we want to leave.  The upshot was that we spent 12 hours standing in the rain, the cold and at one point a thunder storm.  The embassy then managed to supply coaches for the rest of the night which was just as well given that the weather was becoming steadily more cold and dreadful.

At about 4 o’clock in the morning we finally set off down to the terminal.  A horrific and surreal sight greeted us.  The (largely) Egyptians had been cleared from the front of the terminal building and were squatting in the freezing cold on the other side of the road in front of the terminal.  Police or army personnel, batons in hand, were keeping them in order but the men were very quiet and cowed.  Where the men had been standing next to the terminal building was a bizarre pile of their assorted possessions – every sort of bag and various goods and rubbish piled high - all soaking and filthy.  A sight you wouldn’t believe.  The plight of the men was shocking and frightening … no nice warm coaches for them to sit in – one of the British women started crying.

Inside the terminal was another crammed mass of humanity but it seemed be functioning adequately with the odd bit of cajoling and threats from the very sinister police element.  At one point a policeman climbed up on a check-in counter for the Tunis flight and waved his baton and shouted at the check-in queue, presumably to stop them all pushing.  Our progress through the terminal was greatly facilitated by the consular staff who were smoothing every path for us.  They negotiated a speedy check in, reassured us, sorted out any document issues and I’ve no doubt whatever that a few or many bribes were paid.  Doing whatever’s necessary to get our people out.  And then the consular staff have to stay there until everyone else is out!

For me it was all nerve wracking right up to the moment when the plane took off.  Up till then there was always the very real possibility that some procedural or bloody-minded pretext could have prevented us taking off.  The Libyans on the plane (i.e. Brits of Libyan origin) understood this much better than the Anglo-saxons who were chatting gaily away as if we were just about to take off from Majorca rather than Mordor.  One of the Libyans was holding his head in his hands till the plane took off.  Husbands and wives were holding each other tightly, such visible manifestations of affection would normally be a cultural no-no in Islamic countries.

And then the nightmare is over.  We land in Malta.  We have another six hours to wait there while a relief crew flies out – our crew that flew us from Tripoli are very much ’out of hours’ i.e. legally shouldn’t have been flying.  And it’s taken us so long to get here that we have to wait for the next day’s evacuation who get flown out of Tripoli in a Hurricane.  ‘Another 6 hours’ – moan the grumblers like it’s the last straw.  Well no it ain’t.  We’re in Malta and there’s no civil war going on.  Indeed we’re being treated like VIPs at this point I suppose because the UK government is worried about what we’re going to say to the media circus at Gatwick – we get bussed to the terminal building at Malta and a splendid feast is laid on plus whatever else we think we need.  We think we need beer, which the British high commission in Malta very sensibly wasn’t all that keen on supplying, but they couldn’t really refuse.  Later the British High Commissioner turns up, who has got to be quite the cutest and sexiest High Commissioner we have, but this availed not against the frustration and anger of the evacuees.  The poor lady could only apologize for the debacle.

We get to Gatwick at about 9 o’clock in the evening.  I travel back to Hounslow where my lodger Alan and his son Jake are very pleased to see me.  I go to bed