Veering From Peaceful Models, Libya’s Youth Revolt Turns Toward Chaos
Opposition fighters fired from a truck on Saturday before abandoning a checkpoint in Brega, Libya, as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces advanced.
By ANTHONY SHADID
RAS LANUF, Libya — It is a bromide of dictators like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that they stand as the only bulwark against forces of chaos and religious militancy. The tragedy of Libya’s uprising, its genesis in peaceful protests over a government’s disdain for its people, is that Colonel Qaddafi’s own brutal repression from Tripoli east to Ras Lanuf and beyond may make the platitudes reality.
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Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Relatives of a man killed while fighting government forces in Ras Lanuf were overcome with grief Saturday at his funeral.
The protests upending the Arab world have ranged from the climactic success of protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, to the brutal crackdowns in Syria, whose government forced just a handful of demonstrators to sign pledges never to protest again, and to the uneasy standoff in Bahrain between Shiite protesters and a Sunni royal family. Libya has begun to emerge as its own model — the darker side of the forces unleashed this year by the immolation of a young man in the Tunisian hinterland.
Everyone here seems to have a gun these days, in a lawlessness tempered only by revolutionary ebullience. Young men at the front parade with the swagger that a rocket-propelled grenade launcher grants but hint privately that they will try to emigrate if they fail. Anti-American sentiments build, as rebels complain of Western inaction. And the hint of radicalization — religious or something more nihilist — gathers as the momentum in the three-week conflict clearly shifts to the forces of one of the world’s most bizarre leaders.
“This better not go on any longer,” said Dr. Salem Langhi, a surgeon who was working around the clock at a hospital that was abandoned as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces rushed in. “It will only bring misery and hard feelings among people. Losing lives and limbs doesn’t make anyone optimistic.”
No one seems to know what to call this conflict — a revolution, a civil war or, in a translation of what some call it in Arabic, “the events,” a shorthand for confusing violence. It certainly looks like a war — the thud of shelling in the distance offers a cadence to occasional airstrikes, their targets smoking like oil fires that turn afternoon to dusk. The dead and dismembered are ferried in ambulances driven by medical students.
But especially for the rebels, there is an amateurishness to the fighting that began as a protest and became an armed uprising.
“We’re here because we want to be,” said one of the fighters, Mohammed Fawzi.
His sense of a spontaneous gathering offers a prism through which to understand the war: the front at Ras Lanuf is the most militarized version of Tahrir Square in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands wrote a script of opposition and street theater that brought down a strongman everyone thought would die in office. The fighting here feels less like combat in the conventional sense and more like another form of frustrated protest.
Some vehicles bear the inscription Joint Security Committee, but nothing is all that coordinated across a landscape that seems anarchic and lacking in leadership. Fighters don leather jackets from Turkey, Desert Fox-style goggles, ski masks, cowboy hats and World War II-era British waistcoats.
Slogans are scrawled in the street just miles from the fighting. “Muammar is a dog,” one reads. A man who bicycled for three days from Darnah, far to the east, became a local celebrity at the front. Free food is offered, as it was in the canteens in Tahrir, and fighters rummaged through donated clothes. “These are American jeans!” one shouted.
Young men revel in the novelty of having no one to tell them not to play with guns. “God is great!” rings out whenever a volley of bullets is fired into the air.
“Some guys consider this a lot of fun, and they’re hoping the war lasts a lot longer,” said Marwan Buhidma, a 21-year-old computer student who credited video games with helping him figure out how to operate a 14.5-millimeter antiaircraft battery.
An hour or so before Friday’s headlong retreat, a gaggle of young men in aviator sunglasses and knit caps danced on military hardware, thrusting weapons into the air.
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