Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“Qaddafi understands the tribal structure and has the ability to play one person against another, one group against another,” one Libyan official explained. “He’s a strategic genius. He is doing with the reformers and hard-liners what he has done with these tribes, playing the pro-Western element against the anti-Western element.”

For a foreigner, there’s no better illustration of the push-me-pull-you quality of the new Libya than the process of getting in. An application for a journalist’s visa that I submitted last year went nowhere, although the Libyan representative to the United States assured me steadily for five months that the visa was nearly ready. (When I met with Saif in Montreal, he volunteered to take care of it, with no evident results.) Next, I joined an international party of archaeologists who had been promised entry—but as we were waiting to board a Libyan Arab Airlines flight in Rome, we were abruptly denied access to the plane. One source in the Libyan government told us that the Ministry of Immigration had recently moved and our papers had been mislaid. Another said that the head of the visa section had sabotaged files during the move. A third said that the story about the move had been floated as an alibi; the Leader had decided not to let in any Americans. Indeed, a tour group from the Metropolitan Museum arrived by ship in Tripoli in October and was not allowed to dock; the next month, five other ships met the same fate.

As a dual national, I applied using my British passport, again as a member of the archaeologists’ delegation, and, as advised, wrote on the form that I was Anglican. Finally, I received a document marked “sixty-day invitation,” though no one knew whether that was sixty days from the date of the letter, sixty days from the date the visa was stamped in my passport, or sixty days from the date I entered the country. I called the Libyan consulate in London every day about my visa. In the morning, there was no answer. In the afternoon, someone answered and said that consular services were available only in the morning. I flew to London, where the consular officer explained that I could enter Libya anytime in the next forty-five days for a stay of up to ninety days. I arrived at Tripoli Airport in mid-November. Through a Libyan travel agency, I had arranged for a car at the airport, and just as I’d joined a nearly motionless line for immigration, a man from the agency came by with my name on a placard and walked me straight through; the immigration officer never even looked to see whether I matched my passport. “Your visa expired—you were supposed to enter within thirty days,” the agency man said. “Fortunately, the guy at immigration is a friend, so it wasn’t a problem.”

It was an apt introduction to a country where the law is always open to interpretation and personal connections are the principal currency. I was in as a British Christian archaeologist rather than as an American Jewish journalist, but I was in. I promptly went to the International Press Office, where I declared my journalistic purpose, and where the man in charge lectured me for thirty minutes about why Libyan democracy was better than American, the terrible untruths that American journalists had heaped on Libya, and America’s imperialist tendencies. Then he volunteered that the officials I’d wanted to speak to would be too busy for me, and that I shouldn’t have come.

This was standard procedure. Last April, after months of planning, the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York, sent an august delegation—including David Rockefeller, Peter G. Peterson, Alan Patricof, and Leonard Lauder—to Libya, with appointments to meet both Muammar and Saif Qaddafi. After they arrived, they were told that the Leader was unavailable and that the Principal had made a scheduling error and was on his way to Japan.

Officials in Libya seldom say no and seldom say yes. Libyans use a popular Arab term: IBM, which stands for Inshallah, bokra, moumken, or “With the will of God, tomorrow, maybe.” All plans are provisional, even at the highest levels of government. You can see the head of the National Oil Company with an hour’s notice; you can also spend weeks preparing for an appointment that never materializes.

I requested a meeting with the prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, before I went to Libya and every day for three weeks while I was in Tripoli. On my last day, I was in the middle of a meeting when my cell phone rang. “The prime minister will see you,” someone said.

I said that I hoped he could see me before I had to leave.

“The prime minister will see you now.”

I began, “Oh, okay, I’ll get my tape recorder—”

“He will see you right now,” the voice interrupted. “Where are you?”

I gave the address.

“A car will pick you up in three minutes.”