Search Results for: Libya

Sirte and Misrata, Libya’s Last Battle

Longreads Pick

Clare Morgana Gillis recalls her days reporting in Libya with James Foley.

Published: Sep 30, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,694 words)

In Libya, the Captors Have Become the Captive

Longreads Pick

With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer:

“Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of them showed up at the base in Tajoura. Nasser greeted them at the door and led them downstairs. ‘It was a very emotional moment,’ Nasser said. ‘You can imagine how I felt when I saw my brother’s killer embracing his brother.’ The two brothers hugged each other for a long time, sobbing, until finally Nasser pushed them apart, because he could not bear it anymore. Later, he took one of the cousins aside and asked him if he knew why Marwan was being held. The man said no. ‘I told him: “Your cousin killed six very qualified people whom Libya will need, two doctors and four officers. One of them was my brother.” ‘ The cousin listened, and then he hugged Nasser before the family left.”

Published: May 9, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,006 words)

Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon

Longreads Pick

They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them” :

“Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career during the Qaddafi years. But the risks, she says, were too great. ‘I just could not get involved in the government, because of the sexual corruption. The higher up you got, the more exposed you were to [Qaddafi], and the greater the fear.’ According to Asma Gargoum, who worked as director of foreign sales for a ceramic tile company near Misrata before the war, ‘If Qaddafi and his people saw a woman he liked, they might kidnap her, so we tried to stay in the shadows.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Mar 21, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,212 words)

Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality

Longreads Pick

Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman. But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.

Published: Mar 22, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,723 words)

What I Lost in Libya

Longreads Pick

They blindfolded us and stuffed us into a small sedan, three tall people with their hands bound behind them. This is what they mean by a “stress position,” I remember thinking. I don’t know how long that ride lasted—two hours, three?—but it seemed longer. The car’s sound system played a somber remix of Qaddafi’s famous “zenga zenga” speech—in which he pledged to purge Libya “alley by alley”—set to the martial theme of the movie 300. At the point in the speech when the Leader rhetorically demands “Who are you?” the guard who was riding shotgun instructed us, “Say it, say Qaddafi.” “Qaddafi,” I mumbled.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,333 words)

On Libya’s Revolutionary Road

Longreads Pick

For the next two hours, Qaddafi lectured the men. He warned them not to encourage the kinds of protests that had overthrown one dictator in Tunisia and would soon topple another, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt. “Take down your Facebook pages, your demands will be met,” Qaddafi said. At times, he muttered to himself at length, leaving the lawyers baffled and embarrassed. As he listened, Saih felt his fear giving way to a deep and unexpected reassurance. It was not Qaddafi’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the Leader’s seeming desperation or his promises of reform, which Saih did not believe. Instead, it was the mere sight of him up close, an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face.

Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,572 words)

Longreads Best of 2020: Arts and Culture

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. In an unprecedented, strange, and chaotic year, we’ve leaned on writers’ reflections and commentaries on the world around us to help us make sense of moments, of our lives. We revisited a wide range of arts and culture stories featured by the team this year and selected eight favorites that resonated with us.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly Top 5 email every Friday.

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I’ve always loved how Teju Cole observes and moves through our world: a flâneur of modern life, always with a notebook or a camera in hand. Here, we follow Cole on a pilgrimage to Italy as he chases the life of Caravaggio, an artist (and fugitive and murderer) whose emotionally charged, often violent scenes and chiaroscuro technique I studied closely in my AP Art History class. In Rome and Milan, Cole revisits Caravaggio’s paintings “to learn the truth about doom” — to sit with unease, and to experience the artist’s pain and turmoil (“I would find in him the reprieve certain artists can offer us in dark times”).

Cole then travels south, to Naples and along the coast of Sicily, and later to Malta, to the places where the painter spent his exile; he captures both the mundanity and intimacy of encounters with guides and strangers, like his meeting in Syracuse with D., a young migrant who arrived by boat from Libya eight months earlier. (They share a silent, beautiful moment with “The Burial of St. Lucy.”) Part-travelogue, part-profile, part-art criticism, and part-commentary on the ills and horrors of our world, it’s a stunning piece with masterful scope, but also turns inward — a read you’ll likely sit with quietly long after you’ve finished.

I sat on a bench in the middle of the room, the two paintings set at a right angle to each other. I was awe-struck, out of breath, caught between these two immensities. The very act of looking at an old painting can be so strange. It is an activity that is often bound up with class identity or social aspiration. It can sometimes feel like a diverting, or irritating, stroll among white people’s ancestors. It can also often be wonderful, giving the viewer a chance to be blessed by a stranger’s ingenuity or insight. But rarely, something even better happens: A painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you — to call you — to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.

He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: He meted it out to others and received it in his own body. Caravaggio is long dead, as are his victims. What remains is the work, and I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.

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How the US Spied on Allies and Adversaries Alike

Swedish businessman and inventor of encryption machines, Boris Hagelin (1892 - 1983) with one of his company's products, circa 1970. A tape attached to the front of the cipher machine bears the plaintext and encrypted versions of the text 'BORIS HAGELIN STOP BORN HADSHCIKENT RUSSIA STOP JULY EIGHTEEN NINETY TWO STOP'. (Photo by Tony Evans/Getty Images)

The CIA, in a secret partnership with West Germany, used Crypto AG to sell encryption services to gullible governments and then promptly read all their clandestine communications. As Greg Miller reports at The Washington Post, the CIA fed important information to their allies around the world and ignored assassination plots, ethnic cleansing campaigns, and other human rights abuses and atrocities, all in a bid to protect their covert communication channels from being exposed.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

From 1970 on, the CIA and its code-breaking sibling, the National Security Agency, controlled nearly every aspect of Crypto’s operations — presiding with their German partners over hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.

Then, the U.S. and West German spies sat back and listened.

They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco.

For years, BND officials had recoiled at their American counterpart’s refusal to distinguish adversaries from allies. The two partners often fought over which countries deserved to receive the secure versions of Crypto’s products, with U.S. officials frequently insisting that the rigged equipment be sent to almost anyone — ally or not — who could be deceived into buying it.

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Reading Lessons

Type by VectorLab / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Irina Dumitrescu | How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound | punctum books | July 2019 | 12 minutes (3,118 words)

 

I have forgotten how to read. It isn’t the first time. I have forgotten before and I will forget again. In other words, I am still learning how to read.

“Read,” like “love” or “think,” has a thousand meanings pressed into one deceptively elementary verb. We use it in a way that tends towards simplicity. It is the connection of sounds and concepts to standardized squiggles, to trails of ink on squares of paper, scratches carved into sticks, glowing lines of curved neon, careful stitches poked through a tight canvas. It can seem a basic skill, at least to those who have left the learning of letters behind.

Watching my son learn it now, I begin to understand how daunting a task it is, even given a phonetic language with a small alphabet, even with all the plasticity of a child’s brain at his disposal. Learning to read is a years-long series of internalizing rules and their many exceptions, of tiny modulations and adjustments. At first I thought it would be a matter of recognizing 26 letters. Then I saw that he must navigate upper and lower cases, print and cursive, different typefaces and hands, the sounds rendered by certain combinations of letters, umlauts and double S’s, unmarked short and long vowels, and the vagaries of foreign words and their unpredictable pronunciations.

So much work requires attention. My son approaches the challenge of decoding the world with intense concentration, straining to squeeze out meaning from each word and image. He is spellbound by anything legible, whether a phrase in bold, clear type or a comic strip that communicates just enough plot to fascinate, and will stare at it for what feels like ages. He is laboring hard, I know, but I still envy his power of absorption. Sometimes it feels like my practice as a reader has made me faster, but not consistently better. When I think of my own journey of learning to read, I am in fact thinking of a long process of learning and forgetting how to be with texts slowly, intimately, deeply.

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A Citizen Is Obliged To Listen

Getty / Unsplash / Wikimedia Commons / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ankita Chakraborty | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,522 words)

 

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Refugees, or displaced migrants, are most visible in the places where they are most vulnerable: on the high seas while crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, or on TV next to a rolling clip of a nationalist insulting them. In war zones, so that they are shielded from airstrikes, they are made visible by the color of their camps — a uniform white, the same color as that of a doctor’s coat or that of a shroud. In places where they are relatively safe, they are difficult to come by. Refuge makes the refugee invisible. It is unlikely that you will meet a refugee on your way to work; on the off chance you do, they remind you that at this moment there is a war going on in some part of the world, and of your own complicity in that war. For instance, in Delhi, if I come across a Rohingya refugee, I might be reminded that India is, in fact, an ally of Myanmar. In London, in Paris, in Berlin, in New York, meeting a Yemeni refugee, one might be reminded of how long one’s respective country has been selling arms to Saudi Arabia. It is in the best interest of the state that the refugee be kept at a distance from the citizen. It is, as the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck writes, “a matter of…sparing the Land of Poets the indignity of being dubbed the Land of killers once more.”

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone begins with the mention of a drowning incident in a lake near the protagonist’s home in Berlin. An unknown man had drowned while swimming; he waved his arm for help, but no one saved him. His body at the bottom of the lake, an allegory for the several thousand migrants who have drowned trying to cross the sea, works as a trigger throughout the rest of the novel, which unfolds in close proximity to his place of death — very much like the story of Europe in the past century. (In Europe, they have for some time been trying to track down where all the bodies are buried.) At one point in the novel, Richard, the protagonist, a professor emeritus, talks to an 18 year-old African refugee about Hitler, a former resident of Berlin. “Did you ever hear the name Hitler?” he asks. Read more…