The novelist Laila Lalami reminded me that 40 years ago today, Muammar al-Qaddafi overthrew the Libyan ruler King Idris I.
At the time, my friend Muna was living in Libya. Years later in Amman, she told me the story; how they awoke at dawn, horrified to find tanks trained on the palace.
Muna's mother worked for the Queen; her Palestinian father for an American oil company. The family fled with just the clothes on their backs. They spent some time in Malta, before working their way to Jordan, where they ultimately obtained Jordanian passports. To this day, they live in Amman.
Laila Lalami wrote: "It seems to me that coverage of Gaddafi is broadly limited to two topics: his social antics (e.g. the tent he set up in the garden of the Hotel Marigny, his all-female bodyguard corps, his ridiculous outfits and so on) and the Lockerbie bombing. One rarely hears about all the political prisoners who have been rotting in his jails for several decades.
"A couple of years ago, the novelist Hisham Matar wrote a very moving piece about his father, Jaballa Matar, who was allegedly kidnapped by Egyptian security forces in March 1990 and then rendered to Libya. He has not been seen in nineteen years and has not been heard from in ten.
How does one remain free from becoming a symbol or a victim? How do we remain whole and free from hate, yet truthful to our memory?
Life attempts to teach us about loss: that one can still find peace in the finality of death. And yet, my loss gives no peace. My father is not incarcerated, yet he is not free; he is not dead, yet he is not alive either. My loss is self-renewing, insistent and incomplete.
I was always told to expect to lose my father. Many Libyan political dissidents have been assassinated or kidnapped. But now I know that I had no comprehension of the danger he was in. If I had, I would have held on to him with all I could, or tried harder to persuade him not to engage in political dissent, perhaps. Regret is the cruellest companion for those of us who are left behind.
I did try to persuade him to leave his political work, because I loved my father more than I loved my country; or, to put it another way, I had learned by then to live without my country, but not without my father.
When Father was taken, the world did feel empty. For the first couple of years, our ship was lost, then we recovered our bearings and learnt that the speed by which one resumes living is no indication of the depth of one’s grief."
I knew Jaballa Mater personally. When I was a UN correspondent, I was introduced to Jaballa by a mutual friend at the US-Arab Chamber of Commerce in New York. The friend asked me to take Jaballa shopping for presents for his family. I remember him purchasing a wallet and other gifts at the Cartier counter at Macy's. A group of friends accompanied him to dinner at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and the waiter snapped our picture. Jaballa with his shock of grey hair and mustache was laughing, wearing a suit with his signature white silk fringed scarf draped around his neck. There were other dinners, always an eclectic group, whose livelihood or lives were rooted in the Middle East.
Jaballa was living in Switzerland at the time and didn't like to discuss Middle East politics; certainly not the minefield of Libyan politics, which had caused such grief for him and his family. Years later, I was dismayed to learn Jaballa had been kidnapped, while living in Egypt. Widespread speculation was that Egyptian security forces had turned him over to Libya, another victim of Qaddafi's thugs. Until reading Laila's piece today, I hadn't known Jaballa had been heard from at all during the last 19 years. It's possible he is still alive, although who knows in what condition, along with Qaddafi's numerous other political prisoners. Human rights seem to have been forgotten in the West's renewed quest for lucrative oil and business partnerships in Libya.
Another friend, Mansour Rashid Kikhia, the former Libyan Ambassador to the UN, was kidnapped from his hotel in Cairo in December, 1993. Kikhia had resigned his job at the UN and was head of the International Arab Jurists Association. Despite the intervention of the US government and the United Nations, no information about his fate has been forthcoming.
Many political prisoners died in a massacre June 29, 1996 at Abu Salim prison in Benghazi.
In December 2006, I wrote a poem, "Dead or disappeared" about these two men and other activists - and one special friend - I came to know. The poem is dedicated to the memory of Mansour Rashid Kikhia, Jaballah Mattar, Fahd al-Qawasmi, Ghassan Seikaly and an Iranian dissident whose name I have forgotten, but whose story haunts me still. Each in his own way was heroic.
Bright young thing
in New York watching
history unfold amidst chaos
key players crossed my path
some became friends
admired for their selfless courage
The last time I saw him
he took off his shoes
and put his feet on the table
at a UN press conference
so we could see the pattern of scars
calling card of the Shah's SAVAK*
He got our attention.
Two weeks later he was murdered.
The last time I saw him
he seemed a little drunk and flirtatious,
escorted by aides and guards
in an Amman hotel lobby
talking about an upcoming meeting
promising an interview
A sobering phone call followed:
felled on his front porch in a hail of assassin's bullets.
The last time I saw him
he was impassioned about
his human rights work
looking forward to an international conference
to expand the jurists' scope and focus
helping secure rights for all
Newspaper headlines reported his disappearance in Egypt;
UN and governmental inquiries produced no answers.
The last time I saw him
I took him shopping
for family gifts at Cartier
they snapped our picture at the Rainbow Room
and we went to a dinner party with friends
then he went home to Geneva
Vanished without a trace in Cairo;
more UN inquiries; no answers.
The last time I saw him
he told me he loved me
and kissed me goodbye
then boarded a plane to Amman
to do his father's bidding
and work in the family business
Less than five months later he was dead,
shot three times in the head.
For those still here
an obligation to tell their stories
remember what they held dear
the struggles and small victories
undying commitment to causes
greater than themselves
*Secret police during the reign of the Shah of Iran
Note that Qaddafi is spelled in a number of ways. At the UN, we spelled his name Muammar al-Qaddafi.
Photo of bas relief sculptures over a doorway in Amsterdam.