In his column in al-Sharq al-Awsat today, Fahmy Huwaydi reproduces in its entirety a remarkable essay published last May by the Libyan journalist Dhayf al-Ghazzal al-Shahibi: "It has been recorded that I am a traitor and a coward," it begins. Dhayf al-Ghazzal al-Shahibi's essay ranged over corruption, torture, stupid bureaucratic oppression, and more. I had never read the original, and I'm grateful to Huwaydi for using his prime real estate on al-Sharq al-Awsat to make it far more widely distributed now than it was last May.
Because Dhayf al-Ghazzal al-Shahibi, Huwaydi reminds us, disappeared the night of May 21, after he and a friend were picked up off the street by a car full of security forces. He was not heard from again for many days, until his body was found on June 2 riddled with bullets and fingers missing. On June 6, Libya's Minister of Justice told a French newspaper that they hoped to solve the crime within 48 hours - i.e. by June 8. I (Huwaydi) am writing this essay on June 14, and no answers have yet been offered. But, Huwaydi writes, "there is one thing that I can say with certainty and that is that his position and his writings are behind what happened to him."
What is even worse, writes Huwaydi, is that this horrible assassination has been ignored by the Arab world and by the outside world alike, as if the murder of a critical journalist were a normal thing, even as the world rose up in horror over the assassination of the Lebanese journalist Samir Qassir. (Abdalwahab Badrakhan made a similar point in al-Hayat last week). A team of international investigators will seek to uncover the truth of who killed Qassir - but who will care about al-Shahibi? Al-Shahibi has been twice murdered: first by his killers, and then by the world's apathy to his death. Huwaydi writes that he in no way wants to diminish the loss of Qassir, but rather would like to see the scope of the investigations widened to include victims such as al-Shahibi as well.
Let this be the first time that I agree with Claudia Rossett, who as near as I can tell is the only American journalist to raise this issue. She writes today:
Allowing Libyan tyrant Moammar Gadhafi to make a mockery of U.S. policy is not a good idea, especially not when the Bush administration has been talking Gadhafi up for the past 18 months as one of our newest allies in the war on terror and an example to other enemy regimes of how to win America's respect and goodwill.
Gadhafi has lots to snicker about right now, at our expense--as the U.S. continues to give him a free pass over manhandling Libya's most prominent democratic dissident, Fathi Eljahmi. The 64-year-old Mr. Eljahmi has a habit of speaking up for freedom in Libya every time he gets a chance. For this, he has been spent most of the past four years in a series of prisons or--in the more polite lingo applied to his current caged condition--the state security detention facilities of Gadhafi's Great Socialist People's Libyan Jamahiriya.
She includes Dhayf al-Ghazzal al-Shahibi in her roster of ongoing atrocities. I don't expect the Bush administration to listen to an aardvark, or to Fahmy Huwaydi, but maybe they'll pay attention to Rossett and the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking of US expense, the Lebanese model of consensual democracy, which was supposed to have been exported to the rest of the region, is dead. Following last Sunday's win by Maronite General Michel Aoun, the post-Syrian Lebanese Parliament now consists of four confessional blocks: the Shi'a, the Sunni, the Druze and the Maronites.
So Lebanese Spring is dead, Egyptian Spring is dead, Dhayf al-Ghazzal al-Shahibi is dead, Jordanian reforms are dead...what we have here is a moribund morass of malaise.
Posted by: Nur al-Cubicle | June 15, 2005 at 03:07 PM
...muddied by malicious miscreants.
Posted by: Nur al-Cubicle | June 15, 2005 at 03:08 PM
I have no comment about the substance of this post...however I would like to point out that the headline was comedy gold. Kudos!
Posted by: Hassan | June 15, 2005 at 10:06 PM