LAUGHING OFF THE FEAR
After more than a decade of chaos and war, fed-up Libyans are clamouring for peace — and making clear they’ve had enough violence: ‘We want to taste life, not death’
When Taha al-Baskini won a part in a new play about soldiers who reunite after dying in combat, his costume was already in his closet. His onstage camouflage pants were the same ones he had worn as a militia fighter during Libya’s most recent civil war a few years ago, when an airstrike injured al-Baskini and killed several of his comrades as they defended their city.
“People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies,” al-Baskini, 24, whose brother died in the same conflict, said after a recent rehearsal for the play, When We Were Alive, at the National Theater in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city. “You never forget when they were smiling and talking just moments before.”
As an actor, “I try to show reality to the people,” he went on. “The message of the play is: ‘No more war.’ We’ve had enough war. We want to taste life, not death.”
To the audience, that message is hardly a tough sell.
After more than a decade of violent chaos — years that saw their country overrun by foreign mercenaries and subjugated by militias whose power made them a law unto themselves — Libyans are clamouring for peace.
The question is whether the country can maintain a brittle truce even as two rival governments and their foreign backers jockey for power, raising fears that Libya is, once again, sliding towards conflict.
To achieve lasting peace, Libya needs not only to find its way out of the current political crisis, but also to demobilise a generation of young men who have grown up knowing little but war.
Misrata, whose powerful militias were key to overthrowing Libya’s longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt, is full of such men.
More than 40 of them — mostly veterans of Libya’s conflicts — now act at the National Theater, a former meeting hall for Gadhafi’s political party. They hope to bring Misrata entertainment, they say, and some semblance of normalcy.
But there is no avoiding the city’s damage, physical and psychic alike, onstage.
“I’d rather do something funny to lighten people’s moods, instead of reminding them of the friends and brothers they lost,” said Anwar al-Teer, 49, an actor and former fighter who raised money and put his own acting earnings toward converting the venue, which city officials were renting out as a wedding hall, into the National’s 330-seat theatre, installing seating and lights himself.
“But the theatre is impacted by Libya’s reality, even when you don’t want it to be,” he said. “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”
Libya’s 2011 revolution made rebels into heroes. In the years that came after, as the country splintered into rival political factions and warring regions, many former rebels and new fighters joined armed militias, hoping to defend their hometowns or simply to make a decent living.
Militias could pay three times as much as the average salary or more, not that there were many other jobs on offer for young men. As militias grew into political forces, the higher-ups raked in illicit profits from smuggling weapons, fuel and migrants, building their fortunes and their power.
It was not only the money that appealed. At a time when weapons spoke loudest and wearing a militia uniform inspired deference, young men took to imitating the fighters’ style, even if they had never fired a shot: driving pickup trucks with blacked-out windows, wearing their beards long, dressing in fatigues.
“They were seen as heroes,” said Mohammed Ben Nasser, 27, a rising star in Libya’s smallbut-growing television industry who also acts in When We Were Alive. “It was how you got money, power, cars.”
For the four decades of Gadhafi’s rule, no one was allowed to be more famous than the dictator. Soccer players’ jerseys carried no names, only numbers, lest they gain a following.
Paranoid about what it saw as the contamination of foreign ideas, the regime banned foreign films, allowing only Libyan productions that pushed the Gadhafi agenda. If Libyans saw anything else during that period, it was thanks to smuggled-in videotapes and, eventually, illicit satellite and internet downloads.
So al-Teer is teaching many Misratans how to be a theatre audience, down to when to clap. He stages comedies, tragedies and histories from Libya and abroad, including, recently, The Government Inspector, Gogol’s classic satire of municipal corruption.
He plans to add movie screenings, which will make his venue Misrata’s first cinema since the few allowed under Gadhafi closed down during the revolution. One Misratan father recently told him that when it opens, it will be the first cinema his children have ever visited.
Many of the plays carry an antiwar message. When We Were Alive is a black comedy in which dead soldiers return to confront their general, who survived and went on to glory. One character had joined up for money, another for fame, a third because he wanted to fight. They all ended up the same: dead.
“I feel like the audience knows what we’re talking about,” al-Baskini said. “The generals are doing political deals with the enemy, while we’re fighting and giving our lives.”
A business that made light of such violence might seem unwelcome. Yet right downtown is a burger joint called Guns & Buns, where most of the items on the menu are named after weapons. The Kalashnikov burger comes with mayo; the grenade with onion rings; the PK machine gun with tomatoes.
“DON’T CALL 911, WE JUST MAKE BURGERS,” reads a sign on the back wall — though the “N’T” has been rubbed out.
The owner, Ali Mohamed Elrmeh, 40, opened Guns & Buns in 2016, when Libyans were battling to expel the Islamic State group. He said the concept was contentious, but it helped his business stand out among the other fast-food joints in the area. It has become so successful, he’s about to open another branch.
“Now we have kids, teens, even girls — when they hear the sounds of weapons, they can say whether it’s a Kalashnikov or a 9-mm gun or a grenade,” he said. “This is the Libyan reality. But my idea was that when you say ‘Kalashnikov’ or ‘PK,’ these things don’t have to frighten people. Now you just laugh.”
“They started feeling ashamed of being fighters, because now it’s a shame on your family to be a fighter. When they looked at others, they saw you can succeed without being a fighter.”
The financial incentive to fight is also fading: Libya has been largely stable for the past two years, though politicians continue to pay militias for their own protection.
One such politician, Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, the prime minister of Libya’s Tripoli-based and internationally recognised government, has blunted demand for militia jobs (and netted popularity) by handing out subsidies to families and newlyweds.
But recent clashes between militias loyal to Mr Dbeiba and others aligned with the Sirtebased rival prime minister, Fathi Bashagha, are a reminder that violence is never far away.
“People are too used to these things,” said Alaa Abugassa, 32, a dentist ordering a Guns & Buns burger on a recent afternoon. “It’s become part of their reality. It’s the new normal.”