You can go wherever you want in Libya, ask anyone anything you want,” Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, Colonel Gaddafi’s second son, promised The Times and the dozen other foreign journalists admitted to Tripoli 15 days ago.
Today our number has swollen to more than 200, and we are about the only independent observers left in western Libya.
However, we are living under something not far short of house arrest as the regime does its utmost to prevent foreign journalists witnessing its brutal suppression of the uprising. We risk arrest or detention every time we go out without our “translators”, also known as minders. Each evening, in the gilded cage that is the Rixos hotel, we swap tales about who was held where, for how long, and what equipment was confiscated. There are checkpoints everywhere, and our letters of accreditation are valid only if we are working with minders.
A BBC Arabic news team was handcuffed, hooded, beaten and held for 20 hours earlier this week despite being accredited. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a journalist on The Guardian, has not been heard from since Sunday, when he was on the edge of the hotly-contested town of Zawiya.
It has become almost impossible to talk to ordinary Libyans without seriously endangering them. There are informers everywhere, and any Libyan seen talking to a foreigner is likely to be picked up.
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It is dangerous even to telephone them. Not only are our calls routinely monitored, but police and militiamen have begun removing the memory cards from our mobile phones at checkpoints, or listing the numbers we have called. The three-strong BBC news team had a glimpse during its detainment of what happens to ordinary Libyans suspected of dissent. The trio saw terrified men held incommunicado and indefinitely in anonymous barracks, beaten, tortured and subjected to mock executions.
The regime wants the foreign media here purely so it can pass on to the world its preposterous explanation for the insurrection, which is that the vast majority of Libyans adore Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, most of the country is contented and at peace, and the small but violent uprising has been fomented by al-Qaeda terrorists working in conjunction with Western countries who covet Libya’s oil.
To that end we are given “briefings” that are almost comical in their mendacity, and taken on ludicrous official trips. We are ushered to markets to see how normal life has returned, to hospitals to talk to “soldiers” injured by violent protesters, and to watch aid convoys set off for the supposedly starving city of Benghazi. Anywhere genuinely interesting is off limits, and we are invariably greeted by “spontaneous” demonstrations in support of Colonel Gaddafi.
At midnight on Wednesday, after repeated demands that we be taken to Zawiya to substantiate the regime’s claims to control it, an official visit was finally laid on. We went not to the central square, which a few thousand rebels have courageouslydefended for the past two weeks, but to a sports stadium outside the town. There, 200 Gaddafi “supporters” were holding an improbable 1am rally replete with fireworks, perhaps to mask the distant gunfire. As we left, officials gave the demonstrators food parcels by way of payment.
It is still worth being in Libya, though. As we are driven to the regime’s assorted Potemkin villages we can see the shuttered businesses, the abandoned construction sites and empty streets of this distressed city. We see the tanks and artillery and heavily armed that now encircle it.
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But in the margins of the Gaddafi rallies, or the privacy of taxis, Libyans quietly tell you in broken English how much they hate their leader, and that we should believe nothing we see. With the help of courageous Libyans The Times even managed to slip into Zawiya last Sunday.
Nobody should accept the solemn assurance that the regime gave the UN this week in its formal response to the imposition of sanctions. “No restrictions are imposed on the foreign media,” it said. “Media correspondents work freely in Libya, and all the necessary facilities are provided for them.” That, alas, was yet another egregious lie.