The country that first declared war on America

When is our ambassador? Libya in Belgrade proposed that we are traveling to that North African country and do a series of reports and conversations with their officials, I was incredulous at first. A worryingly large number of people I told where we should travel asked me, "So aren't they under Israeli rockets?", confusing Libya and Lebanon.

I went to Google and typed "How safe is Libya?". The results I received were not encouraging: "Terrorism, kidnappings, a high level of crime...", there were assessments of the governments of the USA, Canada, and Great Britain, which in no way recommend their citizens to travel to this country. I called several friends from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ambassadors in neighboring countries and got answers like: "Well, I'm not sure! But call our ambassador in Tripoli, Dragan Todorović...". I called Ambassador Todorović, who answered warmly: "When are you coming? Be sure to get in touch! It is completely safe here!". We finally decided to travel when Jovana Kvržić, a Serbian travel blogger, told me that she was in Libya a few weeks ago and that the country is fantastic and completely safe: "It's so safe that it's even boring!" Jovana told me. with the caveat that she might not be the right person for this kind of advice because she was in Afghanistan before Libya.

Libya is currently divided into two parts - the smaller, western one, based in Tripoli, led by the internationally recognized Government of National Unity, and the larger one, which occupies the central and western part of the country, headed by the Government of National Stability, based in Torbuk. Last year's tragedy in the city of Derna, in the eastern part of Libya, when officially 6.000 and unofficially up to 24.000 people died in floods due to the collapse of a dam during a storm, united the residents and help came from both parts of the country.

Since 2020, there has been peace in Libya, people travel freely from one part of the country to another, and the inhabitants of both parts of the country, as they are the same people, are very polite when they hear someone speaking a dialect from the other part of the country. Thus, it can be expected that with the mediation of Turkey and Egypt, as the most important regional powers influencing Libyan politics, an almost complete unification of the country will be achieved.

DON'T PROVOKE

To get a Libyan visa, in addition to two photos and filling out the usual forms, you also need a negative PCR-test for "monkey pox" (!). I am traveling with my colleagues Žikic and Mladen, a journalist and a photographer, accompanied by Yusuf from the Libyan embassy, ​​whom I have known for several years. We fly from Belgrade to Tripoli via Istanbul, and the former opposition leader and president of the UN Security Council Vuk Jeremić and football player Dušan Tadić are on the flight with us.

On the airport bus at Tripoli Mitiga Airport, two men in their late sixties, maybe even seventies who speak Serbian with a Bosnian accent are standing next to us. I ask them if they work for a Serbian company here. One of them answers negatively: "No, we work for a Libyan company!". I joked, I thought benignly: "So, the Yugoslav labor force is still at a premium!" and got the answer: "Don't provoke and spread propaganda! Mind your own business!". When I later said that we were journalists, they were even more incredulous and cynically commented: "Are you with Jeremic in the group?", alluding to our aforementioned companion on the Belgrade-Istanbul flight. We can only guess what kind of secret business our two temporary fellow citizens in Libya are engaged in.

Half an hour later we were in front of the hotel on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The procedure for entering the hotel, as in most countries in this region, involves scanning luggage and passing through a metal detector.

Ambassador Dragan Todorović, an experienced diplomat who received his doctorate in 2007 at the Belgrade FPN on the topic "Sunni-Shia schism and its impact on the security of the Middle East", is waiting for us there with a broad smile. He is fluent in Arabic, Persian, English and French. He also published books Hezbollah: God's party, Lebanon's electoral system, Contemporary terrorism - al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb i The development of the Islamist movement in Libya, so he is an ideal interlocutor for current Middle Eastern topics.

The first point of our visit was a tour of the large construction project "Third ring road". It is about a large circular highway around Tripoli, the completion of which will solve the large traffic jams in the city. While we talk to the people who lead these works and later to the Minister of Construction and Infrastructure, they all point out that in Libya Yugoslav construction was at a high price and say that the country is now being rebuilt after a decade of wars and the doors are open to us again. They also have the Internet and read what is happening, so almost all of them were up to date with the collapse of the canopy at the Railway Station in Novi Sad and the death of 15 people.

Abu Bakr Al-Gavi, Minister of Construction and Infrastructure, tells us about the projects that his ministry is working on and says that he has been invited by his colleague, line minister Goran Vesić, to visit Serbia and discuss the future involvement of our companies in works in Libya. We told him that the minister had been arrested that morning and that he would probably be hosted by someone else.

MEDINA TRIPOLI

We go to the Medina of Tripoli, the old part of the city where you can feel the true spirit of this country. When the Italians captured Libya from the Ottoman Empire in 1911, they needed a Europeanized square, so they demolished the Bread Street and named it the Italian Square - Piazza Italia. After World War II, when the Italians left, it was renamed Independence Square, and then Green Square when Gaddafi published his Green Book and Green Agenda. Since 2011, it has been called Martyrs' Square in honor of those who died in the most recent Revolution of 2011. There was also an Italian theater on the square, the Miramare, which later became the Royal Theatre. It was torn down by Gaddafi after coming to power in order to get as much space as possible so that he could address a large crowd with his speeches. As it happens in history, that very crowd overthrew him here. Also, at the beginning of the 21st century, Gaddafi blackmailed the Italian state and Berlusconi that he would have to demolish the other buildings from the colonial period of the Italian administration (1911‒1943) if they did not restore them themselves, telling them: "I don't have masters who know Italian architecture, so the only way I can tear them down and make new ones is if you won't fix them because they are a mockery of me in the center". And Berlusconi gave money. The first scene we find in the Medina were people with metal carts (popularly called "japaneri" in our country). "Money from exchange offices is transported in them!" Ambassador Todorović explains to us. A few steps further, it was clear to us what he was talking about: the scene looked like those from New York's Wall Street. Dozens of people stand on the sidewalk in front of the exchange office and shout offers to buy and sell foreign currency.

photo: r. shepherd

The mast of the American military ship "USS Philadelphia" towers over the Red Castle on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in Tripoli. He is there to remind of the First Berber War, which from 1801 to 1805 Tripolitania (part of today's Libya), then an Ottoman province with great autonomy, waged against the newly founded USA. The reason for the war was the American refusal to pay "protection" to the pirates from the Libyan coast. They thus entered history as the first country to declare war on the US. The American military ship "USS Philadelphia" was first captured by the Libyans in 1803, and the following year the American marines sneaked up on it and set it on fire. The Libyans saved the mast from the ship as a "souvenir" of the first American overseas war and the first declaration of war on the USA by a country.

We had the opportunity to visit the Red Castle, although it is currently closed for visits due to reconstruction. The first fortress in that place was built by the Phoenicians in the 8th century BC. Later, it was demolished and rebuilt by various armies and empires, including the Ottoman one. When the British army occupied this part of North Africa in 1942, they placed the castle under their control and in 1948 reopened a museum in it, which continued to be so under King Idris and later during the Gaddafi era. Suffering minor damage during the Libyan Revolution and the First Civil War in 2011, it was closed in 2015 to be reopened by the authorities in 2021.

WORKERS NEEDED

Earlier that morning, the Minister of Labor, Ali Al-Abed, presented us with a model of the Arc de Triomphe of Marcus Aurelius, and we ended the day right next to it, in the Athar restaurant, which serves perfect Libyan couscous. Minister Al-Abed told us that Libya again needs a large number of workers from different fields. Especially in healthcare, where salaries for nurses go up to 3.000 euros.

A day later, Mohamed Hamouda, spokesman for the Government of National Unity of Libya, says that his country expects companies from Serbia to come and continue what was interrupted by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Libya. "The country is in the phase of major reconstruction, highways, hospitals, schools are being built... We need companies from those areas as well as workforce, especially when it comes to healthcare, which is now liberalized and there are a large number of private hospitals as well. The price of a liter of fuel is 0,029 euros (yes, you read that right - 3,39 Serbian dinars). It is lower only in Iran (0,027 euros per liter)", he says.

By the way, the Medina of Tripoli is excellently preserved if compared to similar cities in this part of the world. Among the most interesting buildings is certainly the House of Yusuf Karamalni, the Pasha of Ottoman Tripolitania who ruled at the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century. Inside the Medina is the Gurgi Mosque, built in 1833 by Yusuf Gurgi, so it is also the last Islamic place of worship built by the Turks in Tripoli. Particularly interesting are the buildings of the old consulates of France and Great Britain, where in the "consular times" of the Ottoman Empire, which Ivo Andrić also writes about, diplomats from Western countries spread the influence of their countries and peoples. The Catholic Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli from the 17th century was closed when Gaddafi came to power in 1969, only to be opened as an exhibition space from 2022, and its facade has been completely reconstructed and freshly painted. There is also the Ottoman Clock Tower from the 19th century, and next to it dozens of different shops where, until the middle of the last century, Jews and Christians were very numerous.

The fate of the Libyan Jews is particularly interesting. When the Italians took over the country from the Turks, they found 21.000 Jews, which constituted 4 percent of the population, most of them in Benghazi and Tripoli. The majority survived the repression during Mussolini's rule, so in 1941, Jews made up 25 percent of Tripoli's population, and there were as many as 44 synagogues in the city. After the war, pogroms took place in Libya in which Jews were killed, beaten and their property destroyed - in 1945, 1949 and the last in 1967 after the Israeli-Arab "Six-Day War". State repression continued under Gaddafi, so in 2003 the last Libyan Jew - Rina Debach (80) left the country.