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By Dr Suhail Shafi* 15 March 2002 I was the younger child of an Indian couple, both physicians, both employed in Libya for over a decade. I had been born and educated in Libya, and it was the only country I ever called home for several years to come. Life in Libya had its negative and positive aspects, but we seldom complained, being grateful for everything that we had. On the night our neighbourhood was bombed, the first thing I remember distinctly was the little alarm clock that had been placed on the shelf right next to my bed - it had jumped up abruptly, coinciding with a deafening noise that sounded like a massive explosion. I remember being seized by my mother and pulled out of bed so fast I could not even grasp what was going on. I heard a girl's voice that betrayed a gasp of horror, and I remember the four of us - my parents, my sister and myself - running out into the dark corridor outside our flat. We were rushing down the stairs and I remember my little feet being pierced by pieces of glass that came from the windows which had been shattered by the blast of American missiles that had landed in the neighbourhood behind us. We rushed down into the car park where hundreds of our neighbours had gathered. We were for the most part Indian, Eastern European and Filipino expatriates who lived in the apartment blocks opposite the street from the large Tripoli hospital where my father worked. We usually kept our distances from one another, but we were all there that night, united in our horror. We walked across the street to the hospital where my father worked. I felt a sense of relief in going to the hospital, but it was a sense of relief which, in my heart of hearts, I felt was somewhat misplaced. I could not bring myself to believe that anyone would want to bomb a hospital. I felt cold on that April night like never before - I shivered almost uncontrollably in the hospital park. As my father herded us into a building in the hospital complex, I saw several lights in the sky - I did not and still do not know if they were real American fighter planes or whether they were anti-aircraft missiles fired by the Libyans, but what I do remember distinctly is that they filled me with an acute and indescribable sense of terror. I hid behind a car as I ran towards the entrance of the hospital building. I remember screaming out to my mother: "Do they really want to get us? Is it us that they are aiming at?" When I woke up the next morning, my reaction to the events of the previous night was a curious one. It was not so much of fear, or impending doom, or shock, but a denial. I pretended that the events of the night before were nothing more than a dream, an illusion which, though everyone was talking about them, were nothing more than a non-event from which I was completely insulated. My sense of denial did not last long, for that morning Tripoli had to face up to its losses. The neighbourhood that bore the brunt of the American laser-guided bombs was a civilian neighbourhood inhabited almost entirely by middle class Libyan families. The houses were modern, attractive and comfortable, and would not have looked too out-of-place in any other European or Mediterranean city. I remember my father taking us out in the car to that neighbourhood and I remember the scenes of destroyed homes, gutted buildings, collapsed roofs and smashed windows. Among the buildings destroyed was the French embassy and a children's playground full of evergreens and hibiscus plants and slides and merry-go-rounds where I had frequently played. But what I did not see was the true cost: the remains of the men, women and children who were blown to pieces while they slept. Perhaps the international outcry and the chorus of condemnation following the attack would have been greater if the reports from Tripoli had spoken of the death and maiming of Eastern Europeans and Asians rather than Arab families. Despite the horrific memories of the US bombardment, the following days and weeks were remarkable by their uneventfulness. I watched without too much emotion the funerals of the civilians killed - I still remember them being draped in green Libyan flags, one I distinctly remember had a Lebanese flag. I remember the sight of Western diplomats at the funerals - neither they nor the staff at the British school where I studied back then seem to be singled out for harassment or ill-will. I remember the sight of a dead child on TV - not more than three years old - being picked up by Gaddafi himself, and I remember the anti-American protests on TV. I even remember a BBC radio broadcast mentioning that one of the victims - an 18-year-old Palestinian girl visiting Libya who was killed by a bomb that fell into her bedroom. In retrospect, that report actually seems quite remarkable because the Western media tend to mention Arab casualties as statistics, not as human stories. The events of April 1986 had at least one very sinister after-effect on me: an absolutely and utterly insane, if somewhat understandable, sense of hatred towards America. I will never know how many times I must have cursed America and its government and the then American president, Ronald Reagan, for what had happened. It is only natural that at the time I did not have too much of an understanding as to why our neighbourhood had been bombed. The people who bombed our neighbourhood were simply insane monsters whom I believed were worthy of all the resentment I had in my heart. I remember once seeing a magazine with President Reagan on the front page, and I was so filled with hate I slowly, bit by bit and painstakingly, mutilating his face on the paper. It was a dreadful thing to do, but perhaps it was for the best that my bitterness manifested itself in a relatively benign way. My desire to talk about my experience of the bombing is motivated neither by a necessity nor a need to talk about it in order to come to terms with it - after all, 16 years are a pretty long time - nor by a desire for sympathy. For a long time, I actually wanted to put behind me all memories of the bombing. However, in the wake of the unspeakably tragic events in the US and Afghanistan, I am obliged by my conscience to dig up an unpleasant if distant experience in order to make people realize that, behind every headline, unfortunate or otherwise, people's lives are being affected, and that, any understanding of news stories without scratching the surface and seeing what events mean for ordinary people, is not only incomplete, but abysmally so. One thing that strikes me every time America's bombing of Libya 16 years ago is mentioned is that the event is whitewashed, with people referring to it as the "American attack on Libya", as if it were nothing more than that. The people who died in their sleep, the men, women and children whose only crime was to be living in the wrong part of town, are seldom if ever mentioned, and the attack itself is still widely viewed as just another measure in the fight against terror. It is precisely this lack of appreciation for what military actions of any sort mean for ordinary innocent people in places like Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere that I find unacceptable and I feel compelled by my conscience to say "Enough" and that, even if we have to use military force to achieve an objective, this should always be the very last and most undesirable option and should be used only when all else fails. Civilians who are harmed in the course of a conflict must never be seen as "collateral damage" or, even worse, as statistics which may or may not be mentioned depending on the whims of the journalist. If we dehumanize the innocent victims of conflict, we would dehumanize all of humanity. If the innocent victims of the US bombing of Tripoli are seen as nothing more than statistics, then there is really no overriding reason why the victims of conflict anywhere else in the world could not be viewed as "collateral damage" as well. If I am to heed the advice of a six-year-old boy terrified by the sound of jet fighters in the sky and exploding bombs on the ground, I feel I must encourage people to view the news not just in terms of headlines in ink, not just in terms of stories on TV and radio, but also in the context of people whose only crime is to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and whose offence is no greater than that of children huddling in fear in the basements of hospitals. * Suhail Shafi is a doctor working in Malta. Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis. All rights reserved. |
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