‘You Exile them in their Own Countries’: The Everyday Politics of Reclaiming the Disappeared in Libya

Abstract

Located in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, Abū Salīm Prison has become suspended in Libya’s national collective memory as the site of a contested prison killing in 1996. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the prison hosted many prisoners of conscience, namely individuals who forcibly had been disappeared because security personnel suspected them of opposing the regime of Mu’amar Qadhdhafi. Drawing on interviews with their family members, I trace how Libyan families contested the state’s violence and forced disappearance through everyday behaviors, such as inquiring about their relatives’ whereabouts and visiting Abū Salīm Prison. The article contributes to an ongoing discussion within sociology, anthropology, and area studies about the significance of small-scale acts of resistance as forms of political action. Disappearance not only pulled people apart, but also brought them together, often around the same spaces that were intended to disenfranchise them.

Key Words:

• Disappearance
• Everyday
• Islam
• Libya
• North Africa and the Middle East
• Politics
• Qadhdhafi
• Resistance

Acknowledgments

Thank you to families in Libya for their time and for sharing with me their memories. Many thanks to Ari Adut, Javier Auyero, Sofian Merabet and Michael P. Young for their feedback on an earlier version of this article. I extend my utmost gratitude to Mounira M. Charrad for her constructive comments and continued support of this project.

Notes

¹ Abū Salīm Prison is located in Tripoli and was populated throughout the 1980s and 1990s with individuals who were accused of belonging to groups that opposed the leadership of Mu‘amar Qadhdhafi. According to percipient witness accounts, over 1,200 prisoners were killed en masse in courtyards at Abū Salīm Prison on June 29, 1996, in response to a small-scale prison uprising that prisoners in one cell block had initiated on June 28. The bodies were never recovered and families of the prisoners only began receiving official death certificates in the first decade of 2000 after the Libyan government acknowledged that a violent event had transpired at the prison in 1996. In 2007, several families began officially mobilizing to seek answers about the whereabouts of their relatives and a formal organization was formed in 2008 among families in Benghāzī. See Human Rights Watch (2006) Libya: June 1996 Killings at Abu Salim Prison; Lindsey Hilsum (2012) Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution (New York: The Penguin Press); and Dirk Vandewalle (2012) A History of Modern Libya (New York: Cambridge University Press).

² L. Hilsum, Sandstorm.

³ Transliteration of Qadhdhafi varies significantly because of differences between formal modern Arabic (al-Qadhdhāfī) and Libyan colloquial pronunciations. The spelling ‘Gaddafi’ is in keeping with how one would expect to hear his name articulated among citizens in contemporary Libya on an everyday basis. However, because Qadhdhafi is used in the scholarly literature and that spelling is common in academic search engines, the scholarly spelling is used in this article.

⁴ Jeff Goodwin (2011) Why We were Surprised (Again) by the Arab Spring, Swiss Political Science Review, 17(4), pp. 452–456.

⁵ Lisa Anderson (1986) Religion and State in Libya: The Politics of Identity, The Annals of the American Academy, 483, pp. 61–72.

⁶ Branches of the organization also are located in other Libyan cities, including Ajdabiya, Derna, Azzawiya, and Misrata, among others. However, the Benghazi and Tripoli branches are especially important because the association originated in Benghazi and important political affairs and decisions, including those relevant to the association, are mediated through government agencies and ministries located in the capital city of Tripoli.

⁷ Pierre Bourdieu (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time (Cambridge: Polity Press).

⁸ Patricia Gagné & Richard Tewksbury (1998) Conformity Pressures and Gender Resistance Among Transgendered Individuals, Social Problems, 45(1), pp. 82–83.

⁹ Simon Weaver (2010) The ‘Other’ Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-Racist Comedy, Sociology, 44(1), pp. 34–35.

¹⁰ John M. Jermier, David Knights & Walter R. Nord (1994) Resistance and Power in Organizations (New York: Routledge).

¹¹ Jocelyn A. Hollander & Rachel L. Einwohner (2004) Conceptualizing Resistance, Sociological Forum, 19(4), pp. 533–554.

¹² Ibid, p. 539.

¹³ James C. Scott (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

¹⁴ Ibid, pp. 241–242.

¹⁵ Lisa Wedeen (1999) Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), p. 87.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid, p. 87.

¹⁸ See Michel de Certeau (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press); Alberto Melucci (1989) Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press); Partha Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Veena Das (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press); Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

¹⁹ M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 95.

²⁰ Javier Auyero (2006) Spaces and Places as Sites and Objects of Politics, in: R. E. Goodwin & C. Tilly (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 569.

²¹ A. Bayat, Life as Politics, p. 28.

²² Ibid, p. 22.

²³ In Argentina, many mothers of disappeared men and women connected with one another by frequenting offices of the Catholic Church, such as that of the Monsignori. See Margaret E. Burchianti (2004) Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories, History and Anthropology, 15, pp. 133–150.

²⁴ See further Ronald Bruce St. John (2012) Libya: From Colony to Revolution (Oxford: Oneworld Publications).

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ See further D. Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya.

²⁷ John Barger (2002) Gender Law in the Jamahiriyya: An Application to Libya of Mounira Charrad’s Theory of State Development and Women’s Rights, The Journal of Libyan Studies, 3(1), pp. 30–41.

²⁸ Maja Naur (1986) Political Mobilization and Industry in Libya (Uppsala: Akademisk Forlag).

²⁹ J. Barger, Gender Law in the Jamahiriyya. For the significance of kin groups to state formation across the Maghreb, see Mounira M. Charrad (2001) States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

³⁰ D. Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya.

³¹ For an overview and theoretical analysis of how the responsibilities of the Revolutionary Committees evolved over the course of several years in the late 1970s and 1980s, see Matteo Capasso (2013) Understanding Libya’s ‘Revolution’ through Transformation of the Jamahiriyya into a State of Exception, Middle East Critique, 22(2), pp. 115–128. See also L. Anderson (1987) Libya’s Qaddafi: Still in Command?, Current History, 86(517), pp. 65–68 and 86–87.

³² Ethan Chorin (2012) Exit the Colonel: The Hidden History of the Libyan Revolution (New York: Public Affairs).

³³ John Wright (1982) Libya: A Modern History (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press).

³⁴ St. John, Libya: From Colony to Revolution.

³⁵ Alison Pargeter (2008) Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 95.

³⁶ Author Interview, Maryam, Tripoli, February 23, 2014.

³⁷ A. Pargeter, Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi, p. 167.

³⁸ Author Interview, Maryam.

³⁹ Author Interview, Nazīha, Tripoli, February 8, 2014.

⁴⁰ Author Phone Interview, ‘Abd-Allah, January 27, 2016.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Author Interview, Nazīha.

⁴³ Zumīṭa is a simple, old staple Libyan dish composed of a mixture of barley or wheat, olive oil, and water.

⁴⁴ Author Interview, Fuzia, Tripoli, February 23, 2014.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ ‘Īd refers to two periods of celebration among Muslims, one of which follows fasting during the month of Ramadan (‘Īd al-Fitr) and another that commemorates the commandment by God to Abraham that he sacrifice one of his sons (‘Īd al-Adhā).

⁴⁷ A light, sweet cake made of flour, eggs, sugar, oil, and, occasionally, vanilla.

⁴⁸ A spicy red paste made of chili peppers that is used widely in North Africa and frequently is eaten in Libya on tuna sandwiches or with eggs.

⁴⁹ Author Interview, Nagiyya, Tripoli, February 6, 2014.

⁵⁰ Ibid.