Osama, who picked us up at the airport, spoke very shaky English.
He was charming, but clearly hadn’t a clue what was going on. “Do not fear, the people are not klefty,” he reassured us. And indeed he was right… the Libyans are disarmingly polite, as well as friendly; they speak little French or English – Italian is the second language – and they are absolutely not klefty. We left our bags in the back of an unlocked car on the streets of Tripoli for days, and they remained untouched.
And this in spite of a great deal of poverty and massive – maybe as much as 30% - unemployment; though the country has enormous oil wealth, as is the case with Algeria, there is little trickle down.
One of the blessings of Libya is that there is no advertising on hoardings. What you get instead is endless portrayals of the Colonel looking very much like an old rocker, and, this year, the number 37. It’s thirty seven years since the “White Revolution” – so called because it was bloodless – when Ghaddafi and his military friends eased power from the old king Idriss. One of the exhibits in the National Museum is the turquoise Volkswagen beetle in which Ghaddafi used to travel the country distributing revolutionary tracts. It’s about as potent a symbol of a people’s revolution as could be.
