Women Against the Hangman

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

Benghazi, Libya

Amal Abdullah-Ali is 44, so she has known only two years without Muammar el-Qaddafi, and one effect on her of his life-draining 42-year Libyan dictatorship has been that she “never wanted to give birth in this rubbish country.”

She looked at me hard through thick glasses, the childbearing half of her life lost in Qaddafi’s grim labyrinth. When she was in high school, she had to read his Green Book, which lauds the masses in a state that tramples the masses. In college, her class was taken to see people Qaddafi had hanged — pour encourager les autres.

“He’s tried to change everything, even our memory,” she said. “Now we win or we die.”

People ask: Who are the Libyan “rebels”? Who are the people who now control the eastern part of the country, and besieged western pockets, and battle to wrest Libya from Qaddafi’s brutal hired hands? They are women like Abdullah-Ali, a teacher, people who want a state where, in the words of her cousin Farija Mohamed, “The walls don’t have ears.”

(More here.)