Morocco And Algeria: A Sports Competition

By Mohammad el-Ashab

This commentary was published in al-Hayat on 27/03/2011

The growing interest in the soccer game between Morocco and Algeria is quite interesting especially in light of the hot games that are currently taking place between the opponents of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the remnants of his supporters. Escaping to a space of sports games is less sad and painful to watch than the series of merciless killing. However, the Moroccans and Algerians who had confronted each other in the spaces of ongoing political disputes are fighting on the sports level this time, through a game that is deemed crucial by both teams.

No tracks are kept for victories and failures in the sports field because good sportsmanship accepts positive as well as negative results. However, [the victories and failures] allow for the testing of the popular tendencies. Indeed, in times of depression, people get excited about any victory, even if it is a sports related one. Ever since the two neighboring countries started having their differences in the mid-1970s, the sports competitions started to go off track; although sports competitions are normally supposed to reflect man’s ability to challenge nature and prove his skills, all the while accounting for considerations where money, politics and sportsmanship intertwine.

Morocco and Algeria represent an exception to the effect of border closure at a time where [borders] are no longer subjected to any obstacles as people and goods move [freely] on the banks of the sweeping globalization where there is no place for seclusion. In addition, there are always differences between the officials of the two countries, whether on the level of the dealing with the desert conflict, or on the level of the approaches for confronting illegal emigration and global terrorism. Facts have shown that declaring animosity almost precedes thinking about common grounds or crucial challenges.

This is exactly where the negative repercussions of any kind of estrangement appear. The most obvious repercussion is that the logic of the differences, which controls the popular ramifications, is no longer confined to the political structure, as it has gone beyond them and has established psychological and social barriers between the two neighboring populaces. And when non-governmental organizations – such as the Union of the Maghreb Writers and the Syndical Centers in North Africa – as well as the cooperation fields between the Moroccan businessmen used to constitute a breathing space that enhances understanding and agreement, things have now stooped as low as to allow the political decision makers to monopolize the public directions. Amid these unnatural situations, it was only natural that the sports competitions would be affected by the splinters of the differences in light of a growing feeling that the conflict now encompasses every field.

One can possibly understand the conflicts caused by the desire to host major sports competitions – such as the African Nations Cup or the World Cup, where the Maghreb had been unlucky ever since the 1990s – since this entails competitions with economic, commercial, and media related dimensions. However, it is unacceptable for those sports competitions – which represent a means for brotherhood, coexistence and peace – to turn into something else. There are fears concerning a potential problem in the Sunday game which will be hosted by Algeria because there have been instances where sports derailed off their natural track and caused crises in the relationships between the countries, especially the Arab ones.

Perhaps American President Nixon is the one who once made a bet on opening up to the rebelling China by launching a sports dialogue through tennis. However, this picture was tainted by another kind of tendency, in the same way that the relations between Morocco and South Africa suffered from degradation when the latter received the honor of hosting the World Cup during the last year. And although the sports competition ended, the dispute concerning the desert issue between Morocco and South Africa actually increased. However, the Moroccans and the Algerians can thaw some of their differences on the sports level as long as they are unable to thaw them through the Maghreb structure or at a bilateral level.

Soccer failures teach people how to modify plans and how to replace players and even coaches. However, political failures are met with fewer reactions. There is no greater failure than to revert to estrangement especially that the wind of a global change is blowing on the region of North Africa. One must go along by modifying one’s mentality mainly by giving soccer games their natural size as a test for capacities and skills, no more and no less. Congratulations for those who win or lose while preserving a high sportsmanship.

Syria: Reform Or Force?

By Tariq Alhomayed
This commentary was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 28/03/2011

There are reports of two different schools of thought in Damascus, fighting with one another regarding how to deal with the current events in Syria, following a wave of protests in several cities. One side believes that the time has come for reform, and that this is an unavoidable fact, whilst the other side believes that further force should be used to crush the protests. Which of the two theories will prevail in Syria?
 
There is no doubt that further repression would buy the regime more time, any regime for that matter, but it cannot save it. The clearest examples of this are Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. Both exhausted the use of force, and all means of oppression, but the time for change still came, and when it did it was a harsh reality for the rulers.
 
Can Damascus continue to prosecute a journalist under the accusation of “weakening national morale”, as it has done recently? Can it imprison a child of 15 years of age, accused of threatening national security, as it did a few weeks ago? Such acts are incompatible with the new variables that have come about in the Middle East. Whether the final outcome is positive or negative, there has been a real change in our region.
 
Whether or not Egypt becomes a real democracy, or if the only achievement of the revolution is limiting the duration of a presidential term, and the same goes for Libya, Tunisia, and other states, will the Syrian regime then be able to remain inactive? Of course not. What happened in Syria tells us a lot: the Syrians have rejected the slogans that the state has long been repeating; such as the country's preoccupation with resistance. These empty slogans have now been replaced with stark warnings, about the dangers of meddling with minority-majority, and sectarian issues. The Syrians, like the Egyptians before them, have publicly declared their rejection for the oldest emergency rule in the region, along with many other issues.
 
Therefore, the course of events in our region (from which Syria is not excluded) tells us that Damascus has no option other than [introducing] more reforms in a timely manner, so that it does not miss the opportunity to resolve the situation, and the opposition do not raise their demands to impossibilities. The time has come for Damascus to pay more attention to its internal issues, and to seriously work towards providing decisive solutions with regards to political representation, and the democratic transfer of power. The republic will remain a republic, and there is no magic solution to these problems.
 
Of course, Syria announced the reformative steps it has undertaken, or would take in the future, such as abolishing emergency law, [creating] a new law for the media, dismissing certain members of the government, and so on. These are all important and vital decisions, by Syrian standards. But the real question is: is this enough? Or does reform have to continue, and do more drastic steps have to be taken? I believe that the course of events tells us that reforms are the only solution, and inaction only leads to death. Therefore, Damascus today is facing a critical moment, and must seriously re-evaluate its approach to internal and external [issues]. Today is different to yesterday, and tomorrow may be different once again. The fear barrier has not only been broken in Syria alone, but in the entire Arab region. We all know that violence breeds violence, and as a result there is no 'magic' solution, except introducing further reforms.

Great Leaps Forward In Syria And Jordan

By Rami G Khouri
This commentary was published in The Daily Star on 28/03/2011 

Events in Jordan and Syria last week marked perhaps the most significant leap forward in the continuing Arab citizens’ revolt against the modern Arab security state since the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes.

The public challenge to the pervasive and efficient security and intelligence services in both countries has meant that citizens have crossed a major threshold in demanding changes in the conduct of their respective power systems. Should power configurations and policies change in Jordan and Syria – given their links with Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia – the entire Middle East will be impacted in important ways.

I have been in Damascus and Amman in the past week and discussed the current regional upheavals with regime stalwarts, opposition or independent figures, and ordinary citizens. The ruling elites in both countries are neither willing to admit that the regional democracy wave is lapping at their doors nor clear about how to respond.

Jordan and Syria have portrayed themselves as immune to the regional pressures for change, and assume that their large and omnipresent security sectors can control any outburst of democratic agitation. On both counts, last week suggested, they are almost certainly wrong.

The outburst of small demonstrations in several Syrian cities that culminated in the major clashes in the southern town of Daraa, leaving close to 100 people dead, coincided with a bold move Thursday by hundreds of young Jordanian activists to set up a permanent tent encampment in front of the Interior Ministry. There they vowed to remain until their demands for serious constitutional reform and an end to corruption were met.

What is truly significant is that in both cases the Jordanian and Syrian authorities have been forced to make major promises to examine how they can respond to the demonstrators’ demands. These demands include ending emergency laws, amending the Constitution, changing government officials, and allowing greater political pluralism and government accountability.

Two other dimensions of events in Syria and Jordan last week were important to note. The first was that demonstrators were publically calling for ending or reducing the security and intelligence agencies’ interference in routine affairs of state and society that are unrelated to what we might call pure security threats. The second was that those demonstrating and calling for real change were not from one party or group. Rather, they represented a variety of groups in society that, together, form a formidable coalition of discontented citizens.
In the Jordanian demonstrations that have taken place every Friday, and now in the “March 24” tent encampment that the demonstrators have called “Tahrir Square,” emulating the Cairo piazza that anchored the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, leftists, nationalists and Islamists have joined together to demand real reforms. They chanted: “The people want to reform the regime. We want the corrupt put on trial. Revolts are around us, it is your turn Jordan. Intelligence Department, we want your hands off politics!”

Such public demands of the king and criticism of the powerful General Intelligence Department are novel developments. King Abdullah earlier this week had ordered an acceleration of results from the “national dialogue committee” that he established last month, which is hobbling along because of a boycott by Islamists who do not think the king or prime minister are serious about reform. This follows the king’s changing of the prime minister and government two months ago in the face of weekly protests. He had promised “quick, practical, and concrete steps to launch a process of genuine political reform, comprehensive development, and strengthening democracy.”

In Syria, similarly, a regime that had been in total control of every dimension of society and public life now finds itself forced to respond to the demands of citizens who braved the security services to march in the streets. After the Daraa deaths and the rising number of citizens who defied a ban on public demonstrations, the government Thursday said it would consider lifting draconian restrictions on political freedom and civil liberties, including the lifting of a state of emergency that has been in effect since 1963. A close presidential adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, also said the government was drafting a law that would end the Baath Party’s political predominance, loosen media controls, fight corruption, and provide public servants with higher salaries and health insurance.

Important new dynamics are taking hold in Jordan and Syria, reflecting a fearless boldness in the activism of citizens who had long remained docile in the face of pervasive security controls. Where all this will lead is not clear, but it is clear that a historic page has been turned in the Levant, as has happened in North Africa. Strong and assertive governments now find themselves responding defensively, and not always convincingly, to a public political agenda that is being defined by young men and women in the streets.

Yemen’s Saleh Facing ‘Reality’

By Ahmed al-Jarallah
This commentary was published in Arab Times on 28/03/2011

YEMEN’S PRESIDENT Ali Abdullah Saleh has unequivocally declared his readiness to relinquish power and hand it over to secure hands in accordance with constitutional requirements. With that declaration, he put the opposition before the reality mirror and offered them the task of preserving national unity in Yemen. It is now mandatory for those who called on him to leave power to prove that they are not tools in the hands of foreign masters who want evil to befall Yemen. This is a country already suffering from compounding economic woes and serious separation fears among its sections; therefore, this opposition must come out with something concrete to save the country from a very bleak fate.

The Yemeni President hasn’t been stripped of popular support as in the case of some Arab regimes, and he is almost at par with the opposition in terms of public support. Despite this, he has chosen the middle course to avert bloodshed like the kind we are seeing in Libya currently, especially since he knows that there are 60 million guns in Yemen as every citizen owns one! He wants to prevent the type of pandemonium Egypt has been enmeshed in since the exit of president Hosni Mubarak.

Yemen must not be allowed to become another Somalia, especially due to the presence of pro-separation blocs which had never hidden their intentions. President Saleh has been coming up with one initiative after other, all in the desire to forestall any of the aforementioned scenarios. However, the dictatorial behavior of the opposition has prevented it from listening to the voice of reason and to allow real dialogue where a national transition program could be laid. Does it want to hand over the country to al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and other evil powers? Does it want to create chaos in the country?

The picture in Yemen has become clear to all observers; the extremist demands are being confronted with radical attempts to preserve national unity and stability. There are also some people who are bent on ruining Yemen by hurling accusations of killing against President Saleh. Now, there is a possibility of a counter allegation by pro-regime elements, and then the whole country might erupt in free-for-all killing spree, drowning it in chaos. The Yemeni opposition today has the obligation to save its country by listening to the voice of reason declared by President Ali Abdullah Saleh, or else it would be committing the crime of the century against its own country, and against its people and unity.

North Africa is Europe's Problem – Not Obama's

The EU, not America, must take the lead against Gaddafi
This editorial was published in The Observer on 27/03/2011

Committees are sometimes the fairest way to decide policy; rarely, if ever, are they the most efficient. As a system for conducting wars, their shortcomings are obvious.

Public concern about the risks of intervention in Libya are hardly allayed by the impression that no one appears to be taking ultimate political charge of the mission.

The diplomatic impetus for action came from France and Britain. The US was, after some delay, recruited as a key advocate. Most of the military assets being used in the operation come from members of the Nato alliance. The Arab League is providing diplomatic support and some hardware in the form of Qatari and UAE jets.

The tactical imperative of halting Colonel Gaddafi's assault on Benghazi meant it was necessary last week to shoot missiles first and ask organisational questions later. But those questions quickly reasserted themselves. Almost as quickly, they led to disagreement among anti-Gaddafi allies.

The US does not want to take the lead role, preferring Nato members in Europe to conduct a conflict on their Mediterranean flank. That idea was then bogged down in disagreement between France and Turkey, both Nato members, but with different views of what should be happening in Libya. Paris wants maximum freedom to interpret the UN mandate for intervention. Ankara is more circumspect, wary of a creeping escalation of Nato involvement in North Africa. Britain's view seems to be expressed mainly in sullen whispers of disappointment that the Americans are not more engaged.

For now, the significance of these disagreements should not be exaggerated. But they do expose fault lines that will become more dangerous if the Libyan operation drags on, as well it may. It is revealing also how disorderly the strategic and military dialogue can be among Europeans when the US does not hold their hands.

There are good reasons why Washington wants to be a semi-detached partner. American forces have heavy commitments in Afghanistan. Public opinion in the US is not remotely prepared for a campaign against Gaddafi. Washington has little cause to agitate for regime change in Tripoli. President Obama might plausibly have decided – as indeed he appears initially to have done – that this particular North African rebellion was not his fight. Only late in the day was he persuaded that it was a cause worth fighting for.

Such ambivalence has led to charges of fatal vacillation against the White House. An alternative view is that President Obama, for obvious reasons, weighed his country's interests carefully before committing to another risky military intervention in a fissile Arab country. Having agreed to get involved, perhaps President Obama also surmised that an all-American banner draped over the operation would make it harder to win support in the Arab world and thereby hinder the chances of success.

All of the strategic logic of this conflict points to a predominantly European operation. Tripoli is a short boat ride away from the border of the EU. It is thousands of miles away from Washington. Historically and economically, Libya is in Europe's backyard. Seen from the American perspective, it is a bit rich for Europeans, many of whom are quick to complain about US global hegemony, also to lament a lack of transatlantic GI swagger in a crisis.

The idea of a more assertive, collective continental foreign and security policy has been the ambition of a number of European leaders in recent years. It was a key rationale behind the EU's much-disliked Lisbon treaty, which came into effect last year. But those ambitions have looked painfully naive as a social and political conflagration has torn through North Africa and the Middle East

The US is looking weary of policing the world and, rightly or wrongly, feels starved of gratitude when it does. Nato will take command in Libya, so the US continues to have a major stake in military operations. But the lesson is clear: whatever happens next in North Africa, it is Europe's problem.

Ottoman Adventures Hold Lessons For Our Leaders

By Robert Fisk
This commentary was published in The Independent on 26/03/2011

Amid the fury of the Arab awakening – not to mention our own deepening crisis over Libya – old Constantinople is a tonic, a reminder amid minarets and water, palaces and museums and bookshops and an ancient parliament and a thousand fish restaurants that this really was the only united capital the Arabs ever had.

The sultans used to call Beirut the jewel in the crown of the Ottomans, but two days walking the streets of modern Istanbul – its tens of thousands thronging past the old trams on Independence Street – made me understand for the first time just how tiny a place Lebanon was on the great Ottoman map. Nor can you escape the Ottomans. There in Taksim are the great old embassies of the British and Americans, below them the great banks of the powers which benefited from the "capitulations", the ancient Hotel Grande Bretagne with its crazy chandeliers, brief home to both Ataturk and Hemingway. Suddenly, I am brought up sharply by a photograph from 1917 of two Ottoman Turkish soldiers. They stand in the desert – Palestine? Syria? Arabia? – in literal rags, sack-like hats above haunted faces, their trousers hanging in strips over their legs. Oddly, there appears to be an early propeller aircraft behind them. Were these the teenagers Lawrence fought against in the Arab revolt, the precursor to the typhoon now engulfing the Middle East?

And in a bookshop by the tram stop on Istiklal, I buy Andrew Mango's life of Ataturk, more than a decade old but with the freshness of original research on the founder of modern Turkey. Yes, there are the usual weasel words about Armenian massacres ("hotly disputed", of course) but also an extraordinary account of Mustafa Kemal's early military career, sneaking through Alexandria to fight for the anti-Italian Arab rebels of – well, here we go – Libya. And there are the familiar names. Tobruk. Benghazi. Zawiya. Enver Pasha, a far darker figure in Turkish history – just ask the Armenians – was Ottoman commander in Cyrenaica, besieging Italian forces in Benghazi, dedicated to unifying the tribes of the Senussi (yes, the very same Senussi who are hoping we will win their war for them against Gaddafi) against the Italians. The Senussis, by the way, were founded by an Algerian called Muhammad Ibn Ali al-Senussi who established himself in Cyrenaica in 1843. The tribe's story, which ran up to King Idris (overthrown by a certain Colonel Gaddafi in 1969), is sharply outlined when Mango points out that "Muslim solidarity (in war) was effective when it complemented self-interest and the instinct of self-defence".

There are more paragraphs that might be read by the David Camerons of this world. There's a wonderful line in Mango's book in which he explains that "the Arabs had to be shown that the regenerated Ottoman state was capable of defending them", while Mustafa Kemal himself says of the Libyan campaign that "at the time, I myself saw that it was hopeless". One hundred and 80 Ottomans and 8,000 Arabs were able to surround 15,000 Italians but "the Arab tribesmen came and went as the spirit moved them". The main concern of the sheikhs, Mustafa Kemal discovered, was to make as much money as possible – and that the longer the war lasted, the more money they got their hands on.

At one point, Enver Pasha sent a friend of the future Ataturk to a Senussi oasis (Calo). He later wrote: "In this blessed spot even three-year-old girls are not allowed out. Females live and die where they are born. Such is the local custom. Although in military camps there are both men and women, we have not been able to see a woman's face for the last three months, as they are all hidden behind heavy veils. We lead ascetic lives... If we go on from here, our next stop will surely be paradise." Strange, though, the tricks of history. Ottoman Turkey was to ally itself to Germany three years later – Ataturk would distinguish himself at Gallipoli – and was then to crumble when Germany lost the war. Yet today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those same Turks are vilified in present-day Germany for having too many children, speaking little German and surviving on welfare payments. And last year, Chancellor Merkel claimed that efforts to build a "multicultural" society had "utterly failed" in Germany, a statement supported by David Cameron, who knows as much about Turkish migrants as he does about Libyan history.

For in reality, this is false history. Germany never embarked on any kind of altruistic experiment in "multiculturalism". Turks came to Germany to do the work which Germans did not want to do. The Gastarbeiter were encouraged to go to Germany to provide cheap labour rather than to act as guests in some extraordinary social programme of inter-cultural advancement; just as the first black Britons arrived after the Second World War to help to rebuild Britain – not because we wanted to give them better homes. Ataturk, of course, wanted Turkey to be European as much as Merkel and Cameron would prefer the Turks all went back to the Ottoman Empire. Maybe, however, our masters in Europe (Sarkozy, just as much as Cameron) would do well to browse through a biography of Ataturk in these heady days. The Balkan war forced the Ottomans to abandon Cyrenaica and accept the Italian annexation of Libya.

Enver Pasha refused to accept this fact of history. He argued it was "dangerous to tell Arab tribesmen that peace had been concluded". The Senussis were thus handed over to the grim mercies of the Italians, whose post-Great War fascist regime would assault them for two decades. The parallels are not exact, of course. But it would be interesting to know – if Gaddafi stays limpet-like in Tripoli – how we are going to tell our faithful "rebels" around Benghazi that Nato has run out of puff and prefers peace to more war.

The Eye Of The Storm

By Patrick Graham 
This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 27/03/2011

BENGHAZI, Libya — A month into its life as the de facto capital of free Libya, the port city of Bengazhi has achieved a strange kind of normal. The cribs, garbage cans, and bed frames that were assembled into fortifications to block the advance of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces are disappearing off the city streets, as are the crates of Pepsi bottle Molotov cocktails. The teenagers who started manning these eccentric barricades last Sunday night are back in Freedom Square -- a pre-revolutionary name -- for their nightly ritual of prayers, hanging out along the boardwalk above the sea, and smoking. The scene among the makeshift tents, set up in the heady days of the revolution by everyone from soccer clubs to former political prisoners, is much as it was few weeks ago, except banners once imploring the international community to step in have been replaced by banners thanking the Americans, British, and above all the French. The crowds of mostly young men now exchange cell phone movies of Qaddafi forces' failed attack on the city.

It had been a close call. When I went out for dinner at a local restaurant a week ago, I found the patrons there in a panic: Benghazi's pro-rebel radio station had called all the young men to come and fight on the highway running west past the city's Garyounis University. Heavy shelling started early Saturday morning and continued all day as tanks supported by rocket launchers pushed into the city. It was Qaddafi's attempt to grab Benghazi, or as much of it as he could, before the international forces' airstrikes began. The logic was clear: crush the city and, in so doing, crush the revolution that started there. By the time the coalition attacks started on Sunday, large parts of the city had evacuated to the east.

But the panic ended as quickly as it began. By Monday afternoon, crowds of local tourists felt safe enough to come out of the city to survey the work of foreign intervention. Tank turrets had been thrown dozens of feet from the vehicles' smoking hulls. Men carried the charred remains of Qaddafi's fighters past discarded 10-foot-long wooden boxes of 1980s-vintage Soviet-made rockets. "We thought Benghazi would just be a memory," said a woman named Amina, attending the first big gathering in Freedom Square after the near-invasion. "We would tell the next generation 'this was Benghazi.'"

The paranoia, too, is receding. Saturday's attack was facilitated by local sleeper cells of Qaddafi's revolutionary councils who laid low in the city after being driven from power in February, hiding their arsenals in schools and empty houses. Somehow, they even managed to conceal tanks in the city, probably by camouflaging them with revolutionary flags, which joined the government army attacking from the west. Many here believe Qaddafi's short radio speeches contained coded messages for the loyalists, calling them to come out of hiding to join the fight. The bodies of some dead Qaddafi fighters displayed in the morgue after the battle wore military fatigues pulled over their civilian clothes, hardly a typical combat uniform. Much of this week, rumors of arrested fifth columnists circulated in the city.

But if Qaddafi's forces no longer run Benghazi, it is still not clear who does. "There is no government per se," Abdul Hafiz Gogha, the spokesman for the rebels' National Transitional Council, told journalists this week. The council, which was assembled in late February, is the closest thing to an authority in the city, and is reputed among Benghazi's tattered middle class and intelligentsia -- from which it is drawn -- to be honest and moderate. But Benghazi is home to nearly 700,000 people, and a month-old deliberative body is not the same thing as a city administration, let alone a national government. Among other things, Libya's monthly pay day -- on which this quasi-socialist state has for decades paid guaranteed salaries to the government-employed majority of its workforce -- is less than a week away; rumors abound that Qaddafi's people emptied the local banks on their way out of town.

It is not much clearer who is running the rebel army -- or even who is in it. On Thursday, the first officer many journalists had seen after weeks of fighting appeared at a press conference in Benghazi: Col. Ahmed Bani, an officer who had defected from Qaddafi's Air Force to join the rebels, announced himself as the spokesman for the new national army. He then explained that the Libyan rebels would have to build that army more or less from scratch; seeking to avoid the potential for a coup, Qaddafi had long ago disbanded the military in favor Praetorian Guard-like security brigades, a mixture of regime loyalists and mercenaries. "From now there is the idea to prepare a new army with new armaments and new morals," Bani said. Then he asked the international community for weapons and ammunition to help the idea along.

He did announce, however, that there was finally a general in charge of this embryonic force: Gen. Khalifa Hafter, long considered the only real choice for a military leader here. Hafter had led Libyan forces in Chad during the last phase of Qaddafi's sporadic nine-year border war with his southern neighbor, ultimately fleeing to the United States. Since the uprising began he has been a mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel-like figure in Libya; people close to him say he has spent the last few days travelling the east of the country organizing the defense of cities and towns in case Qaddafi makes another eastward push.

But for now Hafter's army is mostly theoretical. The fighting near Benghazi is being carried out by the Shabab, young volunteers who show up at the front -- a divided highway in the desert -- with their own weapons and cars. They are the same forces that rushed out of Benghazi shortly after the revolution hoping to free all the cities between here and Tripoli, only to be driven back to the city a few weeks later.

As courageous as they are undisciplined, the fighters' simple tactic is to make quick, abortive jabs at Qaddafi's forces, drawing fire from various kinds of artillery. At the front, it is rare to come across anyone who presents himself as a commander, let alone an officer. The Shabab seem to come from all classes of society, with both secular and religious fighters among them. The other day I met a 19-year old medical student and 22-year old mechanic, equipped with a single uniform and one large knife between the two of them. When tank shells and rockets began to land a few hundred yards away, the mechanic encouraged us to hop in a pickup truck that was joining the mad exodus from the area. When we stopped half a mile back, the mechanic told us that his brother had been killed in a similar attack that morning. His only other brother had been killed in the initial uprising a few weeks earlier.

The goal of the Shabab, for the moment, is to reach the town of Ajdabiya, which lies five miles across the desert from the front. The occasional air strikes there can be seen from a small rise filled with onlookers. According to Bani, the military spokesman, Qaddafi's soldiers in Ajdabiya are now surrounded by rebel forces and negotiating. If the revolution does re-ignite, this may be how it comes about: Air strikes followed by negotiations for surrender as Qaddafi forces are pressed by fighters inside and outside the cities.

But it is a slim hope. A real military is unlikely to be organized by the rebels for some time and they have rejected any foreign troops, including volunteers from the surrounding countries. As Bani put it, "The only foreign expert we use is Google Earth." A least on the ground -- the sky is another matter. For the moment, the rebels are hoping that continued air strikes will liberate the western town of Misrata and the southern city of Kufra. This would give them a bases in both the south and the west, exposing Qaddafi's flank as well as proving that the rebels are not simply representing a regional revolution as the Libyan leader has tried to portray them. Hopes of liberating Tripoli have not disappeared, but the reality of Qaddafi's weaponry has tempered them drastically.

Should that plan fail, Benghazi and the towns west could become a kind of Kurdistan or Kosovo. Much will depend on how much support Qaddafi can rely on, and how much money he still has to pay the regime loyalists. Historically, there have been cultural differences between the east and west of the country, a geographic division that lies not far from today's front line, which makes partition appear to be a possibility.

But whatever the differences from one end of country to the other, people in Benghazi emphatically believe that this will not become a civil war. They see their enemy as a mafia state run by very few with a great deal of power and little real support. The tribal divisions have been exaggerated, they say, and, unlike Iraq, the population is not divided by major fault lines of either sectarian or ethnic differences that can be exploited. Nor are any of Libya's neighbors in a position to play the complicating role that, say, Iran did in Iraq.

There is a faith among Benghazians that Libyans across the country are united in their dislike of Qaddafi's violence and his family's incredible corruption. The stories of the Qaddafis' greed that circulate here would make the Sopranos envious -- the price of operating a reasonable-sized business in Benghazi is said to be giving a 40 percent share to a Qaddafi as a silent partner. Not insignificantly, there is very real embarrassment over a leader who is even more vulgar and weird in Arabic than he is in English.

But clearly Qaddafi is not finished, even in Benghazi. As Amina and her family filed out of the square on Wednesday night, her son Heithem, a 25-year-old dental student, pulled out his cell phone to show me a film of fighters defending his neighborhood from attack. Amid heavy gunfire and shouting -- "God is Great!" "There is a tank coming!" -- the men with Kalashnikovs hid behind walls, occasionally darting out for a shot. It was hard to understand how they hoped to overcome the tank. Clearly, even filming the fight was an extraordinarily courageous act by Heithem. Still, as the family left, Amina asked me not to use their last name.

"Why?" I asked.

"Qaddafi," she said.

Patrick Graham is a Toronto-based freelance writer who has written for numerous publications including Harper's, Outside, the London Observer, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. He received an Overseas Press Club of America Award for his work in Iraq in 2004.