"What Can You Do?"

"Maybe you hesitate or seem nervous and they will think you have something to hide. Not all of them are good people."

"If they don't know who you are, and are in their part of town, and you have a nice car, then they are going to think you are a car thief or they say you are with Gadhafi."

The arrests, the maltreatment, the beatings and the superfluous killing is not just taking place on the part of the government troops wreaking vengeance on the upstart rebels when they have the opportunity. It seems that the panic and the chaos and the unrest has brought equal opportunity to the fore.

In that people in Benghazi who are even remotely suspected of having sympathy with the government are being rounded up, taken away, and sometimes murdered. Or simply have disappeared. Accused of being Gadhafi supporters, this constitutes a death sentence. Gangs of vigilantes are doing their thing.

Their thing is setting up roadblocks consisting of anything that comes to hand, to officiously control entry and exit from neighbourhoods. Anyone who appears suspicious is taken away, interrogated, beaten and accused. Frenzied mobs hearing that purported spies for Gadhafi have breached their city are prepared to dispatch them.

The rebel leaders, the interim government in the east, represent professionals: academics, businesspeople, lawyers who have had the privilege of receiving their education abroad in Britain or the United States. They know all about democracy, about human rights and about legalities and justice, and they know the right words to use in expressing that knowledge.

They also admit, however reluctantly, that brutal meting out of 'justice' in the city has been perpetrated by rebel gangs in fear of infiltration by government loyalists. The rebels' provisional government spokesman speaks of hundreds of government supporters living in the city, and their sleeper cells.

"We know where they live and many have been rounded up. There are people looking for them. A lot have been caught and killed." Some people, he explained, had simply been detained to protect them. The revolutionary council is not inciting the mobs toward murder.

"But if they start shooting, what can you do?"