The New, Transformed Libya

"He's [Muammar Gaddafi] dead now. His sons and the other people who were doing the dirty work for him are either out of the country or in jail. They have to face the consequences of what they did. And that's good enough."
It is my country [Libya], as Canada is my country. I was always proud to be a Libyan but I was ashamed to say such a man was our president."
"People were dying for nothing, just for speaking. The guy was killing, killing, killing."
"We resisted them. We fought back, we fought back, we fought back. But they had more power than we did. We couldn't keep them away."
Tarek Ben-Kura, Libyan-Canadian Montrealer

Courtesy of First to Fall   The documentary film First to Fall with Canadian Tarek Ben-Kura, above, shows how Canadians of Libyan heritage went to fight the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

"You could tell there was some naivete as far as what they would experience but they also were so idealistic, as were many people in Libya at the beginning. For them, this was their chance to make a difference."
"Once you're telling the story, you have this feeling that 'I can't leave until I have the full story'. That was the hardest thing."
Rachel Beth Anderson, filmmaker

Tarek Ben-Kura was born in Canada, lived part of his life in Libya, but came back to Canada with his family. Now 25 years old, he is trying to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also copes with life in a wheelchair. Three years ago he decided he would depart Canada when the Libyan uprising against the Libyan dictator began. He most surely was an idealist, certainly not what one might consider to be fighting material, as a business student at Bishop's University in Montreal.

On arrival in Benghazi, he began basic weapons training, determined to help Libyan rebels remove Muammar Gaddafi from power. Though there are no figures on how many Libyan-Canadians fought alongside the rebels backed by NATO during Libya's 2011 conflict, where Canadian air power helped to destroy the regime's ground troops and kept their planes out of the air by bombing them into uselessness, Mr. Ben-Kura states he met other students from Canada prepared to fight in Libya.

They were motivated, he said, by Libyan nationalism, by hatred of their tyrant, and by the promise they interpreted was taking place as a result of the 'Arab Spring'. Libya's North African 'King of Kings' was said to have plotted the assassination of other Arab leaders; claims being made he had once claimed he intended to "behead them one by one". He was a notorious supporter of terrorism, inciting terrorists to wreak havoc within the continent and in the greater world at large.

He helped to arm the IRA. He permitted terrorists to camp in the Libyan desert. His agents were responsible for bombing a Berlin disco. They brought down a Pan-Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing hundreds aboard. He invited the leaders of Canada's neo-Nazi movement to visit with him in his capital of Tripoli. He had more latterly, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, agreed to surrender his drive toward nuclear weaponry.

Olivier Laban Mattei for The New York Times  Fliers urging support for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya make the rounds in Bamako, Mali.

Other North African nations like Mali and Liberia were highly dependent on Gaddafi's generosity, funding them and the African Union with billions in support of their impoverished condition, thanks to the abundant treasury he amassed due to the oil riches that Libya possessed. Libya's vast oil reserves enabled Gaddafi to spread billions around sub-Saharan Africa, investing in governments, rebel groups, luxury hotels, Islamic organizations, rubber factories, rice paddies, diamond mines, supermarkets and OiLibya gas stations.

Within Libya itself there are 100 different tribes, many of which, like his own, jockeyed constantly to position themselves for superior recognition, dominance and profit. Gaddafi was resourceful and relentlessly brutal in ensuring that they all knuckled under to his iron grip of the country. Mr. Ben-Kura had gone to Libya with a friend, another Montreal student, Hamid Fawzi Elfaghi. Eventually Hamid went to the Misrata front, and Mr. Ben-Kura went to Zawiyah.

And there it was, when confronting a Libyan military unit, that he was shot first in the thigh, and once again in the stomach, the bullet passing through his spine, leaving him paralyzed below the waist. He was sped to a hospital in Zintan, then on to Tunisia, spending months in hospital there before returning to Canada in October 2011 and admitted to Montreal General Hospital where he spent another 2-1/2 months at the rehabilitation institute.

He nurses his hopes; both for himself that he will some day walk again, and also for Libya where he feels a new era of promise has surfaced for the country. That, despite the very fact that competing, violent tribal forces have kept the country from forming a government capable of administering the affairs of the country by refusing to surrender their arms to a national military presence. And the fact that Islamists associated with al-Qaeda have continued to gain ground there.

"Most importantly", said Mr. Ben-Kura, in a show of bravura, "I don't regret it [his decision to travel to the country of his birth and sacrifice the quality of his life for the greater good of Libya becoming a 'normal' country with peace and security prevailing]." 

What's done is done, but Libya looks a far way from the kind of country that can present security to its population; Islamism continues on its relentless march.