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reading period：23.8 - 2.9.2018 

《The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between》

This is a true story. This is the 7th book of Pulzer Prize book in this year. It happened in Libya. I have never really followed what happened in Libya, heard many times of this name though — Qaddafi. Throw this book, I learned so many about Libya.  

Muammar al-Qaddafi seized control of the Libyan government in 1969 and deposed King Idris. He had ruled as a dictator for more than 40 years until 2011. He was born in Libya in 1942. However, his corruption, military interference in Africa, and record of horrific human rights abuses turned much of the Libyan population against him. During the “Arab Spring” of 2011, NATO troops overthrow Qaddafi’s government. After months, he was killed in his hometown. 

His family and his dad

The Author - Hisham Matar was born in New York and have been lived in many cities. His dad was dictator’s enemy. His dad was the target of Qaddafi’s government. "The people like his father had been shot in train station or cafes, their car blown up.” "Whenever there were in Europe, his dad carried a gun. Before getting into the car, his dad would ash them to stand well away. He would go down on his knees and look under the chassis, cup his hands and peek through the windows for any sign of wiring.”

Why his father was the target? Here in the book gave informations. 

"His father had made a small fortune importing Japanese and Western goods to the Middle East. The can live lavishly. The money also helped fuel his father’s political activism.

 His father set up a fund for Libyan students abroad and supported various scholarly project. 

His father’s financial resources matched his political commitment which made him dangerous to the Qaddafi regime. 

His father was a leader. 

He knew how to manage and organize a movement. 

He coordinated several training camps on Chad, close to the Libyan border.  

He did not only pour his own money into this, he also had a gift for raising large donations and would shuttle around the world convincing wealthy Libyan exiles to support his organization.  It’s annual budget in the early 1980s was 7Million dollar. By the late of 1980s, figure had gone up to 15M dollars. 

He personally commanded the same all army in Chad.” 

Their families were being monitored or caught. When his sibling was 15, he went off to boarding school in Switzerland. There were four men following him all the way. Luckily he got escaped. When he was 12, he went to Geneva to see eye specialist. At the airport, he realised why his dad was not allowed him to call dad’s name. His dad was kidnapped from Carol and delivered to Qaddafi in 1990. With help of different organizations, he was able to find out that his father was in Abu Salin prison at lease from 1990 to 1996 after that he was moved or executed. At same time, his uncles and cousins together 5 persons got kidnapped. 

Author made lots of effort vie many NGO, Human Rights Watch and other organisation to help relatives and to find out what exactly happened to his father.  Seif  Qaddafi helped to release author’s relatives. But he was not told by Seif that those relatives had to sign a formal apology, otherwise none could be released.

Until 2011,  revolutionaries took control of Abu Salem. They still didn’t have any information about their fathers. His sibling believed that their father might alive. This was why they went back to Libya to seek the truth.  Although it has never been confirmed, the most probable day his father’s life ended was the 29th of June 1966, 1270 prisoners were executed in the massacre.

Libya was under controlled of Italy 

Libya has been occupied by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans and the Italians. The Italian arrived in 1911. They had calculated rightly that the few Ottoman garrisons based in coastal towns would quickly fall. What they did not expect, was the determination, discipline as stamina of local resistance.  Between 1911-1916, Italian terms “Arab Revolt”, more than 5000 men were banished from the city and sent to small islands around Italy and kept in prisons there. The population of Tripoli at that time was only 30 000.

Those men were sent to prisons were scholars, jurists. Wealthy traders and bureaucrats. Some historians claim that one-quarter of the 5000 men lost their lives during the passage. One Danish report had been visited the camps. His book 《Desert Encounter: An Adventurous Journey through Italian Africa》 is a deeply troubling account and a rare documents. 

His Italian host, an army officer, brings him to one of the camps:  "The Camp was immense. It contained at least 1500 tens and had a population of 6000 - 8000 people. It was fenced in with barbed wire, and there were guards with machine-guns at every entrance. As we drove up among the tents children came running towards us. They were in rags and hungry, half-starved, but evidently they were accustomed to getting money from the Commandant on his visits, for they stretched out their hands and shouted in Italian: “Un soldo, signore, un soldo!”… The Bedouins gathered round us. They looked incredibly ragged. On their feet were hides tied with string; their burnouses were a patchwork of all kinds of multi-coloured pieces. Many of them seemed ill and wretched, limping along with crooked backs, or with arms and legs that were terribly deformed. "  

Official Italian census records show that the population of Cyrenaica plummeted from 225000 to 142000. The Orphans, numbering in the thousands, were sent to Fascist camps to be ‘re-educated’. An Italian general boasted that between 1930 and 1931 the army reduced the number of sheep and goats from 270 00 to 67 000. So many people starved to death.

His Grandpa

His grandpa lived on exceptionally long life. Over 100years old. He was an only child, born In Ottoman Libya. He witnessed the Italian invasion, the region of King Idris, and saw the two decades that followed Qaddafi’s coup d’etat of 1969. Near seventy he had his youngest boy, author’s uncle. Nobody thought that he would see him walk, since the life expectancy was around 65. But his grandpa saw his uncle graduate, marry and have children of his own.

His grandpa had joined the resistance immediately after the 1911 invasion. But his could not understand why his grandpa took all family members to Alexandria and stayed there about 20 years. He had became a successful tradesman. After the execution of Sidi Qmar, his grandpa was arrested in Egypt and sent to Italy. Normally it meant execution. However nobody knew that his grandpa escaped after a few days his arrest. When he finally got home, his grandma kept squeezing her husband’s hand to make sure he was not a ghost. He closed the business and the whole family moved back to Libya.

Abu Salim prison 1996’s massacre in Libya and what happened later for many families

Abu Salim prison is a maximum security prison in Tripoli, Libya. The prison was notorious during the rule of Muammar Gaddafi for alleged mistreatment and human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch estimated that 1270 prisoners were killed. 被处决的人大都是政治犯，包括敢于发表反卡扎菲言论的伊斯兰教士和学生。他们在1996年6月举行暴动，抗议监狱条件恶劣，结果遭到军队枪杀，这些军队受卡扎菲核心领导层某些成员的指挥。

It was in 2001. The families were visited by plainclothed officials to ask their Family Book. A couple of days later the book would be returned.  Most of families did not notice the alteration until servers days or weeks or even months later. One family would like to register a new-born and they saw the imprisoned grandfather had been dead years. Another family a women didn’t notice at the beginning. Suddenly someday she just could not account for. He woke up in the middle of the night and took the book. She found that a line written in sting blue ink against her son’s name read : Died 1996 of natural causes. In the year before 1996, she visited his son in Tripoli to  bring her son’s clothes, vitamins, food etc. but after 1996, she couldn’t. It was not permitted. However guards never neglected to tell her try again next time. She continued to cook and purchase gifts and write letter to her son. Turns out, letters were throwing away, food and clothes were eaten and sold out by guards.

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