@ericraymondjreric
JADU, Libya — As armed rebellions go, the enthusiastic revolutionaries here in Libya’s western mountains are am... http://wapo.st/oC0d3X
As a few thousand poorly armed, barely trained young rebels wearing flip-flops and soccer jerseys advance and retreat against the loyalist forces of Moammar Gaddafi, a quiet but perhaps equally important revolution is taking place here behind the front lines, where people are reassembling a society after four decades of dictatorship, trying to hammer concepts such as democracy onto ancient tribal ways.
At a checkpoint near the front lines in the town of al-Qualish, as the two sides lobbed rockets at each other, a young rebel fighter with a rifle dating from the Italian occupation in the first half of the 20th century shouted to a reporter, “Thomas Jefferson good!”
Where once there was the paranoid silence of state censorship, now there are over-caffeinated “media centers” with satellite Internet and lots of ashtrays, staffed by eager young volunteers speaking bits of Manchester English, obsessed with this brand-new thing called free Internet access.
At the Wazin border crossing with Tunisia, where the charred remains of a couple of tanks line the empty roads, the Free Libya passport control officer demanded, “Hey, friend me!”
Each of the uprisings of the Arab Spring has its own narrative and personality, and here in the mountains south of Tripoli, where Berber shepherds still tend flocks beside the crumbling walls of thousand-year-old granaries, the vibe is eager, confident, hopeful.
