In Gaza it’s calm on Saturday but feels like no end in sight

It’s been an eventful week here. The sheer number of rockets and mortars launched by Palestinian militants last Sunday put Gaza back in the headlines, but the real headline grabber was the bomb that exploded outside the central bus station in West Jerusalem on Wednesday. The first one of its kind in ages. A 60-year-old woman was killed. A British one.

Israel was quick to enforce a gag order on all investigations and proceedings linked to this case. That means none of the Israeli media can report any of the truth – or conjecture – that is presented in court when the suspect is prosecuted. Isn’t that suspicious? How come they didn’t jump on this act of terrorism in the heart of Israel? Shouldn’t the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem be under total curfew with tanks parked outside their houses and Apaches hunting down the terrorists?

And why did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad almost beg for forgiveness – followed by Obama’s condemnation (no condemnation of the killing of four innocent Gazans playing football that same day, just condolences to their families) when Israel doesn’t even want us to know who the suspect is?

The only conceivable probability right now is that the attacker was not Palestinian after all. None of the Palestinian factions, brigades, parties, and fronts, popular or otherwise, claimed responsibility, and that’s something. Sometimes we get press releases from four different brigades saying they fired the same rocket. A bomb in Jerusalem would be probably televised live on Al Aqsa TV- the Hamas mouthpiece on satellite – if only they could do it. The truth is, they don’t want to.

Hamas not only disowned the attack, but it has also been calling on all factions to stop rocket fire, calling on Israel for a hudna – truce. How do you reconcile that with Hamas’s own Izz Al Deen AL Qassam brigades claimed responsibility for shooting at least 30 mortars (Israeli media said 50!) in one day last Sunday? Two Israelis were reportedly injured together with some damage to buildings. Israel replied with an entire week air raids, incursions, and deadly fire that killed innocent civilians. On 22 March, the Israeli army fired high-precision Keshet mortar shells at the Shajaiya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City. Those shells killed four Palestinian civilians, three of them from the same family, including two children.

The Hamas militant wing claiming responsibility is in itself a rare event, as the movement in government has been keen on policing the buffer zone to avoid a repeat of Operation Cast Lead. This has, over the last two years, led to disenfranchisement by hardline militants who are known to have defected to Salafi-Jihadist groups who accuse Hamas of selling out to the occupation, being un-Islamic and corrupt just like the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.

In fact, since the end of the aggression against Gaza, the Hamas movement has repeatedly convened all the factions in the enclave to ensure an unofficial cease-fire, with prime minister Ismayil Haniye appealing publicly to all brigades to refrain from their rocket and mortar launching operations at the buffer zone. The most to come out against this - through their declarations and actual reported operations - have been the armed Popular Resistance Committee and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose military brigades have claimed responsibility for several attacks, sometimes on the same day in which Hamas would have declared its instructions to the factions. Israel always responds that Hamas remains responsible for all attacks coming out of Gaza and normally launches its own air raids on tunnels, empty areas and vacated government buildings. In contrast, the previous Wednesday 16 March, Israel had responded to a Qassam rocket falling near Sderot with the bombing of a Hamas training camp in Netzarim, killing two Palestinians.

Sunday's barrage of mortars and, more importantly, the Hamas militant group's claim of responsibility, preceded by Israel's Netzarim training camp bombing, opened a bracket in the unstated rules between Hamas and Israel. Prior to this, however, there was a sporadic escalation of rocket attacks and Israeli attacks on farmers and fishermen at the bufferzone and at sea starting last December. While 2010 is classified by Israeli intelligence with just 28 total injuries on the Israeli side out of 8,000 conflict-related injuries since the 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada was launched. Palestinian casualties nevertheless soared as Israel stepped up its attacks, leading to speculation about whether or not another Israel was about to wage another war on Gaza, including public statements in this regard by the Israeli establishment.

According to the Israeli military, prior to the 19 March attack, over 30 Grad missiles, Qassam rockets and mortar shells landed in Israeli territory. Grad missiles and a mortar shell landed in southern Israel on 31 January, damaging a vehicle and causing four people "to be treated for shock". The first two months also witnessed more than 12 explosive attacks along the buffer zone and a total of 83 attacks.

The question as to why Al Qassam brigades launched the barrage of mortars into Israel last Sunday is perplexing given that prior to the attack, Hamas had given every indication it had no intention of upsetting the status quo with Israel despite enormous Salafi-Jihadist pressures. It must be seen in the context of the ongoing grassroots calls for unity, taken up a notch by President Mahmoud Abbas when he declared the previous Tuesday that he was ready to come to Gaza "tomorrow" for reconciliation and unity among the factions after he was invited to Gaza by Hamas prime minister Haniye. They might have been calling each others’ bluff, but Al Qassam were not amused.

Al Qassam being directly answerable to and funded by the Syrian exiled leadership of Hamas, one possibility is that the militants and hardliners did not approve of Haniye's invitation to Abbas, exposing once again the currents and counter-currents between the Gaza-based political circles and the hardline Al Qassam elements under the patronage of Khaled Meshal in Damascus. Palestinian nationl unity and reconciliation for these elements has always been viewed highly problematic as they are the ones who stand most to lose if Hamas had to give up total control of the Gaza Strip, mainly because of fears of reprisals of executions carried out in the 2007 coup.

At the same time, the Hamas government has shown to be incapable of dealing with peaceful demonstrations from students for unity launched on 15 March and has been suppressing them brutally ever since. An unprecedented mortar attack on Israel could serve to deflect attention and make Abbas's trip to Gaza unfeasible. Israel would be more than willing to make unity harder than it already is as it has already taken a strong stand against it, telling Abbas he could not push for peace while forming a government of terrorists.

On Thursday night, F-16s bombarded buildings in Gaza City, rocking the entire Gaza Strip.  A couple of injuries reported, but turns out it was only on empty, abandoned buildings, one of them – Safeena Building – built by the US to house the Palestinian Authority’s then secret services in Gaza.

Neither Israel nor Hamas want a war, but the real one who can afford to be the brinksman right now is Israel. In killing civilians, it told Hamas it can also raise its drum beating by a notch. Most of the rockets fired since the Al Qassam barrage have been amateurish home-made rockets, with some of them exploding prematurely or falling in Gaza itself. Very depressing stuff – nothing compared to the Grad rockets fired by the Hamas guys. Only problem is, if one of these stray rockets kills and Israeli, or wipe out an Israeli family, then we’re in for trouble. Netanyahu will have to respond to public anger while avoiding another Goldstone report and all that bad publiclity.

Israel and Hamas are like two lovers. They need each other just like the Church needs Satan, McCarthy needed Communism and George Bush needed Bin Laden. And it’s a long love story full of drama, backstabbing, flings and love affairs, the raw material for an epic tragedy.

Follow me on twitter: www.twitter.com/journeytogaza

Where is the film?

Hamas violent crackdown on pro-unity Gaza youth and journalists
19 March 2011, 3pm

How can you ever respect a Hamas police officer who tries to “open” your digital camera in the hope that he will find “the film”?

Forget for a second the shameless beating of secondary school girls I had just witnessed from my balcony.

Forget that they broke into my house carrying sticks and guns, manhandled my landlady, her son and daughter.

Forget also, for a second, that a journalist friend of mine was stabbed in her back by a police officer four days ago while walking back home from the Al Kateeba demonstrations – dispersed violently by Hamas mobs and police with sticks and live machine gun fire in the sky.

But when the uniformed thug leading his eight or so juniors presented himself rudely at my door this afternoon, it was just a scene out of Blackadder. Or Mr Bean. With guns.

Just minutes before, at around 11.30am, I was clicking with my camera from my balcony on the 14th floor as around 100 secondary school girls were chanting against the division, for Palestinian unity, just opposite my flat. These brave girls had just finished school (there are not enough classes for Gaza’s children so students attend schools in two shifts). The demonstrations were expected to start at noon, but the free, independent Gaza youth are impatient. Standing in one of the corners in Omar Al Mukhtar Street – Gaza City’s major boulevard leading to Al Jundi Square – they start chanting. And chanting. Other students start arriving. I keep clicking.

My landlady – a strong, secular Marxist who has argued and had fist fights with some of the most heavily armed Israeli commandos in her family home in Beit Hanoun – is excited. Her daughter – wearing the same school uniform as the girls opposite – is dying to go down, but tells me she’ll wait for some more people to gather.

Policemen are still at a distance in the main square, until we hear police car sirens. Trouble is on the way. A white van rams straight into the group of girls. I’m still clicking, can’t confirm if anyone was hit. Apparently not. Police officers storm out of the van – some carrying AK47s, others wooden sticks. Another van comes from the opposite direction. The girls flee, and with them a crowd that was on its way. Police chase the students, beating whoever is in front of them. More police vans turn up, chasing everyone from the main street.

Then, an officer on the street spots me. He points towards me with his baton as his peers raise their heads towards me. I’m fucked. Might as well keep clicking. They rush to one of the vans and head off somewhere. My landlady tells me to go into my flat and store my pictures somewhere safe. Wise advice. Her son is guarding the main door to our floor. I dash to my flat and frantically copy everything on every possible disk available. Until, as expected, they arrived. Later I would learn that at the same time other security officers were storming into news agencies’ offices here, breaking equipment and arresting staff from NHK, AP, Al Arabiya and Mayadeen, among others.

I’m still upstairs in my flat when they knock on the main door. My landlady and her son and some other friends open. I can hear the commotion. All my photos are saved. I put the card back in one of the cameras and go to meet my visitors.

“Are you the one taking photos,” the leader, armed with a revolver in his holster, tells me trying to grab my camera.

Yes.

“Why are you taking photos?”

Why not?

“Why are you taking photos from up here?”

Let me come with you in your cars to photograph you on the beat.

“Where is your film?”

It’s digital.

“Where is your film?”

Leave my camera.

“Open the camera.”

You can’t open a digital camera.

“So where’s the film?”

There is no film. I can show you the pictures.

“Show me the pictures.”

I can’t show you the pictures if you break my camera.

“What’s your name?”

You tell me your name. You’re in my house. Who are you?

“What’s your name?”

Write me down your name. (Landlady brings paper and pen. The idiot is trying to open the digital camera to rip out the ‘film’).

Since when is it illegal to take photos?

“Where’s the film?”

There is no film. It’s digital. Show me the law stating photography is forbidden.

“Where is the film?”

Which law states that photography is forbidden?

“Open the camera”

You’re worse than the Israelis.

“What’s your name?”

Write me down yours. Where are you going with my camera? You can’t leave without giving me a receipt. Write down your name and state that you confiscated my camera.

(He is calling someone from his mobile, then grabs pen and writes down a note stating that my camera was confiscated, but does not sign it).

Why are you afraid of telling me your name?

What’s your name?

Write down your name.

My landlady is meanwhile arguing with the rest of the thugs.

“What’s your problem?” she keeps telling them. “Why are you in my house? Since when can’t we photograph you doing your job? Since when can’t I take pictures from my balcony? Didn’t you like being photographed in Rantissi’s time (Hamas leader killed by Israel when the movement was not in government)? Do you think that I, as Palestinian, like seeing these pictures? You’re the shame of our country and our cause. ”

The commotion drags on a bit more, until the only one of them who is not wearing a uniform tries to restore some calm, respectfully, for a change.

“It’s OK,” he said. “You’ll have your camera back. Stay calm.”

What do you mean stay calm, I ask him.

“Write down my name. It’s Ihab Al Baz. You can come and pick it up from the police station in half an hour.”

And they left. With my camera.

When tested, Hamas have shown they are not any different from the Mubaraks, Ben Alis, Gaddafis and Ali Abdallah Salehs of this side of the world. They just don’t have the tanks, the fighter jets and the tear gas.

And they’ve learnt all their lessons from the occupier, just in a more primitive style.

At a press conference given by Hamas spokesmen Sami Abu Zuhri and Fawzi Barhoum later, a journalist asked: “Abu Zuhri how do you explain the attack on the Reuters news agency’s offices happening as we speak? How do you explain it?”

Abu Zuhri was speechless, so Barhoum butted in. “Al Salam Aleikum”. Bye.


Latest: Meanwhile between 30 and 50 mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel – the highest ever mortar fire from here since the war two years ago. In an equally unprecedented move, Hamas’s military wing Izz Al Deen Al Qassam claimed it had fired 30 of the mortars. Israel has already sent fighter jets bombing parts of Gaza, many more are expected after dusk.

Demonstrators at Al Kateeba (written in a rush)

In the morning people gathered at Square of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City, main square and boulevard. Thousands were there... then a crowd of Hamas people turned up - they had already set up a stage with loudspeakers so they were 'in charge'. So youth movement decided to leave the place and go to Kateeba Square, the traditional grounds where mass rallies have been held. Thousands left for Kateeba - marching peacefully and setting up tents there.

I climbed on a vantage point - an abandoned building overlooking the entire square, until Hamas police turned up telling everyone to leave. Nothing violent yet - just made to leave... demos continued on the ground, peacefully, lots of young people chanting and dancing for unity. Met some friends who looked shocked but barely spoke - one was in tears and told me she was beaten and asked to cover her hair by Hamas. Another one couldn't walk and was being helped to a clinic - though I didn't witness the violence itself.

Back home, friends called me telling me police had intervened, fired warning shots in the air. Told them I was on my way back but they strongly urged me not to - all cameras were confiscated, journalists arrested and activists beaten up. My friend Adham said "Al Kateeba is on fire" ... thuoght he was being metaphorical but then another one called to say Hamas had set the tents on fire...

Earlier footage I shot from Al Kateeba:

Gaza impatient for 15 March!

A month ago they came out to party for the Egyptians. Tonight is their night.
Gaza City, Square of the Unknown Soldier, 14 March 2011, 9pm onwards... more to come soon...

15 March: Sanaa Al Nahhal from Rafah, occupied Palestine, living in Malta

Sanaa Al Nahhal from Rafah, occupied Palestine, living in Malta, sends her message in support of fellow Palestinians' call for national unity and reconciliation

15 March: Lina Al Nahhal, 20 from Rafah living in Malta

Lina Al Nahhal, 20 from Rafah, living in Malta where she is reading for a degree in European Studies, sends her message of support for Palestinian unity

From the frontline: Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza demand unity (AUDIO)

Voices from the frontline: Listen to the young Palestinians on the frontline of the 15 March protests, putting forward their views on why they are calling for unity, and why the international community has to listen

15 March: Nasseem, 29 from Gaza, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

Nasseem, 29-year-old finance officer from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, speaks of his hopes national unity that would pave the way for a free and democratic Palestine

15 March: Ahed Abu Sharekh, 27 from Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

Ahed Abu Sharekh, 27 from Jabalya refugee camp, speaks on the importance of Palestinian unity ahead of the 15 March protests

15 March: Enaam Abu Nida from Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

Enaam Abu Nida, mother and food security worker from Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine, tells us why Palestinians will be protesting for national unity and reconciliation on 15 March

15 March: Samaah Ahmed, 30 from Gaza, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

Watch Samaah Ahmed, 30, human rights activist from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, calling on the international community to support Palestinian unity

15 March: Bassam, 24, rapper from Gaza City, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

Bassam, 24, rapper with Darg Team, from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why he will join the 15 March protests calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support them

15 March: Noor Harizeen, 21, Gaza City, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

Noor Harizeen, 21, English student at Al Azhar University, from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why she will be joining protestors on 15 March calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support them

15 March: Musheera Jamaal, Gaza, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

Musheera Jamaal, 26, human rights activist from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why she will join protestors on 15 March calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support

Beware the Ides of March

This Tuesday, 15 March, Palestinian youth will only wave the Palestinian flag

I’m at a meeting with a Palestinian rapper, an English student and a human rights activist in their twenties. I asked to meet them so that I could record their voices as they speak about Tuesday 15 March, the day they will be protesting in Gaza with other Palestinians in the West Bank, calling on Fatah and Hamas to end the crippling division.

The issue is sensitive – a similar call for demonstrations a month ago was disrupted before it even started, and Hamas have been harassing the 15 March organisers over the last weeks. But after a long pre-emptive introduction telling them they didn’t have to use their real names if they feared retribution from the Gaza government, Musheera Jamaal, the 26-year-old activist, asks me to set up the video camera.

“I want to be filmed,” she said resolutely.

Her friend Noor Harizeen, 21, took the cue. “Me too. Use our names and faces.”

Bassam, the 24-year-old member of the popular hip-hop band Darg Team, is immediately thinking of what he wants to tell the world, also in his name.

Only a month ago, Palestinians were but whispering in secret about the planned demonstration, with nobody giving a straight answer whether they were participating or not. Mubarak was still clinging on to power, Libya had not yet started its revolution, and the protests here in Gaza were doomed as anti-Hamas demonstrations the moment a Fatah spokesman in Ramallah urged the youth living under blockade to get rid of the Islamist movement. On the day Mubarak was forced out by the neighbouring Egyptians, the Palestinian revolution remained confined to Facebook.

This Tuesday it is bound to be different. Over the last days, more and more young people referred openly to the planned demonstrations. Many more have committed themselves to organising the event and bring their own friends, breaking out of the polarising Fatah-Hamas divide that conditions everything in Palestinian politics.

“Palestinians are dying to do something, to get out on the streets, get something going,” a young doctor who spent seven years studying in the Ukraine told me early last week. “We’ve seen the Egyptians and the Tunisians doing the unthinkable, the Libyans are now following, and we have to do something that gets us out of our mould.”

As they witness the entire Arab world ablaze with the revolutionary fervour that is radically changing the region, the sense of envy at being stolen the limelight must be hitting every self-respecting Palestinian, whose nation has been living under 62 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians are the most fearless Arabs. Democracy is within them – they speak their mind openly and they talk politics just like they eat their daily bread. For six decades, Israel has occupied their land but not their minds. It must have something to do with the fact that neither Fatah nor Hamas could ever be the kind of regimes we are witnessing falling one after the other right now. And also because occupation and repression, everywhere and inevitably, always fuel resistance.

Palestinians know well enough that Israel is the regime that is oppressing them. The divide, as crippling as the blockade of Gaza itself, is the outcome of decades of occupation and segregation of Gaza which precedes the official blockade declared four years ago by almost 20 years. When Palestinians turned up on themselves in the 2007 civil war, killing each other in the streets of Gaza, Israel’s racist, divide and rule policies against Palestinians were bearing its rotten fruit.

Now, inspired by their Arab brothers around them, networking and organising themselves from Facebook and Twitter to secretive to public meetings, Palestinian youth want to call for an end to the divisions and force Hamas and Fatah to stop paying lip service. The two movements say they want unity but have spent the last four years doing anything in their power to make unity impossible.

“We’re coming down (into the streets) to end the division,” says one of the stickers printed by the 15 March organisers.  “Palestine is bigger than all of us”

Last Monday, around 100 students at Al Azhar University in Gaza City gathered for a conference on unity ended up taking to the streets, in the city’s main roads, calling for an end to the division. Impressively, the spontaneous demonstration was allowed to go on by Hamas, with no serious arrests reported later.

International community must support unity

Ending the division would expose the double standards of the American and European governments fomenting it in the first place by insisting on boycotting Hamas, persisting with branding it as a terrorist organisation after welcoming it to contest the elections. In the meantime, the US and EU have no qualms arming and funding the Palestinian Authority with security forces subservient to the occupation and used to arrest, harass and torture Palestinian dissidents. The politicisation of humanitarian aid channelled into Palestine is as immoral as supporting the blood-thirsty tyrants being overthrown in the region.

In the last week, the Palestinian prime minister in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad – who contested elections as an independent – called on Hamas to join his cabinet in a unity government. Hamas refused, and Fatah were not amused with Fayyad’s call, urging President Mahmoud Abbas to remove him from prime minister and install one of them instead.

The first signals from US and European diplomats are already that they would boycott a unity government once again. That is why it is only the Palestinian people – independently of the parties and factions – who can force change in their country in the same way the Egyptians and Tunisians are pushing through with their demands.

Hamas is an essential piece of the Palestinian political and social landscape. Irrespective of whether the Islamist movement is treated as a terrorist organisation or not, it is here to stay. The last four years of blockade and marginalisation have consolidated its grasp of the Gaza Strip, running all the institutions that matter like every administration does, only much less accountably given the international boycott.

Reconciliation is essential for Palestinians’ struggle for freedom. It would be another slap in the face to the international community’s hypocrisy and double standards. As Gaddafi awaits his international criminal court trial – if he gets out of Libya alive – Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the names of countless Israeli generals would also, one day, have to be engraved on the files of the war crimes tribunal.

If there ever was a time to launch the third Intifada, this would be it.

Libya awakens

Some 80 kilometres outside of Tripoli, a vast mishmash of mountains, valleys and cliffs in the middle of nowhere hide a freak of nature very few know about. So little is known about it, that since my Libyan friends took me to see it eight years ago I have only recounted the story to a handful of people with whom I don’t risk my reputation. 

So here is my Libyan secret, now that everything in Libya is being turned upside down: In the valley of Al Riyayna, the forces of gravity do not work. Literally. I saw it with my own eyes – a car, turned off, left on free gear at the bottom of the slope, going suddenly upwards, on its own; an empty can of Coke rolling upwards; water poured on the tarmac defying the laws of gravity.

“This goes to prove everything in Libya is upside down,” I had told my friends, otherwise speechless, admitting I had just witnessed the unbelievable.

I am sure there is some scientific explanation to this bizarre geographic phenomenon, but my secretive research about this particular region proved futile. Not even one page turns up on Google. If only it was in the United States, it would be one big amusement park, a prime tourist attraction, Freakland. This was Libya.

Smashing the Green wall of silence 

My Libyan friends in Tripoli would not talk to me in front of others about politics. Gaddafi was not even mentionable – some spy mic might be registering our conversation. You could smell and touch the fear. The little deep discussions I had with them about the regime would happen in my hotel room, door locked, one-on-one, whispering our questions and answers. Even the angriest would admit defeatedly that we were crossing a red line, and that little could be done to change things.

“This is our system, if we don’t like it, we can leave,” they would say at the end of their conversation, almost apologetically. “That’s our reality, and I guess that’s everyone else’s.”

Indeed many of them left, many of them have studied and settled abroad, some of them sent by Gaddafi himself on some state scholarship and never to return. But many others wanted to stay, despite the oppression, because despite everything they loved their country. Libya is not Gaddafi, they kept repeating, even though his iron grip has crippled the country for 42 years

.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the man who still deludes himself with his self-given title of Leader of the Revolution and sports all sorts of medals on his chest – including the Maltese highest national honour, Gieh ir-Repubblika – has been so far one of the greatest survivors of history.

Since his coup with a revolutionary command council of army officers in 1969 in which they ousted King Idris, Gaddafi has managed to reshape Libya in his own warped idea of nationhood through terror and grandiose lunacy. From the anti-colonialist who earned initial respect from his peers in the region for embodying the Third World’s struggle against the legacies of former empires, the Libyan leader moved on to become the unpredictable maverick to a downright monster ready to kill his own people without a moment’s hesitation.

When prisoners at Abu Sleem protested, he killed them all, 1,200 of them. When students revolted, he hanged them on campus. When Libya was indicted on the Lockerbie bombing, he kept bluffing despite Libya’s innocence, till he pitted his nation into a nine-year embargo. When he saw Saddam Hussein hounded out of his palace and hanged at the gallows, he became best friends with George Bush and Tony Blair.

His spectacular rehabilitation in December 2003, when he reportedly renounced weapons of mass destruction, was in reality only skin deep; an interval in his freak show. At the time, the engineering department at Al Fateh University did not even have electricity to run its laboratories – and this in the premium oil-producing country. American multinationals, and European ones, were quick to befriend the man once dubbed as the “mad dog of the Middle East” by former US President Ronald Reagan.

Many Libyans were sceptical Gaddafi even had weapons of mass destruction in the first place, except for chemical weapons that require no spectacular expertise to produce. Not even Saddam Hussein had the WMDs after all, so what could one expect of an ageing, decaying regime armed with rusty soviet weapons? So superficial was his much-lauded rehabilitation, that his unpredictable, maverick style remained constant, be it insisting on erecting his ridiculous tent in New York or blackmailing Europe with flooding it with immigrants.

All along, the world has refused to see Gaddafi at his bloodiest, his looniest. On the land of oil, Libyans were tortured, executed and others just “disappeared” for the simple reason that they were critical of the regime. Individuals, defectors, activists, journalists and organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been ringing the alarm for decades, but nobody listened.

Yes, I told you so

When then Maltese President Eddie Fenech Adami visited Gaddafi in July 2008, I had asked him whether the Libyan leader’s ambitions to develop nuclear energy with Russian and French investment was discussed at all in the tent in Bab Al Aziziya. At the time, three French reactors we leaking radioactive material, so Malta’s national interest was clearly at stake if Tripoli started experimenting with nuclear.

“We didn’t think it was a question to go into at this point in time,” Fenech Adami replied in his typical dismissive manner.

Even less tactfully, then Maltese health minister John Dalli and now European Commissioner, who also had business interests and consultancies in the Jamahiriya, had chastised me in front of all the other journalists at the press conference at the Maltese embassy.

“You keep writing the same old stupidities,” he told me. To him, questioning Gaddafi and his motives was just useless chatter that would only undermine Malta’s efforts to keep good business relations with Libya. So blinded and off the mark was the Maltese government’s reading of the situation, that only a couple of weeks ago Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi was hugging the tyrant in what was a genius of timing – making you wonder whether the foreign ministry is run by Gaddafi’s camels.

Now, cornered by his own people, Gaddafi is threatening to explode Libya’s oil wells. Thank God he hasn’t had the time and the expertise to develop nuclear reactors.

As the Libyans, inspired by their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours, defy decades-old assumptions, the latest pictures coming out of Libya make us all witnesses to a widespread massacre. The regime keeps losing one general after the other – the Libyan delegations to the UN and to the Arab League have defected, as have the two heroic pilots who landed in Malta. The Libyan deputy ambassador to the UN called Gaddafi’s measures, “a genocide”.

From the looks of it, Gaddafi will stay on until he is killed or forcibly removed. And it will be a great irony of sorts, that the self-styled revolutionary leader of the masses would have been ousted by the angriest revolutionaries in Libya’s history.