Reply #45: Social solidarity and the Libyan revolution

[tabatha]

Ryan Calder, PhD student in sociology | 4/22/11

BENGHAZI, Libya —If you had told Benghazi residents three months ago that they would be throwing Molotov cocktails at Qaddafi loyalist tanks, they would’ve looked at you like you were crazy. Even after the Egyptian revolution began on January 25, Qaddafi’s iron grip on Libyan society seemed too strong to allow an uprising of the sort that occurred in Tunis and Cairo. In early February, Ahmed, a 26-year-old medical student, heard about a joke that was making the rounds in recently liberated Tunisia. “The Tunisians were telling us Libyans to bend over so they could see the real men over in Egypt.”

This underscores one of the biggest challenges posed by running a revolution that no one expected:It’s not surprising, then, that when the revolution happened, few people here had much of an idea about what to do next: how to keep a society dominated by the government sector running once that sector was gone. Just as the opposition’s Transitional National Council (TNC) has faced the problem of managing its volunteer-heavy rebel army, people trying to manage quotidian aspects of life during the war faced the problem of what to do with the thousands of volunteers who want to help but don’t have anyone giving orders. This is true in medical care, aid distribution, and other state services: while the TNC has managed to restore many of the functions of government previously handled by the Gaddafi regime, volunteers continue to shoulder much of the burden.

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Everyone in opposition-held territory seems to have a story about how much nicer people are to one another now that Gaddafi is gone. “Before the revolution, you’d go out into the street and find a bunch of angry people,” says Shawg, the anesthesiologist. “They’d be taking it out on each other — you’d find a lot of fights on the street, people saying bad stuff to each other, or even driving. Sometimes you’d find people just fighting for the sake of fighting. Everyone was in a bad mood, all the time.”

But with the revolution, people in Benghazi began showing an outpouring of support for their doctors. She recalls how on March 19, as Gaddafi’s tanks were rolling through Benghazi’s streets and Revolutionary Committee members were shooting at civilians, she and other doctors were overwhelmed by the number of wounded they had to treat — and by the kindness that ordinary citizens were showing them. “In the hospital, men as old as my father would run around the ICU at Jala Hospital , passing out milk and juice and boxes of dates to the doctors,” she says. “They’d stuff them in the pockets of my lab coat and shake my hands, and they’d hug the male doctors. They’d bring pillows and blankets from home, giving everything they could to the hospital.”

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/04/22/%E2%80%9Cit%E2%80%99s-funny-but-gaddafi-brought-out-the-best-in-us%E2%80%9D-social-solidarity-and-the-libyan-revolution/