Libya is not for the Italians like any other country, for it is the neighbor and the former colony, which is full of hearing and sight in the news bulletins, but it nevertheless seems distant and mysterious and difficult to understand as if it does not concern them, except that an Italian photo story published recently with a comment in French was able to display the tragedy that This country has lived it since the fall of its former leader, Muammar Gaddafi.
With such an introduction, the French website Orient XXI opened a review of the book "Libya", written by Francesca Manucci and Gianluca Costantini, which tried to talk about Libya, not as it appears in the news bulletins as a series of military battles, or negotiations closer to a farce. Or, numbers of immigrants drowned on the way to Europe, or that shelter in which Italy hopes that immigrants will be detained, or international bodies and alliances in a civil war whose end cannot be expected.
This book - as the site says - provides reports on migrant camps, and it is a journalistic work that translates into a graphic story The testimonies that Francesca Manucci collected in the field between 2014 and 2019, supported by the drawings of Gianluca Costantini and the script of Daniele Broly.
Although this photo has been published since the end of October 2020, it remains a very live topic, first for urging Italy to pay attention to this neighbor who affects what happens to it, and also because it helps to understand and overcome the "Libyan fog", as it is called in one of the chapters of the book. .
History and geography play an important role in this story that deals not exclusively with current events, but also with Libya's past as well as with the international context, and focuses primarily on people.
Graphics and glitter
The famous cartoonist Costantini - who had never set foot in Libya - was able to compose this large painting as a result of documentation and reconstruct the drawings. Therefore, this book came more than a "story", as it is in fact a group of shots that gradually form the elements of the puzzle, through pictures from the past and pictures From the present, it has advanced across the pages of an enormous amount of detail and narrates a multifaceted human story.
This work - as the website says - begins with the story of the Abu Salim prison massacre in 1996 through the memories of a survivor, when 1270 detainees, most of them political prisoners, were killed without trial during the Gaddafi era in retaliation for a rebellion that broke out inside the prison, and the book tells a heart-wrenching story for families who sent for years Several messages and things to their deceased loved ones without their knowledge.
In the second chapter directly, the book talks about the much newer prison of Zawiya, and presents an interview with one of the migrants detained there, so that the pictures of the bodies in the first and second prisons are an addition that facilitate the comparison between the past and the present, and refer to the idea of a country that has for a very long time been accustomed to inhumanity, where the current violence is the heir Past violence, and where victims can become executioners because they grew up in the repression.
Militias in this country control by force of arms the strategic crossroads, oil wells and immigration detention centers
Soothing money
Through reading and watching the stories of immigrants, the coast guard, human traffickers, the director of the detention center, and the citizens queuing at the bank, the idea of a country governed by 3 key words emerges: weapons, money and fear, as the country is covered by a dense and armed mafia network, as the website says.
Militias in this country - as the website indicates - by force of arms control strategic crossroads, oil wells and immigration detention centers, and they sell imprisoned migrants to smugglers, and with money they buy new weapons and fuel the war, while militia smugglers buy men to use as slaves, or to transport them to Sicily in exchange for money. Or to blackmail families in their countries of origin for money always, while other parties control the liquidity of banks and give money to citizens only in return for bribes.
In the end, Manucci and Costantini say very clearly that "everyone in Libya is complicit just like us on the other side of the sea. We are the ones who initiated the militias in Tripoli by pushing them to agree with the Sarraj government, and we had agreements previously with Gaddafi, and we agreed with the governments that came after him to keep the migrants in" Libya, in prison or dead at sea, on condition that they do not reach our coasts. "
The book dedicates the last paintings of two figures from the two generations who lived through the 2011 revolution, the first being a young activist named Salem, who works for freedom of the press, notes with bitterly how difficult it is to rebel against this regime, given what the uprising against Gaddafi has become.
The second is Tewa, a woman and a mother waiting for her son to return from the war, and she embodies the generation immediately preceding the revolution, and she says, "We always bowed our heads because things were going well economically. The state distributed oil revenues, on the condition that people obey of course."
The site concludes that those who grew up among the "supported life" of Gaddafi ended up instilling submission in the souls of their children, so that they embody the old saying that "dictatorship does not kill with what is plundered, but rather with what it gives." Therefore, the lesson in Libya is that money is drugged, and perhaps in a different way. This is what happens in Italy - without weapons - "where our relative well-being makes us sleep and makes us uninterested."