Muammar Gaddafi had already ruled Libya for 15 years in June 1984 and he had a fearsome reputation for brutality towards his enemies. But the grim scene that unfolded in the eastern city of Benghazi was a spectacular first even for him.
It was a blazing hot day. Thousands of schoolchildren and students were bused into Benghazi’s basketball stadium, where they saw a frightened young man with curly hair and beard, kneeling with his hands bound behind his back, pleading for his life before people’s prosecutors.
Sadiq Hamid Shwehdi (30) was accused of plotting to assassinate the leader of the revolution. The court described him as “a terrorist from the Muslim Brotherhood, an agent of America”.
In this grainy, recently re-discovered film, Shwehdi is seen alone in the centre of the stadium, sobbing as he confesses to his crime of joining the “stray dogs” — in the chilling terminology of the regime — before being sentenced to death.
In the crowd, a young woman in olive green fatigues shouts and waves her clenched fists. Later, in a nauseating display of zeal, she pulled at Shwehdi’s legs as he writhed on the makeshift gallows, the basketball scoreboard clearly visible in the background, until he stopped struggling. Huda “the hangman” Ben Amer went on to become a Gaddafi favourite and fled Benghazi after this year’s uprising .
“Many Libyans saw the original live broadcast of the trial at the time and still remember it, but this is the full video and audio — and it has not been seen since then,” said Peter Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher who unearthed the material. Until now only fragments of the original were available. Shwehdi’s brother Ibrahim handed over four Beta video tapes to be digitised and preserved for posterity.
Bouckaert worked with Tim Hetherington, an American war photographer who was killed in April covering the siege of Misrata. Together they pored over hundreds of still photographs taken from a state security office that was burned and looted by protesters. Many show Gaddafi looking young and relaxed in the early days after the 1969 revolution, hobnobbing with his hero, the then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
Another set of images records a last visit to Benghazi by the ageing King Idris, the pro-Western monarch overthrown by Gaddafi and fellow officers as they emulated Nasser.
This jerky, gruesome footage also captures a moment of international intrigue in the years when Libya became an obsession for the US, with Ronald Reagan dubbing Gaddafi the “mad dog” of the Middle East.
State-managed kangaroo court
Shwehdi’s execution followed a daring assault on Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli the previous month, a an attempted coup planned by the National Front for the Salvation of Libya which the regime claimed was backed by the CIA. Shwehdi’s cousin Magdi was killed in the raid. Two thousand people were arrested and 12 were hanged publicly in their home towns, some during the Ramadan holiday.
“Shwehdi’s execution was ordered by a state-managed kangaroo court,” said Ashour Shamis, a London-based dissident who helped plan the coup, which was doomed when its military commander was killed.
Shwehdi and the others were trained in Morocco and Sudan. Some entered Libya from neighbouring Tunisia, where the operation was overseen by security chief Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who went on to become the country’s president.
“He was an ordinary Libyan who felt disgust for the Gaddafi regime,” said Shamis. “He gave up his studies and a comfortable life in America to return to Libya. He knew he was risking his life.”
Other hangings were broadcast, and re-broadcast, on Libyan state TV. Cases of torture, demolition of homes and mass detentions were also reported that year.
Human rights abuses persisted even as Gaddafi began to mend fences with the wider world and, eventually to come in from the cold. In 1996, 1 200 inmates, many of them Islamists, were killed in a notorious massacre in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison. No Libyan official has yet been called to account over that. Protests involving the lawyer representing the victims’ families proved to be the spark for the Benghazi uprising.
Gaddafi, his son, Saif al-Islam, and intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi are wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) on charges of crimes against humanity committed in the initial unrest in February.
“This film will not be relevant to the ICC case because that only covers a limited time period,” said Bouckaert. “But we felt that it was important to preserve this traumatic part of the heritage of the Libyan people. It is also part of the legacy of my friend Tim Hetherington because it was the last project he was working on before he was killed.” – guardian.co.uk