As Gaddafi's forces were preparing to move on Benghazi I spent a week travelling around and interviewing the people of East Libya for a documentary on how Gaddafi maintained power over minds and lives for so long and to discover why now so many could never imagine returning to life under Gaddafi. The story opens through the eyes of one of four Libyan New Zealanders remaining there.

"I wanted to be here to see the end of Gaddafi. This is one of my happiest days that he is gone. I am so happy."

The euphoria of Libyan New Zealander Ali Aurfi, retired ship pilot, imprisoned for marrying a New Zealand woman was shared by almost all in Benghazi yet as he said this Mon 14 March a No-Fly zone had not yet been announced. The cities' mood oscillated from jubilant gunfire and powerful surging chants to expressions of anger and disgust that they were not being helped by the international community. Gaddafi was steadily advancing yet people who some weeks previously could have expected prison or death for talking to me did not hesitate to be named and photographed. Without exception they said a return to life under Gaddafi was unimaginable.

This time Ali was staying put but in 1982 Ali had left Benghazi to live in New Zealand. "From 1977 Gaddafi had had his revolutionary committees and they were grabbing everybody…some people were hanged…things got really frightening… my family were in New Zealand so I left."


For marrying his New Zealand wife Ali was sent to jail in 1972. "He wanted to make an example of us (for being in contact with foreigners) and put us in prison with very bad conditions and after a month he decided we should all go back to the army as if nothing had happened." He had got all the permissions required but under Gaddafi the point was not to respect the law but to know what displeased Gaddafi and anticipate his whim.

Ali invited me to his impeccable home on a broad stretch of his land on the semi-rural outskirts of Benghazi last Tuesday for a lunch of lamb and rice served in a massive wooden bowl he thought might be Matai. He drove me there in his Renault Megane, bought from someone apparently born on the first of September 1969 and hence able to buy the car at half price, as they had the honour of sharing their birthday with the day on which Gaddafi acceded to power. As we waited he jestingly waved the Free Libya flag at his older brother, a one-time colonel of Gaddafi's generation who then served as Libyan ambassador to the EU's forerunner from 1970 to 1974 one year after the coup that toppled King Idriss. He launched the coup from Benghazi.

"It started pretty well with his promises of justice, fair distribution, no favouritism. Then in the first year funny things happened. First he announced there had been a coup attempt by some of his colleagues. He made everyone work for the government , the private sector was completely destroyed and then people started to have doubts, however Gaddafi had this oil … to divide the people and also give some here and some power there and so on." Ali gave me a thorough tour through the years of Gaddafi's terrorisation of Libya and the world, a world in which virtually any group that threatened established power had support from Gaddafi, including the IRA, Italian Red Brigades, independence activists in New Caledonia, Australian Trade Unionists and some Maori activists, some of whom had visited Libya.

Gaddafi discarded the constitution and began dismantling and weakening state institutions, including the army until he and his family sat at an apex of power based on nepotism in which he tolerated no opposition, favoured some with arbitrary gifts, impoverished the majority, denied education and created distrust of each towards the other such that public opinion could not coalesce and threaten his power.

Gaddafi's monopolisation of truth in the public sphere stopped many learning things that might threaten his self-appointed role as guardian and guiding hand of the nation, the brother leader as he was officially known. But once truth about arbitrary imprisonments, torture and massacre was revealed in the area of eastern Libya, that is Cyrenaica, and beyond the sense of outrage at having been lied to so blatantly and for so long was all the greater and a return to how it was before when people had been "brainwashed....is impossible" in the words of 24 year old Mohammad f. Alzayami . Like almost all I spoke to in Free Libya, the territory not controlled by Gaddafi, Muhammad meant this and proved it by his unconcern at being quoted, named and photographed. Brave things to do in a regime where even suggesting there should be such things as justice could see you dangling at the end of a rope and where Gaddafi has recently traced people speaking to the BBC by phone.

Mohammed, a computer science student, was of a new generation who could speak English for it had been banned in high schools from 1986 to 1996, according to a Libyan English teacher in Tobruk. Muhammad told me that the gutted community centre, Al Mathaba(The Green Book Centre), I was roaming through in central Benghazi had been used to indoctrinate people. The people were "mixed, young and old… When you came you wrote your name and bank account number at the door. He gave people money to come, about 200 Dinar(the Dinar being roughly on par with the NZ dollar)…some people believed it and some people didn't " Ali Aurfi later added that "sometimes you must go or you lost your job". The fence around the centre was regulation green; the same green that many shop fronts or cafes had to be painted because Gaddafi said so and because this was the green of the Green Book, that Muhammadsaid was preached at the centre. The Green Book, I never read. It is said to be contain Gaddafi's economic blueprint for Libya, vaguely socialist theory, written in a rambling and incoherent manner. It was the statue of the Green Book that the world saw tumbling down at the hand of protesters in Tobruk. Beside the centre a towering statue of Nasser, the former Egyptian president, and once held up as a figurehead of pan-Arabic unity, a promoter of which Gaddafi likes to portray himself. The statue stands over a long roughly 5 metre high relief of socialist realism style depicting happy families and a rank of heroic soldiers.

One of those who believed was Hany, a self-made Libyan from Benghazi whose business card indicated he was a supplier of parts for Shell in this region. I met him at a checkpoint from where I was hitching after the militia asked him to help out. At first he was suspicious of me, asking for my passport and dismissing my enquiry about who he was. Later in his black late- model V8 cruiser he explained that I could be taking photos for Gaddafi. Like many I met Hany had no official position but assumed the role of official, telling me also that there was an "FBI" working in Cyrenaica, meaning local intelligence people. Later in Benghazi a man challenged me while I was filming a fully-laden truck coming in at 11.30pm. He had told me he was from the transitional security council and that there was a curfew, which was not true but he laughed it off when I said I was also from the security council.

Hany, who said he had made his forture, was at pains to tell me he was from simple stock and had made his money in an honest way. He said he had lost "three good friends and two cousins" in the fighting against Gaddafi. "At first Gaddafi was a good man…When I was young I thought he was the particular man in Libya". Attempting to explain Gaddafi's ability to cultivate true believers he says "He knew our needs well" He speaks angrily at how those responsible for Bengazhi's "8 million(dinar) infrastructure fund "stole all Benghazi's budget" yet "He(Gaddafi) let them walk free" Hany said he later worked as a graphic designer/journalist for a newspaper but left because of its lack of independence. He said he had moved his family to Egypt and was now supplying Cyrenaican fighters with food supplies at cost. "I've already made my money"

Another man supplying the fighters was Muhammad Lamin from Tobruk who said he had been taking heavy machine guns and shoulder-held anti-tank missile launchers (RPG 7s). "Kalashnikovs mean nothing towards heavy weapons." Frustrated by his lack of English he pointed to his greying hair to indicate that living under Gaddafi created a lot of daily stress. "It's not age that caused this"

His brother-in-law, Anwar Hassan, a safety specialist for the Libyan state oil company, Golf, had lived in the US where he had at least one daughter, spoke for the two of them. Anwar had been imprisoned in 1988 for 19 days on return to Libya. "No one was informed." For Gaddafi simple contact with foreigners from the developed world was reason for suspicion and punishment. Anwar says that is why "we are so happy to see foreigners like you", alluding to my anglo-saxon origins. He explains that for some years ties were banned as too western. Decent four wheel drives were also banned as they made it too easy for people to escape into the desert. In a desert country intercity roads are few and all travel can be effectively controlled with the checkpoints found at regular intervals and which in the east are now manned by Cyrenaican militia.

Before I enjoyed another much welcome lamb dinner with Mohammed and Anwar in Tobruk I interviewed them with a camcorder as we strolled among the graves of soldiers from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Great Britain and Poland in the commonwealth war grave just over the road from the compound he was custodian of following the departure of a Turkish construction company. Muhammad says, with Anwar translating , " They are like my friends. I played here when I was young. We look after these graves." Hassan adds that these soldiers also helped the locals with education. The tombstones of several New Zealand soldiers, including Private E.K.Delamere of the New Zealand infantry, gives their deaths as December 1941. After the Axis forces first major defeat here in World War 2 Rommel came back and re-conquered. The road he took was the desert road from Ajdabiya just south of Bengazhi directly to Tobruk, bypassing and isolating the coastal towns of al-Baida and Darnah. If Gaddafi chose, graphic designer,Hany, had said before the No-Fly zone was declared, he could take Tobruk in an hour.

After dinner with Muhammad and Hassan two fighters entered just back from the then front at Ras Lanuf. Mohammad swiftly removed the cartridges from their Kalashnikovs and placed them in the corner. Earlier Anwar had shown me a 3 inch Beretta pistol "Look at it! We are afraid of it." He adds that it is the only thing that Muhammad had to protect his family. We are afraid of it because we are not used to guns". Gaddafi also stopped people owning hunting guns. After Anwar had left his daughter from the US phoned to say she loved him and had seen him on NBC.

A common refrain among the people I speak to is how Gaddafi disempowered most Libyans not just materially but by denying them international contact and the language in which to conduct it and how he impoverished their minds. Ali Aurfi affirms that "You rarely find a person in Libya reading a book or reading newspapers , which are politicized. The books you want to read are not available in Libya. The whole society is rundown everywhere…healthwise, universities are all politicized, schools are politicized because the main subject is Green Book, and also transport, roads, corruption."

Seeking an answer to how Gaddafi could impose his will on a people for so long I turned to Mohammad Busidra, an Islamic preacher, jailed for 21 years for his promotion of Islam. Busidra is calm, dignified and sharp. He had spent stretches in solitary confinement in prison in Tripoli in a 60cm by 60cm cell and had been beaten with sticks. He says that some young male prisoners were sodomized by guards to remove their dignity. Mohammed, a 55 year-old Bedouin, was a shepherd as a boy and went on to become a member of the Engineering faculty at the university in Benghazi. Dismissed in 1976 for protesting against Gaddafi he went to Cardiff and studied Biochemistry. In Britain he had joined a group "calling people to Islam", Jamaat Tabligh, travelled for a year and then returned Libya and work in al-Bayda hospital as well as preaching. After imprisonment for 6 then 2 months in the mid-eighties he was put away in 1989 until 2009.

"This regime didn't need for you to have a charge to be arrested...all they need is for you to act of talk in such a way that they don t want it, whether it is right or wrong, whether it is a crime or not a crime. " The opportunity for mass protest was limited by the possibility that "Every person you speak to can be a detective (informer) and...this regime made every one of us curious (suspicious) of the other.

Echoing Muhammad, Hany said "Every Arab dictator sees what people want ... The moment he starts ruling the people he will satisfy whatever they want until he knows he has many followers enough strength to defend his chair and at that moment he will take off the mask...and he will show the real face.
Most people I spoke to say Gaddafi is mad. But earlier Tobruk banker, Mohammad al-Tahawy, extremely articulate in English and quoted extensively in a recent edition of Time earnestly put the question to me. "Do you think Gaddafi is mad?" I was tempted to say he is more bad than mad but Mohammad Busidra put it best "Now he tells lies and he believes himself...he looks at himself as a god that cannot make mistake."

But what about the senior figures upon whom Gaddafi depends? Busidra says "He is a magician. 90 percent know he is a liar but they are opportunists." Earlier in the cemetery Anwar Hassan recollects how "One day one of his security men told me 'If you look at the full moon you will see Gadaffi's picture...' I said 'what!' He said 'Just look.' ...This regime spreads all kind of dirty thoughts. He tries to brainwash people that he is some kind of god. He calls us rats" I wondered if Gaddafi was aware that the fallen Australian soldiers, who were most numerous, from precisely 70 years ago had been described by the Axis forces as desert rats that would be rooted out.

I left Benghazi on Wednesday morning 16 March lingering on the border with Egypt the following day knowing I would probably never be back and wondering if Omar Mohammad Ali, who had insisted on driving me back to my hotel, his bright young daughter Mdwen happily dictating her name in English her brother Mwae opening the door for me, would still be there if I did. Back in Cairo it was no longer possible to get through to Ali by phone. He lived on the outskirts of Benghazi into which soldiers loyal to Gaddafi had moved. But Gaddafi was blocking the two mobile networks and cutting fixed phone lines. It was an anxious wait for his family trying to phone from New Zealand; as well as for Deputy Head of the New Zealand Mission, Greg Lewis, in regular contact with Ali and for Ambassador, David Strachan, both putting in overtime at the Cairo embassy to keep abreast of events.

Cyrenaica