I came across this real story in the middle of a BBC news item about Tripoli eyewitnesses. It speaks volumes and does not need any additional comment.
An old woman, in her late 70s at least, I’m told, entered the bank to collect her 500 Libyan dollars ($410; £253) in state aid announced a couple of weeks ago.
There were two long queues – one for men and one for women. She stood in the men’s queue.
The men urged her to move to the women’s section. “Why?” she challenged.
A man told her: “Ya haja [a term of respect for an elderly woman] this line is for men, women is the other one”.
She loudly replied: “No. All the men are in Benghazi.”
The room is said to have been stunned into silence and she remained in her place until her turn came and she walked out with her money.
It is perhaps a bittersweet private reminder of how frustrated many here are at the lack of efforts in Tripoli in recent weeks to defy the regime and take to the streets.
The joke doing the rounds among the silent opposition in Tripoli is that upon liberation the Benghazi people will bring container loads of women’s underwear for the men in Tripoli.
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On a separate note here is a brilliant article by the UK Independent’s Robert Fisk exploring the feelings of families who lost loved ones as “collateral damage” in previous attempts to hit at Gaddafi. Sgarbi and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici might have an opinion about civilians faultlessly involved in this preventive intervention but their opinion pales in comparison to that of a mother who lost her daughter in 1986 following an US bombing in retaliation to the Berlin discotheque bombing by Gaddafi. I for one did not expect this kind of answer from her.
But it was with some trepidation that I called them yesterday. Mrs Ghosain answered the phone. “I hope they get him this time,” she said. And I asked, timidly, if she meant the man with the moustache. Colonel Gaddafi has a moustache. Mr Obama does not. “Yes,” she said. “I mean Ghazzefi.” “Ghazzefi” is the Lebanese Arabic pronunciation of the man’s name.
