Gaddafi Must Kill Us All to Survive

The last time we heard from my father was at three in the morning on March 1, when he phoned my brother from our family home in Tripoli to tell him, “I’m about to be arrested.”

My father told my brother, who lives in Manchester, to look after the family, and urged us all to continue fighting the Libyan regime, no matter what happened to him.

That was the last we heard from him.

I escaped from Libya the next day. There was nothing else I could have done. I was able to leave because I have a British passport – I was born in the UK and lived there until 1989. If I had stayed, I would certainly have been arrested, and that would have made our family’s misery worse.

Three of my brothers have already been arrested. Only my mother and two of my sisters are now left in Tripoli. The regime is not looking for women.

From the moment the uprising began, life in Tripoli became really bad, really tense. It was impossible to live a normal life, to eat or sleep.

Tripoli has become a ghost town. No one is going to work, school or university. People only leave their home to obtain the basic necessities, and after sunset, no one goes out at all because of the frequent killings.

I was politically involved to an extent before the revolution, and I took part in the recent demonstrations.

My father Abdul Rahman, however, is a long-term critic of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

As soon as the uprising began, my father began speaking to international media, using his real name in interviews for the BBC, Al-Jazeera, Sky and Al-Arabiya television.

He wasn’t afraid, and it was his decision to speak out. In any case, it’s hard to tell someone like my father what to do.

Of course it was dangerous. We had to leave our family home, a farm on the outskirts of Tripoli, after we received inside information of a plan to kill my father. We split into groups and scattered, hiding with various friends and relatives across the city.

But the regime has a lot of informants, and three of my brothers were tracked down to a friend’s house in Tripoli and detained at two in the morning of March 1. We don’t know what the charges are – if there any at all – just except that thousands of others are being arrested as well.

We have had no contact with my three brothers; we don’t even know if they are alive or dead.

One of my brothers, Khaleed, somehow managed to call our father to tell him they had been arrested.

My father knew he was the one the authorities were really looking for. So he went back to the family home and waited.

We don’t know exactly what happened, except that he was able to call my brother in Manchester. Some relatives went to the house the next day and said it was clear the arrest had been accompanied by violence. My father didn’t even have a chance to put on his shoes. Our house was wrecked; everything inside was broken, vandalised or stolen.

The minute I heard what had happened, I called my mother. She said, ‘I think you should leave – if you stay it will only make things worse.’

So I had to go. Even though I worried about leaving her and my sisters behind, I left the next day on a ferry taking British citizens out of the country. It was not an easy decision, and sometimes I feel I abandoned them; but of course it wasn’t like that. We keep in touch from time to time, but we know that all phone lines are monitored regularly.

Now some of my family are in the UK, some have been arrested, and some are still in Tripoli. It is very frightening.

I am a little surprised that the international community seems to be waiting until we hit some magic figure for the number of deaths before real action is taken. I am British as well as Libyan, so this is very hard for me to understand.

I don’t, however, think we are going to see civil war. The western media have this all wrong. A civil war requires two big groups that fight one another because they want different things. That isn’t the case here. There isn’t even a regime – there is no government any more; it is all fractured.

All there is is Gaddafi’s troops fighting against the people. He and his family don’t have any supporters any more. All they have is the power to sow fear, and even that is breaking down.

We believe that we’re nearing the end and that it is only a matter of days now. The regime cannot win against the people, and we have reached the point of no return.

Whatever price needs to be paid will be paid. Even if that price includes the lives of my father or my brothers, we will have to carry on, just as the entire Libyan nation must do.

The most important thing right now is my country, not my family.

The only way that Gaddafi can hold on to power is if he kills 6.5 million Libyans. If that happens, then he is welcome to stay and rule over the Libyan desert.

Bashir Sewehli is a sustainable development manager with an oil and gas company.