LIBYANS IN the country’s “liberated” eastern flank like to joke that the only time they opened their mouths under Gadafy’s rule was while sitting in the dentist’s chair.
Now, for the first time in more than 40 years, they feel free to tell the stories they have kept to themselves for all those decades, and they have foreign journalists only too eager to listen.
Most journalists covering the uprising in Libya enter from Egypt. On the Libyan side of the border, guards who have defected from the government forces wave reporters through without asking for passports or visas.
I crossed the border on Friday in a van full of young Egyptian doctors travelling to Benghazi to treat the injured. “Now we are officially clandestino”, quipped an Italian journalist accompanying us.
We were swiftly ushered past militia checkpoints with cheers and smiles.
At one roadblock, manned by armed teenagers as well as by some older men, cans of grape juice and packets of Italian-made chocolate wafers were thrust through the windows of our van. “Ahlan, ahlan [Welcome, welcome]” they cried.
Across eastern Libya, there are stories of taxi drivers refusing to take fares and ordinary Libyans offering food and lodging to international media.
“We suffered a massacre and there was no one here to see it,” one man in Benghazi, the nerve-centre of the uprising, told me. “We are so happy to see the world’s journalists here so they can tell the real story of what is happening in our country.”
Soon after the revolt began, the government shut down access to the internet, blocked phone calls out of the country, and jammed satellite phone signals. It also declared that any foreign journalist who had sneaked inside the country would be considered an al-Qaeda collaborator.
Reporters have made only tentative moves further west towards the capital, Tripoli, which still remains in the hands of the Gadafy regime.
On Saturday, a group of journalists had their equipment confiscated in a town west of Benghazi. On Friday, the regime flew a small number of journalists into Tripoli for a brief and strictly supervised one-day tour of the city.
In Benghazi, Libyans fluent in languages other than Arabic have volunteered as translators at a new media centre housed in the charred former court house on the seafront, which had been the scene of a battle between protesters and the dregs of Gadafy’s security forces in the city.
Inside, past walls hung with colourful caricatures of Gadafy, young men issue press passes and distribute pamphlets and a newspaper published by the opposition.
Before the recent turmoil and the dire government warnings against foreign reporters, Libya was one of the most dangerous and restrictive places in the world for journalists to work.
Under Gadafy’s rule, domestic state media was strictly controlled and visas for foreign journalists seeking to report independently as opposed to participating in strictly controlled government junkets were nearly impossible to get.
In the east, Libyans cannot believe that now, after all those decades of stifling repression, they are free to have their stories – many of them sad, others horrific – heard.