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A Libyan rebel stands by a shop window decorated with a portrait of Muammar Qaddafi with his son Saif al-Islam on his shoulders in Tripoli.
A Libyan rebel stands by a shop window decorated with a portrait of Muammar Qaddafi with his son Saif al-Islam on his shoulders in Tripoli.
TRIPOLI -- As fighting continues in the Libyan capital between rebels and fighters loyal to deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi, a sense of calm has finally settled over most of the city, putting something of an end to what has been the most intense conflict to emerge in the "Arab Spring."

Explosions and gunfire were still audible late in the afternoon on August 26, nearly a week after rebel forces entered Tripoli and four days after they made their initial assault on Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound.

But leaders of the rebels' National Transitional Council have assured journalists here that they control 90 percent of the city, with the remaining Qaddafi strongholds slowly succumbing to armed attack. More cars are coming onto the streets, though it is far too early to say that any normal sense of life has returned to the war-torn city on the Mediterranean coast.

A drive through downtown Tripoli early on August 26 revealed a ghost town. Martyrs' Square -- formerly Green Square, the plaza in central Tripoli where Qaddafi would regularly rally his supporters -- lies empty. The large scaffolding that used to support a platform and lights is still standing. Graffiti covers concrete barricades surrounding the square with expressions like "Finito" and "GAME OVER." Trash is collecting on the streets, and residents this morning woke up to discover that there was no running water.

'A Qaddafi Hospital'

The Zawiya Street hospital houses the victims of the running street battles that have gripped the city over the past week. Doctors say that they have treated both rebels and Qaddafi supporters alike, with favor toward none. Walking down the hallway, I am assaulted by a horrible stench. After tying a cloth mask over my face, I enter a small room where five decomposing corpses lie under blankets. Flies buzz around the room. I have never smelled anything worse in my life.

As the airport is long closed and major aid organizations have still not established a significant presence here due to the recently ended fighting, Tripoli's hospitals are running short on supplies. When I visit the Zawiya Street hospital around 11 a.m., it is being staffed mostly by nurses and medical students. The doctors, who have been working nonstop shifts, are sleeping.

"I came here yesterday because my neighborhood was surrounded by snipers," says Mohammed el-Bosefi, a 24-year-old medical student who lives on the road connecting the airport to Qaddafi's compound, the two sites in Tripoli that have been the scene of the most intense fighting, and which remain contested. He would have rushed to the hospital earlier had the route there not been so perilous. "I couldn't come here. I stayed in my neighborhood just to help my friends, my relatives, my neighbors," he says.

On August 25, he tells me, more than 100 people were brought to the hospital and 10 died, mainly from gunshot wounds. While Tripoli residents have largely stayed off the streets this past week to avoid the violence, many of the casualties were injured inside their homes, Bosefi says.

"This is a Qaddafi hospital," says Ala Salem, a 22-year-old Tripoli resident, as he surveys the blood-stained floors and decaying walls. "This is what we want to [show] the world."

Smoke rises above the Souk Bouslim, east of Tripoli

A Plan Long In Waiting

While Tripoli lies in an obvious state of physical disarray, a strange sense of order pervades its streets. The rag-tag group of rebels -- mostly young men in their early 20s and late teens -- has devised a block-by-block system of checkpoints to ensure that pro-Qaddafi forces cannot advance to secure parts of the city.

Though the capital was late to fall in the civil war -- which began six months ago when protests broke out in the eastern city of Benghazi -- its citizens were well prepared to mount their own resistance when rebel forces finally made their assault. Interviews with rebels and anti-Qaddafi activists reveal an elaborate system of secret cells that were formed three months prior to the liberation of Tripoli.

Mohammed Abou Gahba mans a checkpoint right outside his apartment building with a group of his friends. Standing over six feet tall and with thick arms, he learned English while living in England and is training to become a pilot. But for the past week he has been patrolling his neighborhood with an assault rifle. He says that three months ago, citizens in his neighborhood -- as they have across the city -- began organizing "councils" to prepare just for the moment when rebels would advance on the city. "We do it in secret," he says. "We don't need to be in public because if the government knows, if Qaddafi government knows we have a council here, they will kill us, capture us, and put us in prison."

Abdullah Ahmed Bilal is a commodore in the Libyan Navy and lives not far from the checkpoint manned by Mohammed. He speaks of the Tripoli underground that naturally formed when it became clear that the challenge to Qaddafi's regime, which began in the east, became serious and might actually make its way to the capital. "Before the rebellion came to Tripoli," he says, "for three months we organized...we organized them, everyone was responsible for his area, must do this, this, this, this. Because we have seen during the Iraq war so many people kill, steal so many things, that's why. We organize this thing three months before."

'He Can't Be A Muslim'

August 26 marked the first day that Friday Prayers were held in Libya without the Qaddafi regime in power. Though the Libyan leader liked to paint himself as a hero fighting on behalf of the Islamic faith, like all dictators, he controlled the practice of religion so that it would not present a threat to his god-like status. There was only one hero who would be worshipped in Qaddafi's Libya, and it was not Allah.

Faiq Shineb is the caretaker of the Mulai Muhammed Mosque. Libya's most famous house of worship, it appears on the dinar, the national currency. Growing a beard, as religious Muslim men tend to do, was discouraged under Qaddafi, and would make one an easy target for the intelligence services. The hirsute Shineb tells me with a broad smile that he began growing his current beard a month ago, his own expression of optimistic defiance against a regime that controlled nearly every aspect of the individual's life.

Bilal, the naval officer, says that Qaddafi's forces tried to bomb the Mulai Muhammed Mosque where he prays because some rebel fighters had holed up inside. They missed the house of worship, hitting an adjacent apartment building instead. "How can he be a Muslim like this?" Bilal asks. "He can't be a Muslim."

During the Qaddafi era, imams were selected and monitored by the regime. Some of the men at the mosque tell me that they think there are secret cameras hidden in the mosque's walls. "Last Friday, as before Friday, as before Friday," Shineb says, the imam of this mosque would deliver the same chutba, or sermon, in which Qaddafi, or "Brother Leader," would doubtlessly be praised. Shineb says he hasn't seen the imam since the battle for Tripoli began. "I don't know if he will come back or not," he tells me. "I don't know because maybe the people, when they see him, I don't know what they will do."
New President Vaclav Havel meetscitizens after being elected at the Prague Castle.
New President Vaclav Havel meetscitizens after being elected at the Prague Castle.
In early July, news leaked that a German nonprofit organization, Quadriga, would bestow its annual honor -- given to "role Models for Germany" -- to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yes, that Vladimir Putin, the man who, in his 11 years ruling Russia, has presided over the country's slide into authoritarianism, a withering of the rule of law, and a foreign policy of aggression toward its neighbors.

According to the German newspaper "Sueddeutsche Zeitung," Quadriga selected Putin, whom it described as, "in the tradition of Peter the Great, a switchman in the direction of the future" for his fostering "stability through the interplay of prosperity, economy and identity." An outcry erupted in the German media, and a national leader of the country's Green Party, along with a respected historian, resigned from Quadriga's board of trustees.

But ultimately it was the threat from Vaclav Havel, playwright, anti-communist dissident and the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, to return the prize he had won in 2009 that persuaded the foundation to change course. The very same day that Havel's disapproval was reported by the Czech newspaper "Lidove noviny," Quadriga announced that it would cancel the award celebration, originally scheduled for October 3, the date that East and West Germany were reunified. The foundation said that it "most deeply" regretted the displeasure expressed by Havel, whose intervention was all the more stirring considering his poor physical condition: the former president has not made a public appearance since March. ("The truth is that Russia has become a threat to its neighbors," Havel told my co-blogger Michael Zantovsky for a "World Affairs" profile that appeared earlier this year. "I don't care whether this be considered liberal, or conservative, or progressive.")

Anyone with a passing understanding of contemporary Russia can understand the outrageousness of recognizing Vladimir Putin for a contribution to human rights. Doubly ironic is bestowing an award in recognition of the reunification of Germany to a former KGB officer who recruited Germans to spy on their countrymen. Stationed in Dresden from 1985 through 1990, Putin worked hand-in-hand with the Stasi, the East German secret police and one of the most ruthless intelligence services known to man, whose files, according to the historian Timothy Garton Ash, stretched for 110 miles when opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The initial decision to give Putin the award may owe partly to the fact that the vice chairman of Quadriga's selection committee, Lothar de Maiziere, was forced to resign from the cabinet of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl over rumors that he had worked for the Stasi. But the Quadriga controversy was more than the result of some personal favor. And the organization's choice to rescind its prize to Putin at the behest of Havel is not only a story of the dueling reputations of world figures. The whole episode is illustrative of a worrying trend in German foreign policy that has seen it move closer to Russia at the expense of its traditional Western allies and the new democracies to its east.

Germany's relationship with Russia hinges on its heavy consumption of Russian-supplied gas. Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, is the biggest customer of Gazprom, the Russian energy conglomerate, which Putin has assiduously used as an instrument of foreign policy over the past decade. German-Russian relations reached their peak under the former Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who once described Putin "an impeccable democrat." Just weeks after stepping down as chancellor in 2005, Schröder became chairman of the board of Nord Stream, a project that would transit Russian gas directly to Germany through a pipeline under the Baltic Sea. By avoiding land routes and bypassing transit countries in central and Eastern Europe, Nord Stream will allow Russia to cut off gas to these nations while continuing to ship it to Germany. Not for nothing did the late American congressman and human rights advocate Tom Lantos deem Schroeder a "political prostitute" in 2007.

Relations between the two countries thawed under Schroeder's Christian Democrat successor, Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and was thus all-too-familiar with the reality of Russian dominance. But over the past five years, relations have slowly returned to the Schröder-esque status quo. When Putin's handpicked successor and puppet, President Dmitry Medvedev, mentioned the word "candidate" in passing during a speech at a conference in Hanover in July, Merkel replied, "Candidate, that's lovely to hear." With a Russian presidential election coming up next year, the remark was hardly accidental. This utterance amounted to, in the words of "International Herald Tribune" columnist John Vinocur, "an approximate political endorsement by a German chancellor of a nonannounced candidate for president" in a country where elections are a farce. More significant was Merkel's March decision, highly controversial within Germany, to abstain from the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, distancing Germany from France, the U.K., and the U.S. and putting it on the side of Russia and China.

To be sure, Germany has serious economic considerations to weigh regarding Russia that cannot be written off. But being Gazprom's largest customer and Russia's biggest trading partner comes with its own levers. Trade is a two-way street; without a German consumer, Gazprom and its subsidiaries would not be able to collect fees. The relationship between Germany and Russia, in other words, is one of co-dependence, and, on the German side, could become more independent were Berlin serious about weaning itself off Russian gas. The German government's knee-jerk decision in the aftermath of Japan's Fukushima disaster to end its use of nuclear power demonstrates a lack of seriousness when it comes to energy generation.

As with many aspects of contemporary German political life, another reason for Berlin's timorousness toward Moscow is in some part attributable to historic guilt from World War II, when Nazi forces committed heinous acts against Soviet citizens and starved millions of Soviet troops to death in Operation Barbarossa. It is this very sort of admirable, if at times misplaced, feeling of responsibility for the past, however, that doesn't exist in Russian leaders of the Putin mold. "There's a sense we should avoid conflict at any cost," Rolf Fuecks, director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation, recently told RFE/RL about the attitude of the German political establishment toward Russia. The uproar over the Quadriga award, however, indicates that many Germans do not approve of the way in which their country's foreign policy has been headed.

"People, your government has returned to you!" Havel triumphantly declared in his 1990 New Year's Address, his first major speech as president of a free Czechoslovakia. The loss of a human rights prize is hardly bound to make Vladimir Putin blanch; the former KGB man is not known for his sentimentality. But how fitting that a lifelong dissident who sacrificed so much to return government to his people should strike a blow for freedom against a dictator who has stolen government from his.

originally published in "World Affairs Journal"

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