What Can We Do for the Young Libyan Revolution?
It is the question the world is asking itself about the one Arab revolution that has already been the object of the most savage repression -- and unfortunately, it's not over.
So I asked the question in Tobruk, the first free Libyan city on the road after crossing the border from Egypt. I asked Farid Rafa, 37, a former officer who fraternized with the people on the first day of the uprising and who "is holding out" with a few others beneath a tent at ex-Jamahiriya Square, since rebaptized in the name of a victim of the regime, Mahdi Elias. I asked Ali Fadil, an elderly professor of physics and chemistry who has hung young peoples' caricatures of Gaddafi - Gaddafi with a grotesque mustache; Gaddafi made up as His Majesty, Lord of the Rats; Gaddafi as a woman, botoxed and heavily made up; Gaddafi in the nude, his hands hiding his genitals, fleeing from an insolent and joyous crowd; the head of Gaddafi, drowning in a sea of blood, etc. - on the walls of his school, now closed down. Marvels of comic imagination and popular inventiveness, these drawings. The Revolution inspires talent.
