I continue to spend 7 or 8 hours of my life every evening glued to Tribute FM, a contemporary English speaking radio station broadcasting from Benghazi, Libya. I’ve taken to streaming it on my mobile and not missing a word, even if I need to visit the loo.
I’ve spoken before about Tribute FM here.
I find it compulsive listening. Broadly speaking, this is the background: Some young Westernised yet proud Libyans, some with hints of ‘London’ accents, have returned to Libya and are part of the struggle to free themselves from the rule of Gadaffi. Each night they get ‘on the air’ and talk, sometimes playing a song or two.
Their presentation and technical skills are not exactly honed, but they are funny, witty, and, well, just young people in a group get-together, bonded by a need to say ‘enough is enough’ to a mad warlord who is killing them.
They can rationally and calmly talk about what’s happening out there, yet also with an obvious passion and frustration their voices will quiver with emotion when it comes to certain aspects of their struggle. They can’t identify who they are or where they are actually broadcasting from, and so use assumed names like “Pink” or “Brains” or “Techie” or “Mole” (even though he hates being “Mole”, preferring “Mr G”). Using Skype, the rest of the world calls in to what sort of becomes a phone-in programme. Caller after caller after caller make it through to air. It is genuinely non-stop.
With very few exceptions, the callers are ‘Libyans abroad’. America, Canada, Saudi, UAE, Ireland, England, and many more. A lot of them are involved in actively campaigning or demonstrating within the countries they are (currently) resident, some report about what they’ve been up to, and others offer words of encouragement, or join in with a running ‘topic’ of debate.
Bizarrely, as their experience of youth culture abroad greatly influences them, they will, for example, conclude a frank and graphic discussion about how a captured injured enemy soldier should be treated (ranging from shooting him dead, to treating him ‘like royalty’ in order to help heal him and hope he will repent) with ‘shout-outs’. This is quite freaky listening, and took me a while to get used to. A few seconds after passionately saying, “Kill them, that’s the only way, they have to be killed. If I was faced with them I would have no issues with pointing my gun at their head and then their heart and sending them straight to hell as the traitors they are,” you’ll then hear, “Yeah, a big-up to my girls Shabs, Naz, and all the krue, and can you play [whatever urbany artist] some time, yeah? He’s got such a great voice, we all love listening to him, innit.”
Very surreal listening.
I am of course, an outsider. I’m a very spoilt un-oppressed English man and I’m not Muslim. This puts me a number of degrees away from being able to communicate with them as a friend, or to call-in to them with any confidence. They either live or know first hand about life under the Gadaffi regime, which held the population back mentally, and starved them of the ability to express themselves or allow youth culture to flourish and develop naturally. They are also all Muslim. As with all Muslims, this means they will nearly always be slipping in phrases in Arabic like “insha’allah” and greeting with “Salam alaikum” and making the odd religious chant and so on within a sentence. I’ve worked very closely with Muslims before and am mainly used to the more general customs, whilst still feeling very conscientiously an outsider.
It also meant that during their debate about what to do with a captured injured enemy soldier (a ‘soldier’ is of course a loose term. During a time of civil war, a huge number of ‘soldiers’ are just untrained citizens who have become involved in the armed fighting. Sometimes they are involved because their family will be tortured if they don’t fight, sometimes because they are caught-up in the belief they have to defend/fight, which can in itself be due to only consuming the ‘wrong’ propaganda) they made references to Sharia as a form of guidance as to how they should treat him.
My understanding is that under Sharia you treat your captives well, especially if they are a Muslim brother, but there are other teachings that glorify blood-thirsty killings of your enemy (probably mainly us kafir!), so it’s very interesting listening to them slightly wrestling with their ‘natural’ desires and trying to temper them with an interpretation of which of the archaic rules should apply from those left by their Prophet Muhammed (s.a.a.w, I add as I’m not being disrespectful of their religion during this article). And then to follow all of that with a ‘shout-out’ is most obscure.
On the religious front, I did notice a throwaway comment along the lines of, “It’s not as if they are crusaders or anything”. Painfully, this brought home to me their reality that most of their historical experience has been fighting Christian ‘crusaders’ intent on subjugating them.
I, as a white English man with no religion would still be tarred with the awful brush that the Christian legacy has across the world. I live in a country where rules and laws are still overseen by Christians, despite the increasing struggle to break free of control by the Church and remove it from the State. For most followers of Islam the consideration that there may be people outside of any faith is itself outside of their acceptance or understanding and comprehension. If you’re not Muslim you either a Jew or a Christian. I am none of the above, yet I carry the shame of Christianity and what evil it has, in collaboration with the Jews, done. Sigh.
Anyway. There I am every evening, listening attentively to Tribute FM even though I am such an outsider.
These people are the future of Libya. If they can keep their passion yet show true compassion and a sense of justice, then they will re-build their country to reflect a modern understanding and new way for the people. Hopefully, that means all of them. There will no doubt be tensions and opportunists who want to take control by division, and transitional times will be so very difficult. But, if the people talking via Tribute FM are anything to go by, their future will be a very good one.
The owners of these anonymous Tribute FM voices should be proud.
England's England 