My Brilliant Career as a People Smuggler and Sort-of Refugee

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August 29, 2013 by kate ahearne

Refugees and people-smugglers have been occupying our thoughts and dominating our politics in recent weeks. One of the most toxic aspects of the debate has been the idea that Kevin Rudd and those who agree with his PNG arrangement are nasty, cruel and inhuman. Commenting on a piece I published recently, one of my readers took me to task because my heart wasn’t ‘bleeding’ enough.

I had expressed support for the PNG agreement because it seems likely to stop the drownings, and because I don’t like the idea of those with money being able to take precedence over others living without option in often appalling conditions in camps closer to their homelands.

So I’ve been thinking back to my time as a teacher in Libya and Yemen, and reflecting on my own brilliant career as a people smuggler and a rather privileged, sort-of refugee.

Part 1: Libya, 1980-1982

In 1980, armed with my shiny, new Master’s degree, I traveled with my 10 year-old daughter, 15 month-old son and my (then) husband to Libya on a two-year contract to teach English as a Second Language at Garyounis University in Benghazi.

Muammar Gaddafi had been in power for 11 years, and we arrived to find a repressed society where people lived in fear. Just a few days before we landed in Benghazi, 4 students had been executed in the quadrangle at the university – for anti-regime activities.

We were quietly warned by other expats to trust no-one. We learned about spies, the secret police, and the morality police. There were even rumours that my American boss was a spy – whether for the regime or for the CIA, nobody seemed to know.

The secret police were efficient and scary, but the morality police were a bit of a joke. Apparently they had bought a fleet of white Peugeot 504s. Nobody else in Benghazi had a white 504, so they weren’t exactly incognito. I fell foul of them once, for sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette – such behavior by a woman!

On another occasion my husband was picked up by the secret police for taking photos on the streets. He was whisked off to the police station, and his camera seized. This was a lot more serious, but he was able to sweet-talk his way out of trouble by feigning ignorance of the ‘no photos’ rule, and by insisting that he only wanted to show people back home some of the wonders of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

Nobody spoke to us in any detail about Gaddafi or the regime, and we soon learned better than to ask.

The Colonel would harangue the country for hours on end on television, quoting from his Green Book, and images of Gaddafi adorned the streets on giant billboards.

Not everything he did was obnoxious – he was committed to the education of girls, for instance, and he poured billions of dinars into developing agriculture and, hopefully, pushing the desert back.

Thanks for the pic to 10 lb travelling

Brand new ‘kit’ supermarkets from the USSR had sprouted in the cities – identical, and identically devoid of actual goods. Occasionally there would be a boat-load of cheese, or Italian bedroom suites. Sometimes eggs would be ‘in’. But you would have tried in vain for a pair of scissors, or meat, unless meat was ‘in’ – in which case, tiny shop-fronts would suddenly open up around the city, and lumps of meat would be sold – not by the cut or the kind, but by the kilo. We were delighted to buy a lump of something or other with a telltale purple stamp that we later discovered to be kangaroo (masquerading as beef) from Australia.

Private enterprise was frowned upon, and the souk had been closed down some years earlier. Although the gold souk had survived, the craftspeople were gone.

During the first year, we lived in a hotel in the centre of Benghazi. There was a young Libyan clerk who worked at the check-in desk. I’ll call him Ahmed. Not a very nice young man – arrogant and a bit creepy, openly rude and not at all helpful. We were warned to be very careful around him. Ahmed’s English was rudimentary, but he was an enthusiastic Gaddafi supporter, and his great dream was to be allowed to travel abroad to study.

It was almost impossible to escape from Libya. By 1980, the borders were firmly closed, and very few people were allowed to study abroad at that time. Unless you were an obvious supporter of the regime, you had no hope. We’ll come back to Ahmed later.

At the beginning of the second year we were given a flat, and I traveled to the University in a bus with other teachers. I also taught an evening class for members of the community – many of these students were Libyans, but quite a few were expatriates from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

One of my evening students was a Polish woman – a laboratory technician at the local hospital. I’ll call her Anna. Like all the other Poles, Anna and her teenage daughter were destined to be put on a plane non-stop to Warsaw at the end of her contract – no ifs, no buts. Times were tough behind the Iron Curtain, and during my second year in Benghazi, she asked me to help her to get to Australia.

I didn’t really warm to Anna very much – she was shamelessly pushy, for one thing, but I knew that if I was in her position, I’d be pushy, too. As things stood, she had nothing to look forward to. We never became friends, but I agreed to help.

This involved two trips to Tripoli to visit the British Embassy, which in turn involved all sorts of permissions and stamps on bits of paper from all sorts of authorities. There was no Australian Embassy, and we needed a visa for Anna and her daughter. It was all very complicated, involving lots of phone calls. This meant taking a taxi into town to one of the ‘classier’ hotels, booking a call which might or might not eventuate and hanging around for hours, knowing that your phone would almost certainly be tapped.

And even if we could get a visa, we would still need help from someone well-placed in the Libyan regime to help us to get Anna on a flight to London instead of Warsaw. Anna thought she knew of such a person, but he would exact a heavy price.

Eventually, I noticed that I was being followed. When I got on the bus to the University, there was always a car following – always the same car. When I came home on the bus, the car would be there again. If I went shopping, or if I got in a taxi to make a phone call, I was followed.

One day, coming home from the university, I was the only person on the bus – the other teachers had all gone home earlier. The car was there, as usual. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was in danger, and that I’d put my family in danger. I had understood this intellectually, but on this day, I knew it in my bones. The bus could be stopped and I could be taken off – no witnesses except the bus driver, and we all knew which side his bread was buttered.

I’ll never know why they didn’t just whisk me off the bus that day when they had the perfect opportunity. Perhaps they thought our ‘conspiracy’ was bigger than just one frightened woman and her teenage girl, and hoped to catch us doing something even more dreadful than what we actually were doing.

By the time I got safely home, my nerve was gone. I told my husband I couldn’t continue with our plans to get Anna to Australia. So he took over, and eventually, thanks to his efforts, all the arrangements were in place. Flights were booked, and a few days later I was on a plane to Malta en route to the UK. We hoped that once it was obvious that I had left the country unaccompanied, the heat would be off for Anna and my husband.

As the plane left Libyan airspace, a buzz went up. There was the clink of bottles and glasses. Drinks were offered – real drinks with alcohol in them. I had a couple of those.

A few days later my husband and our young son, with Anna and her daughter boarded a plane to London. (My own daughter had already gone home to Australia during the previous summer vacation, so she was safe.)

At the airport, my husband shook hands with Anna’s Libyan contact. In his hand were the keys to our flat, and when the handshake was finished, the keys had changed hands. Under the Gaddafi regime, there was a mantra – ‘The occupier is the owner’. This was one of the ‘socialist’ aspects of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. So, we had just given away the University flat that we’d been living in to a corrupt official. And got away with it – a massive bribe by any standards.

Anna and her daughter flew on to Australia on visitor’s visas, overstayed their visas and settled in Perth.

Meanwhile, we went to Dublin for an extended visit with my husband’s family. One night we went out for dinner to a restaurant in the city. And who should we see there but Ahmed – scoffing wine (forbidden in Libya) and making merry in excellent English. He told us that he had only been pretending to be a Gaddafi supporter, and that his English had always been a lot better than he’d been letting on. He was now studying English at an advanced level and had no intention of ever returning to Libya.

Well, blow me down. Having been the cause of quite some paranoia for us while we’d been living in the hotel, it was a bit weird to have him shaking hands all round, ordering drinks and smiling all over his face. Now he was our newest, bestest friend.

Well, he was still arrogant and slimy, but we had to admire his devotion to his dream of escaping the Gaddafi regime. Well done, him.

So that was Gaddafi’s Libya in the 1980s – and Anna and Ahmed were two of the lucky ones who got away.

And my family was especially lucky, because we had money, and my children and I were Australian citizens, while my husband was travelling on an Irish passport. We certainly fled, and we certainly had a small, unpleasant taste of what it must be like to be a real refugee – but we had a home to go to and the means to get there.

Part 2: Libya, 2009.

In 2009, with my children all grown up, I returned to Libya. This was at least slightly risky, because if my name was on a list somewhere, I could have been in big trouble. I taught at the Police Academy, working with police and defence forces personnel as well as members of the public.

Tripoli Thanks for the pic to keyafrica.

Nobody knew it then, but these were the dying days of the dictatorship. Gaddafi himself was never talked about by the Libyans in my life – at least, not in my hearing.

The teachers I lived and worked with did talk to some extent – not about Gaddafi himself, but about the regime that frustrated our lives and all our best efforts – with ‘committees’ of ‘inexperts’ who made decisions about every aspect of our working lives – with the result that photocopiers didn’t work, promises never came to anything, and incompetence was the norm. While many thousands of dinars were being spent on updating the buildings, there was nothing available for teaching equipment and materials – as they say, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

For the students, the needs were great; for the teachers, the frustration was maddening. I found myself becoming more and more insistent, and began to refer to myself as ‘she who shouts’. I developed a hands-on-hips routine and a steely glare. Eventually, we did get our new photocopier.

In some ways, the regime seemed to have loosened up. It was easier for Libyans to travel outside the country, and Gaddafi was no longer overtly supporting terrorism. He had ‘come in from the cold’ and been enthusiastically accepted by Tony Blair during his time as the British PM, and to some extent by the international community – all that oil, after all!

Tripoli was still a mess, but private enterprise had begun to flourish again. There was a thriving market precinct, and the souk was back in business. There were restaurants and privately-run shops of every kind. You could buy fresh vegetables, fruit and meat at any time – including square bricks of something that looked like beef but was actually camel. The other teachers probably took my stories about the ‘good old, bad old days’ with a pinch of salt.

But there was still fear, and for ordinary Libyans, little hope of escape. In fact, Libya’s refugee problem was all coming the other way, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. As I looked around my classrooms, I saw virtually no-one who had been born before the Gaddafi regime, now celebrating its 40^th anniversary – they knew nothing different.

At the mid-term break, I headed for Tunis for a week off. At the airport my plane was delayed, and while I waited, the big-screen TV in the departure area showed several men in handcuffs being read their execution orders. People began to gravitate towards the screen, including young children. They gathered in silence. Eventually, the prisoners were taken to an outdoor location and shot.

Some of the students I taught in Libya in 2009, died during the civil war. I don’t know how many, or who they are. I haven’t enquired. I knew that some of them were from districts where the death toll was very heavy. I only know for sure that two or three who still sometimes contact me are safe. If you can’t escape, it seems that in the end you have to stand and fight.

Part 3: Yemen, 2010-2011

I was teaching in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen in 2011 when the Arab Spring began to gather impetus, sweeping though Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen.

I lived and worked in a secure compound. If I turned right at the gate, and right again at the Parliament, I would find myself in Tahrir (Martyr) Square. If I turned left, I would pass an army base on one side, the Russian Embassy on the other, and would eventually arrive at the University. As it turned out, we were located bang in the middle of the coming revolution.

Several times I saw protests outside the army base. The protesters were mostly women, swathed top-to-toe in black – many wearing American-style baseball caps.

Women in Sana’a protest against the Saleh regime, 2011.

Yemen is the poorest of the Arab states. I never went out without plenty of small change for the beggars. Occasionally, a woman would touch me on the arm and say a few words in English. Some of these were Yemeni women, while others were boat people fleeing the brutal civil war in Somalia. For the Somali community, desperate as life in Yemen was, it was still better than the alternative.

Towards the end of my second term, as the unrest in Yemen escalated, I began to receive emails from the Department of Foreign Affairs urging me to leave. I fobbed them off.

A big protest was planned in Tahrir Square for the last Friday of the term. On the Thursday I managed to find and buy a digital camera, and on the Friday morning set off for the Square.

On my way to Tahrir Square – Two young men displaying a poster of a very much younger President Saleh

But by the time I arrived at the Square, I realized that something strange was happening. What were all these supporters of President Saleh doing here? Where were the anti-regime protesters I had been expecting to see?

All over the Square, giant tents had sprouted like mushrooms overnight. It was still very early in the day, but the area was starting to fill up – all men and boys. Alarm bells began quietly ringing in my head.

The two young men on the right are wearing the Yemeni Jambiya (curved dagger).

Eventually, I realized that I’d better high-tail it out of there. It would only take one unfriendly person, and I’d be a statistic. Looking at this photo on the camera screen, I sensed that the mood was changing. Some of these faces were not very friendly at all.

Safely back at the College, I learned that pro-Saleh supporters had taken over the Tahrir Square the previous evening, erected the tents and patrolled throughout the night to keep the protesters out. They were armed, and had been provided with placards and bribed with money, food and Qat (the local narcotic). Thanks to social networking, the anti-regime protesters had moved without fuss to the University, where they set up camp and stayed until President Saleh stepped down in February, 2012.

The following week was exam week. Students were quite openly checking Al Jazeera for news of the Arab Spring. Every day, protesters were dying on the streets of Sana’a. One of our students, a doctor, was dealing with the wounded every day at the local hospital. Another lost two cousins during that last week of my stay in Yemen.

I never did get to see the anti-regime protest. On the following Saturday, just as I was finishing my exam marking and paperwork, I received a phone call from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. I was told, in no uncertain terms, to be on the next plane out of Sana’a. According to DFAT, the situation was explosive, and the airport was likely to be closed at any time without notice. So, reluctantly, I informed my boss and packed my bags.

One of the teachers had a friend who was a taxi driver, or who could at least borrow a taxi. This was a great relief because the taxis were no longer considered to be safe, especially for an unaccompanied western woman. At ten that night this Somali refugee drove me safely to the airport, where I spent a very anxious night waiting for the first plane out in the morning.

For people like my Somali driver and his family, the future was bleak, as it was for the vast majority of Yemenis. For millions of people in Yemen, there is no hope of asylum seeking. None of these people is ever likely to be on a boat to Australia – they have nothing.

Once again, I was a sort-of refugee myself, but one of the privileged ones. The College was obliged to close for the foreseeable future, as the other foreign teachers packed their bags and left during the next few days. On the following Friday, 57 protesters were shot dead by snipers on the roof-tops, shooting into the crowd outside the University. The civil war had begun in earnest, and I was safely home in Australia.

Yemeni women celebrate the first anniversary of the ouster of President Saleh.
Thanks for the photo to AFP