Tripoli outside night |
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Collection title
Méditerranéo
First broadcast date
09/25/1999
Abstract
Nightlife in Tripoli: family walks by the seaside, games in the streets, men on café terraces, Italian speaking café owners...
Production companies
-
RAI - Coproduction
- France 3 Marseille - Coproduction
Audiovisual form
Magazine
Primary theme
Public areas and social issues
Credits / Cast
- Sanguinetti Sampiero - Journalist
Map locations
- Libya - North and coastline - Tripoli
Context
Tripoli: exterior night
François Siino
If at the end of 1999 Mediterraneo's cameras could take their TV audience for a night-time stroll through the busy, well-lit streets of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, it was for a very simple reason: the United Nations embargo imposed since 1992 had just been lifted. They were witnessing the somewhat hesitant beginning of Libya's return to the international stage, the end of a total isolation which had brought serious economic difficulties particularly in key sectors such as health.
The complex relationship which the Libyan state, the Jamahiriya, maintained with its regional and international neighbours actually dates back long before the embargo. In the 1980s the U.S. administration under Ronald Reagan had invented the term “rogue state” to describe this nation perceived as a threat to world security in general and American interests in particular. In 1986, to force the Libyan leader to stop his terrorist attacks and his support for those who carried them out, American aircraft bombed Tripoli and Benghazi. But the event which pushed the international community to take severe measures was the Lockerbie bombing in December 1988, when a Pan Am flight over Scotland was blown up. When Colonel Gaddafi refused to hand over the two men suspected of planning the attack, the UN imposed an embargo in 1992. That concerned mainly air services and technological and military imports, though it also drastically reduced how many diplomats were allowed to remain in each capital and froze Libyan financial assets abroad. Problems at home and international isolation forced Gaddafi to soften his position. On April 5th 1999, the two Libyan suspects were finally handed over and the sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council were immediately lifted.
The resumption of contact with ordinary life in Libya which the report offers is admittedly superficial (the programme was also broadcast in many Arab countries). No allusion is made to the difficult years the population had just been through nor to the causes of their suffering. We watch an ordinary evening in what could be any Mediterranean city; crowds strolling on the streets and in the squares, families with children coming to take the air on the seafront. The merry-go-rounds turn, the terraces of the cafés are filled with people drinking coffee or sodas, smoking hookahs, children play football. But it is perhaps precisely this everyday banality, this family atmosphere which the report wants to convey, reminding us quite rightly that in the Mediterranean as elsewhere, underneath the labels imposed by the violence of international relations, people have more in common with each other than international confrontations would suggest.
Bibliography
Burgat François, Laronde André, La Libye, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2003
Djaziri Moncef, 1996, État et société en Libye : islam, politique et modernité, Paris, L'Harmattan.
Haimzadeh Patrick, 2011, Au cœur de la Libye de Kadhafi, Paris, JC Lattès.
