Saturday, April 28, 2012

Of Lindsey Hilsum and hill of beans

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04/28/2012

Of Lindsey Hilsum and hill of beans

People write. I write. Everybody reads NOT.
Hold that thought.
I write. Everybody reads.
February 29, 2012 One million hits.
Writing is easier than reading, not the other way round.
What I write, not a book. Not a researh paper (only to be published in a scientific journal). Never a short story, a cute poem, a cuter (false) biography, perhaps, a Memoir, all except a revise edition of both Bill and Hillary's such silly attempts in their glorious past. The keyword is "past."
Oops!
I gave up all my secrets. Oh well. Easy come easy spilled.
...and I am Sid Harth@mysistereileen.com


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Sandstorm: Lindsey Hilsum

Synopsis:

Sandstorm is the best kind of reportage: humane, historically-informed and full of details that only a writer close to the action could have noticed. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi has been one of the twenty-first century's defining moments: the Arab world's most bizarre dictator brought down by his own people with the aid of NATO aircraft.

Lindsey Hilsum was in Libya when Gaddafi met his squalid end. She traces the history of his strange regime from its beginnings - when Gaddafi had looks, charisma and popular appeal - to its paranoid, corrupt final state. At the heart of her book, however, is a brilliant narrative of Libyan people overcoming fear and disillusionment and finding the strength to rebel. Hilsum follows five of them through months of terror and tragedy.

This is the Libyan revolution as it was made and lived. Sandstorm will take its place in a library of classic books about turning points of history.
Lindsey Hilsum: Sandstorm by FaberBooks

Tags:

Categorised as:
Non-fiction
Sub-categories:
Current Affairs
Places:
Libya
Genres & Themes:
Conflict; Dictators; East Vs West; Journalism; Reportage; Revolution; War
Sandstorm book cover      

Selected edition:
Hardback
ISBN:
9780571288038
Published:
05.04.2012
No of pages:
304

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Lindsey Hilsum

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Lindsey Hilsum (born 3 August 1958) is an English television journalist and writer. She is the International Editor for Channel 4 News,[1] and a regular contributor to the Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian,[2] The New Statesman,[3] and Granta.[4]

Contents

Biography

Early life

Her father is professor Cyril Hilsum, a physicist best known for research that helped form the basis of modern LCD technology. She attended Worcester Grammar School for Girls and the University of Exeter where she graduated with a degree in French and Spanish. [5]

Career

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News' International Editor. She has covered the major conflicts of the past two decades, including the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2011 she reported the uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain, as well as Libya. She has also reported extensively from Iran and Zimbabwe, and was Channel 4 News China Correspondent from 2006 to 2008. During the 2004 US assault on Falluja, she was embedded with a frontline marine unit, and in 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started. Before becoming a journalist, she was an aid worker, first in Latin America and then in Africa. Her book Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution will be published by Faber in the UK in April, and by Penguin Press in the USA in May.

Awards

She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex in 2004 and has won several awards including the Royal Television Society Journalist of the Year, James Cameron Award, One World Broadcasting Trust award, Amnesty, Voice of the Viewer and Listener and the Charles Wheeler Award.

References

External links

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HRW: Libya must clarify status of Qaddafi-era supporters
April 28, 2012   share
Libya must clarify the rules under which it disqualifies from public office individuals who stood by the regime of former leader Moammar Qaddafi, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.
"Exclusion from public office should be based on concrete and provable claims of wrongdoing, rather than poorly defined connections with the previous government," said HRW Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Lea Whitson.
The National Transitional Council (NTC) "should amend regulations to eliminate vague and broad prohibitions on who may serve as a government official or become a candidate for election," a statement said.
HRW said current regulations bar people from holding senior government posts or running for office if they "glorified" the previous government or if they stood against the February 17 revolution that overthrew Qaddafi.
"It is terribly unclear how the vetting commission will decide who can and cannot participate in the new Libya’s political life," Whitson said in reference to a commission tasked with vetting senior officials and candidates.
With two months to go before a constituent assembly is elected, the commission's procedural rules have yet to be published.
The so-called Integrity and Patriotism Commission also vets senior security officials, ambassadors, heads of government institutions and companies, heads of universities and heads of unions, HRW said.
Its regulation excludes members and leaders of institutions active during Qaddafi's government, including the revolutionary guards, revolutionary committee and student associations, it added.
Those involved in crimes, including torture, and those who had commercial ties with Qaddafi's clan or stole public funds are also barred from office, the rights group said.
HRW urged the interim government to refrain from determining eligibility based solely on past or present associations, give concrete proof of wrongdoing when someone is barred from office and implement an appeals process.
"Excluding candidates for elections on vague and over broad grounds violates international standards for free and fair election," it said.
-AFP/NOW Lebanon
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Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution by Lindsey Hilsum – review

Gaddafi's deposition and the events that led up to his bloody end are quite a story
Rebel fighter, between Benghazi and Ajdabiyah
End game … rebel fighter in front of a burning vehicle belonging to forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, March 2011. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Muammar Gaddafi's demise in Sirte last October was the ugliest of any of the dictators toppled by the uprisings of the Arab spring. Tunisia's and Egypt's deposed leaders – 24 and 30 years in power to Gaddafi's record 42 – got away with gilded exile and a humiliating trial respectively; Yemen's veteran president was pushed into retirement. Regime change in Libya was always likely to be brutish. The events that led up to the Brother Leader's bloody end are quite a story.
  1. Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution
  2. by Lindsey Hilsum
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Lindsey Hilsum was in all the right places to tell it now – in Benghazi when the revolution erupted in February 2011; in Tripoli when the regime fell in August; and in the ruins of Misrata to see Gaddafi's rotting corpse on display in a vengeful parody of a traditional lying-in-state. Sandstorm is an impressive combination of vivid reporting and cool analysis from the veteran Channel 4 foreign correspondent. But what makes her book so useful is that she zooms out from the day-to-day drama to explain how Libya was different: its tribal society, small population, vast oil wealth, nonexistent or stunted institutions, routine repression and, above all, the wacky, capricious ruler who presided over it for so long.
Gaddafi came to be seen in the west as a vicious buffoon with a penchant for comic-opera uniforms, female bodyguards and ranting speeches – as well as for antics such as arming the IRA, giving anti-colonialism a bad name by bankrolling some of Africa's most noxious tyrants, and carrying out the Lockerbie bombing.
Libyans concentrated on what he did (or failed to do) back home in the Jamahiriya – his own Arabic neologism for "state of the masses". His utopian vision was set out in the unreadable Green Book – full of ideas that were "derivative and discredited". Hilsum describes doomed efforts by brave opposition activists to overthrow Gaddafi as well as the notorious massacre in 1996 of 1,270 prisoners in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. Relatives of those victims mounted the protest that sparked the Benghazi uprising.
Sandstorm looks closely at the years after 2003 when Gaddafi, rattled by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, surrendered his WMD arsenal. The old pariah became a valued new ally in the west's "war on terror", cooperating with the CIA and MI6 to hunt down Libyan jihadis. Later, some of these emerged, reborn as Islamist democrats, Tripoli's new rulers – along with embarrassing documents about rendition and torture.
For Britain and other western countries, Gaddafi's open stance meant business opportunities galore, especially contracts in an oil industry recovering from years of sanctions. Hopes were invested in the efforts of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's LSE-educated and supposedly reformist-minded son, whose star faded as returning Libyan exiles found that for all the smooth talk he was not able to deliver fundamental change. For, Hilsum writes, as it emerged from isolation the Libyan regime became "less of a dictatorship and more of a mafia state". US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks made this clear.
So a peaceful transition was never an option. In a fateful speech in February, Saif pledged to defend his father's regime "to the last bullet" against the "greasy rats" who had the temerity to oppose it. Days later, when troops shot down demonstrators in Tripoli, one man Hilsum interviewed saw the light: "It dawned on me that it would not be like Egypt or Tunisia. Gaddafi wouldn't stop. Those countries had pseudo-democracies but we had nothing. So we quickly took the path of armed conflict."
Hilsum gives a riveting account of the battle for Tripoli, with activists risking their lives to pass intelligence to Nato, whose targeting – contrary to regime propaganda – was largely accurate, and too cautious for many Libyans. But there is disappointingly little about decision-making in western capitals or how it was coordinated with the wealthy and ambitious Qataris, who maintained their own lines of communication to Islamist rebel brigades rather than the National Transitional Council. Part opportunism, part luck, this was intervention "lite", conducted without the risk of putting "boots on the ground" (except for small numbers of deniable special forces). It seems unlikely to be repeated anywhere else – and certainly not in Syria – as the Arab spring runs its increasingly grim course.
Alex Crawford, a special correspondent for Sky News, made headlines covering the uprising in Zawiya and riding with the rebels into Tripoli, scooping the massed battalions of the BBC. She won praise for her nerve and determination and writes candidly in Colonel Gaddafi's Hat (HarperCollins, £14.99) about the irreconcilable conflict between an addictive job and her children and husband at home. Hers is a fast-paced story that captures the excitement and fear as well as the boredom of the hotels where journalists were forced to stay to be lied to by regime minders.
Ordinary Libyans play a bigger role in Tripoli Witness (Gilgamesh, £9.95), by the British-Lebanese journalist Rana Jawad, who worked undercover for the BBC Arabic service. Jawad had noticed over the years that Libyans had "no sense that change was possible or that they could do anything to alter the direction of their lives". Gaddafi's international rehabilitation did not make much difference to them: behind the gleaming new towers on Tripoli's waterfront the streets were still potholed and filthy, the health and education systems catastrophic. It was, she writes, "the memories of the dead, the oppressed and the shunned that ultimately sparked the Libyan uprising". It's no surprise that the new dawn has been marred by revenge killings.
All three books – part of a steady stream on the events of the last year across the Middle East and north Africa – agree that Gaddafi's largely unlamented departure brought exhilaration, an unfamiliar sense of empowerment and profound uncertainty about the future. In Arabic, "revolution" (thawra) rhymes neatly with "chaos" (fowda). But that's another – unfinished – story..


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