Libya's rebel voices
- Source: Global Times
- [20:53 June 12 2011]
- Comments
By Lin Meilian in Benghazi
Despite continued fighting on the outskirts of this "liberated" city, a sense of normalcy is returning as people go to work, go shopping, go for dinner and unlike before go out to buy their choice of newspaper.
The global "big-picture" of Benghazi is a city of audacious people at the center of a three-month-long uprising aimed at toppling Gaddafi who remains in power just 405 miles away in Libya's capital Tripoli.
The on-the-street reality of Benghazi is a city that has already undergone a broad social transformation. Perhaps most evident is the proliferation of publications that have released fresh new voices that have long been gagged.
Prior to the outbreak of fighting there was only one newspaper in Benghazi. Today about 50 new newspapers and magazines are being hawked on the streets.
Most of the new publications are publishing on a micro scale and not all are able to meet their own deadlines. Some have circulations of only a couple thousand and manage pressruns a couple of times a week.
The publications still require permission to publish from the National Transition Council(NTC) but that seems not difficult to obtain.
For the first time Benghazi has a weekly newspaper for young people that is published in Arabic and English. "I am very happy to be able to try our best to express our voices," said 16-year-old Hamid Bugrein, a student-turned-reporter for Intefathat Al-Ahrar, which literally means, Uprising of the Free.
The newspaper found funding from a charity foundation and publishes about 2,000 copies a week. "Our young readers want to know what other young people think about the revolution," said the editor, Metigha Ghremiee, a college student who was majoring in economics when his country's crisis began.
Lacking journalism skills
None of the paper's four reporters have experience in journalism and an English professor is called in to help polish their stories.
Like most of the new publications, this young newspaper for young people doesn't strive for objectivity and its stories are often loaded with political rhetoric. Western journalistic values are not easily maintained after reporters interview those who were imprisoned or wounded in the fighting against Muammar Gaddafi's troops. For most local journalists it's also the first time they've been able to write the other side of Gaddafi's rule.
As a weekly, the paper has a hard time keeping up with hard news from the battlefronts and concentrates on opinion pieces, features and helpful information.
Last week's issue, the paper's fifth, carried a front-page story warning people of the dangers of shooting firearms into the air in celebration, and asking citizens to donate their unused firearms to the "liberation fighters". The paper also carried a heartwarming letter from a 17-year-old American girl who wrote that Libya's revolutionaries are her heroes.
Tariq El-Ghdiree, a Benghazi bookshop owner says sales of new newspapers are growing week by week and people's reading habits have changed. "People here didn't read the newspaper that much because it was all about Gaddafi," he said. "Now readers have alternatives."
Salem El-Abar, the editor-in-chief of this city's long-established original newspaper, which goes by the English name Benghazi Newspaper, believes most of the new publications will be short lived.
"Those that started after the revolution will have only a short breath. They can't carry on over the long term because they can't meet the readers' needs," said Abar.
