Decoding People of Benghazi Attitude Toward Operation Dignity: Observation

This article describes only my own views. There are no tangible proofs that can support my observation. In other words,this article is based only on observational facts. It is not based on any research or statistics.

Life in Benghazi is socially enriched, everyday I meet strange people in different places. During the last five months, most of our chit chats are about the current conflict. I have observed different responses toward the Operation Dignity in real life or on social media. Not all Benghazi’s people have the same response, some are supporters, neutrals, or
adversaries. There is no statistics show exact supporters’ percentage. However, I can reassure that the majority is with Operation Dignity.

Five months period is enough to develop knowledge and make some observation on people’s views. It is easier now than ever to understand one’s opinion. People reaction fall in systematic way based on their tribes and their ideologies.

People of Benghazi come from the three provinces (Barga, Tripoli, and Fazzan) in Libya. One’s political opinion is directly related to their tribal roots. Even though most of them have settled here for many decades (Born and raised in Benghazi) and have no connection with their province, their opinion somehow connected back to their original tribe. This is what we call it “Jahawyia” or Regional, which is basically one stands only (either wrong or correct) with his tribe or province.

In this decoding, I focused only on people who come from Barga and Tripoli province as they represent the majority in Benghazi. I created two parts that are effecting people’s views. Let’s use XY as the unknown two parts. X represents the tribal roots or province. Y represents the ideology. Therefore, X is either from East (E) or from West (w ).

X= E or W

Most of Eastern tribes support Operation Dignity. As I said before there are no statistics showing the truth, but I can reassure that the majority of them is supporters. I never encountered one from Barga does not support  Operation Dignity. If there is one who does not support, that would be related to Y parts, which is the ideology. let’s say (E) equals or larger than 90% supporters. West (w ), or people come from Tripoli province, has larger adversaries. One of my friends is rooted back to Misrata’s tribes. He has never visited Misrata before, and now he is one of opponents. It becomes on daily base obvious whenever I meet adversaries, I found out they are from (W ). Again, there are no statistics showing how many. In addition, (W ) holds the largest number of neutrals. Many people can’t see themselves related to any parts in this conflict. They keep saying the famous phrase (ربي ينصر الحق) “May God grant only victory to the right”. Let’s say (W ) equals or larger than 50% supporters, 30% neutrals, and the rest opponents.

Y part represents the part connected to the ideology, precisely islamic ideology. Let’s say ideology in Benghazi composes of three parts: Moderate, Political, and Extreme islam. Moderate muslims are the majority of Benghazi. I consider myself as moderate. My brothers, sisters, and friends are moderates. Still there are so many extremists, and we considered them as normal citizens before 2011 when ideological differences emerged. There are Salafists who proved to be against other extremists who joined Islamic State or Ansar Alsharia. The difference between Salafists and other extremists is Jihad. The third type is people who use Islam in their political advantages, famously known as Muslim Brotherhood. These people look no different than moderate unless you dig deep in their ideology, and they come from East and West as well.

Here we go again with their classification. Moderates (M) are mostly Operation Dignity supporters. Salafists extremist (ES) are all Operation Dignity supporters. Other extremists (E) with Muslim Brotherhood (MB) are all Operation Dignity opponents.Therefore (Y) represents the following

Y= (M), (Es), (E), or (MB)

Therefore, Benghazi’s residents attitude toward Operation Dignity is XY connected to each other.

For example, I come from Eastern tribes (E) and I am moderate. My attitude toward Operation Dignity when X= E and Y=M is EM which means I’m totally supporters according to the main equation XY.

Try yours, or try anyone you know. Just pick one and apply this equation. The chances you will get is so close to my results.

This is a diagram can help you understand my points

My whole point is that some Ideological divisions is not the only issue face Libya nowadays, but also divisions between the East and West. I could be wrong! Yes, but I believe if I have the full funds and the ability to launch a research with widespread survey in the city, I would be so close form these results. It’s only observations so far, and could be right or wrong. The only thing I need is the proof. Do you agree? let me know your code and how is related to the overall diagram.

 

Enlighten Me and Restart Schools in Benghazi

As the crisis continues in Benghazi, we suffer a lot from multiple issues. One of the issues I mentioned in the previous topic was the educational halt. As a reaction to this stop, appeared many efforts to restart schools and learning cycle. However, these efforts emerged as separate and individual efforts, and they need to be unified in one vast initiative. One of them is called Nauwarni Initiative, and I think it’s the most sophisticated one.

Enlighten Me initiative, or Nauwarni, is basically a movement by civil society organizations sponsored by the National Council for Freedom and Human Rights. Their main and the only target is to restore schools in Benghazi. They started with several goals to reach their main target, evolving on the current situation in Benghazi and how to embrace the crisis and restart the schools. They developed several goals, and theses are some of them:

• Restarting education in schools located in safe areas: More than 75% of Benghazi is under the army control, and these areas are safe and contain large numbers of schools. Most of these schools are untouched. Others have some less damages in some parts due to some near by clashes happened in previous months. Nauwarni asks officials to reopen these schools in order to catch up with the current academic year as long as these areas are totally safe.

• Restarting education within schools occupied by refugees: According to Nauwarni, there are more than 40 schools occupied by refugees. However, most of these schools are not occupied 100%. There are empty classes, and the courtyard could be used as one large outside class. In order to restart learning for students who live in these schools, Nauwrni is welling to provide teachers and schools supplies to these schools.

• Students who are now living outside Benghazi should enroll in schools: Nauwarni says government should track these students in different cities, such as Al-Marj and Al-Bida. They must develop a process to make sure it is easy for students to enroll with no burden of official papers and other things.

• Checking with students who are refugees outside Libya: Some families had to travel outside Libya, most of them in Egypt, Tunisia, and Jordan. Nauwarni demands the government to check on these students by contacting with Libyan embassies, to make sure they catch up with their studies.

• Re-activate “Home Education” system and launching a TV channel: In 90s, Libya had a system called Home Education, which focuses on learning only at homes. Parents who are able to teach their kids at home, could register their kids in this system. At the end of the academic year, they allowed to take the final exam as the regular students. This system was supplemented with a local TV channel broadcasting only classes. Nauwrni thinks that it is the best time to re-activate this system again as the war continues. There are many parents who are welling to teach their kids at home nowadays. Nauwrni also now working on launching a TV channel on Nilesat. They start recording the classes and should be broadcasting soon. There are other online courses, such as Benghazi Skype School, but the current internet fluctuated speed in Benghazi makes it more difficult to follow with these classes.

To this moment, there is nothing serious attempt to restart schools in Benghazi. The only and main issue is the security. One of the school administrators told me that it’s our responsibility to provide the safe environment for the kids. Parents will hesitate to send their kids while they can listen to sound of explosions. He describes the issue of security as the main issue, fearing that these kids could be targeted by terrorist attacks. I believe it is important to keep these students safe, but we have to deal with education safety first. We’ve seen images from Japan after the Hiroshima bomb showing kids in damaged classes (Or even no schools at all) . If we have, for example 40,000 students, our goal should be to restart learning at least 50% of them. In other words, reducing the damadge in the education system as low as possible.

Benghazi Is A War Zone

It’s almost 8:00 pm, sitting home with no power, no gas in my car, and no cooking gas to eat heated food. The only things keep my body warm are the four layers of clothes I wear right now. I have exactly 40% of battery in my laptop, which motivated me to write this post and to make me busy and thinking free of the sound of clashes and explosions outside.

It all started in mid October, when Gen Khalifa Hifter decided to move forward Benghazi to free it from some terrorist organizations who have taken over the city the last months. I am not going to write detailed information, most of people who watch the news know what exactly happened. Despite the debate and political arguments everyday, there are ordinary people living everyday different life in a war zone.

Mostly in the morning, I have to walk to the adjacent bakery to get some fresh bread. Before, getting fresh breads in the morning was as easy as getting a cup of coffee from the nearest coffee shop. But now, I have to stand in line for 30 to 45 minutes to get some breads. Why is that happening? According to some spokespeople, there is a scarcity  in flours. The reasons of this shortage are the financial situation in Libya that prevent the government to import flours quickly, and most of flour stock located in the war zone within Benghazi, which makes it harder. Eighty percent of Libyan food depends almost on bread. It’s like Mexican people depend on tortilla, or Asian people depend on rice. In other wards, I have to get bread in the morning to eat something during the day.

When it comes to the bread, it’s something extra for several people. I am talking here about sick people who have to go to hospitals in order to get some medical services. This became nightmares for many people. Kidney department, which is a place for many people to get dialysis at least three times a week, was closed due to clashes close to the hospital. Lots hospitals are closed because of their locations in the war zone. The other working hospitals suffer from medical supplies shortage. The reasons are the same with the bread problems, which are finical issues lead to delay importing the medical supplies and the war zone. They are not the only issues, working hospitals suffer also from the number of medical staff as well. As we know, most of medical staff in Benghazi’s hospitals are foreigners. Most of them fled the country because of the unrest. In addition, many of Libyan medical staff had to leave Benghazi and to be refugee somewhere else as their homes located in a war zone. It is also difficult for sick people to drive as there is a gas shortage.

A lot of Gas stations are shut down, as there is no gas coming. If one gas station opens, I would wait in line no less than 5 hours to fill my car. I see people are making BBQ while they are waiting in the line. I’m bringing my books to read. The shortage of gas  issue started with closing the main commercial port in Benghazi due to clashes inside the port. Therefore, ships loaded with gas now have to port in Tobruk. Then, workers empty the gas in tank trucks and ship them to Benghazi. The main problem is that Tobruk port cannot handle this amount of operation as the port designed to deal with particular number of ships.

Cooking gas became luxury in the previous four months. It is impossible to get a cooking gas cylinder. Again, the similar reason with gas, ships loaded with raw cooking gas have to port in Tobruk’s port, with less ability to operate enormous numbers that serve a city as Benghazi. How people of benghazi get over it? by not using gas stoves. Instead, they use stoves work with electricity. People start to buy small stoves with one or two heads to use it everyday. But that does not keep us away from problems as we have constantly power cut.

In these four months, which is the coldest months in the year, we suffer a lot of power cuts. Power cuts at least 2 hours a day. We had many times when we got Black Out on the whole city. Sometimes the black out lasts for more than 48 hours. I couldn’t figure out reasons cause this power cut problem. The only reason is the war zone.

Prices of goods soar up as the port is closed. All goods now have to be shipped from other ports in Libya, resulting extra cost. Therefore, prices of goods went up. In addition, prices of Dollar to Libyan Dinar also went up. These expensive goods make people spend a lot of money, so they must get the money form their bank accounts into their pockets.

Many banks within the city are closed due to the security issues. Only a few are open outside Benghazi. You can imaging when people go to get their money. Yes, again you have to stand in lines no less than two hours.

Schools are closed, and learning for kids has stopped. Children should get some education as they are fast growing brains. There are some schools are open, only because some refugees families stay there. These families suffer from all pervious things (bread, gas, cooking gas, education, and power) in addition to leaving their homes.

I became well-known with sound of clashes, gunfights, shilling and loudly explosions. This became typical in my life as the war continues. The only anxiety is to be hit by random gunshots or falling mortars while I move around. That day, I was home playing with my little baby girl, only five months and four of them with this crisis, when noisy explosions erupted. Fragmented pieces of metal and shrapnel hit my home making intense damage. A mortar has fallen in front of my home, no one injured. This is the only fear of everyday when you live in a war zone.

Several people ask me to leave, to find another life away from this chaos. The truth is that I never stop thinking of leaving. But something inside me keeps telling me that all this going to end soon. Telling me the future will be much better. This war will end soon, and we will live normal life. Optimistic! Oh yes! I have no doubt, no worry, it’s only a dark could and will go away, and the sun will rise and shine again. This is what I can see in people’s eyes here in Benghazi. When I talk with them, they feel optimistic about the future. It turned out the same sound inside them keeps telling them it is going to be all right. We all trust in Allha.

Updated:

This video shows a 4 hours in the morning. Note that things is getting much better.

 

What Does A Successful Country Look Like?

When it comes to Libya, I usually try to find ways to measure and improve my environment. One of the tools I found  and I was fascinated with is the Social Progress Index.
How to measure a country as if it is successful or not? One answer is by GDP. GDP is the income per person in a certain country. In other words, GDP is how much they earn annually. Using this tool to measure is what we know today. For example, Usually people say Turkey is becoming a developed country that their GDP had doubled. As a result, using the economic growth as a tool to determine the success of a country is the most reliable way.

According to UN, Libya GDP is $74,597. If we compare Libya GDP with Jordan GDP, which is $33,596, we interpret that Libya is more successful than Jordan, which is not true. Jordan is more successful country in this time than Libya as it is becoming failed state. Because of Oil, Libya economically more successful that Jordan. Thus, taking the GDP as a measurement tool is not accurate.

Many efforts have emerged to measure the success of a nation. Social Progress Index is one of those and the most popularity.

This tool measures the basic needs of people lives, such as food and shelter and how it reflect on their life quality. The main purpose  of this tool is to show how every country does.  Additionally, it’s good tool to define problems in a nation and  to solve it.

The Social Progress Imperative’s mission is to improve the quality of lives of people around the world, particularly the least well off, by advancing global social progress. The Social Progress Index provides a robust, holistic and innovative measurement tool to guide countries’ choices to enable greater social progress and foster research and knowledge-sharing on the policies and investments that will best achieve that goal.

Social Progress Index measures these principles:

For Libya, it’s hard to define the problem, especially with this huge empty land. Brazil, for example, is huge land with high population, they use the Social Progress Framework to define and locate problems in more than 200 municipal. As a result, they improved life quality in many areas that suffer before.

Unfortunately, Social Progress Index doesn’t measure Libya among the other 50 states in 2014. However, we could adopt the methodology to reach the quality and equality among Libyan cities.  Officials could use the framework to figure out where is problem in many cities in Libya. There are many places, especially in the south, face real problems in terms of life quality. It hard to notice the real problems, and it’s too difficult to find the shared hidden problems in different geographic locations. So using this tool to measure the overall life in these places would define the problem and solve it.

This is the top 20 in 2014:

The Complexity of Libyan Situation

Do you think you can understand what is the main problem in Libya now? Some reports say Western intervention is the reason behind what happened in Libya now. Some say it’s a civil war and the reality of Libyan people! 
Don’t worry of getting lost, it’s really complicated situation in Libya now. It started more than 45 years ago when Gaddafi coup The Kingdom of Libya. 
I’m trying to connect every single issue that caused the current situation. I’m trying to understand what is going on!
Most of my focus was on social human behavior, which is the reason of all the current issues. However, once I connected everything together, I found it deeply complicated. 
This diagram (or  map) visualizes my thinking, and makes it simple to understand what is the big issue. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure it out. And that doesn’t worry me because I believe the change will eventually happen and fix all these complex problems. 

The Secret of “Why We Changed After 17th Feb For Only Short Time?”

Feb 2011

On April 2011, news came as Libyan people, at least in my city Benghazi, have changed. I’ve been told that people’s behavior toward each other and toward their city was incredible. 

So, what made them change? What exactly happened? To answer  this, Imagine a football team. Their coach is generous kind person. The team members love him because he cares a lot for their sport and personal life. However, for their scores and performance, they are so behind from called champions. Their level is not as the perfect as other teams. One day,  stroke hit the coach, and he was transferred to the ICU. It was extremely negative news for the team. As a response, the team decided to get the champion cups for their coach. They doubled their time in training. They improved their playing strategies. It started to pay off. They reached to the final match and they did it. They became the champions. Eventually, they changed to better team.

This story was presented in The Power of Habit book by Charles Duhigg. In extremely negative events, such as death, sickness, and wars, people tend to change easily.

Back to Benghazi 2011. The city has witnessed an intensive violence in streets. This was the first incidents for 40 years. Therefore, people changed easily for the hope of getting a better future. People became aware that they can reach something after all this bloodshed in streets. That’s why we watched the change happened rapidly. 

Today

Today, all this change has vanished. It’s important to understand the feeling of depression coming after the feeling of hope. Libya is on the edge of a civil war, and problems never end, or It could end by splitting Libya to two parts. It’s easy to justify why people lost their rapid change in this chaos. However, we should understand exactly what happened so we could avoid it again.

According to Erika Anderson, there are two types of changes. One is quick and sometimes necessary. It’s called the disruptive change. It cause some destruction, sometimes negative and other positive. The other type is the evolutionary change. It’s gentle and takes long time to happened. What happened in 2011 was the disruptive change. It was easy and quick, but has collapsed easily. It was fast and necessary to happen. But it lasted for only months. 
Evolutionary change attacks the culture. It attacks the root of our environment. Therefore, it lasts for long time. If we aim to change our people, we should adopt the evolutionary change.
 
In Brain Rules book, John Medina illustrates the human brain as two moving parts. They are the background and the foreground parts. We have the ability to access to the them anytime we would. The background part is your fetal environment, evolutionary history, and genetic. The foreground part is hormones, prior experiences, and current environment trigger. We have the authority accessing them anytime we would to provide the knowledge on how to behave in certain moment.
 
To change Libyan behavior, we have to attack the background as the root of their culture to gain the evolutionary change that will last forever. But how? By targeting the most widespread negative behavior among Libyans. So, what is that behavior? 

In my own perspective is the social awareness. Libyans, especially the young ones, are missing the idea of social awareness. Social awareness could be traced back to our culture. Lack of social awareness is when we don’t realize the problem. In other words, we do things daily and sometimes realize them as wrong things, but we keep doing it again and again. This bad behavior becomes the social norm that you can do it and you’re not blamed. Social norm is something is acceptable in one place, and in other places is not acceptable. For example, a Libyan does not stand in line, and in other countries, he would stand perfectly.  

By focusing on this issue, we could make thousands of solution to fix it. One of them is by keeping educating people on every possible channel we could reach them. By changing one thing we could reach the chain reaction.

I’ve been exploring the idea of how to change my people. I really would like to hear your point. It is great to collaborate together to change this social behavior based on our current environment. Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.