Libyan Ambassador Aujali recalls serving under Gaddafi, sees promise ahead for country
https://dervishcom.blogspot.com/2011/12/libyan-ambassador-aujali-recalls.html
Last month, the walls of the Libyan Embassy on the seventh floor of the Watergate office building were barren. Hazy penumbras of dirt showed where portraits of Moammar Gaddafi had hung. A lone travel poster touting a visit to the Roman ruins of Tripoli survived the purge of wall hangings after Libya’s revolution — and even that poster had had to be altered: Masking tape covered Gaddafi’s name for his country, the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the last word of which meant “state of the masses.”
“I don’t want to see this name anymore,” says Ali Aujali, and because he is Libya’s ambassador to the United States, he gets to decide what goes on the walls.
It may not seem like much, but the freedom to choose office decor is something entirely new for Libyan diplomats. So this month, when the embassy refilled those barren walls, Aujali put up a poster of a religious man and the flag of Libya’s revolution, all under a banner marked “Freedom.”
While the new Libya begins organizing for its first elections, the country is being run by a mix of expatriates who have come home to help out, businessmen who have put their jobs on hold, and religious figures eager to give Islam a more open and prominent role. In Tripoli, the capital, the men at the top of the interim city government are a bedsheet manufacturer and the former manager of the city’s Mercedes-Benz outlet.
But in Washington, the new Libya’s representative is the same guy who served as Gaddafi’s ambassador here since 2005, a career diplomat who has not lived in his homeland since 1976. Aujali, 61, joined the diplomatic service nine months before Gaddafi staged the 1969 coup that toppled King Idris.
The reason Aujali is still in his luxuriously appointed office with the panoramic view of the Potomac up to the Key Bridge is that last February, five days after Libyans first took to the streets for a Day of Rage protest against the regime, Aujali quit. He went on TV to say he would no longer serve a government that used deadly force against people peacefully expressing their views.
Aujali’s resignation made him a hero to Libyans, even if, just 10 days before the protests, he had said that Libyans most certainly would not revolt against Gaddafi. “It’ll never happen,” he told the Washington Diplomat.
Aujali laughs at those words now. Indeed, he laughs at all the Gaddafi jokes — gone are the days when a Libyan diplomat had to be rigidly serious about everything. But he says he was not lying: “On Feb. 16, I still believed that, because whenever anyone had risen up against him in the past, there was no mercy. He hanged people in the streets. He crushed them.”
The ambassador says that in private, his true belief all along was that Gaddafi was “a strange person” (as he told The Daily Show in March), “a very smart, very shrewd man, but a man without principles,” he says now.
Diplomats from any nation are famous for boasting in private that they know better than the bosses back home. But the nature of diplomacy is that you must speak for those you serve. That left Libyan ambassadors in the position of taking extreme and absurd positions to back up their mercurial master.
“I don’t want to see this name anymore,” says Ali Aujali, and because he is Libya’s ambassador to the United States, he gets to decide what goes on the walls.
It may not seem like much, but the freedom to choose office decor is something entirely new for Libyan diplomats. So this month, when the embassy refilled those barren walls, Aujali put up a poster of a religious man and the flag of Libya’s revolution, all under a banner marked “Freedom.”
While the new Libya begins organizing for its first elections, the country is being run by a mix of expatriates who have come home to help out, businessmen who have put their jobs on hold, and religious figures eager to give Islam a more open and prominent role. In Tripoli, the capital, the men at the top of the interim city government are a bedsheet manufacturer and the former manager of the city’s Mercedes-Benz outlet.
But in Washington, the new Libya’s representative is the same guy who served as Gaddafi’s ambassador here since 2005, a career diplomat who has not lived in his homeland since 1976. Aujali, 61, joined the diplomatic service nine months before Gaddafi staged the 1969 coup that toppled King Idris.
The reason Aujali is still in his luxuriously appointed office with the panoramic view of the Potomac up to the Key Bridge is that last February, five days after Libyans first took to the streets for a Day of Rage protest against the regime, Aujali quit. He went on TV to say he would no longer serve a government that used deadly force against people peacefully expressing their views.
Aujali’s resignation made him a hero to Libyans, even if, just 10 days before the protests, he had said that Libyans most certainly would not revolt against Gaddafi. “It’ll never happen,” he told the Washington Diplomat.
Aujali laughs at those words now. Indeed, he laughs at all the Gaddafi jokes — gone are the days when a Libyan diplomat had to be rigidly serious about everything. But he says he was not lying: “On Feb. 16, I still believed that, because whenever anyone had risen up against him in the past, there was no mercy. He hanged people in the streets. He crushed them.”
The ambassador says that in private, his true belief all along was that Gaddafi was “a strange person” (as he told The Daily Show in March), “a very smart, very shrewd man, but a man without principles,” he says now.
Diplomats from any nation are famous for boasting in private that they know better than the bosses back home. But the nature of diplomacy is that you must speak for those you serve. That left Libyan ambassadors in the position of taking extreme and absurd positions to back up their mercurial master.
