The Hill News

Akram, the first Free Libyan I met, as I crossed the Egypt-Libya border at the end of March, proved to be the perfect Ambassador for the revolution. Twenty years old, the tenth of eleven children, Akram had never visited Tripoli and only been to the border twice; he had been studying to be a pharmacist but his secret passion had been heavy metal music and that world of freedom beyond Ghadafi’s Libya, which Facebook and Skype had opened to him. Through song lyrics and his online friendships, he had developed accent-free and colloquial English and was now acting as a volunteer guide for the first UK mission to the National Council in Benghazi. 

Throughout our seven hour drive he described with intense enthusiasm how the rebellion had grown from the regime’s brutal suppression of a students and lawyers demonstration in Benghazi just six weeks earlier into a spontaneous mass revolt which had swept aside Ghadafi’s 42 years of oppression.  But not yet compl! etely - Akram was clear: the revolution would remain incomplete while Ghadafi and his family remained in Tripoli, while the rest of Libya still suffered. Akram really wanted to be at the front with the other young revolutionaries but had been asked to volunteer for this other duty. And he did it well. Before we had reached the National Council HQ which would be our base for the next weeks, Akram’s pure enthusiasm had gone a long way to convincing us that the international community had been wholly right to intervene to protect the Libyan people’s struggle for freedom.

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