IT IS the sound of screaming amid gunfire that Mustafa Mohammed Dahmani cannot forget. It was June 1996 and Dahmani, then in his 20s, was in his third year of what would turn out to be an 18-year incarceration at Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison.
Thousands of political dissidents disappeared into the void of the sprawling, high-walled compound over the four decades of Muammar Gadafy’s rule. The name Abu Salim looms large in the imagination of many Libyans because of what transpired within its walls on that June day which Dahmani recalls with a shudder.
The regime, faced with a rebellion by inmates protesting over atrocious conditions, responded by killing 1,200 prisoners, according to Human Rights Watch. It has become known in Libya as the Abu Salim massacre. “I remember the shooting began at 10 in the morning and lasted for hours,” says Dahmani.
“We couldn’t see anything because we were in our cells but we could hear the sound of constant gunfire and screaming. We couldn’t believe what was happening.” For years, Libyan officials denied that the killings at Abu Salim had ever taken place. The men’s families were kept in the dark – they continued to bring food and clothes to the prison for years, not knowing their loved ones were dead.
The first public acknowledgement was by Gadafy in 2004. He said that prisoners’ families had the right to know more. To date, however, there has been no official account of what happened that day.
“Abu Salim is the deepest wound in our country,” Salah, a Benghazi resident, told me earlier this year. After the families went to court to demand information, the government promised them money to drop their cases. Many refused, outraged. They wanted justice, not compensation.
It was protests by women whose male relatives had perished in the massacre that prepared the ground for wider demonstrations against the regime in mid-February, which in turn evolved into the fully-fledged revolt that has now all but routed Gadafy.
Last week, as rebel fighters swept through the city faster than anyone, even the rebels themselves, had expected, the hated edifice of Abu Salim was stormed. Rocks and metal bars were used to smash the locks off cell doors.
Thousands of inmates, some of whom had spent their entire adult lives in prison, were set free. On a visit this week, one of the most poignant sights was a rope made of rags that one prisoner had used to climb to a tiny window near the ceiling in order to see what was causing the ruckus outside as rebels overran the complex.
“We couldn’t believe it,” says Tariq al-Fateh (38), who was freed last week after 14 years in Abu Salim. “We ran to freedom.”
He showed me the cell he had shared with five others, pointing out the flimsy pink mattress he slept on and the sheets his cellmates hung from the ceiling for some semblance of privacy.
“I’m very happy to be walking around here as a free man,” he smiled. Fateh was jailed because he was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, militants who posed the most serious threat to Gadafy in recent decades. He joined, he says, not because of ideological fervour but out of a desire for revenge.
“My family suffered a lot under this regime. My father spent 12 years in Abu Salim for nothing. He had done nothing.” Fateh was moved between different sections of the prison. He spent lengthy periods in solitary confinement. Once, he endured six months in complete darkness, in a tiny cell with no toilet. He says he contracted Hepatitis C as a result of medical treatment in the jail.
Walking though the dank corridors of the prison, Dahmani remarked that many of the cells were not as bad as when he was an inmate.
Some communal cells had been fitted with a squat toilet, shower and basic kitchenette. Mustafa suspects this was to assuage the concerns of human rights groups, particularly after the 1996 massacre came to light.
“They made improvements to try to convince foreigners they were open to change. In my day, it was much worse – there were often 20 people in a cell.
“I was once confined to my cell for two full years and received food through a small window. We were treated very badly. The guards did not seem human.”
Hundreds of Libyans have picked their way through the deserted complex over the past week. “We want to see how they lived, how they suffered,” said one woman as she entered one of the numerous grey-and-white-painted prison blocks. Aside from the curious onlookers, there were many former prisoners like Dahmani, Fateh and Khalid Ghalab, a goldsmith jailed for six months in 1995. “Why was I here? Just for being a good Muslim and going to the mosque every day. That’s all it took for the regime to suspect someone,” he says.
Flies swarmed through airless cells strewn with the detritus of lives interrupted. Many cells were covered in elaborate pencil sketches, or neatly transcribed poetry and verses from the Koran. Under one particularly detailed drawing, the prisoner, a graphic designer, had included his website address.
Photographs of cars, mosques, and landscapes ripped from newspapers were pinned to the walls. One cell featured a photograph of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. Several inmates had fashioned fans out of flattened milk and juice cartons as a respite from the stifling heat. The most pitiful cells, aside from those rumoured underground, were just big enough to fit a small mattress right next to a squat toilet.
Many of the most recent arrivals were men swept up during searches for “revolutionaries” as protests against Gadafy gathered momentum across Libya over the last six months. The graffiti in the cells where these men languished is infused with hope, in contrast to the despair of the longer-serving prisoners. One bold scrawl reads simply: “Libya will be free.”