Libya’s unshackled youths find voice in media

Newspapers and magazines are mushrooming in Libya’s rebel capital Benghazi where a new generation of media entrepreneurs, unshackled from government censorship, is thriving.

The son of Fathi al-Jahmy, a prominent pro-democracy Libyan dissident who died after going into a coma while in solitary confinement, is chipping into Panorama, a multi-lingual weekly newspaper, as its political reporter.

“My father had many principles that I hope to advance,” said Ahmed al-Jahmy. Mr Jahmy, a young man in jeans and black T-shirt, looked around nervously during an interview, unconvinced that the prized new-found freedom is a given or that the regime’s spooks were truly gone.

“Don’t speak so loudly, you just don’t know” he reprimanded his colleague Ziad who had launched into an analysis on whether there was a real risk of fundamentalism gaining ground in a practising but moderate Muslim society.

“There was no freedom of expression before,” Mr Jahmy, 27, said with a wry, apologetic smile.

“Under (Libyan leader) Col Gaddafi there was no way of starting a newspaper without security clearance, and every newspaper had to have Kadhafi’s Green Book slogans at the top of the front page.”

The main papers before Libya’s second city became the opposition’s bastion – the self-dubbed “Free Libya” – were government newspaper Akhbar Benghazi and Al-Qurayna, under the grip of Col Gaddafi son Seif al-Islam.

“The press before was all by Col Gaddafi and making him look like an angel,” said Miehad Mahana, 20, an engineering and architecture student turned English editor.

“Now we can say whatever we want and we want the world to hear us: we don’t want Kadhafi. We win or we die. We want to show the world the brave Libya that is willing to die to be free,” she added.

Panorama launches its second edition on Tuesday, the fruit of 22 young Libyans, men and women under 30, who worked countless hours to produce a publication containing articles in Arabic, English, French and Italian.

The first 2,000 copies cost them “575 dinars exactly,” which the team itself paid, meaning they will eventually have to put aprice on what is now a free weekly or find sympathetic financing.

“We want to show the real Libya... the poverty despite oil profits and all the problems that are a fall-out from Col Gaddafi: the high unemployment, the corruption, our polluted coastline,” said Mr Ziad.

The collapse of censorship, he said, opened many doors. But social norms still set some barriers, with values such as women’s modesty pushing their female colleagues to return home early or women to refuse being photographed.

“When a woman is taking the picture it is more comfortable for women because of our culture and religion but some still do not accept to be photographed and we respect that,” explained Rona Issam Quleissa, 21, the team’s photographer.