Libya notebook

The battle had the busy, obsessive yet irrelevant air of a point-to-point. It was a social event, held outdoors, a good place to see and be seen. The jeunesse dorée of the western Libyan town of Zuwara were out in force. People had come from miles around. Rather than tweed suits and barbours they were wearing battlefield fatigues and clung to machine-guns and rocket-launchers. As artillery rounds and bullets whistled overhead, the Zuwarans made informed comments, ducking when the shooting got too close. Half a mile ahead, street fighting had already claimed some 20 lives and inflicted 300 casualties. Welcome to post-revolutionary Libya.
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We slept overnight in the Dolphin Hotel on the edge of Zuwara, about five miles from the front and converted into a field hospital. From the roof there was a spectacular display of tracer on the near horizon and we went to sleep to the heavy pounding of artillery. The following morning a ceasefire had been called so we drove across the devastated front line, the heavy smell of cordite in the air and ruined houses still smoking. When we met the other side — Arabs from the neighbouring town of Rigdolen — they were no more capable than the Berber Zawarans of presenting a convincing account of what everyone was fighting about. We guessed that at the heart of it were ancient feuds and control over local smuggling rackets.
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In post-revolutionary Libya there is only an apology for a central government and no rule of law, just heaps of armed men, none of whom have the slightest intention of giving up their weapons. The day after we arrived we were told that the manager of the Rixos, the most opulent hotel in town (where dozens of journalists were held in luxurious captivity in the final days of the regime), had been kidnapped.