Posted this already in one IBN subforum but nobody seems interested. Anyway, posting this also here since i really, really recommend that you read this from top to bottom.
i can't describe what the article is but you will definitely be moved.
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Long but GREAT read. Initially wanted to post in a subforum but i guess this story is about a basketball player and not really just about the country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25933297
Not sure what's the situation over there now but this piece gives us outsiders a really touching story of a basketball player who fought for survival.
Here are snippets from the article.
It was a beautiful flat. Everything was state of the art and it was spacious, too. It had two big living rooms, three big bedrooms, flat screens everywhere. The couches had gold trim and were so big and heavy they were impossible to move. The door to the apartment was reinforced steel, like on a bank vault.
It was 27 December 2010 and I had just arrived in Benghazi, Libya's second biggest city, to play basketball for a team called Al-Nasr Benghazi. I had stayed in some nice places playing for teams in Europe, but this seventh-floor apartment in the middle of town was something else. It was like the Taj Mahal.
I didn't immediately notice the photographs dotted around the place - of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi and his grandchildren.
When I did, I phoned the team president - we called him Mr Ahmed - and he told me how it was. "The apartment belongs to Mutassim Gaddafi, the Colonel's son," he said. "Al-Nasr is the Gaddafi club. You are playing for the Gaddafi family."
Gaddafi! When I was a young kid growing up
In my first practice with my new team-mates there was a weird atmosphere. I asked the other international player on the team, Moustapha Niang from Senegal, "Why does everybody look so depressed?" And he explained it to me. "We've been losing," he said. "They haven't been getting paid, some of them are getting physically abused. If we don't win our next game, some of these kids are going to get beat."
From the roof of my apartment in Benghazi I could see the whole of the city. I liked going up to the roof, especially when I was homesick and missed my family. I could really clear my mind up there.
But on 17 February 2011, at about 09:15 in the morning, I go on to the rooftop and see 200, maybe 300 protesters outside a police station across the street. A military convoy is coming closer and closer. Then, without warning, shots. People running, people falling. Dead bodies all over the ground. I'm praying, praying that this is a dream, that I will wake up sometime soon.
There's so much anger in me. I reach for the gun, but then the other soldier steps out of the shadows, and pokes me with his own AK-47. I think he might just pull the trigger and blow me away.
But he doesn't. He just shoos me back to my apartment, jabbing at me with his gun. I'm yelling at him in English, calling him every name under the sun, but I don't have it in me to take him on. There's nothing I can do. He closes the steel door on me and I sink to the ground, weeping, banging my head against the door. I can still hear that poor girl on the stairwell. I can't do anything to help her.
At my team president's office, Moustapha and I hugged, and Mr Ahmed told the two of us, "I could get you out of here, but it's going to be very dangerous." He said it would mean a six-hour drive on a long desert road to the Egyptian border. Just a few days earlier, he had hired a car to take a Cameroonian footballer to the border. But this footballer had panicked at a rebel checkpoint and made a run for it across the desert. He had been gunned down.
i can't describe what the article is but you will definitely be moved.
--
Long but GREAT read. Initially wanted to post in a subforum but i guess this story is about a basketball player and not really just about the country.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25933297
Not sure what's the situation over there now but this piece gives us outsiders a really touching story of a basketball player who fought for survival.
Here are snippets from the article.
Quote:
It was a beautiful flat. Everything was state of the art and it was spacious, too. It had two big living rooms, three big bedrooms, flat screens everywhere. The couches had gold trim and were so big and heavy they were impossible to move. The door to the apartment was reinforced steel, like on a bank vault.
It was 27 December 2010 and I had just arrived in Benghazi, Libya's second biggest city, to play basketball for a team called Al-Nasr Benghazi. I had stayed in some nice places playing for teams in Europe, but this seventh-floor apartment in the middle of town was something else. It was like the Taj Mahal.
I didn't immediately notice the photographs dotted around the place - of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi and his grandchildren.
When I did, I phoned the team president - we called him Mr Ahmed - and he told me how it was. "The apartment belongs to Mutassim Gaddafi, the Colonel's son," he said. "Al-Nasr is the Gaddafi club. You are playing for the Gaddafi family."
Gaddafi! When I was a young kid growing up
Quote:
In my first practice with my new team-mates there was a weird atmosphere. I asked the other international player on the team, Moustapha Niang from Senegal, "Why does everybody look so depressed?" And he explained it to me. "We've been losing," he said. "They haven't been getting paid, some of them are getting physically abused. If we don't win our next game, some of these kids are going to get beat."
Quote:
From the roof of my apartment in Benghazi I could see the whole of the city. I liked going up to the roof, especially when I was homesick and missed my family. I could really clear my mind up there.
But on 17 February 2011, at about 09:15 in the morning, I go on to the rooftop and see 200, maybe 300 protesters outside a police station across the street. A military convoy is coming closer and closer. Then, without warning, shots. People running, people falling. Dead bodies all over the ground. I'm praying, praying that this is a dream, that I will wake up sometime soon.
Quote:
There's so much anger in me. I reach for the gun, but then the other soldier steps out of the shadows, and pokes me with his own AK-47. I think he might just pull the trigger and blow me away.
But he doesn't. He just shoos me back to my apartment, jabbing at me with his gun. I'm yelling at him in English, calling him every name under the sun, but I don't have it in me to take him on. There's nothing I can do. He closes the steel door on me and I sink to the ground, weeping, banging my head against the door. I can still hear that poor girl on the stairwell. I can't do anything to help her.
Quote:
At my team president's office, Moustapha and I hugged, and Mr Ahmed told the two of us, "I could get you out of here, but it's going to be very dangerous." He said it would mean a six-hour drive on a long desert road to the Egyptian border. Just a few days earlier, he had hired a car to take a Cameroonian footballer to the border. But this footballer had panicked at a rebel checkpoint and made a run for it across the desert. He had been gunned down.