Then, in minutes, the few hundred mourners who had gathered in this city melted away into a perfect spring day, ending another funeral — this time for the victims of a Friday bombing in the eastern oil town of Brega — that had been transformed into a pageant for denouncing the NATO forces whose bombs are taking a regular toll in Libyan lives.
For the officials who shepherd the small band of foreign journalists covering the war from here to such events, seeing them as powerful propaganda tools to be used against the Western powers, the burials on Saturday provided a moment that even the most accomplished propagandists could not have written into their script.
Just before the coffins arrived, two high-flying aircraft — NATO planes, for sure, since others are banned under a United Nations-imposed no-fly zone — wrote vapor trails high above.
As one aircraft circled back to the northeast, another flew on to the southwest, toward the western mountains along the Tunisian and Algerian borders where there has been intense fighting between Libyan rebels and the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. At the sight of each aircraft, mourners pointed in agitation to the sky, demanding that foreign TV crews capture the moment and shouting choruses of support for Colonel Qaddafi.
The moment captured the anger and futility felt by Libyans still loyal to Colonel Qaddafi as NATO aircraft pound targets in Tripoli and other government-held areas night after night, day after day, with the total of sorties flown since the air raids began now cresting 2,500.
Western defense officials have said that 40 to 50 percent of the Qaddafi forces’ striking power has been degraded, and with it almost all the capability, in fighter aircraft, missiles and antiaircraft batteries, that Libya had to confront an aerial invader. So far, only one NATO plane has crashed, and that was early in the conflict, after what NATO officials said was a technical failure.
If the funeral on Saturday was planned as a moment to strike a moral blow against the West, it was only modestly successful. Other messages pressed in.
The cemetery chosen for the burials was not one of the city’s most prestigious, but one set on a windblown stretch of shoreline across from a bleak highway overpass. A mile or two to the west, the idle cranes of the Tripoli port and the anchored ships stood like sentinels, testament to an oil-based economy that has been paralyzed by the war.
The 10-minute bus ride from the journalists’ hotel passed by several of the long lines for fuel that are a telltale feature wherever the government still holds sway. Dwarfing the lines in Baghdad in the final months of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the ones here run for miles, often four lines abreast, sometimes with more than one snaking corridor of vehicles approaching a single gas station. The waits can last days, a week even, and they have added to an air of demoralization that weighs even on officials appointed to mind foreign reporters.
Against this background, the funeral promised a powerful counterpoint, one with the potential to rally faint hearts. On Friday, officials gathered reporters at a Tripoli mosque to announce that 11 Muslim clerics had been killed in a NATO strike at Brega, 500 miles east of Tripoli, and the government’s easternmost point of control. The officials said 45 others had been wounded in the bombing of a former oil company guesthouse, and gave the platform to a cleric who called for the dead to be avenged in terrorist attacks against the West.
Earlier in the week, the propaganda apparatus had been focused on a gathering of tribal leaders in support of Colonel Qaddafi. Now, the deaths of the imams appeared to lay the ground for marshaling an even wider body of opinion. Calling the NATO attackers “crusaders” set the tone, as did the assertion, common in all the bombings, that NATO was lying when it identified the Brega target as a “command-and-control” center for pro-Qaddafi forces.
But the funeral itself seemed strangely flat, at least in political terms. For one thing, despite the location being broadcast on Libyan state television, and circulated in cellphone text messages, barely 500 people showed up, in a city of two million. No important government officials attended. For all the browbeating directed at foreign reporters by mourners who vowed their love for Colonel Qaddafi and their hatred for NATO, the event, taken as a whole, seemed underwhelming.
Part of the problem lay in the contradictions and uncertainties that flowed from official accounts, and those given by the mourners.
According to officials, the nine coffins, with bodies wrapped in the green of Islam, were those of the dead Muslim clerics. But some mourners offered differing counts. Two men whispered that their uncles, among those being buried, were soldiers, and one of those said the man concerned had been dead for weeks. Another identified one of the dead as a driver.
There was a man who said that he was in the guesthouse when it was attacked, and that 7 of the group of 16 he had led to the Brega gathering from Sirte, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, had been killed, 4 of them imams. The man, who identified himself as Attiya Ali Ahmed, 25, appeared to have suffered no injury in the attack. He said that the gathering had been called for a public reading of the Koran and to rally morale in Brega against the rebels, and that he had seen no sign of any military activity in or near the guesthouse. And he warned reporters to accurately convey his account.
“The Koran does not permit anything but the truth,” he said.
