We are joined by the acclaimed Libyan poet and scholar, Khaled Mattawa. “I think the regime is over even if Gaddafi manages to survive,” Mattawa says. “Libyans are saying, ‘Yes we will have a new constitution, perhaps we will have a new flag. But we do not want you or your father or the rest of your plan, so get out of here.”

Khaled Mattawa, Libyan poet and scholar. He is an associate professor in the English Language and Literature Department at the University of Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Khaled Mattawa joining us from Michigan. Welcome to Democracy Now!, professor. Talk about what you have learned, it is very difficult to get information out of Tripoli and Benghazi right now, what you understand has happened.

KHALED MATTAWA: I understand that Benghazi is out of the Gaddhafi regime’s control and I understand that the battle for Tripoli continues. Last night, as I talked to one of your staff earlier,—I talked to one of my relatives and he was in the city near the court building, the North Benghazi Municipal Court building, and that is where the protests were. That is where people had gathered to pray and make speeches and so forth. He told me they were collecting weapons that had been left about in the clashes and that they were depositing them into the court building. There was—the demonstrations were mostly by the seashore in downtown Benghazi, but also there were demonstrations, from what I could tell from the footage, near the area of Burka which is about 5 kilometers south from the seashore. It is also kind, has an important square and some important buildings. Also it had a military compound which is supposedly where Oasdi Gaddhafi’s contingent or division was stationed and there was fighting between the military there. And, of course, what I heard on Hura is from, I think a military officer, Colonel—Sabre, who said that Benghazi is completely freed from Gaddhafi’s control and people had already declared the area, or renaming that area the name that it had from 1969 to 1978, the “Arab Republic of Libya,” meaning the end of the so-called Jawaharea age which is Gaddhafi’s notion of people’s democracy and so forth. Now in Tripoli people had come out into the streets. They were converging from Ben Ashour which is east of Tripoli and from Gargaresh and Helangeles and west of Tripangurshi and they were trying to both meet in Market Square, Medenishu Hadaw which Gaddhafi had named Green Square and it sort of stuck, but people are coming back to call it Maydan Ash-shuhada and they were trying to meet there and as soon as they gathered there was shooting and they backed off into an area called Meden Jirar or the Algeria Square which is less than 1 km away. So people are trying to converge into the center of town to protest, to celebrate the end of the Gaddhafi era, but they are still fighting, they are being shot at. There was a funeral procession in Tripoli today and the reports are that they had been shot at and Al Jazeera just a short while ago reported that 60 had been perhaps shot, killed in Tripoli which is a huge number which is the same kind of number that we had heard about from Benghazi yesterday. The regime just sort of escalated the—its attack on civilians in Benghazi. There were 50 yesterday

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mattawa-–

KHALED MATTAWA: ...and now in Tripoli we are hearing 60. Yes?

AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch is estimating more than 300. They said that could be a very serious underestimate, but your nephew was also shot?

KHALED MATTAWA: Yes, he was shot in the leg but he is the one who I told you was out in Benghazi helping collect weapons. He had been participating for 3 days, since Thursday or Friday, he and his brothers. He was shot in the leg. I’m not sure if he was shot Saturday or Friday, but he had come right back so it was a very minor injury so we are glad that happened. But the numbers of dead in Benghazi is perhaps 250, from the 200 that you are hearing is 250, but people are saying maybe more. But the vast majority, and I’m talking about maybe 60 to 70% of the dead, were in Benghazi.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened to your friend, the novelist Idris Al Mesmari after he gave an interview?

KHALED MATTAWA: Idris Al Mesmari gave an interview, I think it was Thursday night, the 15^th or the early morning of the 16^th, to Al Jazeera and BBC Arabic. I think I heard his name on the radio or on Al Jazeera and I immediately called him, he answered and said “yes I was on Al Jazeera and I will be on BBC Arabic and that things are great and so on, that he is great—in the sense that the intifada or the revolution had begun—and he was exhilarated and he said “listen to the BBC Arabic,” and I was ready to listen to that and then very shortly after I heard that he was arrested by the authorities. What happened was that the authorities had come to his home. He is married to Professor Omid Al Faras who is a professor of political science at the University of Benghazi or Guyunas and they had come to his home. One of the revolutionary committees, a well known figure in the revolution, actually personally came to their home. They came at them with knives and fists. It was she and her daughters and apparently a nephew and they beat them and she was cut with a knife or a machete and, upon hearing that his family was being attacked, Mesmari surrendered. What I hear is that he had been taking to Tripoli, but I also hear from somebody from there and others that he is safe. But I don’t know if that means that he is still under arrest and has not been harmed or if he is hiding somewhere. But my contact told me that he has been receiving medicine, he is a diabetic. He is a great figure of a man, well not in size but in spirit. He is a very small framed man and he has a lame leg because he is a victim of polio, but he has been a real dynamo of culture life in Libya since the early 2000’s. He started a magazine called “Arazeen.”

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mattawa, I just want to interrupt because we have very little time and I wanted to get to Gaddhafi’s son’s speech and its significance. Saif Gaddhafi on Libyan state TV said, “Libya is not like Egypt, it is tribes and clans, it’s not a society with parties. Everyone knows their duties and this may cause civil war.” We’ve also heard reports of soldiers fighting each other. Talk about this and also, if you could go back and give us one of the roots of this uprising to do with the arrest of the human rights lawyer who represented families of survivors of the prison massacre.

KHALED MATTAWA: Well, Saif Gaddhafi showed his real face which is exactly that of his father. It is actually quite amazing. If you were to close his eyes as a Libyan like myself, you would the father’s voice in him. What you heard was really the regime showing that it had been using this card all the time, that it had been trying to divide the country according to tribes and sections and it had used that division consistently. So yes, Libya is largely tribal, which by the way tribalism is something that Gaddhafi brought back. We were in the 60’s and into the 70’s we were getting to be much more urban focused culture, much more mixed culture. If you look at Benghazi, people have said this about Benghazi, it is the city where all Libyans live.

Benghazi is, interestingly enough, a kind of America where people had come from the west to live in Benghazi, from the south, from further east. It is a city that had existed for 2000 years and had died and come back to life in a phoenix fashion. All of the time it had come back to life it was through new blood coming from the rest of Libya. But the tribalism is something that the regime had used and it is trying to sow the seeds of division. Tripoli too, even though you have east and west and south of Libya, Tripoli too has also vast numbers of people who cannot call themselves Tripolitians or even westerners. But it is time to sow that division. One of the last things I heard is that is that the regime is saying that the easterners want to bring back the monarchy which is something that traditionally the west had never been really receptive to when we had a monarchy from the 50’s and 60’s. So, again, they are spreading rumors and so forth. But as people were chanting in Zawia, which is east of Tripoli, they were chanting in Tripoli itself and in all parts of Libya, they were saying “With our souls and our blood we will protect you Benghazi.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Professor Khaled Mattawa, acclaimed Libyan poet and scholar in University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where, by the way, there is an ice storm that is taking place now. Talk about the prison massacre. Human Rights Watch said 1,270 prisoners were killed there. This was years ago, though, and a human rights lawyer’s arrest that have been the spark for these most recent protests, Professor Mattawa?

KHALED MATTAWA: Fateh Turba will come down as one of the heroes of Libya. He had persisted to help the families of the victims of the Abu Salim massacre. He really took all of the opportunities offered to him by the regime, which is that 12 years they admitted that the massacre took place. They would never show the numbers. They had said there was an investigation, but they never brought any piece of paper to actually show who the culprits were. We know who the culprit is. Everyone knows it is Abdullah Sanoosi, the head of internal security. He is wanted by Interpol for bombing the French airliner that was sort of the parallel to Lockerbie over Africa. We know who did it. It was a complete act of betrayal. These were prisoners who had asked for rights of visitation, for better conditions and when they were beginning to demand they were beaten and they managed to capture 2 prison guards and the riots erupted and then Abdullah Sanoosi came to them and said, “Okay, we will take care of you, we will deal with this safely, why don’t you know give me your injured and we will take them to the hospital.” He negotiated with them and this was stated. He took the injured in buses and those injured people, maybe 150 people, were never heard of again and then he came back at the prisoners, blew into their cells, forced them into a courtyard and he had guards with Kalashnokov’s on top of the open courtyard and shot at them. They shot at them for approximately 2 hours, killing everyone.

Some of the survivors of the Abu Salim massacre were people who happened to be in the kitchen and it so happened that some of the negotiations were taking place somewhere near the kitchen. So the witnesses that have survived are people who were completely by chance. There were reports that people who had ended up in Boosleem shortly after the massacres saw that once some of the paint began to flake there was blood on the walls behind the new paint. So it’s a complete travesty, a complete disaster on the Libyan people; but it’s also something that the regime never wanted to admit to, they never wanted to address, they never wanted to catch who did it because it was an intrinsic act indicative of what the regime is in its spirit and its policies and the way it treated its people. So they never addressed it and it never went away. It just never went away. In the 2000’s Saif al-Islam saying, “We will address this and Gaddhafi acknowledging, they kept pushing the Ministry would not answer them, Gaddhafi would not do anything. Saif Gaddhafi’s Human Rights Association would not be able to do anything. They kept pushing them and pushing them to the fringes, but individually they had been sent people to bribe the families with bits of money. What happened on the 15^th or 14^th is Terbil made the speech saying we are now going to have a sit down here and then he was arrested and as soon as he was arrested, that’s when the demonstrations took place....

AMY GOODMAN: And that was...

KHALED MATTAWA:...and he was a real hero.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the human rights attorney, Faith Terbil. We have 30 seconds, professor. Do think Gaddhafi is still in the country? Do you think—these protests will overthrow Gaddhafi?

KHALED MATTAWA: You know, this is the moment that the Libyans have been waiting for for a very, very, very long time. Reports that he’s has flown to Venezuela, I’m not sure if that is true or not. It is really now just coming down to Tripoli and, as Saif Gaddhafi indicated, they are trying to fight very hard, and they are fighting hard because they are killing a lot of peoples very quickly in Tripoli. I think the regime is over, even if Muammar Gaddhafi manages to survive, even if they manage to suppress things in Libya by miracle they manage to survive. Saif Gaddhafi, himself, had made the most sweeping reconciliation saying, “Okay, everything will be on the table. We will have a new constitution. We will have a new flag, etc. etc. Well Libyans are saying, “Yes, we will have a new constitution, perhaps we’ll have a new flag, but we don’t want you or your father or the rest of your clan. Get out of here, leave.”

AMY GOODMAN: ...Khaled Mattawa, we have to leave it there. ...

KHALED MATTAWA: So even if they come back... Libya is forever changed by these events.

AMY GOODMAN: I thank you very much Professor Khaled Mattawa, acclaimed Libyan poet and scholar, professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.