Only God Knows: Family Movement Politics Against State Violence in Libya

• In Event: 118 - Regular Session. Arab Refugees and Political Participation

Abstract

On June 29, 1996, approximately 1269 Libyan political prisoners were killed en masse in Tripoli’s Abu Salim Prison according to the international human rights community. Their bodies have never been recovered. The imprisoned, many suspected Islamic fundamentalists, were forcibly disappeared from their homes and workplaces in the late 1980s. Their arrests highlight how the state policed and penalized particular forms of piety and masculinity. For the families, however, their relatives and their memories were not so readily effaced. For years, relatives, particularly women, sought answers and prison visitation rights. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tripoli, this paper details the story of one family, that of Meryam Shkiwa, whose experiences exemplify how resistance to the regime began as moments of persistence and endurance long before the Libyan uprising in 2011. Through Meryam’s experience and other interviews with families, I highlight the sociological significance of disappearance as a strategy of repression and the key issues confronted by families in their search for their relatives. Meryam’s narrative traces her family’s engagement with security forces following her brother’s disappearance to her own involvement in an association created in 2008 called the “Association of the Families of the Martyrs of the Abu Salim Prison Massacre.” For Meryam, the regime’s violence cannot be properly acknowledged in a single incident but culminates in a series of losses and absences that constitute the present. This case calls attention to the sociological significance of families in activist organizing, illustrating how people collaborated and mobilized in a repressive political climate.

Author

• Amina Zarrugh, University of Texas-Austin