THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: Five rocks in a line on the tarmac made a minimal roadblock, and two men with broom handles as weapons guarded the road into eastern Libya, stamping their feet in the freezing rain.Brown teeth flashed in a genuine grin, and one of them shouted: "Engilisi very good!"
Behind him, on a small roadside obelisk which might once have carried a picture of Col Muammar Gaddafi, hung a long-hidden red, green and black banner decorated with a silver star and crescent moon. It was the national flag of the old kingdom of Libya, which was overthrown in the coup launched on Sept 1 1969 by the young Colonel. Now, after 41 years in hiding, the flag is back. And the Colonel is being overthrown.
It was very much like being back in the revolutionary year of 1989, driving across the Yugoslav/Romanian border immediately after Ceausescu's fall from power: the air of improvisation, the sheer unexpected delight at being free of a repressive regime which had lasted so long that everyone thought it was permanent.
And there was the symbolism of the flag. In Romania they cut the Communist symbols out, so the old tricolor flew everywhere with a jagged hole in its centre; here, they brought the old flag out of hiding places and hung them up.
It was an act of restitution, a symbolic eradication of everything Col Gaddafi's crazy rule has tried to establish. But, as in Ceausescu's Romania, it will take decades to restore the immense waste, and the loss and outright theft of the nation's patrimony.
Libya is an empty country: an enormous section of North Africa containing only six million people. Divide the trillions which the country's oil had produced since the early 1970s by six million and everyone here should be a multi-millionaire. Not so. Libya may not be dirt poor like Sudan or Yemen, but the comfortable capitalism of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt is entirely missing. Even Algeria seems richer. >>> John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor | Sunday, February 27, 2011
