In Jan 1990 protesting Berliners recovered vast quantities of the Stasi secret police files revealing the grim realities within East Germany before they could all be destroyed. In late February of this year, protesters in Benghazi also recovered a good portion of the Revolutionary Committee secret files for Eastern Libya while THEY were in the process of being destroyed, revealing the grim realities of the Libyan state.

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How many of you know what the Stasi was? For some of our younger readership, let me fill you in if you are in the dark:

From EastGermany.info:

The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry of State Security (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, was formed on Feb 8, 1950. The motto of the Stasi was "Schild und Schwert der Partei" (Shield and Sword of the Party). It was modeled after the MGB , Ministry of State Security, then existing in the Soviet Union. The Stasi infiltrated all aspects of daily life in the East Germany, it was estimated that by the 1980s, one out of seven citizens in East Germany was part of the Stasi or a Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators). Like its Soviet counterpart, the Stasi monitored political behavior among East German citizens, and is known to have used torture and intimidation to stop dissent. The Stasi was East Germany's largest employer in East Germany.

The Stasi ran security checks for most job positions. Files were kept on 6 million of East Germany's 16 million people .A prison was built in the Schumannstrasse, where the Stasi used NKVD techniques to extract information, such as making victims stand in front of a bright light for days, threats against family and isolation. Phones were tapped, letters steamed open and people were arrested on the slightest suspicion. Dissenters were often followed 24 hours a day with exhausting detail. Family members and close friends were also forced or enticed to become informers, leading to much hatred after the fall of East Germany. An East German citizen never knew who could be trusted. Each year a paid agent had to recruit 25 informers or risk a loss of benefits or demotion. Many were bribed or blackmailed into working for the Stasi.....

The Stasi was directly linked to the KGB and sent it information until 1990. There had been an estimated 85,000 full time Stasi agents and 109,000 private informers and an estimated 1 to 2 million east Germans had served as Stasi agents at one time or another. The Stasi left behind a staggering 2 trillion pages of reports. Most were hand written, as the Stasi distrusted computers. The colloquial name for the Stasi was Zur Firma (The Firm). (source)

(source) Stasi high officials, including Erich Mielke in the center, Minister of State security from 1957-89 and perhaps the most hated man in East Germany over the decades. Tens of thousands were imprisoned, tortured, exiled or executed during his reign.

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After the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989 and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in reality the East German, Stalinist-style Communist government, collapsed soon thereafter, the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police, despised and hated by most Germans, quickly realized that its voluminous secret surveillance and other politically explosive files had to be destroyed if the thousands of Stasi agents identifiable in these files were not going to be prosecuted, or, worse still for them, hunted down by vigilantes. Berliners soon heard that the Stasi were destroying these files by hand and shredder, and on January 15, 1990, they massed in front of the Stasi Headquarters in Berlin to protest, growing and growing in size and anger until they ultimately forced their way past the police and stormed the building.



(source) Berliners storming Stasi Headquarters on January 15, 1990

The vast majority of the voluminous Stasi files were thus recovered, although there was much wrangling over just what to do with them, because many officials were afraid that they would indeed lead to widespread vigilantism, so many thousands of East Germans had been abused by the Stasi over the years. Ultimately, strict controls were imposed to allow Germans and the media to review the often chilling files.

Gaddafi Drifts toward Totalitarian Communist Security Systems:

After Muammar Gaddafi and other "Free Unionist" Army officers (Gaddafi without a doubt being the most dominant figure), overthrew the Libyan Constitutional Monarchy in 1969, the new and fervently nationalistic Libyan junta sought a close relationship with pan-Arab advocate and hero to millions, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser in turn decided to take Gaddafi and the junta under his wing to help solidify their government, training Gaddafi in the fine arts of media manipulation and propaganda to further state power, even sending advisers to create a more Arab nationalist and revolutionary state. Nasser also helped Gaddafi set up his initial security apparatus.

 

Gaddafi, however, was an acerbic leader with radical ideas from the start and soon found himself beset by a coup against him, that was, however, discovered by Egyptian Intelligence and quashed in December, 1969. Shaken, Gaddafi felt he had to strengthen his control. To quote from a Middle East Quarterly article:

Qadhafi survived the coup plot but concluded that his power depended upon tight control. His Revolutionary Command Council issued a "Law for the Protection of the Revolution," making it a criminal offense to proselytize against the state, to arouse class hatred, to spread falsehood, or to participate in strikes and demonstrations.[6] Within weeks, the Revolutionary Command Council assumed total public control over Libya. Qadhafi assumed formal control as both prime minister and defense minister. He curbed any significant delegation of authority beyond family and his closest associates.

This was all later enshrined in his famous 1973 "Five Point Address":

On April 15, 1973, Qadhafi moved to cement power, unfettered by commitments to Cairo. He launched a systematic assault on the Libyan bureaucracy and intelligentsia. Speaking in Zuwarah, he delivered what became known as his "Five-Point Address," in which he declared:

• suspension of all existing laws and implementation of Shari'a (Islamic law)
• purging the country of the politically sick
• creation of a people's militia to protect the revolution
• administrative revolution; and
• cultural revolution

But Gaddafi was not done. Influenced by the socialist governments of the Eastern European variety with their centralized state economies, lack of political plurality and heavy security apparatus, as well as Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism and other ideological currents, including Islamic, he ended up recreating Libya as the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" in 1977 (source).

Thus Gaddafi ultimately stamped his own power and vision over the Libyan people for decades, simultaneously proclaiming himself "The Brother Leader" or "The Guide", to give himself the appearance of being not so much the throne, but the power behind the throne. And throughout the decades, we must recall that the old axiom that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" was at work.

His new Libya, however, was, like the German Democratic Republic with its Stasi, paranoid of criticism and dissent from the start, not that pre-Jamahiriya Libya didn't already have these evolving traits. It was a Libya where conformity and unquestioning obedience to the state as well as praise of Gaddafi was demanded, as if everyone must be a dedicated acolyte in Gaddafi's personal brand of secular-theocratic revolution, in actuality yet another collectivist, totalitarian legerdemain ludicrously promising paradise while built on mountains of repression.

And thus it was that local Revolutionary Committees throughout the country were going to enforce this conformity by, Stasi-like, spying on almost everyone in Libya and detaining, even imprisoning, torturing or disposing of anyone considered suspicious enough. To quote from Wikipedia:

Gaddafi's Revolutionary committees resembled similar systems in communist countries. Reportedly 10 to 20 percent of Libyans worked in surveillance for these committees, a proportion of informants on par with Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong-il's North Korea. The surveillance took place in government, in factories, and in the education sector. [ 18 ] Dissent is illegal under Law 75 of 1973. Gaddafi has said that "execution is the fate of anyone who forms a political party". [ 18 ]

Engaging in political conversations with foreigners was a crime punishable by three years in prison. Gaddafi removed foreign languages from school curricula. One protester in 2011 described the situation as: "None of us can speak English or French. He kept us ignorant and blindfolded". [ 19 ]

The regime often executed dissidents publicly and the executions are rebroadcast on state television channels. [ 18 ] [ 20 ]

Libya under Gaddafi was the most censored country in the Middle East and North Africa, according to the Freedom of the Press Index. [ 21 ] (source)

The Recovery of Revolutionary Committee Files in Benghazi

In circumstances not unlike the recovery of the Stasi files in Berlin in 1990, when protests erupted against the Gaddafi regime in mid-February of 2011, quickly deteriorating into violent repression that in turn inflamed rebellion and revolution across Libya, one of the cities where there were dramatic clashes between Libyan security forces and the populace was Benghazi. Despite utilizing plentiful violence, state security personnel quickly began to lose control and, in one night in late February, amidst all the ongoing turmoil, citizens noted that one of the internal security buildings was on fire. Breaking in as they saw security personnel rush out another door, they realized that all the Revolutionary Committee security files were in danger of being consumed by fire, and managed to save a good portion of them. What they discovered in these files is quite revealing, yet another window into the harsh reality of life in Gaddafi's Libyan police state, as well described in this al Jazeera expose entitled Under Gaddafi's Eyes:

Copyrighted Image? DMCA

Former criminal prosecutor Ayman Gheriani reads a classified internal security surveillance file [Evan Hill/Al Jazeera]

Benghazi, LIBYA - Benghazi internal security headquarters, November 3, 1990. A fax arrives at 10:30 in the morning, addressed to the director from the head office in Tripoli.

"We received information about some of the suspicious people," it begins. A list of names and paragraphs of information follow.

One man is singled out for listening to religious tape cassettes from an Egyptian sheikh. Another man named Bileid is identified as a teacher and a "big criminal," someone who has grown a beard but is "morally depraved," implying that he is homosexual.

At the bottom of the page is Eissa Ahmed al-Farsi. He was fired from his job as an agricultural studies teacher at Omar Mukhtar University in Baida. He belonged to one of Libya's secretive revolutionary committees, the power behind Muammar Gaddafi's regime, but dropped out. He began spending time with bearded men at the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq mosque in Benghazi.

The fax is stamped and dated. "Peace," it says at the end.

Farsi's large, blue surveillance file is number 6,247. At the bottom, it is marked "very secret." He is one among tens of thousands, each for a Libyan who unwittingly became a target of Gaddafi's secret police, the enforcers responsible for squashing dissent and sowing terror over more than four decades in the Libyan Arab People's Jamahiriya.

In theory, the Jamahiriya -- or "state of the masses" -- is run by people's committees and an enormous, directly elected congress, but in practice, Gaddafi's personally loyal, autocratic, and extra-judicial state apparatus is controlled through community-based revolutionary committees, the lijan thawriya. High-ranking army, police and internal security officers often double as committee members. For decades, they have had the ability to arrest, interrogate, torture and imprison Libyan citizens at will.

Now that Gaddafi's regime has fallen in the east, stories like Farsi's -- detailing the government's far-reaching coercive power -- are finally entering public view. (TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE, CLICK HERE)

Garish reading indeed, but I must point out however that the Libyan regime is not the only police state in the Middle East or North Africa, for almost every country in these areas has had some version of a repressive state security apparatus in the past decades, often aided and abetted by America, Britain, Israel and other cynical powers. Often these security apparatuses work together secretly and viciously, colluding against those who speak out even beyond one or the other's borders. We must remember that Gaddafi's first internal security mentors were the Egyptians.

Now, however, the eruption of the Arab masses against these brutal infringements upon the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has begun to transform the region, one country at a time. What is needed now is solidarity from freedom-loving peoples everywhere with their struggle, for the battles are far from over, victory not even guaranteed. And their gains are our gains as the planet transforms. Weakening the chains of the old paradigm that has ruled our planet through fear for millennia anywhere weakens it everywhere. The Egyptian revolution's example even echoed in Madison, Wisconsin in the mass protests against autocratic Governor Walker, as marchers were extolled to "walk like an Egyptian!", even though this may many, many marches to effect change.

Authors Bio:
I am a student of history, religion, exoteric and esoteric, the Humanities in general and a tempered advocate for the ultimate manifestation of peace, justice and the unity of humankind through self-realization and mutual respect, although I am not a pacifist, nor do I believe in peace at any price, which is no peace at all but only delays inevitable conflict. There are times when the world must act. Planetary consciousness is evolving, but there are many retrograde forces that would drag us back down.

I have also written one book, a combination of poetry, photography and essays entitled "Post Katrina Blues", my reflections on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans two years after Katrina struck. Go to the store at http://sanfranciscobaypress.com/ to purchase. And I also have a blog called Plutonian Mac.