Colonel Ghadaffi was there with a few other heads
of state that I couldn’t recognize.
I never actually met the Colonel but I saw him often enough, he used to visit Benghazi fairly regularly and when he did and if I was on hand, I would go up to the control tower to watch proceedings. It was always the same, before his aircraft arrived half a dozen buses would pull up and disgorge a few hundred Libyans. They assembled as a crowd on the tarmac. I was told that they had been rounded up from the streets of Benghazi and paid a couple of dinars to front up at the airport.
A small rostrum would be brought out and placed in front of the crowd. The Colonel's aircraft would taxi in, he would disembark to loud cheers and walk to the rostrum. A short speech, then into his car and off to the military barracks, to more loud cheers. The crowd dispersed, the rostrum was removed, the aircraft taxi away, the buses departed, and all was normal again.
One time however, the routine was broken in a way that made my day. The crowd had assembled, the aircraft was on its way in, when a goat herder with about fifty goats appeared around the base of the tower. Normally the goats would follow the road off the base, but the gates leading to the tarmac area had been left open, and goats being goats went through the gate.
Goats were not supposed to be part of the welcoming crowd so the officials tried to herd them back through the gates, they scattered of course and caused much running about arm waving and shouting. Eventually they were brought under control and the Colonel's aircraft was allowed to park.
I don't know if he was told the reason for the delay.
This would have been the same goat herder whose goats ate all the new trees that had been planted to beautify the approaches to the airports main gate.
Another time I saw the Colonel was during the celebrations held to mark the 10th anniversary of his taking power on the the first of September 1969. So on the first of September 1979 great celebrations were planned. Many of the world’s leaders were invited and Benghazi was to feature a big parade of military equipment including a fly past by the latest military jets of the Libyan air force. The preparations for this parade went on for weeks prior to the event.
Rumour abounded as to the form of the parade and at one time it was reckoned 2000 tanks would be involved. What was not rumour was the destruction caused by the practice runs of those tanks that appeared on the outskirts of the city. There were hundreds of them of all sizes and shapes. It was OK while they stayed in open country, they didn’t do much damage, but the parade was to be held along one of the main streets of Benghazi. So practice began to be held on similar streets in the cities outer suburbs.
Apparently the army had the same problem as the air force in that they had plenty of hardware but not enough drivers. I know the airforce had over 200 Mig fighters at Benina but I never saw more then 10 in the air at the same time. In the army’s case there were plenty of tanks but no drivers.
The solution as far as the parade went, was to train university students enough to be able to maneuver the tanks into parade formation, complete the parade, and disperse out of the city. This was what the weeks of practice was all about. You may have noticed my remarks about Libyan car drivers, you can imagine what it was like when hundreds of young students were given tanks to play with.
Those streets where practice took place were wrecked.
Fences torn down, trees uprooted, the surface torn up, cars crushed, it all happened. As it transpired only a few expatriates were involved, mainly those unlucky enough to live on the Tripoli road where most of the damage occurred.
The day of the parade arrived, and because of the importance of the occasion with dignitaries supposedly arriving at Benina, Abdulrahim asked us to maintain a presence at the airport all day. Pete and I shared the day with Pete taking the morning to mid afternoon and me taking the afternoon and evening. This meant I could go to the parade.
The long wide street that the parade would follow was suitably bedecked with flags bunting and slogans, the street was cleared of cars, a smattering of people lined the footpaths. There was a grandstand erected near the end of the street for the dignitaries to assemble and view the spectacle.
I wandered along to a position opposite the grandstand. Colonel Ghadaffi was there with a few other heads of state that I couldn’t recognize. There was plenty of room on the stand, I debated briefly with myself as to whether to take a seat, but decided it would be a bit too presumptuous. There were few other spectators along the route, which must have been a disappointment for the Colonel.
The parade started and it was one of the most impressive displays of military hardware I am ever likely to see. They came four abreast, just managing to fit the width of the road. There were tanks, armoured cars, armoured personnel carriers, missile carriers, tracked guns, trucks towing guns, rocket launchers, and so on. An army commander’s dream. The tanks were particularly impressive and on the whole the students managed fairly well. Now and then the parade came to a halt and at times the formations got a bit ragged, but the whole thing passed in a couple of hours without major mishaps. One particular thing caught my attention, whenever a tank braked, it rocked forward on its tracks then settled back. This untanklike curtsy caused a ripple effect right down the line. As a tank braked, the next in line had to brake and so on, so a sort of linear Mexican wave traveled down the column each tank bobbing in turn.
Although the parade itself went off without major mishap, the aftermath was not so smooth. The plan was that as the tanks etc. came to the end of the parade proper they were to disperse down several selected streets in an orderly fashion. Something went wrong and vehicles ended up trying to negotiate streets that were totally unsuitable for them. Shop fronts were wrecked, people were run over and general mayhem ensued.
The ordinary people of Benghazi will always remember the 10th anniversary of the coup.
I saw none of this as I had to leave before the end, to relieve Pete at the airport. When I got there another surprise awaited. Pete told me he had just been advised that the ILS (Instrument Landing System) had failed. So I said I would look into it.
The ILS is a precision approach to landing system, and like all Navaids is monitored for accuracy. If the transmitted beam is outside tolerance the equipment shuts down and this fact is relayed automatically to the control tower, the controller there alerts the technician who goes off to find out what’s wrong.
The ILS building housing the equipment sits just off the end of the runway it services and in Benina’s case can not be clearly seen from the access road till one is nearly there. I rounded the bend and the ILS came into view. It was fairly easy to see what the problem was. There parked alongside the building was an aircraft. Not just an ordinary aircraft, but a MIG25! Russia’s latest and most secret jet fighter. An aircraft that close to the sensitive monitor antenna had upset its readings and closed the equipment down.
What surprised me was the fact that there was no one around, there it was all by itself. It was obvious what had happened, it looked as if the pilot had come in too fast and too far down the runway (all four kilometers of it) and so ran out of braking room. Long skid marks on the runway was evidence of this. The pilot had managed to stop just off the runway. It must have been quite a landing.
I wandered round the aircraft admiring its lines and obvious power and thinking to myself that I would be one of a very few western civilians who had got close enough to a Mig25 Foxbat to touch it.
I sensed a movement and looked up and there seated comfortably between the two angled tail appendages was a guard pointing a submachine gun at me. There had been someone here after all. He gestured with his gun, “beat it”. So I beat it and went back to fill in the log, thinking this has been an eventful day.
Next page. Chapter 16 Politics