The Last Time I was Arrested

.

September 5, 1977. My penultimate day in Libya.

Sue, Mustafa and I were taking a final drive together in the countryside. I spotted some charcoal heaps in a roadside field and pulled over to take a photo of this rural scene.

The Charcoal Heaps

Another car came up and stopped in front of us. A man in plainclothes got out and rushed up to me. “You are under arrest,” he yelled. “You are under arrest for taking photos of an agricultural project.”

Like most of our teachers, we’d been stopped and/or arrested many times before, but I really hadn’t anticipated this happening on my last full day in Libya.

Still, the policeman had the law on his side: In Libya as in most other less-developed countries it is illegal to photograph government buildings, bridges, airports, military installations and agricultural projects. Mustafa tried to argue that a charcoal heap is hardly an agricultural project but the secret policeman was having none of it.

So off we all went to the police station.

The station sergeant was rather nasty and he went on and on about our being Israeli spies.

We listened patiently for a while and then Mustafa gave him a business card. Not his own card but a card of one of our friends, a colonel and the deputy head of the Libyan police.

The sergeant looked at it. He was clearly impressed. “You know this man?”

“Yes, he’s a good friend of ours,” said Mustafa. “He gestured to me. “He’s a student in my British friend’s school.”

“I will phone him now.” And he did.

Now, I couldn’t understand the phone conversation but Mustafa whispered a translation to Sue and me. Basically the colonel told the sergeant to stop being such an idiot and ordered him to let us go immediately.

The sergeant hung up. We waited expectantly. “Well, he says that I must write a report and then it is up to me whether or not we keep you here.”

We could have pointed out that this was not at all what our friend had said. But then the sergeant would have lost face. And he might have reacted badly. So we kept quiet.

He went to the filing cabinet to get some paper for his report. The top drawer was empty. The second drawer was empty, too. The third drawer contained a very cute little kitten.

The sergeant went to the other offices looking for paper but there wasn’t any anywhere.

So in the end he told us that he was letting us go with a warning this time but that we should be more careful in future.