No-Fly Zone

In 2011 I traveled by bus from Cairo northward to the Mediterranean coast and across the land border from Egypt into Libya. Sometime later, I flew the cross-country distance from Benghazi into Tripoli. A few weeks after that, my cousins drove me west through the Ras Jdir border crossing into Tunisia, from Ben Guerdane all the way up into the capital city. These circumstances were extraordinary, in a period of revolution, and to deal with the burdens of long-distance land travel struck me as unsurprising. I was unaware at the time that the impossibility of air travel during this period echoed the early and mid-1990s, when international flights could not land in Libya. I could not have known that, as the result of the ongoing war, this year would preview the decade to come.If Angelenos are famous for having animated arguments over the best combination of freeway routes a driver should take to avoid their city’s epic traffic, Libyans have a less well-known practice of capably advising a traveler on how to exit the country when some or all of the airports are closed. Particularly spectacular among the causes of these air-travel disruptions was in August 2014, when an explosive militia battle leveled Libya’s capital city’s international airport (fig. 1). But this event was one in a long and taxing list. From the 2011 no-fly zone during the revolution to most of the 1990s, when the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) made flying in or out of Libya illegal, Libyans have long been unable to take air transport for granted. Sanctions and more explosive manifestations of war converge in the way they complicate, limit, and preclude the mobility of regular folks.In the absence of air travel, it becomes necessary to use overland transport methods or go by sea. Libya has lacked any form of rail transport since the 1960s, when the few train routes the Italian colonial government had installed in the first decades of the twentieth century went out of commission. Journeys by ferry have been intermittently available to travelers leaving from Libyan coastal cities, with destinations including Malta, Turkey, and Greece. Much more numerous than ferries in recent years are the perilous boat journeys of those attempting to cross the Mediterranean clandestinely. Ultimately, Libya is an oil exporter and a car culture; since Mussolini himself inaugurated the coastal highway in 1937 (Krais 2019: 145), the predominant mode of transport in and beyond the country has been to drive. This is no small matter in a country as large as Libya. I have only ever once gone by car between Libya’s two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. It was a long summer day in 2007 with three of us in my uncle’s car—my dad, his brother Idris, and me. We spent a night in Misrata to shorten the trip and, even then, it was more than an eight-hour ride east, a vast expanse of coastline with the sea stretching out to our left while the beach transformed into the desert on our right, interrupted only by the single road that carried us (fig. 2). To travel by car between metropolitan areas within Libya or across borders to leave the country in any direction is to undertake an arduous journey, even in the best of circumstances.While I am sure it must have sometimes happened, I have never heard of Libyan women driving between cities along the coastal route without the presence of a husband, brother, son, uncle, or male cousin.1 To push your luck is to ride with a male friend who is prepared to pretend to be a cousin if questioned.2 To travel by land is to be susceptible to stops—checkpoints, among less official interruptions—at many more points along your journey than if you go by plane. It also requires access to a (well-)functioning vehicle, something which is these days confined nearly exclusively to militia leaders and the wealthy. The prospect of breaking down in a remote area may be both genuinely frightening and a possibility that bolsters the arguments of family members against you driving.3 All of this means that you are much more likely to have to rely on a male family member to be willing to drive you. The complications and constraints that an absence of air travel creates are—like other aspects of (im)mobility in daily life—deeply gendered in their effects. Whether the airport has been wholly destroyed by militia fighting (fig. 1); the United Nations has mandated a no-fly zone; or it has become internationally illegal to repair Libyan planes, causing these once-functional aircraft to litter empty airports uselessly, the impacts of these transformations largely play out in other, less visible sites of people’s lives. In practice, sanctions operate on a continuum with military violence in the ways they confine people—and women in marked ways—to their homes and neighborhoods.The 1990s have been called “the sanctions decade” for the extensive use of these punitive measures by the UNSC and by individual powerful states. Iraq and later Haiti faced comprehensive sanctions, while a longer list of states was penalized with “targeted” sanctions, ostensibly “in an effort to hurt those most responsible for conflicts rather than ordinary people” (Mingst and Karns 2007: 88). The sanctions imposed on Libya in 1992 by UNSC Resolution 748, which followed US-imposed economic sanctions in place during the latter part of the 1980s, were multifaceted and included an arms embargo, asset freezes, the denial of visas, and the cancellation of air links. These measures were meant to be maintained until the UNSC decided that the Libyan government had sufficiently cooperated with US, UK, and French efforts to “establish responsibility” for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 (which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland) and Union de Transports Aériens Flight 772 (which crashed near Bilma, Niger) and had effectively, “by concrete actions, demonstrate[d] its renunciation of terrorism” (UNSC 1992). In 1998 the cost of these sanctions on the Libyan economy was estimated at $28 billion (Martinez 1999: 1).Through the UN sanctions, Libya was constructed as incapable of responsibly participating in air-travel systems. As a result, states were instructed to “deny permission to any aircraft to take off from, land in, or overfly their territory if it is destined to land in or has taken off from the territory of Libya,” except “on grounds of significant humanitarian need” (UNSC 1992). UN member states were also expected to “prohibit, by their nationals or from their territory, the supply of any aircraft or aircraft components to Libya, the provision of engineering and maintenance servicing of Libyan aircraft or aircraft components, the certification of airworthiness for Libyan aircraft,” and the provision of any aircraft insurance (UNSC 1992). These latter measures meant that even where flying remained possible for people living in Libya—inside the borders of the state—it became structurally less safe.Libyans remember the suddenness with which airport traffic evaporated from one day to the next when these sanctions went into effect in April 1992. One tells of picking up a friend arriving home from Germany the day before the cancellation of air links took effect, excitedly receiving an order from Pizza Hut before this kind of favor between preteen friends became impossible. Another remembers returning from Umrah and arriving on one of the last flights into Tripoli, a hazy seven-year-old’s memory of airport chaos contrasted with the calm of the day of their family’s departing flight. In 1999 the political scientist Luis Martinez wrote of the sanctions, which were then in their seventh year: The embargo on air transport, although frequently violated, nevertheless remains experienced as a form of isolation. Certainly, this perception does not concern the elites of the system who very quickly put in place circumvention procedures thanks to cooperation with the airport on the island of Malta. But for the majority, only land and sea transport allow them to leave the country. Beyond the material impossibility of leaving Libya quickly, it is the feeling of being gradually quarantined by the international community that is felt the hardest. (Martinez 1999: 7)The affect of isolation—like the discursive construction of aloneness—is also gendered. When I made the bus trip from Cairo to Benghazi in 2011, I was the only woman traveling alone. There were other women, part of family units, and there were plenty of unremarkably unaccompanied men, but it was a point of significant attention—both from bus company employees and fellow passengers—that I was there and no man was there with me. Since 2011 repeated scandals have erupted in Libyan public discourse around more and less officially sanctioned practices of questioning and limiting women’s mobility on the basis that they are not meant to be traveling “alone.” On both sides of the politically divided country, under competing governing structures, officials in Libyan airports continue to stop women to ask for a mahram (guardian), or a history of prior travel, or an explanation for traveling alone—even when in a group.4 In one 2017 instance, the official who announced a new policy requiring Libyan women under the age of sixty to travel with a mahram defended the policy by arguing that groups of Libyan women were traveling abroad to collaborate, sometimes unknowingly (!), with foreign intelligence services. In the name of national security, he argued, and having “nothing to do with politics or religion,” a woman should, therefore, “at least be under the surveillance of her brother or her husband” (al-Nadhouri 2017). The constraints on women’s mobility that stem from sanctions and military violence operate in interwoven fashion with these patriarchal and patronizing logics and policies. When a woman “can’t go” to an international conference, to study or work abroad, or on vacation with friends, it may be as a result of one or all of these forces. Indeed, for most, these actions are never options to begin with.In 1994 my dad made his first trip back to Libya in over fifteen years. Eleven at the time, I remember wanting to go with him—the only chance I would have had to meet my paternal grandparents. But these were the years of the film Not without My Daughter (1991), and I was, like many of us with American mothers during this era, ironically, prevented from traveling. My father, Abdulwahed, flew to Tunisia and continued from there into western Libya overland. At the conclusion of the visit some weeks later, his brother drove him back to the border, this time with their sister as a passenger. When their car was stopped at a Gaddafi regime checkpoint, my aunt mouthed off to the soldier, unimpressed with his interrogation of her brother’s plans to exit the country. My dad used to love to tell this story to me in particular, grinning with pride at his favorite sister’s impudence and wrinkling his eyebrows in faux annoyance at how she could have landed them in real trouble. Rather than probing the structural elements through which a checkpoint encounter like this is produced—the air embargo, Gaddafi’s surveillance state, oil politics, and the infrastructural legacies of colonial rule—the story spotlights my aunt’s apparent personal quirks. Underpinning the humor is an indirectly told joke about how women get you into problems when you let them leave the house with you.The sanctions that the United Nations imposed in 1992, those that the United States legislated in 1986, and those that enabled the NATO intervention in 2011 differed in their particularities and in their effects. Cumulatively, they form a history of complicated mobilities. In the Libyan instance, sanctions have repeatedly intersected with other manifestations of war to make land travel the only option when intercity and international movement is possible at all. The necessity of car and bus travel, in turn, enables practical limits on women’s movement that are overlaid by discourses of protection, surveillance, accompaniment, and aloneness. Together, these elements shape the spatial configuration of how, where, and when confrontations over women’s movement can take place. These battles occur at checkpoints, in the airport, and at home, refracting off of each other even as they share neither unified sides nor aims.