The month everything collided for Emad Badi: a war started, his family was in the middle of it, and he had a master's degree to finish (EP 4).
On April 4th 2019, Khalifa Haftar launched a military offensive on Tripoli. Badi's family was there.
At the same time, he had five or six master's deadlines at his London university — his thesis on state-society relations in Libya.
He described managing academic output while trying to find out if people he loved were safe. Friends who were journalists in Libya were unreachable during the day — only available very late at night, when the fighting paused. He would write essays during the day and check on family at 2am.
All of it from London. Unable to go back.
He called it "just insane" — his most intense month.
What frustrated Badi most was not the offensive itself but the silence of Libyans who had previously been vocal. People who had opinions about everything went quiet when it mattered. More than a hundred thousand people displaced. Thousands dead. "When are you going to actually talk?"
He didn't buy desensitisation as an explanation. He called it opportunism — people calculating which side to be seen supporting.
April 2019 illustrates a specific condition of diaspora life during conflict: you are simultaneously inside the crisis (emotionally, through family) and outside it (physically, in a safe country). You have access to information that people inside don't, and they have an experience you can't reach. The gap between the two is where Badi lived that month.