Episode: 46 — "Accept the Life You Chose, Sweet and Bitter" · Full Episode #46
Date: Season 5
Language: Arabic
Jawhar Ali (جوهر علي) is a Libyan journalist from Derna, based in Istanbul at the time of recording. His career has been defined by reporting from and about Libya during its post-2011 conflicts. He has experienced violence both as a witness and as a direct target.
On a day that became known locally as Black Monday, a bombing struck the city of Derna. Jawhar was among those who ran toward the site of the explosion. He arrived to find the aftermath — bodies, debris, the chaos of a civilian area hit without warning. While he was filming at the site, a second strike hit. He was struck by the blast. He continued filming.
Derna, a coastal city in eastern Libya, had been a target of multiple armed factions throughout the post-2011 period. The 2015 bombing was one of several attacks on the city. Jawhar's decision to run toward the explosion rather than away from it was not heroic in his telling — it was professional instinct, the reflex of a journalist who understood that documentation was the only thing he could offer.
See: Black Monday — Derna
The most harrowing account in the episode concerns an incident in Misrata. A Snapchat video that Jawhar had posted was taken out of context and weaponised against him. Armed militia members used the video as a pretext. He was kidnapped.
What followed was torture. Jawhar was pistol-whipped. He was subjected to falqa — a method of beating the soles of the feet that is widely documented across the region as a form of punishment and interrogation. He was held in a cell approximately one metre by one metre. His captors contacted his mother and told her they had killed him.
Jawhar described the experience in the episode with a degree of composure that does not diminish its severity. He was a journalist, detained and brutalised by a militia, on the basis of a social media post that had been deliberately misrepresented. There was no legal process, no charges, no trial. The detention was extrajudicial, the violence deliberate, and the psychological warfare — telling his mother he was dead — calculated to cause maximum harm beyond the physical.
The incident illustrates the conditions under which journalists operate in post-2011 Libya: no rule of law, no press protections, and the constant risk that any public utterance can be seized upon by armed groups as justification for violence.
Jawhar offered this statement as a summary of his relationship to displacement. He was not making a philosophical claim about cosmopolitanism. He was describing the basic calculus of a person who has been tortured in his own country: home is not where you are from, it is where you are not in danger. Istanbul, at the time of recording, was that place for him — not because he chose it, but because Libya could not guarantee his safety.
"Any place where you feel safe becomes your homeland." (EP 46)