Source: Suleiman Doga · EP 140
Subject: The 1983 assassination of Yusuf Kharbeesh by the Gaddafi regime's overseas hit squads — and the family forbidden from mourning him
Yusuf Kharbeesh (يوسف خرباش) was Suleiman Doga's maternal uncle. In 1983, in Italy, he was assassinated by the Gaddafi regime's overseas operatives — the squads the regime itself named "stray dogs" (الكلاب الضالة) in the public language used to describe Libyans living abroad who criticised the regime. The squads targeted dissidents in European cities throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Kharbeesh was one of them.
The killing was followed by a secondary punishment that Doga described as, in some ways, harder to absorb than the killing itself. The family was forbidden from mourning publicly. To hold a funeral, to receive condolences, to gather in the rituals through which Libyan families process death, was treated as an act of opposition. The grief had to be carried privately. The family was not permitted to set the death down in the social architecture that exists precisely to absorb deaths.
Soon afterwards, the regime demolished the grandmother's house. The demolition is a particular kind of state cruelty — the destruction of the physical centre of the extended family, the place where the rituals that had been forbidden would have happened. The grandmother lost a son and a home in the same period, with the second loss prescribed by the regime as punishment for the existence of the first.
The story sits at the centre of Doga's account of his generation. The Gaddafi regime did not only kill. It engineered, with deliberate care, the conditions under which the killing could not be processed by the families it touched. The forbidding of mourning is the engineering. It is what distinguishes a state that kills from a state that aims to deform the people it kills among.
Doga's generation absorbed this as the ambient condition of the country. The televised executions on Ramadan TV, the assassinations of relatives abroad, the demolished houses — these were not exceptional. They were the texture of growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Libya.