Source: Ghassan Atiga · EP 154
Subject: Ghassan Atiga's father is arrested in 1990 and imprisoned in Abu Salim — Ghassan is twelve
In 1990, Ghassan Atiga was twelve years old when his father was arrested and taken to Abu Salim — the Tripoli prison that has, over the long arc of the Gaddafi era, come to stand for the regime's most concentrated cruelty. The arrest was the rupture point of his childhood. The household before the arrest and the household after it were not the same household.
The pattern of Gaddafi-era political imprisonment was specific. The state did not communicate. The arrest was rarely formally announced. The location of detention was not confirmed. The charges, when there were charges, were not shared. The family was not told whether the prisoner was alive or dead. They were not told whether the imprisonment would end.
For the Atiga family, this was the texture of the years that followed 1990. The father was somewhere. They did not know where. The state's silence was a tool. The silence was designed to break the family in parallel with the prisoner.
Ghassan was twelve. He has spoken about the period with the particular clarity of someone who watched a household reorganise itself in real time around a missing person. He did not have the adult vocabulary at the time. He had a child's reading: my father is gone, no one will say where, no one will say when.
The reading the children of disappeared Libyans arrived at — across that period, across families, across the country — was structurally similar. They assumed death. They assumed it because no other reading was available, and because the regime's overall behaviour made the assumption rational. The 1996 Abu Salim massacre, when it later became public, confirmed the assumption for many families. The 1,270 prisoners killed in a single operation included men who had been "disappeared" years earlier.
"They killed Baba" is the framing Ghassan and many Libyans of his cohort grew up inside, even when it had not yet been confirmed. The framing was not melodrama. It was the rational reading of the data the state had supplied. Until the state supplied better data, the family was inside the framing.
For the Atiga family, the framing held until 1997, when the data finally changed. (See The 1997 Release.)