Good Reads: Qaddafi's African mercenaries, Tripoli's water, and Mexican gangs

 

Good journalism is dead. We know this because good journalists tell us this every day, in well-written, well-researched, logical, persuasive stories about the dying news industry. We trust these articles, because they are published by reputable news organizations that still care about things like fact-checking and penetrating questions and deep analysis.

All of which proves that good journalism is not, in fact, dead. (Terribly undervalued, maybe.… Not that I’m complaining.)

Today’s collection of Good Reads is a reminder that good journalism goes beyond mere information – that pesky little crawl of type at the bottom of the TV screen – into a satisfying exploration of an issue that gives readers a new way to think about issues that affect their lives.

Timbuktu and mercenaries

In the fabled city of Timbuktu (see map), where the deserts of the Sahara meet up with the mighty Niger River, The Atlantic’s reporter on the ground, Peter Gwin, meets up with Tuareg mercenaries who fought to defend ousted Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi from his own people.

Mr. Qaddafi’s use of mercenaries from all over Africa was so common that when citizens see people with darker skin than theirs, they assume that person is a mercenary and promptly hand that person over to the authorities, or, more horribly, settle the matter violently themselves.

In the Atlantic piece, Mr. Gwin describes an interview with a Tuareg fighter, given the pseudonym Abdullah, recently returned from Libya. His unit in Tripoli was told to disperse anti-Qaddafi demonstrators.

“That was easy,” he said with startling nonchalance. "We would kill three or four in the front of the crowd and they all ran away."

And when Qaddafi said in February that his fighters would hunt for protesters house by house, Abdullah and his men took the Libyan leader at his word. "To be honest, it is true. We believed what Qaddafi told us. We believed we would go there and kill everyone."

Fight for water

Libyan news continues to dominate headlines, and in the Monitor’s Backchannels blog yesterday, Dan Murphy reported that the anti-Qaddafi forces have rejected a United Nations proposal to send in peacekeepers. The rebels say they are not in a civil war, but rather in a fight to defend themselves against the forces of a dictator. Now on the outskirts of Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, the rebels have given the city an ultimatum to surrender by this weekend. If not, the rebels say they will take the city by force.

[Source : csmonitor.com]