A fixture of the central square in Zawiya, the well known local dissident and writer, Hadi Ben Kora, always used to park his battered Swedish Volvo in front of the old mosque. Then he would walk to work in his infamous shop, a small copy shop just off the central square in Zawiya, a small Libyan city on the coast about 40 kilometres west of Tripoli.

A fixture of the central square in Zawiya, the well known local dissident and writer, Hadi Ben Kora, always used to park his battered Swedish Volvo in front of the old mosque. Then he would walk to work in his infamous shop, a small copy shop just off the central square in Zawiya, a small Libyan city on the coast about 40 kilometres west of Tripoli.

In Libya Ben Kora is well known  and, as with most Libyan writers and intellectuals, the only options open to him during former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, were to withdraw from public life and to remain silent, living mainly in his own small world.

And Ben Kora’s world was his store; it was marked by a banner that proclaimed the words “Al Shahed”, which translates to “the witness” and it also had a drawing of a popular cartoon character, also known as “the witness”, on it.

Ben Kora’s daily routine involved the demands of the store’s customers and watching people on the square. He would meet with friends or he would sit alone, dreaming and writing.

The magazine that published Ben Kora’s most controversial pieces of writing was La (or No) magazine. It was first published in the late 1980s but was banned by the Gaddafi regime after it published an investigative piece about Libyan children being injected with the HIV virus in the 1990s. Over 400 children in Benghazi were injected with infected blood and, although the Gaddafi government put the blame on foreign medical workers, its involvement was viewed with suspicion – and it was a subject the government didn’t want discussed.

When the Libyan revolution of 2011 came to Zawiya, Ben Kora’s store became a much busier place – it was used to prepare food for the revolutionaries. That is, until it and the nearby mosque, a major rallying point for protestors in Zawiya, were destroyed by Gaddafi’s forces.

Ben Kora himself was enraptured by the revolution. As “witness” to activities on the square, he didn’t feel he could just stay at home and watch what happened on his television. So he documented events with his own camera, taking pictures of military vehicles in the square and portraits of the revolutionaries killed in the early days of the fighting.

“I will never forget the soldier who shouted at me to get out of my car,” Ben Kora recounts. The soldier searched the old man’s car and found the camera.

“The soldier then told me I would lose everything because of that camera, my family, my children, everything. But I replied to him that ‘the whole country has already been lost’.”

Ben Kora was blindfolded and taken to the notorious Ain Zara prison on the outskirts of Tripoli. He didn’t know what his fate would be and describes the waiting in prison as “another kind of death”.

“Being in prison was hard; I felt very frightened for my family having to live without me. Gradually I only started thinking about myself. And it became an almost mystical experience,” Ben Kora says. “I reconsidered and re-evaluated many things. I remembered things I had never remembered before.”

After the Gaddafi regime was overthrown, Ben Kora was released from prison on August 20, 2011. He made his way back to Zawiya only to find that his store was gone. Not a single trace of The Witness remained in the square.

Even today Ben Kora cannot let the memories go. He comes to a café nearby the square daily to sit by himself, or to meet friends. But something is missing here. The pictures of Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, which used to decorate the walls in his store no longer give the conversation flavour.  

Still Ben Kora loves the square; he loves the fact that so many minds are connected to the square and therefore, to him. Indeed, he has become a landmark here.

“The square breathes with the city and it is the city’s memory,” he says poetically.

The square is bigger than just the buildings that now populate it, Ben Kora says. In the 1980s the square changed and started to be overshadowed by high rise buildings. “They distorted the significance of this place,” he notes.

Nonetheless the square still has symbolism – it has been a  mirror of history and Libyan politics. And not just recent events – for example, in 1922 the Italians executed Libyan rebels here. And following WWII, the square reflected Zawiya’s changes again as large numbers of prosperous, educated Libyans returned home; it was to be one of the city’s most prosperous periods.     

Ben Kora still thinks about the most recent Libyan revolution a lot; he calls it “the volcano” and he remarks that “it is only through the revolution that Libyans have come to know themselves. But there is still oppression hidden there, inside, just like petrol hides under the ground”.

Most recently, Ben Kora’s beloved square has borne the marks of this Libyan revolution. Right now, there is destruction all around but in one corner of the square someone has set up a small gallery to display photographs of locals who died fighting in the revolution. There are also remnants of the weapons used.

Meanwhile on the other side of the square there’s a large banner hanging. On it is a drawing of the new state-sanctioned design for the space. Zawiya’s new square will feature a tall, central revolutionary monument, mirroring the parallels of the surrounding high rises.