For a country that is the proud curator of 2400-year-old stone inscriptions, modern Libya has been slow in filing its own recent history. Prehistoric Libyans recorded life and issues of historical importance on stones, but modern Libya only started recording its recent collective memory in 2012.
New Libyan archive law
For a country that is the proud curator of 2400-year-old stone inscriptions, modern Libya has been slow in filing its own recent history. Prehistoric Libyans recorded life and issues of historical importance on stones, but modern Libya only started recording its recent collective memory in 2012.
New Libyan archive law
Article 60 of Statute 24 established in 2012 an independently-funded public body charged with handling the country’s archives and reporting directly to the Cabinet. The new regulated institution will be merged with the old center, according to the National Center for Archives and Historical Studies, the relevant authority.
“We have struggled to create a Libyan archive since 1978 as we were among the few countries that did not have one,” said Professor Mohamed Tahar Jirari, Head of the National Center for Archives and Historical Studies since its establishment in 1978.
“There were laws and regulations issued before this law, but they were limited in favour of a specific field or party on the political, state and informative levels,” he explained.
The new law prescribes ‘the existence of a recorded collective Libyan memory in a state or popular archive.’
Jirari said the first steps towards passing the archive law began in 2010. “A committee was formed to create a fully integrated law, but the outburst of the revolution suspended its work,” Jirari told Correspondents. “The law was eventually referred to the National Transitional Council (NTC) to be discussed, voted upon and passed in March 2012,” he added.
Building for the past
The new archives building is located in the city centre in Tripoli across Jarart Island on Municipal Street. The staff, brought together by the idea of not letting the country fall into a state of collective amnesia, are still busy with archives from over 100 years ago.
In 1977, 10 of the faculty professors of the History Department at the University of Tripoli agreed on the need to create a Libyan national archive, but the state at the time did not provide the necessary means. All the professors obtained was a historical research centre affiliated to the university, limited to documenting the era of Italian occupation.
Given the urgency of documenting the colonial era, the faculty professors accepted the limitations, albeit reluctantly.
The research team divided Libya into 17 regions and specialists were sent to collect verbal stories from witnesses in each. The result was 15,000 audio tapes carefully kept in designated stores accompanied by their old index.
Badria Mohammed Riani, a former employee at the archive, later indexed the tape’s subjects in three volumes for ease of reference according to alphabetical order.
The documentation of the colonial era continues: the last recording was with Rasim Sadeq Naala, spokesman for Crown Prince of Libya Hasan as-Senussi. As-Senussi never became king: a coup by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in September 1969 abolished the Libyan monarchy.
Nuggets of insight into colonialism
Other colonial files are of equal interest, for example, the file on Sulaiman Baroni, the historical character who led the Jihad against Italy in Libya’s west. Baroni’s file contains a hand written letter by Baroni that dates back a century.
Other files shed light on martial trial records and those sentenced to death. One well-kept document shows photos of a pardoned Libyan defendant said to have been born in 1895. Both the photos and the defendant’s fingerprints are still clearly identifiable.
Under article 60, the new archive centre has been granted extensive powers: the center is the sole caretaker for collecting, translating and publishing all manuscripts – particularly those in handwriting which demonstrate an intellectual and artistic thinking. In addition, the center has the right to determine the historical values of each document.
Prison for hiding history
Citizens are also obliged by law to deliver available historical documents to the centre in exchange for “fair financial compensation” with the right to complain if the price does not match the worth of the document.
So if you have dusty old photos or torn documents, best deliver them. Failure to deliver documents of historical importance to the archive will be punishable by imprisonment and a fine of not less than 1,000 dinars ($750) and not more than 5,000 dinars ($3,800).
Prison sentences would be of a term not exceeding five years and a fine of no more than 10,000 dinars ($7,600) on the deliberate destruction, unauthorized publishing or smuggling outside Libya of a kept document.
Despite such wide-ranging powers, staff at the archive say difficulties remain. “The center faces significant challenges including the lack of archiving experience,” says its new head, Jirari. The new archive is trying to overcome this challenge by contacting other countries for training personnel.
“We have contacted the European Union, the USA, the UK and Germany who have been the most responsive, but the security situation is still delaying the arrival of some overseas teams,” added Jirari.
Selling state secrets
The biggest challenge however is to persuade people to comply with the law and deliver their historical documents to the centre. “Some individuals and institutions prefer to keep their documents and sell them to traders,” says Jirari.
According to the former head of the Benghazi Military Intelligence Archive, a substantial chunk of the country’s military archives were stolen and sold after the building was bombed in August 2012.
