The warning couldn’t have been clearer. Libya’s water supply network, a multi-billion dollar project that pipes clean water from underground reserves in the south to some 4.5 million residents along the coast, is at risk. If an airstrike hits one of the 3,000 manholes along the pipeline, says Abdul Majid Qa’oud, agricultural minister and chairman of the Great Manmade River People’s Committee, the whole system would break down. “It will be a humanitarian disaster,” he says.
That such an extensive pipeline network — when it was completed Muammar Gaddafi boasted that it was the 8th wonder of the world, with enough concrete to pave a road all the way to India — should have no emergency backup system beggars belief. The tour of the network’s control center was an indication of a regime desperately seeking ways to prove its relevance to a captive press corps grown weary of being spoon fed propaganda on organized excursions.
Signs that Gaddafi’s regime is rapidly losing popularity among those in the capital are plentiful, even to journalists imprisoned in the luxurious confines of a well-orchestrated P.R. machine. In a move that will hearten dissidents, Italy has taken the strongest stance yet against the regime. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told Reuters in Rome on Monday that a divided Libya was not acceptable and that the rebel council was the only legitimate interlocutor.
And while state TV broadcasts scenes of jubilant pro-Gaddafi crowds on a constant loop, their real time incarnations tell a different story. The throngs of supporters that used to greet the journalist bus upon its arrival to the hotel have disappeared, and the rallies of the regime faithful have diminished. One bystander at Sunday’s anti-U.N. protest in Tripoli suggested a little too loudly that the young men stomping on President Obama’s photo were being paid, 150 dinars a day, he had heard.
