Khaled Mattawa: The Milk of Libyan Resistance

Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Tocqueville.

THOUGH Libyan government forces have killed and wounded hundreds of civilians in their siege of the western city of Misurata, one of the most telling examples of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s wrath has been the bombing and destruction of a dairy plant there.

In just a few years the Naseem dairy plant, owned by a local family, had achieved what Colonel Qaddafi’s regime could never do: provide Libyans with a decent glass of milk.

I was 5 when Colonel Qaddafi came to power, in 1969. One of my earliest pre-Qaddafi memories is of a small Peugeot maneuvering through a crowd of children playing on our street in Benghazi. A tall man would step out, quickly open the trunk and dash up to each house before getting back in the car. If I blinked, I could imagine that the sweating jug of fresh cold milk on our doorstep had appeared there all by itself.

Soon after Colonel Qaddafi’s coup, though, milk ceased to come magically to our door. The dairy farm apparently belonged to “an enemy of the revolution,” and was nationalized. I remember driving around with my father, looking for a place to buy milk. We found one at last, but its door was closed, and empty five-liter plastic jugs were lined up outside, placed there by milk-starved residents. This was in the early 1970s, when Libya was producing about two million barrels of oil per day, one for every Libyan....