Exiting Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya 51 The Abu Salim prison massacre demonstrations [happened] in Manchester and in London, but mainly Manchester, in support of their demands. We did a lot of activities, displaying posters and things, trying to raise the awareness of these issues. Along with these efforts, a small group called the Libyan Human Rights Commission was founded in the United States in 1995 by émigré activists, with at least one member being formerly affiliated with the NFSL, to criticize the regime over its abysmal human rights record. In 2002, a small but significant number of websites emerged to publicize information about the country and to post the writings of Libyans, usually under pseudonyms. Ashur Shamis, who was exiled in 1969 after Gaddafi’s coup, established a political organization called the Libya Human and Political Development Forum in London. As part of this initiative, he founded an online newspaper called Akhbar Libya that would often broach sensitive subjects, such as corruption among Libyan elites, using information gleaned from insider contacts. According to Gazzini (2007), Akbar Libya started as a four-page newspaper in the 1980s before going online in the early 2000s. Sites such as Libya Watanona (Our Homeland Libya), run by Dr. Ibrahim Ighneiwa, posted articles, histories, and letters in English and Arabic and was a hub for remembrances and grievances, but it did not have a specific political agenda. Other sites, such as Justice4Libya, were dedicated to remembering those who had been imprisoned and killed in the 1996 Abu Salim Massacre. A community leader who came up numerous times in my interviews, Ali Kamadan Abuzaakik, founder of the American Libyan Freedom Alliance (ALFA) in Washington, DC, also held meetings to evaluate the state of the opposition and consider their future course of action (Bugaighis and Buisier 2003). Exile organizations such as these were scattered and small, however, and generally lacked non-exile membership. In 2005, members of the American and British NFSL, the Libyan Human Rights Commission, and other dissident groups such as the Libyan Constitutional Union and the Libyan League for Human Rights met in London to declare themselves a coalition called the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition. According to scholar Alice Alunni’s (2019, 2020) extensive research on this conference, their members attempted to transcend ideology and Islamism to unite under a nationalist agenda. As part of this effort, they referenced the 1951 constitution and came together under the flag of King Idris’s rule. Covered by the BBC and Al Jazeera, the Libyan regime condemned the conference. In doing so, however, the regime incidentally raised awareness of the opposition abroad and the 1951 governmental framework inside of Libya (Alunni 2019: 251). In the 2000s, a number of websites were created from abroad in order to promote Amazigh culture and identity. In the 1970s, Libya’s Amazigh association, the Rabita Shamal Afriqiya, was forcibly closed and its members arrested on charges of creating an illegal political party (Al-Rumi 2009). Because the heritage and language of this ethnic group had been repressed for decades in https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press