82 Silenced and Split Women’s Association in Manchester in 2003, attested that becoming a public face of this nonpolitical “society” put her family at risk back home in Benghazi. She said, I thought, because it’s a social organization, you know, it’s not about politics, I wrote my name and gave a [local] talk. So everyone knows me in Manchester. But at that time, my brother-in-law phoned me from Libya and said Zakia, what you did do? He said the Mukhabarat [Intelligence] come to me and said “your sister-in-law made a group which appears like a social group, but inside we believe it’s a political group against Gaddafi.” Accordingly, Zakia refused an invitation to participate in the 2005 conference over fears that the regime “will go after my parents.” The regimes also continued to hold sway over Libyan and Syrian students through their state-sponsored scholarships. Zakia from Manchester attested, “Those who come to study from Libya, they’re scared to contact us if they are a relative. Because they sign a paper there that says if you want to come to study, you agree that ‘I will not contact my sister or my brother-in-law when I go’ – like a contract.” By threatening to withdraw their scholarships, Libyan officials paid for and coerced students to demonstrate in support of Gaddafi during his appearance at the United Nations in 2009 (Hill 2011). So just as the regime forced the masses in Tripoli to perform their loyalty, migrants were forced to do the same. For all of these reasons, being “publicly anti-regime was fringe,” as Syrian American Sarab from New York recalled. Abdullah, a Syrian who became active after moving to Boston in 2008, explained that only “a few people, using aliases [online], were comfortable talking about things that no one dared to otherwise.” While small groups of Kurdish Syrian and Arab Syrian exiles in London periodically held protests, these events were considered to be high-risk because Syrian officials filmed the demonstrators and blacklisted those who were not already in exile, preventing participants from returning home. These fears were realized in some cases. When one first-generation Kurdish Syrian youth named Tha’er found out through his contacts at home that he was wanted by the regime for participating in a protest outside the London embassy, he was forced to remain in Britain thereafter. These threats plagued Libyan commemorative demonstrations as well. Dr. Abdul Malek’s daughter Sondes mused, “We’d done demonstrations for Libya in the past, but they always had limited numbers because of fear of what the regime would do. A lot of the time, people who went to these demos would wear masks for fear of what would happen to their family members if they were recognized.” Hamid reported that his father and some other members of the US-based Libyan Human Rights Commission, a small group active in the mid1990s, used aliases in the media “because they were scared for their family back home.” Accordingly, anti-regime movements remained small and estranged from the broader community. Mohamed S. of London lamented that because “everyone was [so] scared, they got no support.” https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press