50 Exit from Authoritarianism Others like myself kept gathering together outside, and we had a political movement. I was a joint member of the National Democratic Party, which was active for a long time since 1970. [It was] a mixture of Libyan intellectuals, students, and civil societists. We gathered to collect information and talk about human rights issues. We had a newspaper called the Voice of Libya, Sawt Libya, as a privately funded organization. Our members were across London, Egypt, and Switzerland. As opposition to Gaddafi took an increasingly Islamist turn in the 1980s, dissidents in the diaspora mobilized in the spirit of a religiously oriented vision of liberation. According to Pargeter (2008: 87), Libyan students who were attracted to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood movement originating in Egypt “formed their own Ikhwani [Brotherhood] groups in the United States and the United Kingdom and, in 1979, began referring to themselves as the Libyan Islamic Group, Jama’a Islamiyya Libiya.” Others sharpened their fighting skills in the internationalist brigades of anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. According to Middle East expert Alison Pargeter (2008), between eight hundred and one thousand Libyans joined the international struggle, with about three hundred returning to launch the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group against Gaddafi. Another dissident named Dr. Mohamed Abdul Malek joined the European Muslim Brotherhood after his emigration to Manchester. He founded an initiative called Libya Watch, a one-man organization dedicated to raising awareness about imprisoned Brotherhood members in Libya. Dr. Abdul Malek explained, As part of Libya Watch, we would support asylum seekers from Libya. I remember there was one incident in which we showed this [British] judge the public hanging of individuals in Libya in Ramadan. You know what he said? “This is a fabricated tape. This cannot be true.” It was very difficult for Westerners to appreciate what was going on because it simply does not happen here. But it was real. It was very much real. Political activism before the Arab Spring also focused on one of the regime’s most egregious crimes. During the region-wide crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s, Libyan Brothers and other dissidents were imprisoned in the regime’s hellish Abu Salim prison. After prisoners organized a strike in 1996 against increasingly inhumane conditions, approximately twelve hundred inmates – many of them gravely crippled by disease and torture – were gunned down en masse. Information in Libya was so tightly controlled that the victims’ families and the outside world remained unaware of the massacre for years. In the early 2000s, the regime began to send notices to the families that their loved ones had died. Grieving relatives and lawyers in Benghazi started calling on the regime to acknowledge the Abu Salim Massacre. To support their demands, dissidents in Britain organized demonstrations. “The anniversary of the Abu Salim prison massacre was a day that we would not miss,” Dr. Abdul Malek of Libya Watch attested. Nagi, a former British emigrant who I interviewed in Tripoli, recalled, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press