Christopher Stevens, the Libyan

The fanatics who murdered Christopher Stevens, the American Ambassador to Libya, yesterday in Benghazi are not only criminals, they are imbeciles.

A young, smart diplomat, as well as a courageous man in the field, Christopher Stevens was one of the best friends Libya had, and was one of the secret artisans behind its liberation.

In this joint battle from Paris to Benghazi, then in Washington D.C., our paths had crossed several times. It had started in Paris, on March 14, 2011. Gadhafi’s troops were marching on Benghazi, doomed to its bloody fate. France was nearly single-handedly supporting the Libyan revolutionaries. And all seemed to be lost, when I begged Mahmoud Jibril — the National Transitional Council’s Executive Chair, who a few days previous had negotiated with French President Nicolas Sarkozy to obtain recognition of a free Libya — to come back to Paris immediately to meet Hillary Clinton, who was headed to the G-8 Summit. Christopher Stevens attended this meeting. This young and fresh diplomatic advisor was moved by the plea that Jibril had made, as he later told me, and he was among those who pushed Hillary Clinton to inform President Barack Obama, and relay the call for help [from Jibril] that he had just witnessed. We all know what happened next.

One month later, April 9 and then again, we met in Benghazi, where he was not the Ambassador yet but the NTC’s American Representative. He immersed himself completely into his mission. He is one of those people who pushed his country to intervene in the air and also on the ground with the Special Forces. I recall one morning when we broke into laughter when we realized that we had both scheduled a meeting at the same time, with the NTC’s president, who was not very observant of protocol. I have the recollection of our high-spirited but frank conversations and always in a good mood about the eventuality of a Libyan Dayton, which he seemed to favor, and that consisted in imagining a divided and confederated Libya. I recall his elegance, his bright smile and that day on the road to Brega when he made a vibrant, very literary and, in that place, rather incongruous praise of San Francisco.

And then, one year later, I saw him again in Washington D.C. The story was drawing to a close. I came to interview Hillary Clinton about this war of liberation, where France and the United States ended up standing shoulder to shoulder. And Christopher Stevens was there again. We met by chance in the elevator; we hugged, kissed and then had a long conversation in the Department of State cafeteria, where he announced to me that he had been named Ambassador to Libya. He still looked youthful and still had the same contagious cheerfulness. He was convinced that a new chapter was about to be written in the long U.S. history with the Arab world — one that saw Americans as friends, not of the dictators this time, but of the peoples. And that chapter, he had the intention to contribute to writing and embellishing it.

This country that he had defended so much, this city Benghazi that he had helped to save and that he had loved, turned out to be fatal to him. Ten years after Daniel Pearl — another American who also respected the Arab and Muslim peoples and admired Islamic wisdom — he became the victim of the same fanaticism, of the same barbaric and tragic blindness. The Americans lost an ambassador. The Libyans lost a companion and a friend. The imbeciles won.