Mark Colvin reported this story on Monday, March 28, 2011 18:10:00

MARK COLVIN: In Libya opposition forces are moving at breakneck speed towards Tripoli. Yesterday they took the oil cities of Ras Lanuf and Brega, meeting little resistance from Gaddafi forces.



Now the Opposition Council in Benghazi claims that Sirte, Gaddafi's hometown, is in its hands. Sirte lies halfway along the coast between Benghazi and Tripoli.



The Opposition Council says it now expects the real fight to take place in Tripoli instead of Sirte where they expected much greater resistance.



Yesterday in the capital journalists staying at the Rixos Hotel witnessed the brutality of the Gaddafi regime up close.



A distressed young Libyan woman, Iman al-Obeidi, burst into the dining room as journalists were having breakfast. She said she'd been raped by 15 of Gaddafi's militiamen.



In footage now seen all over the world staff and government minders quickly and violently hustled her out of the hotel.



UK Channel 4's foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller told me what was revealing was the government's reaction to the outrage of the foreign press.



JONATHAN MILLER: The government spokesman who's a very eloquent man in English and has relentlessly defended the indefensible first of all started alleging that she was drunk, then that she was possibly mentally imbalanced and he never reined in from any of those statements.



Yesterday morning he began to brief journalists privately that she was a prostitute, that she was a woman of easy virtue who had gone out seeking paid sex and that at least one of these checkpoints where she'd gone she'd got into a bit of trouble which is why it was being dealt with as a criminal matter…



MARK COLVIN: How have the journalists been reacting to that sort of briefing?



JONATHAN MILLER: Well the media were, have lost any respect that they may ever have had for this man and last night there was a very hostile news conference in which we challenged him about this because he was unwilling to say, you know, with the assembled cameras from all over the world and I mean live on Libyan television, he was unwilling to repeat these allegations.



And we challenged him to do so but he refused and said, "It is now a legal matter. It would be inappropriate for me to do so." But we said, "Hang on a sec, do you now retract the statements that you made that she may have been a prostitute or that she was a prostitute?" And he stormed out. He left the room.



And so it, you know, he says, "Why are you focusing on an issue which is just one tiny, little story when thousands of Libyans are being bombed illegally and immorally by the Western crusader alliance?"



Well, he doesn't seem to understand, the government doesn't seem to understand that for journalists here who have been unable to get out of this hotel, not only was it a case of the story coming to us and we glimpsed this brutality, but it became a very symbolic story absolutely illustrating in a nutshell what Libyans have to put up with in this country in terms of this brutal, tyrannical regime which has ruled them for 41 years.



MARK COLVIN: Now you've been there for two and a half weeks. What have you and haven't you been able to see and report on in terms of the bombing?



JONATHAN MILLER: We've been severely restricted. It has been a nightmare in terms of being able to tell this story properly.



Journalists have been stopped. Most recently last night I tried to leave the hotel with my TV crew to just walk down the road and we were arrested at the gate and brought back to the hotel.



I mean it's that bad. We're under virtual house arrest…



MARK COLVIN: And when they do take you out to see something what do they take you out to see?



JONATHAN MILLER: They put us in buses. And you can imagine what a bunch of recalcitrant, grumpy journalists are like being herded like goats onto buses. And we're taken off to see things that we don't want to see.



We're taken to see crowds of Gaddafi lovers ranting and raving about how much they love him, about how their blood is green, not red.



And none of these people that we're taken to see ever have any truck with the possibility that the rebels are genuine, Libyan, pro-democracy, that this is an uprising of genuine, democratic uprising. They see it as an Al Qaeda inspired foreign conspiracy to take power from their beloved leader.



We do not see the real things happening. And in fact journalists when they have ventured out of this hotel and taken the risks and eluded security have found themselves unfailingly arrested. Their cars are turned back to the hotel. They're stopped at checkpoints. Black bags have been placed over their heads. They've been taken at gunpoint into detention and left in stress positions.



They have been absolutely unable to report what's going on despite the bizarre government assurances that it is still possible to go freely wherever we want. This is nonsense.



MARK COLVIN: Now despite all that are you getting any feeling about what the fear is, the degree of fear or the degree of triumph, whichever, in Tripoli among the Gaddafi forces? From the outside world the military situation seems to have changed pretty radically.



JONATHAN MILLER: It is utterly remarkable Mark how quickly this is happening.



I woke up half an hour ago to news that the rebel advance had already run through the city of Sirte, or the town of Sirte.



Now Sirte is about half way between Benghazi and Tripoli on the coast. It is a very symbolic city to have fallen to the rebels if this is true because it is Gaddafi's hometown.



And last night some journalist colleagues of mine who'd left for Sirte yesterday morning reached the town. And they described their terror of driving around this place as allied or as coalition bombs were falling in the dark and being unable to find the hotel that the government had promised to put them in.



This will, I think, probably buoy the suppressed insurrection of recent weeks. There are many countless thousands of Libyans who cannot wait to see the back of this tyrant. But they have been kept quiet because of the brutal manner in which their uprising was put down in places like Zawiya, you'll remember about three weeks ago, you know huge gunfights between pro-Gaddafi forces and the opposition, which Gaddafi finally won.



The towns, including Tripoli and a town just outside Tripoli to the east, Tajura, these places have been, the protest has been suppressed.



This news however may reawaken the sense that hope is there still, that they can get rid of this man, and I think you might see that rekindling of that internal insurrection that we had a few weeks ago.



MARK COLVIN: And Gaddafi forces seem to be on the run. Do you think they will, some of them will also defect or do you think the whole thing will collapse?



JONATHAN MILLER: I think collapse is probably the more accurate assessment of it.



You know it reminds me of what happened when Saddam's forces were finally taken by the Americans marching into Baghdad and there were scenes of Iraqi soldiers, government soldiers trying to get rid of the clothes they were in. Friends of mine saw men running down the road in their underpants in their attempt to pass themselves off as civilians rather than soldiers.



It's very weird because one of the correspondents who I spoke to who'd got to Sirte last night, I asked him, "Well you know if Gaddafi's forces are retreated towards you in Sirte, where are they?" Because there's nothing between them and the rebels now, there's no settlement.



And he said, "I don't know. There's a few tanks around. I can see a few soldiers and some busloads of civilians who just turned up." But you know he said it didn't look like a retreating army.



It's possible that it's already been so decimated or destroyed in the rebels' advance that they have not got it, they don't look like a retreating army. Perhaps their armour and their tanks are scattered and destroyed in various places along this desert road and perhaps it's just rag-tag band of retreating soldiers. It's hard to know.



But it's possible that they may just try to disappear into the civilian population because, you know, they don't seem to have anywhere to retreat to.



MARK COLVIN: Britain's Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Miller speaking to me from the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli where as you heard he's been pretty much locked up for two and a half weeks. This is his last day there after two and a half weeks.



And you can hear a longer version of that interview on our website from this evening.