Tears of grief, tears of joy

It was a man in Amman, Jordan, and Mohamed Eljahmi didn't know him. All he said was that Mohamed's 68-year-old brother, Fathi, was dead. "They killed him," Mohamed Eljahmi said. "They let him out of prison so he could die in a hospital."

They grew up in Libya, and years ago Fathi took his little brother Mohamed to the airport in Tripoli.

"You must go to America," Fathi told him. "That is where you will find freedom, because you will not find it here."

And so that is what Mohamed Eljahmi did, because his big brother Fathi was everything. Fathi paid for everything, and Mohamed went to Northeastern University and became an engineer. When Fathi visited Mohamed for the last time, 28 years ago, he stayed at the Harvard Club, and who would imagine it, two self-made guys from Tripoli sitting in the Harvard Club.

In Libya, Fathi Eljahmi built a successful business and became the most dangerous revolutionary who never lifted a weapon. He believed that people in Libya, that people all over the Arab world, deserved the same rights that people in the Western world take for granted. He went public, calling for democracy, real elections, a free press, and for this he was thrown in prison seven years ago.

While the preening Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy was buying legitimacy all over the world, with petrodollars and craven promises not to blow up airplanes anymore, he showed his true colors by keeping Fathi Eljahmi and all he stood for in a small, unventilated cell.

Mohamed Eljahmi sat in his kitchen, in Chelmsford, using a laptop to mount a campaign for his brother's release. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the American Islamic Congress, the American Jewish Committee - they all knew Mohamed, and they all took up Fathi's cause. But realpolitik got in the way of human rights, of Fathi's rights. So while Khadafy's regime was being rehabilitated in the corridors of power in Washington, and Khadafy's son was being feted at Harvard, Fathi wasted away, first in a prison cell, then, for the last two years, in a psychiatric lockup. It was an old Soviet ruse: When someone speaks the truth, label him crazy.

When Dr. Scott Allen, medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, visited Fathi last year, he discovered that Fathi was being denied medication for diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

"It was torture," Mohamed Eljahmi said. "They let him die, slowly, painfully. It was torture."

Fathi was in a coma when he was flown from Tripoli to the Arab Medical Center in Amman three weeks ago. He never woke up.

Mohamed Eljahmi spent most of Friday calling friends at the various human rights groups, thanking them. He waited until Friday afternoon to call his 19-year-old son, Tarek, who just finished his freshman year at Davidson College in North Carolina. He was driving to soccer practice when his cellphone rang.

"Your uncle Fathi passed away," Mohamed Eljahmi said, and as soon as he said it he regretted it, because there was silence, and he realized his son was driving on a highway.

Tarek pulled the car over and called his father back. "You probably don't think I'm impacted by my uncle's death. That I don't care," Tarek said. "But you need to know, he is my inspiration. He is my hero. He stood for everything I believe in."

While away at school, Tarek Eljahmi joined the ROTC. "This country gave me everything my uncle wanted for everyone," he said. "I want to pursue a military career to protect freedom, to give others a chance at it."

Mohamed Eljahmi put the phone down and cried - tears of grief for a brother lost, tears of joy for a son who is everything a father could want.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.