But as a cache of documents captured by Colombian security forces from a guerrilla redoubt in 2009 confirms, this was no ordinary rebel.
Because Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's army employed many mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa, these innocent migrant laborers now find themselves singled out by ordinary Libyans and rebels who believe they are the enemy.
For ordinary people, sympathy for rebel groups is fuelled by more basic considerations.
The prisoners, after all, included many ordinary people as well as rebels, and killing them would hardly shield the Qaddafi regime from any conceivable accusation.
Charles said the characters in the film such as Connolly "are not essentially rebels, they are ordinary people who didn't want to fight for the King or the Kaiser".
These poignant contrasts — bombs in a school, peace offered by a man who is marked by a sign of war — yield up a series of profiles in miniature, reminders that the rebels once "led ordinary lives, many of them in the ranks of the middle or professional classes, but those days are long gone".
Religious leaders and diplomats from Sierra Leone say that if the refugees return home, rebel soldiers and ordinary, desperately poor residents will almost certainly attack them and steal their new clothes, brand-name sneakers, even their prostheses.
Vic is not a rebel, just an ordinary, alienated, working-class bloke in another industrial northern town, and Schlesinger's first feature, like the best of his later work, focused on what he once described as "human difficulties and the illusions of love".
That same square which had finally earned its name (Liberation) – and which was one of many across the country to exercise a magical, magnetic pull on ordinary Egyptians to rise and rebel against Mubarak is now being occupied by military police and riot forces.
