Men carry bodies found in a mass grave to a cemetery overlooking the Libyan town of al-Qala on Sept. 30, 2011
Πηγή: Time
By ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER / AL-ASAABA
Oct 5 2011
Unlike their neighbors in nearby communities, the residents of al-Asaaba are not happy with the way things in Libya are going. It used to be the favored town of the area; now its residents are the losers. The kids are an important indicator of this twist of fate. They are Ahmed Ramadan's grandchildren. They went up to the car when it pulled up onto Ramadan's driveway. Ramadan was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's personal secretary. According to other security chiefs captured by former rebels who now control the country, he was also responsible for relaying the Libyan leader's most important security commands throughout the country during the bloody six-month uprising.
When Ramadan was captured in late August, Tripoli rebel fighters say he tried to kill himself. He survived the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head only to wind up a prisoner at the rebels' main military base in Tripoli instead. "The rats took him," one of his grandchildren now says from the car window. And around these parts, the children aren't the only ones still using the ousted Libyan leader's slurs for his enemies.
Ramadan's hometown of al-Asaaba is one of several towns on the fringe of western Libya's Nafusa Mountains that two months after the fall of Tripoli have found themselves on the wrong side of history, struggling to survive in a post-Gaddafi period of unmanaged retribution and vigilante comeuppance. "Most of the people who worked for Gaddafi's forces were from Mashashiya, Gawaleesh and al-Asaaba," says Colonel Suleiman Shenbar, a military commander from the transitional government in the regional capital of Gharyan, enumerating nearby towns that were loyal to the fallen regime. "Between 70% and 80% supported Gaddafi," he says of the people of those towns. But, he adds, they have been subdued. Still, submission there came grudgingly. On Sept. 10, loyalists killed eight Gharyani forces when they entered the town to seize weapons, and Shenbar says they're still working on seizing the rest.
In the center of al-Asaaba, the tricolor flag of Free Libya is now painted on some of the storefronts, but it's unclear who put it there. The fighters from Gharyan who man the checkpoints on the town's approach are suspicious of anyone arriving from within al-Asaaba — and perhaps for good reason. "We were the only mountain town that was with Gaddafi," says Hussein Masbah, one of Ramadan's neighbors.
Although most Libyans opposed Gaddafi, the former rebels say, there are still those who benefited from his 42-year rule. Those who hated him — from the political Islamists of Benghazi in Libya's east to the indigenous Amazigh fighters of the Nafusa Mountains in Libya's west — said they did so because of his cruel repression, his cronyism and his neglect of most communities. Those who loved him did so not because he represented a certain politics but because he favored them with jobs or development, the rebels say. The readjustment of fortunes may be hard to digest.
In al-Asaaba, residents speak of their nostalgia for Ramadan and his favors. "This house is not like what you'd imagine," says Hussein Masbah, unlocking the green gate to the former Gaddafi aide's compound. "It's a simple house. He took a bank loan to build this house," he says. Ramadan would spend summers there, doting on the locals, he adds. "We loved him like our father. He always gave money to help poor people." When Gharyani fighters raided the compound a few weeks ago, they caused severe damage, Masbah says, shooting up the walls and arresting several who were guarding the compound, including Masbah's brother, whom he hasn't heard from since.
The New York City–based monitoring group Human Rights Watch released a report this week alleging an increasingly systematic pattern of abuse by the former rebels against Gaddafi-loyalist captives. Anti-Gaddafi militias, often operating independently of the governing National Transitional Council (NTC), carry out their own versions of justice, often placing suspected loyalists in prisons and secret detention centers without trial, and even torturing some of them.
The behavior raises serious concerns, observers say, as the NTC's battle for control over larger Gaddafi strongholds like Sirt and Bani Walid continues. But even if the NTC gets a grip on its roving militias, the loyalist towns pose a conundrum for the new authorities. Most of the towns were undoubtedly inhabited not just by Gaddafi supporters but by his forces too, the rebels say. They also say that the residents of the Nafusa Mountains village of Gawaleesh — now a ghost town — were the ones who staffed Gaddafi's nearby military base and carried out abuses against the neighboring town of al-Qala.
In a clear reversal of fortunes, the writing on Gawaleesh's abandoned walls now spells out who's in charge. "Al-Qala is your master," reads graffiti painted on the facade of a looted convenience store. "This is what happens to anyone who sells his country," another wall warns. For Gawaleesh, the price for supporting Gaddafi — on whatever level that amounted to — has been paid. The town is ghostlike and silent; the doors of homes and shops have been busted open by bullets, their interiors ransacked and looted. The only sound is that created by the metal doors creaking on their hinges in the wind. "They were from a Gaddafi brigade," laughs a fighter from Zintan who pulls up in his pickup truck. Where did they go? "Where is Gaddafi?" he shrugs and drives on.
Al-Qala, meanwhile, has been dealing with retribution. On Friday, hundreds of townspeople from al-Qala and the neighboring village of Om al-Jersah gathered on a hilltop above al-Qala to bury the latest 10 bodies discovered in a mass grave. Fathi Mohamed Ajad's brother Youssef was one of them. Gaddafi's forces — many of them, residents say, operating out of Gawaleesh and al-Asaaba — had tortured him to death in June. The others had been shot, and the collection of bodies had been dumped in an irrigation reservoir at the edge of an olive grove in Om al-Jersah. Youssef's body was the only one to have been buried, only shallowly in the outer furrows of the field nearby, and dogs had begun to eat it. "I knew him from his teeth and his trousers," Ajad says of the otherwise unrecognizable form.
A month before, residents had discovered a mass grave there containing 35 bodies — also civilian residents of the town, including Ajad's father, uncle and nephew. In early summer, Gaddafi's forces had moved into the town, rounding up any man they found, residents say. The oldest discovered in the mass grave was 89-year-old Salem Younes Krer; the youngest was 17-year-old Amhamed Mohamed. And many there now feel the pull of vigilante justice. "We have caught almost all of them," says Talal al-Hadi, the father of another victim, resolutely, referring to the alleged killers. "They were all Libyans," he adds. Al-Hadi means the perpetrators weren't the foreign mercenaries often alleged to be behind Gaddafi's worst wartime abuses. But there in the Nafusa Mountains, where "everyone is family," his words carry a bitter and more chilling message: the perpetrators were neighbors, and this fight is personal.
In al-Qala, like most of the other mountain towns, the former rebels have been quick to embrace their long-repressed Amazigh culture, raising the symbolic flag of the Amazigh alongside that of the NTC. The local school is back in session. And even as bodies are laid to rest, most say they're optimistic for a better future.
In al-Asaaba, the schools and banks remain closed, and many of the residents remain bitter and fearful. "We don't have money. Our kids can't go to school. And we can't go through the checkpoints because we're from al-Asaaba," says Masbah. Still, the residents of al-Asaaba say they have accepted the inevitable. "We're all revolutionaries now," Masbah says with an ironic laugh.
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