Libya still under arms: 'A civil war contained, not over'

Πηγή: Le Monde Diplomatique
by Patrick Haimzadeh

Dec 2011

The new government formed by the National Transition Council includes some of the former rebel leaders as ministers, but still has to win recognition among the Libyans. It also has to deal with the militarisation of society, retreat into tribal and religious identities, and interference by foreign powers.

Last month, the main concern in Tripoli was getting your hands on a sheep to slaughter, as tradition requires on Eid al-Adha (feast of the sacrifice). Libyan sheep were 25 dinars a kilo (around $27), about twice the price before the revolution, and many families were only able to afford an imported Turkish animal, cheaper but considered inferior.

Though life felt normal by day, at night things were much less settled, and there were regular incidents with armed groups. Most were clashes between the armed inhabitants of some districts and thuwar (revolutionaries) from the town of Zintan, whose brigade was decisive in the liberation of the capital, alongside those from Tripoli itself, Misrata, and other western Libyan towns such as Yefren, Jadu and Rujbane. After most of the Misrata brigade left to fight in Bani Walid (1) and Sirte, and other brigades went home, the Zintan, with 1,200 men, were the biggest organised military force still in the capital. It was they who took the area around Tripoli’s international airport (including Gaddafi’s biggest palace and his security brigade) in August, after three days of fighting, and the National Transition Council (NTC) put them in charge of security within a 25km radius of the airport.

Their leader, Mukhtar al-Akhdar, is a charismatic figure to the rebels of the Jebel Nafusa. He has been involved in every battle since March. Before the war, he was director of a small company that hired chauffeur-driven vehicles to oil companies. His only soldiering experience was military service in the 1980s, when, like many young Libyans of his generation, he served in the forces sent into northern Chad. Al-Akhdar takes his mission seriously and was proud to explain that the NTC’s president, Mustapha Abdeljalil, who had moved into premises in Tripoli occupied by the former Islamic Call University, had personally entrusted him with the external security of this site (which lies in the zone for which he is responsible).

Monday 7 November was a big day for al-Akhdar, since he was expecting the first commercial flight into Tripoli since the conflict (Turkish Airlines from Istanbul), but he was still more concerned with the events of the previous night. An altercation between Zintan thuwar and youths from the Hay al-Andalus neighbourhood had got out of hand: both sides had received reinforcements, with pick-up trucks and heavy weapons, and al-Akhdar had had to negotiate with the heads of the local military councils (2) to prevent a major clash.

Incidents of this kind, some of which had claimed lives (especially among the militia of the self-proclaimed military governor of Tripoli and former jihadist Abdel Hakim Belhaj), had been on the increase. The Zintan thuwar are the focus of the dissatisfaction of many residents of Tripoli, who regard them as thieving and undisciplined and feel that they should leave the city. Al-Akhdar admitted that there had been incidents: “My thuwar aren’t saints. Some of these incidents were due to the consumption of contraband alcohol, which is getting more common in Tripoli.” He said he had ordered his company commanders to take action, expelling the culprits if necessary.

A few hours later, he was in the huge park around Gaddafi’s palaces (bombed by Nato) and tents, for a party hosted by the Organisation for National Concord (ONC), a charity set up in August that already has more than 5,000 members. Women and children who fled the towns and villages that had supported Gaddafi when his regime fell, had been invited. Over traditional dishes, ONC members from coastal towns and from among the thuwar expressed diverging views. Those from the towns felt it was time for the thuwar to leave Tripoli and join the national army; the thuwar felt they were still needed to provide “security” and thought Abdel Hakim Belhaj was orchestrating a propaganda campaign against them.
Ranks and pay to negotiate

The thuwar feel they won the war, and do not see why they should place themselves under the command of army generals who were part of the Gaddafi regime, or opponents of the regime who have returned from exile. According to al-Akhdar, everything will have to be negotiated — ranks, pay, back pay for eight months’ service, jobs or scholarships for those who do not want to enlist. He intends to defend his men’s and tribe’s interests in the race for power, influence and access to resources (oil in particular) in Libya.

For al-Akhdar, there is no question of leaving Tripoli, and leaving the field open to Belhaj (who is said to have no more than 300 men). Everyone at the feast agreed: they see Belhaj as a jihadist who aspires to political power and has no local support. He is known as “the rubber stamp man” and is said to have arrived in Tripoli, without taking part in the fighting, with a team from Al Jazeera and a rubber stamp naming him as military governor of Tripoli. Nobody wants to have anything to do with his sectarian vision of Islam, which they see as alien to local tradition, nor with his protector, the emir of Qatar, whom they accuse of interfering in Libyan affairs. By contrast, Abdeljalil enjoys unanimous support for his upright character, as a man of law, his ability to listen and his declared aim of defending Libya’s traditional and Muslim identity.

But there is little sign of national concord. Few show concern for the inhabitants of towns and villages that have suffered reprisals for having supported the Gaddafi regime. Cars with Sirte or Bani Walid number plates are stopped; their passengers are questioned and searched, and sometimes have their possessions confiscated. A member of the Warfalla tribe from Bani Walid who had taken refuge with relations in an area of Tripoli where the population are mostly Warfalla — and where graffiti homages to Gaddafi appear on the walls nightly — told me his house was looted bythuwar from Misrata in October. “We will never forget. We will bide our time and wait to take our revenge.” If the suffering of those on the losing side is not acknowledged, and nothing is done to protect them, it hard to see how the “national reconciliation” the NTC’s political leaders evoke can be achieved in the near future, when the NTC has no real control over the thuwar.

South to Zintan

I headed south towards Zintan. The first town on the road, al-Aziziya, is the stronghold of the Warchafana, a major tribe who supported Gaddafi, more or less actively, until August and are regarded as “last-minute” revolutionaries (3). Once it reached the mountains of the Jebel Nafusa, the road passed close to the villages of Riyayna, which symbolise the divisions: al-Riyayna al-Sharqiyya (Riyayna East) joined the insurgents early; al-Riyayna al-Gharbiyya (Riyayna West) supported Gaddafi to the end. Riyayna West was a ghost village, with burned-out houses and looted shops; in Riyayna East, life had returned to normal. Slogans praising the Zintan were everywhere, hastily painted on top of (and barely covering) those praising tribes on the losing side.

Eventually we reached Zintan, seat of the military council for the western region of Libya, which played a major role in coordinating operations in the Jebel Nafusa and prepared the assault on Tripoli. Zintan has a population of only 35,000 but more than 3,000 thuwar, making it the most militarised town in Libya. According to al-Akhdar, 1,800 Zintan thuwar had been deployed to the region’s seven largest oil sites, and to Ubari, where they were negotiating the disarmament of the Touareg. It was near Ubari that the Zintan captured Gaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam, on 20 November; they took him back to Zintan and were refusing, as of late November, to hand him over to the NTC.

Al-Akhdar said: “We can’t compete with Misrata, which has over 12,000 thuwarfor a population of 300,000, but our concerns are different. We did not want to go with the Misratans to besiege and attack Bani Walid. We want to maintain good relations with the Warfalla, who have been our allies and good neighbours for a long time. The people of Misrata wanted revenge on the Warfalla for besieging their town; the Warfalla have been their rivals for a long time. And we were the best able to protect the oil wells, since we come from a Bedouin background and we are familiar with the desert regions as far as Ubari. Other people living in Tripolitania don’t know those areas and don’t venture into them.”
’No to tribalism’

These words recall the distinction drawn by the historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) between the values of the Bedouin and of city dwellers. The Zintan regard the Tripolitans as servile, hypocritical and arriviste, and see themselves as free, courageous and frank; the Tripolitans respect the courage and esprit de corps of the Zintan, but feel their values and customs will be unsuited to city life once peace has returned.

The rise in the number of armed confrontations is due to the militarisation of society and the retreat into primary identities (4) at least as much as to the omnipresence of weapons. Local leaders are reluctant to recognise these tribal clashes as such and prefer to talk of isolated incidents, which they blame on “fifth columnists” or “Gaddafist sleeper cells” trying to foment division among the “Libyan people”. The official discourse, summed up by the slogan “No to tribalism, No to regionalism”, which has appeared recently on posters and banners across Tripoli, is little more than a pious wish (5).

In Tripoli, Belhaj, who has the support of Qatar and Al Jazeera and whose men, natives of the capital, are ideologically trained and disciplined, could be tempted to present himself as an alternative to the “undisciplined” Bedouin, at the risk of provoking violence. There is also a risk that the tribes and regions that supported the Gaddafi regime, now defeated and humiliated, will be driven to increasing violence by their desire for revenge.

So, after eight months of a conflict that western leaders are still reluctant to describe as a civil war, the protection of the civilian population — Nato’s justification for joining in the war — is still far from assured. The triumphalism of the coalition leaders congratulating themselves on “their” victory after the fall of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi reveals their profound lack of interest in the “Libyan people”, though they have never stopped claiming the bombing was to protect them. But the deteriorating security situation and the number of armed confrontations in Tripolitania could soon remind them that military victory in a civil war means nothing in itself, and is no guarantee of the civilian population’s safety.

Notes

(1) Bani Walid is the stronghold of the Warfalla, the largest tribe in Tripolitania, most of whom supported Gaddafi.

(2) There are officially 53 local military councils in Tripoli.

(3) Between 10 and 12 November, at least 17 people were killed and several dozen wounded in clashes involving heavy weaponry between members of the Warchafana and a militia from the coastal town of Zawiya.

(4) The towns that played a major role in the revolution all have their own newspapers and TV stations (Libya has a total of 14 stations). Like the major tribes, they all also have a Facebook page.

(5) One of the priority objectives of the Free Officers Movement, led by Gaddafi, after the 1969 revolution was the official suppression of tribalism. Concrete measures were taken, but these had little effect and remained in place for only a few years before Gaddafi decided to make the tribes a pillar of his political power once more. See Patrick Haimzadeh, “How to make Libya work after Gaddafi”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2011.

Patrick Haimzadeh was a diplomat at the French embassy in Tripoli from 2001 to 2004. He is the author of Au cœur de la Libye de Kadhafi (Inside Gaddafi’s Libya), Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris, 2011

Hospital is a casualty of Libyan war

After taking Tripoli, rebel fighters target Moammar Gaddafi’s last bastions of support.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Mary Beth Sheridan

Oct 17 2011

SIRTE, Libya — Amid a raging battle for this last major Gaddafi stronghold, humanitarian groups in recent days have discovered a tableau of horror in the city’s main hospital.

More than 100 patients were lying in the hallways, in urgent need of attention. One man’s wound was swarming with worms. Another, whose legs had been amputated, had no painkillers. The morgue was overflowing.

The Ibn Sina hospital offers a glimpse into the desperation in Sirte, home town of fugitive former leader Moammar Gaddafi. Although the autocratic ruler was toppled in August and the world has recognized a new, pro-democracy government, the war isn’t over. Some of the fiercest fighting in the eight-month conflict has been unfolding in recent weeks in this coastal city.

Interim government commanders said late Sunday that the other major Gaddafi holdout, the smaller city of Bani Walid, had fallen. In Tripoli, the capital, bulldozers set to work Sunday tearing down the walls ofGaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound — one of the most potent symbols of his reign.

But explosions continued to ring out in Sirte, where anti-Gaddafi forces are using tanks, artillery and mortars to smash their way into an area of the city center where loyalists are holed up and defending themselves with small-arms fire. Most of the city’s roughly 100,000 residents have been forced to flee.

For several days this month, the Ibn Sina hospital — one of Libya’s finest medical institutions — became a front line in the battle for Sirte. Outsiders gaining access to it in recent days have found operating rooms in ruins. Shattered glass twinkles like loose diamonds on windowsills. Skylights are blown out, and flies buzz around patients.

A handful of Sirte’s doctors and nurses managed to hang on through a fierce rebel bombardment in which the water supply failed and the building was raked with gunfire and artillery. When international medical teams arrived, they found the hospital’s personnel “completely burned out, confused, tired, not able to do their proper job,” said Gabriele Rossi, emergency coordinator in the city for Doctors Without Borders.

On Sunday, they were still struggling to take care of two dozen patients when the water again went out.

“Our problem, always,” sighed Abdullah Etbiga, a doctor who has not gone home for three weeks, as he sat in the hospital’s lobby. “Water, water, water.”

Libyan medical personnel started fleeing the hospital after the battle of Sirte began in mid-September. But not Etbiga.

“Everyone was afraid, but what can I do? I said, ‘I will stay with the patients,’ ” said the 40-year-old surgeon, who is unmarried. He rustled up food from the cafeteria and wondered if his siblings in Sirte were still alive.

Even before the fighting began, the hospital’s staff had noticed an ominous sign: Gaddafi had moved military forces, some from Tripoli, into vacant, brand-new buildings that belonged to the medical facility.

On Oct. 1, a young woman was in her brother’s hospital room changing his dressing when the first shell struck, recalled Maria Cristina Cruz, a nurse from the Philippines. “It hit here”— the nurse pointed to her stomach — blowing the woman apart.

Etbiga was catching a nap in another part of the hospital, exhausted from doing six surgeries a day, when he heard the boom. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s outside the building,’ ” the doctor recalled. “Then I opened the door, and there was smoke everywhere.”

Pro-Gaddafi soldiers in the hospital fought back with a barrage of semiautomatic rifle fire and possibly other weapons, nurses said. Medical personnel raced to wheel patients into the basement and corridors to protect them from the shooting.

Over the next few days, most of the remaining staff members fled. Etbiga became the only general surgeon in a hospital that normally employs 200 doctors. He did vascular surgery, a chest operation, a Caesarean section. “Then the anesthesiologist left,” he said.

Without water and running low on medicine, the hospital stopped performing operations. The tiny staff struggled to feed the terrified patients and change their dressings as the building shook with blow after blow. In their care were pro-Gaddafi soldiers and wounded children. On Oct. 8, revolutionary forces seized control of the hospital.

Two days later, a team from Doctors Without Borders reached the hospital and determined that 15 of the patients were suffering from acute psychiatric problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal thoughts and depression, Rossi said.

The morgue had run out of room. On Saturday, nine corpses in white body bags were on gurneys behind the hospital in 70-degree heat. They had been there at least 48 hours, Rossi said.

In the past few days, the hospital has begun to sputter back to life. International medical groups have donated medicine, water and personnel. The Red Cross has evacuated dozens of patients. Surgery resumed Friday. A refrigerated truck arrived Saturday night to hold bodies.

Doctors and nurses have arrived from Tripoli to help out, some wearing the red, black and green bracelets of the anti-Gaddafi movement.

They are part of the hospital’s new look. Revolutionary forces slinging AK-47s sit in the lobby, and the proclamations and poems praising Gaddafi have been torn down.

Etbiga is trying to contact doctors who left to urge them to return. “I want the hospital again working,” he said.

Still, there are constant reminders of the clashes between Gaddafi loyalists and revolutionary forces. Fighting rages in a small area about a mile from the hospital, and the sound of artillery echoes daily across the city. As Etbiga showed a visitor an operating room that had been wrecked by a shell, there was suddenly a loud boom.

Amnesty International: Detainee abuse must stop in Libya

Πηγή: CNN
By Moni Basu

Oct 13 2011

(CNN) -- In late August, Libyan rebels sifted through the remnants of the life Moammar Gadhafi's fleeing supporters left behind, reveling in their capture of Tripoli. But at the same time, more sinister acts were taking place.

In a house in Abu Salim, rebels tied the hands of two brothers from the southern city of Sabha and beat them while taking them into custody.

"They beat us several times using their rifles," the elder brother told human rights group Amnesty International. "They also whipped us. When they transferred us to Mitiga (the airport detention facility), they forced us to walk on our knees to the vehicles while they insulted and beat us. They accused us of being mercenaries."

Such abuses of suspected Gadhafi loyalists were widespread, an Amnesty International delegation discovered. A report issued Thursday said armed militia detained as many as 2,500 people in the Tripoli area and that almost always, people were arrested without warrants and far from the oversight of the Ministry of Justice.

Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty's North Africa researcher, told CNN Thursday that the arrests were more like abductions -- people taken from their homes by unidentified captors carrying out raids on suspected Gadhafi loyalists.

"We spoke to several guards," said Eltahawy, who heard the screams of detainees being whipped as she waited in one of the facilities. "They didn't see a problem to beat detainees to extract information. To them it was normal."

It was the way things had been done for four decades of Gadhafi's ironfisted rule. After visiting 11 facilities and interviewing 300 detainees, some of them women and children, the Amnesty team found that culture very much in place as Tripoli was falling.

A 17-year-old boy from Chad accused of rape and being a mercenary told Amnesty that he was taken from his home in August by armed men who held him in a school where they punched him and beat him with stick, belts, rifles and rubber cables:

"The beatings were so severe that I ended up telling them what they wanted to hear," he said. "I told them I raped women and killed Libyans."

In issuing the report Thursday, Amnesty International called on Libya's National Transitional Council to put an immediate end to such human rights violations.

The reality is that many of the armed militias are working outside the law, Eltahawy said. Libya's new leadership needs to do all it can to start off on the right foot.

"What the national council needs to do from the very beginning is to send a strong signal that this behavior will not be tolerated," she said.

Otherwise, there is a real risk that patterns of the past will be repeated in post-Gadhafi Libya. CNN reached out to the interim council but did not receive an immediate response.

Human Rights Watch has also documented detainee abuse that amounts to torture.

The global monitor issued a report earlier this month that urged Libya to ensure rule of law as it forges ahead in building a new nation.

Those interviewed told Human Rights Watch that they were beaten and given electric shocks. Some showed their scars as proof of their claims. One man wept openly in telling his story of abuse.

A detainee identified as Ahmed said this:

"They took an electric cable and started hitting me with it. They didn't use electricity, but they said that if I didn't talk, they would...They hit me with a butt of the Kalashnikov. They kicked me in the face and in the chest. One scratched me with the knife (bayonet) of the Kalashnikov."

Human Rights Watch said none of the detainees have ever faced a judge.

"After all that Libyans suffered in Moammar Gadhafi's jails, it's disheartening that some of the new authorities are subjecting detainees to arbitrary arrest and beatings today," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

As a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Libya has an obligation to prevent torture and abuse, Amnesty International said.

Libyan authorities, the group said, cannot allow such abuses to go on simply because the nation is in a transitional phase. If they do, said the human rights activists, Libya's new leadership will be no better than the old.

Libya's transitional forces burn, loot village homes near Gaddafi's birthplace

Πηγή: newKerala
Oct 6 2011


Tripoli, Oct 6 : Forces loyal to Libya''s transitional leaders looted and burned civilian homes on Wednesday in the recently captured village of Abu Hadi, near ousted ruler Muammar Gaddafi’s besieged tribal homeland of Surt.

Smoke spires were noticed after fighters, mostly from the western city of Misurata, threw gasoline bombs and grenades into abandoned homes in the village, a center for Gaddafi''s tribe, the Kadafa, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Libya''s new transitional government has urged fighters not to engage in looting and recriminatory assaults. Misurata had suffered greatly during the war, and officials have conceded that reining in its fierce and revenge-minded fighters has been difficult.

"The Misurata brigades are taking their revenge for what soldiers originally from this village did to them. They are burning houses, stealing gold and shooting animals," a fighter from an eastern-based brigade that was also taking part in the offensive against Surt, said.

The capture of Abu Hadi, a desert scrubland about 12 miles south of Surt that was overrun in recent days after fierce fighting, has been a symbolic victory for the forces of the transitional government.

This is reportedly the village where Gaddafi was born in 1942, though Surt has often been referred to as his birthplace.

A paramedic who worked with the revolutionaries returned to find his home in Abu Hadi ransacked and his father, a former officer in Kadafi''s military, missing, possibly detained by anti-Kadafi forces. The paramedic, who declined to give his name for fear of recrimination, said he had gone from one detention facility to another looking for his father, so far without finding him.

The paper quoted a paramedic as saying that he arrived at the newly "liberated" area and found his home a mess.

Another resident said: "Rebels from Misurata came to patrol the houses, they took weapons, and stole mine and my neighbor''s car. They came three times in one day, shooting bullets into the walls of our houses and breaking cupboards. They did this in front of our women and children.”

Libya Fighters Loot Gadhafi Tribe, Showing Divide

Πηγή: abcnews
By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP)

Oct 5 2100

After capturing this hamlet, a center for Moammar Gadhafi's tribe, revolutionary fighters have gone on a vengeance spree, looting and burning homes and making off with gold, furniture and even automobiles.

Other fighters are trying to persuade them to stop and have sought to protect the tribesmen of the ousted leader. As a result, the rampage in Abu Hadi, a suburb of Gadhafi's home city of Sirte, has underscored a geographical split among the forces loyal to Libya's new interim government.

Most of those looting homes are unorganized, volunteer bands of gunmen from the city of Misrata, to the west, which was brutalized in a bloody siege by Gadhafi's forces during the nearly 7-month uprising against his rule. Trying to rein them in are revolutionaries from eastern Libya, which shook off Gadhafi's rule early and have since had time to organize their forces.

"The Misrata fighters came into the revolution with a sense of bitterness and anger," Breiga al-Maghrabi, an eastern fighter, said Wednesday. "They want revenge for what happened to them in Misrata."

"Look — it's Ali Baba," he told an Associated Press reporter as he cruised streets of Abu Hadi in his pickup truck. He pointed at a residential street where a number of revolutionaries walked out of a home with belongings in their arms. The looters loaded a white Chrysler on the back of a truck and drove away with it.

The capture of Abu Hadi earlier this week was a key step in the revolutionaries' weeks-long siege of Sirte, the most important of the pro-Gadhafi cities that are still holding out against Libya's new rulers. Abu Hadi lies to the south of Sirte, and with revolutionary fighters already on the eastern and western sides of the city — and the Mediterranean Sea lying on its northern side — that means Gadhafi loyalists inside Sirte are now trapped.

The loyalists in the city center have been putting up a powerful defense for three weeks now, and on Wednesday the two sides traded artillery, tank and mortar shelling. Still, a spokesman for the revolutionaries' Defense Ministry, Col. Ahmed Bani, vowed on Wednesday that its forces "will be able to completely dominate Sirte in the next few days."

Deputy Defense Minister Fawzy Abu Kataf said it would take two days of heavy shelling to uproot the remaining pro-Gadhafi fighters in the city. But he said revolutionary fighters were holding off on an all-out assault to allow residents to leave.

Abu Hadi, a center of the ousted leader's Gadhadhfa tribe 10 miles (16 kilometers) from downtown Sirte, was a ghost town. Streets were littered with bullet casings, and black smoke billowed from four homes that had been set ablaze by fighters. Many of the homes laid out in rows in the residential complexes had been broken into, with wooden doors busted, stoves and refrigerators overturned, baby clothes and homework strewn all over the floors.

Fathi al-Shobash, an eastern revolutionary, said that when he tried to stop Misrata fighters from raiding homes, they would push him away and say this was their time to treat the Gadhadhfas the way they were treated by their leader. Gadhafi drew heavily on the Gadhadhfa and other loyalist tribes for his military and other key parts of his regime.

"I came to sincerely fight for freedom and my one goal is to rid Libya of Moammar Gadhafi," said al-Shobash. "Why take it out on innocent people from his tribe?"

The tensions between east and west have begun to percolate on a national level as the interim government — set up by easterners — tries to solidify its authority after the fall of Tripoli and Gadhafi's ouster in late August. Already, some in the west have rankled at what they see as attempts by easterners to dominate.

Eastern Libya was the first to rise up in February and set up a quasi-state with a de facto capital in Benghazi, the country's second largest city. That gave them more time to organize their forces, creating a command structure and a degree of discipline in the ranks.

In contrast, western cities faced heavier crackdowns by Gadhafi's forces that kept them divided. Misrata was battered by a siege that was repelled after weeks of bloody street fighting. Western cities have formed brigades of volunteer fighters that have been criticized for being disorganized and acting like armed gangs.

"We ask them, 'Who is your commander,' and they say 'We don't have one,'" al-Maghrabi said of the western revolutionaries at Abu Hadi. "Many are just armed and running around taking out their anger on the homes here."

The tensions erupted at a checkpoint at an Abu Hadi roundabout held by Benghazi fighters. Scuffles broke out when a Misrata fighter refused to take orders from the Benghazi revolutionary.

"You divided the country, admit it — you divided it," the Misrata man shouted at the Benghazi fighter as other revolutionaries tried to pull them apart.

One Misrata revolutionary, Abdullah Faisal, denied men from his city were behind the looting, insisting eastern fighters had let a "fifth column" slip in.

Col. Bashir Abu Thafeera, who commands a brigade of eastern fighters at Abu Hadi, said the Misratans' thirst for vengeance was understandable, given the brutality of the Gadhafi siege of their city.

"They suffered a lot at the beginning of this revolution, and this is also the reaction of 42 years of oppression under Gadhafi," Abu Thafeera told the AP. He said many of the homes that were burned were believed to belong to Gadhafi loyalists who participated in the Misrata siege.

Still, he warned that the same looting could erupt in Sirte itself when it falls. He said eastern fighters would try to move into Sirte more quickly to take control to prevent looting and vengeance attacks.

Most of Abu Hadi's residents fled last week during the fighting before its capture. Families packed up what they could and set up a tent camp several miles away. Abu Thafeera said his troops were trying to ensure their safety so they could return.

One resident, Saada Gheit, came to look in on her home and found it looted. "They took my gold, raided my closets. I don't know why they are taking out their anger on us," she told the AP.

The 47-year-old Gheit and 10 other families have taken refuge in another house nearby. Gheit on Wednesday cooked a meal in a giant cauldron over a bonfire in the courtyard as children ran around nearby. She said her family car was packed with blankets and clothing in case they need to flee again.

"All we can do is run from place to place," she said. "They don't like Moammar Gadhafi, but what was our crime?"

Many in Surt, Libya, don't trust revolutionary forces

Libyans flee Surt (Bela Szandelszky, AP / October 2, 2011)

Πηγή: LATimes
By Ruth Sherlock

Oct 2 2011

Reporting from Surt, Libya— As fighters loyal to Libya's revolutionary government gain on the holdout city of Surt, residents are making it clear that the battle for hearts and minds is far from won.

The scrublands that surround Moammar Kadafi's hometown have become a confused patchwork of loyalties. As vehicles of the revolutionary forces patrolled the dusty villages in newly seized territory Sunday, many residents peered angrily from their homes.

"The rebels are worse than rats. NATO is the same as Osama bin Laden," said a father, his seven children crowding around him.

Surt has been a primary target in the seven-month NATO bombing campaign that helped rebel forces gain control of most of Libya. The intensity of the bombing, coupled with recent rocket attacks by the opposition forces, has turned Surt into a "living hell," several families said.

Hundreds of families fled the city Sunday, anticipating a new assault. But too frightened, angry or mistrustful to flee to opposition-controlled territory, many sought refuge in nearby loyalist homes.

"We have 10 families staying with us now," said the angry father, who, like many others, declined to be identified for fear of recrimination. "There is little food, not enough clean water and no gas. Before, we lived wealthy lives. I had two homes. Now we live worse than animals."

Fleeing families also set up home in an abandoned school, crammed 30 people to a room, sleeping on the tile floor.

Revolutionary leaders say they are supported by a mandate to oust a brutal dictator. But many residents from Surt said they longed for Libya to be "just as it was" before the uprising began in February.

"We lived in democracy under Moammar Kadafi; he was not a dictator," said another Surt resident, Susan Farjan, who said she had been an on-screen journalist for Libyan state television. "I lived in freedom; Libyan women had full human rights. It isn't that we need Moammar Kadafi again, but we want to live just as we did before."

Despite the living conditions and her dust-ridden clothes, Farjan's makeup, Chanel perfume, diamante earrings and gold necklace told of a better life in times past.

"Everyone loves Kadafi. My father loves him so much, the blood is green in his veins," Farjan said as tears welled in her eyes, alluding to Kadafi's use of green as the national color.

Women and children gathered around Farjan suddenly burst into a raucous, tearful chorus: "God, Moammar, Libya. This is all we need!"

With no electricity and only state news stations operating inside the city, families in Surt had little knowledge of events of the last six months. Many believed that the city of Misurata, an anti-Kadafi stronghold to the west, where local fighters pushed out loyalist forces, had been overrun by an odd mix of North Atlantic Treaty Organization ground forces and Islamic extremists.

Revolutionary fighters on the outskirts of Surt have run an informal public relations campaign, supplying fleeing residents of a city they deeply mistrust with food, fuel and medical supplies. "We have to show them that we are not the people Kadafi claimed we were," said Ahmed Zubair, 27.

Splits and confusion have appeared among some of the refugees. In the abandoned school, as some women shouted for Kadafi, others hissed and professed their support for the rebels.

"We are a one-family democracy," joked Mohammed Farjan, 25.

Though his parents decry the fall of the regime, Farjan said he had been against Kadafi since before the uprising. He said authorities had offered him thousands of dollars to stop a Facebook campaign against the longtime leader.

Internet service was cut after the eruption of mass protests in February, he said. Then he and three colleagues played "hide and seek" with regime forces, leaving anti-Kadafi graffiti on Surt's walls, he said.

The vast majority of city's 100,000 people didn't like Kadafi, he alleged. "But when the bombing started, most began to support him again," he said.

HRW: 'Thousands Arrested Without Review in Tripoli'

Πηγή: Human Rights Watch
Sep. 30 2011


(Tripoli) – The National Transitional Council (NTC), the de facto authority in most of Libya, should work to stop militia groups from making arbitrary arrests and abusing detainees in prisons and makeshift detention facilities across western Libya, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch visited 20 detention facilities in Tripoli and interviewed 53 detainees. The detainees reported mistreatment in six facilities, including beatings and the use of electric shock, and some of them showed scars to support the claims. None had been brought before a judge.

The NTC, with the help of its international supporters, urgently needs to set up a justice system able to provide prompt judicial review of all detainees, a task that has not been given sufficiently high priority, Human Rights Watch said.

“After all that Libyans suffered in Muammar Gaddafi’s jails, it’s disheartening that some of the new authorities are subjecting detainees to arbitrary arrest and beatings today,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The NTC owes it to the people of Libya to show that they will institute the rule of law from the start.”

Since the fall of the Gaddafi government in late August, 2011, local brigades, militias, and other security groups aligned with the NTC have arrested thousands of people and held them without proper legal review, Human Rights Watch said. Those suspected of the most serious crimes, such as killing and rape, have received some of the worst treatment by arresting forces and prison guards, some of which may amount to torture.

Many of those arrested are dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans accused of having fought for Gaddafi. In some cases, guards at detention facilities have illegally forced sub-Saharan Africans to perform manual labor.

A key problem is the array of security forces operating in Tripoli and western Libya without effective oversight or experience, Human Rights Watch said. Some appear to have performed well, with one apparently issuing arrest warrants, but others have abused detainees and used unnecessary force at the time of arrest.

Mahmoud Jebril, the de facto prime minister and head of the NTC executive committee, told Human Rights Watch on September 23 that he and the NTC believed the detainee situation required urgent attention. “Prisoner abuse of any kind is not acceptable,” he said. “We joined the revolution to end such mistreatment, not to see it continue in any form.”

Jebril’s commitment to end prisoner abuse is encouraging, and he and the NTC should implement the commitment quickly, Human Rights Watch said. Bringing the various neighborhood militias and security brigades under a unified command, and setting clear standards for their conduct, should be a top priority, Human Rights Watch said.

Between August 31 and September 29, Human Rights Watch inspected eight prisons in Tripoli and twelve smaller detention facilities, among them two private homes where local security forces were holding detainees. The sites included the two wings of Jdeida prison, as well as Tajoura prison, Moftuah prison, and several facilities located on the Matiga air base. Detainees previously detained in four other Tripoli facilities described their treatment in those places. Ayn Zara and Abu Salim prisons remain empty following the late-August escape of detainees held there by the Gaddafi government.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 37 Libyans and 16 sub-Saharan Africans. The 53 people included 16 women, 4 children, and 5 people considered “high value” because of their positions in the Gaddafi government. Eight of the interviewees had been previously detained in Tripoli by brigades and militias aligned to the NTC. In all but a few cases, officials gave Human Rights Watch unrestricted access to speak with detainees in private.

The detainees who reported abuse said guards had beaten them, sometimes on a daily basis. Seven prisoners in two facilities, including women, said guards had subjected them to electric shock. Two detainees who had been at one facility reported beatings on the soles of their feet – a torture technique commonly used during Gaddafi’s rule. The names of facilities where mistreatment was found are being withheld to protect detainees from possible reprisals.

The detainees accused of rape and killing appear to have suffered the worst treatment while their interrogators pressed them to confess.

In one of the six facilities, detainees said that the treatment was improving. In another, abusive guards had been arrested and a new group placed in charge, detainees and officials said.

Sub-Saharan Africans in detention said that prison guards forced them against their will to perform manual labor, including carrying heavy materials, cleaning, and renovation jobs around Tripoli or on military bases.

Fewer than half of the 53 interviewed detainees said they had been questioned, and none had been investigated by the police or brought before a judge. None said they had been able to speak with a lawyer.

No NTC official with whom Human Rights Watch spoke was able to provide an estimated number of detainees held in Tripoli, or a list of the city’s many detention facilities. As of September 27, the two wings of Jdeida prison alone held approximately 1,500 detainees.

In recent weeks NTC authorities have attempted to concentrate the detainees arrested by the various security forces in the main prisons, such as Jdeida and Tajoura. They have closed or downsized some makeshift facilities, but military brigades and neighborhood militias still hold captives in some local facilities, Human Rights Watch said. The brigades also transferred some detainees out of Tripoli to facilities in Zintan, Misrata, and Zawiya. Families often do not know how to find their relatives who have been detained.

Most of the prisons and makeshift detention facilities in Tripoli visited by Human Rights Watch appeared to be overcrowded and undersupplied, especially the prison cells holding sub-Saharan Africans.

NTC authorities in Tripoli attribute detention problems to the chaos that followed the takeover of the government and the need to build security after four decades of Gaddafi’s rule. The delays in forming the interim government have compounded the shortcomings, Human Rights Watch said.

The NTC has been running eastern Libya since March, but the criminal justice system is still not functioning well enough even there to give detainees a prompt judicial review, Human Rights Watch said.

Only 50 percent of investigators and prosecutors who worked under the Gaddafi government in Tripoli have returned to work, the NTC says, and the new government has yet to define their priorities. Few of those who have returned to work have begun processing cases.

“The NTC leadership needs to solve this problem together with the military brigades, local authorities, the police, and justice ministry,” Stork said. “Governments and international organizations supporting Libya’s transition should make a functioning criminal justice system a top priority.”

Jebril said the NTC is working to ensure the humane treatment of all prisoners and to establish a judicial process to review their cases. “In the meantime, we will step up our efforts to communicate with all parties about the need to respect the rights of detainees, and to uphold the values that distinguish us from the Gaddafi regime,” he told Human Rights Watch.


Abuses in Detention

Detainees from six detention facilities reported mistreatment at the hands of guards and investigators, including beatings and the use of electric shock.

Because the detainees expressed fear of reprisals, including some who said they might face beatings for talking with a Human Rights Watch researcher, Human Rights Watch is withholding their real names.

A dark-skinned Libyan, Abdulatif, said that guards in one Tripoli detention facility used electric shock to force him to confess to crimes he said he had not committed:

Libya Rebels Dumping Hundreds of Bodies in ‘Pro-Gadhafi’ Cemetery

Rebels cover bodies of pro-Gaddafi fighters March 23

Πηγή: Antiwar
by Jason Ditz

Sep. 18 2011

The Libyan rebel movement’s primary embarrassment at the moment is that their claims of “50,000″ civilians slain by Moammar Gadhafi looks by early bodycounts to be about 49,000 too many. Bodies are turning up, however, and not the ones the rebels were hoping for.

Instead, reports have the rebel forces dumping hundreds of bodies in a “pro-Gadhafi” cemetary with no identification, slain by the rebels for some unexplained reason. Just one cemetery reported some 800 unidentified corpses.

It is unclear if these are slain members of the regime’s military, or simply dissidents. The rebels are also said to be converting a number of buildings into additional prison space, apparently out of concern that the prison-happy Gadhafi regime simply didn’t have enough room for the enormous numbers of people the new pro-NATO regime is detaining.

In Misrata, the rebels have filled a former school with detainees. None were charged with crimes but were said to have “committed crimes against Misrata” and that the local rebels would decide what to do with them. Reports have them looking for a bigger building, since the school is now packed with detainees.

The exact extent of the Libyan rebel crimes will likely remain unclear for some time,as the unexplained depopulation of entire towns and the Misrata militia’s penchant for attacking the refugee camps they ordered black people into has left massive numbers of people missing without a trace.

Destroyed school raises questions for rebels

In this Sept. 25, 2011 photo, a boy plays with a pre-Gadhafi flag next to destroyed computers in the Tareq Bin Zeyad school, allegedly attacked by revolutionary forces taking revenge, at Al-Shegaiga village, 160 Km south of Tripoli, Libya. Libyan villagers in the western mountains accused of being Gadhafi loyalists say they are being punished by rogue revolutionary forces trying to terrorize the residents, raided their homes and schools and stole private property. The incidents raise concerns for the national council's ability to reconcile tribes accused of harboring Gadhafi loyalists and avoiding further violence.

Πηγή: Reuters

By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI

Sep. 28 2011

o AL-SHEGAIGA, Libya (AP) -- Textbooks are strewn across the floor of the computer and math lab. Pages of science homework are stamped with footprints. A cupboard has been smashed. Bullet holes puncture computer screens and frame door locks.

The Tareq Abu Zeyad middle school lies in ruins. Villagers in this isolated, dusty hamlet in Libya's western mountains say revolutionary forces carried out the attack last week to avenge their past support for Moammar Gadhafi.

The assault, part of a series of reported attacks throughout the region, is an example of what can go wrong as Libyans struggle with how to go forward after months of brutal civil war that often pitted tribes and families against one other.

"I don't know why they would take revenge on a classroom, on a school, which should be for the public good," said Mohammed Saleh, vice principal of the middle school in this town about 110 miles (180 kilometers) southwest of Tripoli. He shuffled through the lab room, shaking his head.

Saleh is a member of the al-Meshashya tribe, which pledged its allegiance to the regime at the beginning of the revolution and harbored Gadhafi's loyalists when they fled from cities liberated by the former rebels.

The al-Meshashyas, who populates this and other villages in the area, say the attacks are particularly wrong-headed because many residents silently supported the uprising but feared publicly voicing opposition to Gadhafi. The revolution began in mid-February in the eastern city of Benghazi and then spread across the nation.

Elsewhere in Libya, other tribes that professed loyalty to Gadhafi have come under fire as well. Many members of the Twarga tribe fled Misrata during the battles for the western city. Now dozens of Twarga families live in schools in Tripoli because revolutionary forces do not allow them to return to their homes in Misrata.

A military spokesman for the ruling National Transitional Council, Col. Ahmed Banim, dismissed all these allegations as an attempt to tarnish theimage of fighters from the town of Zintan who proved vital in last month's push into Tripoli that forced Gadhafi into hiding.

"There is a focus to make the Zintan and Misrata revolutionaries look bad, but they did the most in the struggle to rid Libya of Gadhafi, and I do not like these accusations," Bani said.

He said that tribal leaders should take the initiative to resolve any problems.

Ibrahim Abu Shala, a leader of the al-Meshashyas, said that Gadhafi commanders visited village elders in March to persuade them to oppose the rebellion.

Abu Shala said he then persuaded the tribe to pledge loyalty to the regime and to harbor Gadhafi loyalists. He said he accomplished this through special envoys and state media propaganda and by playing on Bedouin tribal loyalties and ancient rifts between his tribe and one in Zintan.

"Being one of the biggest tribes in the western mountains, Gadhafi used us to hold back a rebellion in this part of the country," said Abu Shala.

The regime armed families and young men with new weapons, mainly Kalashnikovs and hand-held machine guns.

Abu Shala said that those supporting the revolution were outnumbered and threatened into silence by Gadhafi fighters who used the strategic mountainous terrain as hiding locations.

But once it looked imminent that Tripoli would fall and the entire country would soon come under revolutionary command, the al-Meshashyas said they officially declared allegiance to the revolutionaries on Aug. 8 - nearly two weeks before the rebels entered the capital.

"We heard that the revolutionaries announced that we had to hand over our arms, so we met with them and they gave us two hours to do so," said Amer Ramadan, who attended the meeting between the tribal representatives and the anti-Gadhafi rebels from Zintan.

He said the Aug. 21 meeting was very cordial but that they were given only two hours to hand over all the weapons - even though there had not been a call from the National Transitional Council to collect weapons in the cities.

"They decided we were too slow with the handover so hundreds of them entered our villages and began rifling through our homes and destroying public property as punishment," said Ramadan.

He said the attacks began on Sept. 21 and continued for three days. Private cars and farm animals were stolen, and homes were burned.

The attack on the middle school took place at night, when children were not in class.

On Sunday, bullet holes still pockmarked the outside and inside of the expansive school, and shattered glass littered the floors.

Mahdi al-Mashi, a 30-year-old alumnus, wonders why people who call themselves revolutionaries would take out their vengeance on public property like a school.

"Many of us silently joined the February 17 revolution from the beginning but we were held hostage by the threats of the Gadhafi regime and his power," al-Mashi said. "Why do we have to pay for it in this savage way?"

Suleiman Saleh, who is from the nearby town of Mizdah, said revolutionary fighters forced his family out of their house and rifled through their belongings, accusing them of being traitors and hiding weapons.

"My mother and wife were still in the house when they barged in, and they didn't find anything because we don't have any weapons," Saleh said, speaking over the phone from his family's home.

Associated Press journalists were not allowed to enter Mizdah on Sunday by revolutionaries guarding the checkpoint into the town of some 20,000 people.

"Al-Meshashya are opponents of the new government and the revolution. They are trouble, keep away from them," said Adel Khalifa, 34, manning a checkpoint.

Saleh provided a video recording of his home, showing walls pockmarked with bullet holes and covered with anti-Gadhafi slogans. The kitchen and bathroom were destroyed - ceramic strewn across the floor.

Two other houses were burned down in Mizdah, according to Saleh.

"We are not used to this treatment from the revolutionaries, and don't expect it," said al-Mashi, another villager.

He said he was worried that the tribes would take matters into their own hands and start attacking each other with weapons, deepening the rifts between them.

Abdullah al-Matoug, the deputy head of the local military council, said authorities were in the process of collecting all the weapons from people in the villages but that it was going to take a while to persuade people to hand them over.

"We are still new and don't have enough resources to fend off attacks like the ones here," said al-Matoug. He sat in a cramped office of an old police station in al-Shegaiga, more than a dozen automatic weapons in a pile behind him.

Outside the makeshift council office where children hung the new Libyan flag and spray-painted the word "Free Libya" on the outside, a man said he expected a new civil war to break out between the tribes.

"These revolutionaries are now operating like a bunch of armed gangs," he shouted. "There is no order, no law, and the NTC is doing nothing to help - a new civil war will start again."

The man, who refused to give his name, was silenced by his friends. An AP reporter was asked to ignore his comments.

Libyan Besieged Sirte: 'Civilian Casualties and grave shotages'

Revolutionary fighters fire from tanks towards Qaddafi troop positions in Sirte, Libya

Πηγή: CBSNews
Sep. 27 2011


Hundreds of civilians fled Muammar Qaddafi's hometown of Sirte on Monday to escape growing shortages of food and medicine and escalating fears that their homes will be struck during fighting between revolutionary forces and regime loyalists.

Anti-Qaddafi fighters launched their offensive against Sirte nearly two weeks ago, but have faced fierce resistance from loyalists holed up inside the city. After a bloody push into Sirte again over the weekend, revolutionary fighters say they have pulled back to plan their assault and allow civilians more time to flee.

NATO, which has played a key role in decimating Qaddafi's military during the Libyan civil war, has kept up its air campaign since the fall of Tripoli last month. The alliance said Monday its warplanes struck eight military targets near Sirte a day earlier, including an ammunition and vehicle storage facility and rocket launcher.

However, some Sirte residents fleeing the town Monday told a reporter for British daily The Timesthat NATO's bombing of the besieged city amounted to a genocide of those within its boundaries.

"Nato bombing is killing civilians," a man who identified himself as Mohammed Ali Alum Sekily told The Times. "Where is the United Nations? Where is the Muslim world to stop this genocide of the people of Sirte?"

Sekily said six members of his family had been killed, but he declined to give details on their deaths.

Others fleeing Sirte painted a more confused picture of who was behind the worst of the destruction, saying it was difficult to tell whether an explosion was the result of shelling from Libyan forces encircling the city, or NATO jets overhead.

Sirte, 250 miles southeast of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, is one of the last remaining bastions of Qaddafi loyalists since revolutionary fighters stormed into the capital last month. The fugitive leader's supporters also remain in control of the town of Bani Walid, southeast of Tripoli, and pockets of territory in the country's south.

Civilians fleeing Sirte described grave shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

Eman Mohammed, a 30-year-old doctor at the city's central Ibn Sina Hospital, said the facility was short on most medicines and had no oxygen in the operating rooms. She said most days, patients who reach the hospital find no one to treat them because fuel shortages and fear keep staff from coming to work.

She said many recent injuries appear to be caused by revolutionary forces. "Most of the people killed or injured recently are from the shelling," she said.

Forces on the city's outskirts fire tank shells, Grad rockets and mortar rounds toward the city daily with little more than a general idea of what they are targeting. NATO, meanwhile, is operating in Libya under a mandate to protect civilians.

Mohammed, who is from the Warfala tribe that has traditionally supported Qaddafi, said most of the fighters in the city are armed volunteers fighting for personal reasons.

"There is a bloody aspect to it," she said, standing at a rebel checkpoint outside the city. "Many people died in the battlefield as martyrs, so their relatives are angry. It doesn't have to do with Gadhafi anymore. It's more about revenge than about anything else."

She said she didn't expect the fighters to surrender easily.

"It is just simple resistance, just those who lost relatives or who are defending their homes," she said.

Others said they also felt endangered by the fighting.

"We got scared for our children," said Amir Ali, 40, who ran a metal workshop in the city for years. He fled with his five children when the explosions got too close to their home.

"It comes from both sides," he said. "I have no idea what kind of weapons they are, but it's all heavy stuff."

He said the shortages keep many people who would like to flee from getting out.

"There are many people inside who don't have cars to leave or can't get gas," he said. "Others don't want to leave."

Rivalries Impede Governing in Libya

A man carries away two crates of ammunition looted from the Khamis Brigade headquarters on the outskirts of Tripoli.

Πηγή: The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KAREEM FAHIM

Sep. 25 2011

TRIPOLI, Libya — When the fighters who ousted Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi find caches of weapons from his arsenals, they do not entrust them to Libya’s new provisional government. Instead, they haul them back to their hometowns, like Misurata, Zintan, Yafran or Rujban. And when they capture members of the Qaddafi government, the fighters say, they cart them home as well.

“Why shouldn’t we?” said Mohamed Benrasali, a Misurata member of the Transitional National Council, the interim governing authority. “We call them the spoils of war.”

Anwar Fekini, a leader from the Nafusa Mountain town of Rujban, agreed: “All of us, we do the same.”

As the former rebels in Libya try to assemble a government to replace the toppled Qaddafi government, the quiet hoarding of weapons and detainees illustrates the fissures of regional rivalry and mutual distrust that continue to impede progress.

It has been almost two months since the leaders of the Transitional National Council promised to assemble a new cabinet, amid recriminations over the still-unsolved assassination of their top military commander, and they renewed that pledge more than a month ago when Tripoli fell.

But after meeting to try again on Sunday, the council’s top officials have still not overcome regional disputes over the composition of the cabinet, even though it is expected to hold power for only the first eight months after the official “liberation” of Libya is declared.

This vacuum at the top is, in turn, holding back efforts to unify the country, exert civilian authority over freewheeling militias, and get control of the weapons that now flood the streets.

Negotiations are deadlocked, council members say, over how to divide power among groups from different regions. Leaders from Benghazi, Misurata, Zintan and other cities all argue that their suffering or their contributions during the revolt entitle them to a greater voice.

Some are also challenging the council’s current face to the world, Mahmoud Jibril, a former University of Pittsburgh professor of political science who has been serving as both the prime minister and foreign minister. He faces especially determined opposition from Misurata, a center of manufacturing and trade whose fighters endured a devastating siege by Qaddafi troops, and emerged as the rebels’ most potent force.

“Misurata, we will never accept Mahmoud Jibril,” Mr. Benrasali, a spokesman for the Misurata fighters, said Sunday.

He faulted the prime minister for spending little time in Libya in the Qaddafi years and almost no time there during the revolt.

“He is a source of tension, and not a unifying figure at all,” Mr. Benrasali said. “He should do the honorable thing and just vanish.” Some in Misurata now want to charge Mr. Jibril with “treason,” Mr. Benrasali said, for weakening the transition by holding on to power.

Many in Misurata are now backing a native son for the post of prime minister: Abdul Rahman al-Swehli, a British-trained engineer from a prominent local family. “The next prime minister has to be a Libyan — a Libyan who doesn’t have a second passport, a Libyan who has lived in Libya for the last 42 years,” Mr. Benrasali said.

But fighters from the Nafusa Mountains — especially from the city of Zintan, which suffered its own brutal siege — want a greater role in the cabinet as well. Noting that the current council president, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, comes from Al Baida in the east, they say that other top posts should go to westerners — from Misurata or the mountains — who they say deserve credit for ending Colonel Qaddafi’s hold on Tripoli.

“Like Misurata, we are the ones who paid the highest price,” said one council member from the mountains, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. “So there is no question who is going to take the prime minister, the defense minister, the interior minister, the foreign minister, the justice minister — during this transitional phase, they should certainly go to the people who carried the revolution.

Meanwhile, residents of Benghazi, the largest city in the east, noted that they had started the revolt and had worked for months to supply weapons and money by boat and plane to rebels in Misurata and the Nafusa Mountains. “Benghazi carried the weight of the country through this difficult period,” said Shamsiddin Abdul Molah, a spokesman for the council.

He said the council was now “weak” and deadlocked, and he acknowledged that bands of fighters were hoarding weapons and captives. But he said he hoped that elections would ultimately give legitimacy to a new government.

Supporters of Mr. Jibril, meanwhile, say the deadlock results from a power struggle among Misurata, Zintan and the other towns of the mountains, and that Mr. Jibril played a crucial role in the rebellion by building international support. Without NATO airstrikes, they note, none of the rebel brigades could have triumphed.

During a news conference in Benghazi this week, Mr. Jalil, the council president, rejected demands for allotting political power based on the toll of revolt. Though cities like Zintan and Misurata deserved “priority in reconstruction” and recognition by history, he said, “fighting and struggle is not a measure for representation in government.”

“Membership in the transitional national council and the new government is a right guaranteed to all of us,” he added, and the council decided long ago to reserve as much representation for residents of Qaddafi strongholds as for the most rebellious towns. “We have two seats for Surt, same as for Tobruk, regardless of Tobruk’s early support for the revolution and Surt’s delayed support,” he said.

Still, Mr. Jibril has been trying to name a new cabinet since early August, when the top rebel military leader, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, was killed in circumstances that appeared to implicate council officials. Summoned to Benghazi on suspicion of betraying the rebels, General Younes and two aides were shot to death — out of revenge, officials said, over the general’s role in suppressing an Islamist insurgency in 1996.

The killing was embarrassing for the provisional government as well as for General Younes’ powerful tribe, and no prosecution has been announced. “It’s in no one’s interest to solve this thing,” a former rebel official said.

Libyans with no leadership quit Bani Walid front

Πηγή: AP

By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI

Sep. 24 2011

WADI DINAR, Libya (AP) — Many revolutionary fighters are abandoning one of the main fronts in the battle to rout Moammar Gadhafi's loyalists, saying they're not afraid of dying in the face of heavy resistance but are tired of the disorganization and lack of ammunition among their own ranks.

Bani Walid has proven impenetrable in part because of its daunting natural defenses — the town of 100,000 is strung along mountain ravines where loyalists hold the high ground. But the nearly month-old assault has only underscored the disarray in the forces of Libya's new rulers, which include both a relatively organized military and brigades of untrained volunteers.

The regular forces have already pulled back from the Bani Walid siege to focusing on Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, further east on the Mediterranean coast, and other strongholds further south.

Weeks after Tripoli fell and Gadhafi went into hiding, revolutionary forces have struggled with his loyalists' strongholds in Bani Walid and Sirte. Further south deep in the desert lies another bastion, Sabha, and several desert towns in between remain in the hands of the ousted regime — an obstacle as the country's new ruler, the National Transitional Council, tries to solidify its control.

In recent days, even the volunteer fighters who had remained at Bani Walid, determined to continue, have begun to filter away in frustration.

Mohammed Andar, a 35-year-old former police officer, said he decided to return to his home in Zawiya after he was wounded by shrapnel in the back of his leg in an ambush on his brigade. He was being rushed to the hospital Wednesday, the same day his twins celebrated their first birthday.

His wounds were not serious enough to keep him from battle, but he felt it was pointless.

"A martyred father would be an honor for my children, but not in this chaotic, ill-planned way," he said while resting near a revolutionary checkpoint about 25 miles (45 kilometers) north of Bani Walid.

To enter Bani Walid from the northwest, coming from Tripoli, the revolutionary fighters must cross a steep valley, some 400 yards (meters) wide, that divides the city. Gadhafi loyalists hold the high ground on the other side, enabling them to rain down with rockets, mortarts and cluster bombs on fighters trying to approach the valley.

Osama al-Fasi, a field commander from Bani Walid, said his fighters were not prepared for such fierce resistance and blamed the NTC's military leadership for not providing the necessary ammunition, weapons and leadership to sustain a real attack on the city.

"We were shocked at the force of the resistance we faced," al-Fasi told The Associated Press, referring to Gadhafi loyalists as garbage. "Bani Walid is filled with the garbage of Libya and we don't even have heavy weapons to fight them with."

On Friday, leaders of al-Fasi's brigade, the Martyrs of 28 May, decided to officially abandon the northern front and move their base to the southern front because the terrain is easier to fight through.

Five Russian tanks made in the 1970's and seized by fighters when Tripoli fell last month arrived in Wadi Dinar at the revolutionaries' positions on the city's northern outskirts last week, but have sat idle in desert checkpoints requiring maintenance. Fighters spend their days lounging on them, posing for photos from cell phones and using them to dry laundry.

"Can you believe that I enter the front line here with only one magazine for my Kalashnikov?" Hassan Abdel-Qadir, another fighter from the city of Zawiya, east of Tripoli, said in disbelief. "We feel very deflated and frustrated — where is the military council with its leaders and ammunition and help? We've been left to fend for ourselves here."

Military rebel commander Daw Saleheen said it was impossible for the army to inform everyone of movements or information because the resources were not available.

"There are so many fighters and we can't communicate to all of them," he said. "This is a revolution — of course it's going to be chaotic."

Andar said the lack of communication was proving fatal.

On Wednesday, a number of leaderless fighters attempted to push the northernmost checkpoint deeper into the city and enter the center via off-road routes.

Abdel-Salam Genouna planned the attack, which backfired when Gadhafi loyalists armed with heavy machinery ambushed the 10 cars on the expedition from hidden valleys, killing eight fighters, according to Alaa Shafori, a doctor at a field hospital.

"We ran out of ammunition because we were just planning to make this a patrolling expedition," he said. "It was a shock and we are lucky many of us survived."

The remaining fighters have been left shell-shocked and uncertain if Bani Walid is worth the fight.

"I want to die for Libya and for freedom, not for this kind of mess," said Bassam Turki, a 33-year-old fighter from Tripoli who went home after last week's battle.

Fighters besieging Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, further east on the Mediterranean coast appear much more organized, though they too have faced stiff resistance. On Saturday, they pushed into the western side of the city under heavy fighting. They have also moved around the city to try to cut off supply lines through the desert to the loyalists.

Andar, the former police officer who quit the fight at Bani Walid, said tribal loyalty also was proving stronger in the city than other areas, making it harder to gain local support for the revolution.

"In all the cities we liberated, the people inside the city rose up and helped us — except in Bani Walid," Andar said.

Field commander Fathi Kirshadz said the Bani Walid forces had been diminished because local fighters were worried about their families and defected.

Al-Fasi said he was a wanted man inside Bani Walid. He said Gadhafi forces have his name as well as a number of other Bani Walid fighters on a "wanted for execution" list and were attacking their families.

The fighters are too week to hold positions inside the city, making families that raise the tri-color revolutionary flag vulnerable. Al-Fasi said sources inside Bani Walid have told him about 15 civilians have been killed in raids since last Friday.

"We are responsible for the souls of those dead civilians," al-Fasi said, putting his hand to his neck. "Those families greeted us with celebration, and we left them to die."

Fear and loathing in Libya's Misrata

Πηγή: news24
Sep. 23 2011


Misrata - The graffiti on a burnt-out building on Tripoli Street - the main boulevard in Misrata in ruins after ferocious street fighting - sums up the bitter mood in a city besieged for months by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces.

"We don't want the traitors and the people who ran away and want to come back," it says. That message echoes others scrawled around the Mediterranean port, which was a wealthy trading centre before Libya's revolution erupted in February.

The "traitors" are the people suspected of collaborating with Gaddafi’s forces as they pummelled the city and who are now being hunted down and imprisoned by a 70-strong team run by the new authorities.

The ones who ran away are mostly being blocked from returning - checkpoints ring the city and only those with special permission can enter - until they can prove that they did not collaborate.

But even those who do make it back are subjected to scorn - and sometimes violence - by their fellow townspeople who stuck it out and fought back during the long months when victory was far from certain.

"This is happening too much in Misrata. Everyone is pointing the finger and saying 'He's a traitor, that one is a traitor'," said one man on Thursday outside an administrative building on Tripoli Street now used as a jail for around 600 suspected collaborators.

The man, who would not give his name, said he was at the jail to try and find out why a relative had been imprisoned.

Possible traitors

But when he saw that a fighter loyal to the National Transitional Council (NTC) interim regime was looking at him as he spoke to an AFP correspondent, he suddenly said "I can't talk any more. There is no problem."

And he hurriedly walked away.

Another man outside the jail, who also declined to give his name, said fighters had come to his house the night before to detain his brother, a Misrata native who had been working as a doctor in Tripoli.

He had been seen some time ago on Libyan state television – Gaddafi’s propaganda channel - being interviewed in his Tripoli hospital about casualties allegedly caused by Nato airstrikes.

He was now being investigated for alleged collaboration, but his brother insisted he had no choice but to speak to the television reporters.

Scouring old footage from the now defunct state television is one of the methods used to root out possible "traitors", explained Ibrahim al-Sherkissiya, the head of security in Misrata, whose office is in the prison.

Another technique is ploughing through Gaddafi security services' documents - seized as anti-regime fighters slowly conquered town after town - to find the names of Misrata people who betrayed their own.

They also mine the data seized from mobile phones found on captured Gaddafi soldiers, the security chief added. Supplying food, water, ammunition or information to Gaddafi’s forces was a crime, he said.

Sherkissiya, like many townspeople here, said the stringent measures were justified because of the possibility that a "fifth column" might be operating in Misrata.

Private property

Fighting was still raging at the nearby city of Sirte, one of the Gaddafi loyalists' last hold-outs, he pointed out. And several people had recently been arrested trying to struggle hand grenades and guns into Misrata, he said.

Sherkissiya said a team of 22 lawyers and court officials and 54 fighters were assigned to find Misrata's enemy within.

They conducted proper investigations and kept their prisoners in decent conditions, allowing them visits by relatives and access to health care if needed.

"If we ascertain that a person is a traitor, we will keep him in prison until the government has a new legal system in place" and a trial can be conducted, he said. Many arrests had been made after locals denounced their neighbours, he said.

Only around 15% of those arrested were cleared, he said.

That means that most of those detained will not be leaving Tripoli Street for some time as the new administration in the capital struggles to rebuild the institutions of a country that for decades was treated as private property by its dictator.

Misrata was home to half a million people before the revolution and used to attract workers from across Libya as well as thousands of foreign, mainly African workers.

Nearly all of the outsiders left when the fighting began and few in this town - which is intensely suspicious of outsiders as well as of black-skinned Libyans seen as loyal to Gaddafi - want them back.

Authorities

Nor do many Misratans want to see the return of the natives who fled.

"If a guy ran away from Misrata and did not fight, he cannot come back," said Mohamed Rgeeg, whose family lived on Benghazi Street until their apartment was blitzed by a rocket-propelled grenade early in the siege.

The 20-year-old, his parents and siblings now live in an apartment allocated to them by the new authorities in the Ghoush district. It used to belong to a man he said was a Kadhafi loyalist.

The authorities take a less hard-line approach, saying that if their hands are clean any Misrata resident can return.

Security chief Sherkissiya warned however that for the moment returnees might not be safe: he was keeping some people in detention simply to protect them from possible attack from neighbours who saw them as traitors, he said.

Shortly after Sherkissiya spoke, an AFP reporter saw a semi-conscious young man being dragged out of a Misrata hospital and roughly dumped into the back of a pick-up truck and driven off with an armed guard.

"He is a Gaddafi kidnapper," said one man in a group of onlookers.

Black life is cheap in Libya

Πηγή: Time
By Justice Malala

Sep. 19 2011

They are killing black people in Libya. They are killing them in the street, they are killing them in hospitals, they are killing them in transit camps, they are killing them in their houses.

They are not killing any old African. They are killing black Africans, the dark, sub-Saharan Africans. Skin tone, the darkness of one's skin, has become for many blacks in Libya the difference between prison and freedom, death and life.

The rebels who gunned for the toppling of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi have for the past six months been killing anyone who looks dark. Given that there are between a million and two million black Africans in Libya, a slow and under-reported massacre is unfolding in that country.

No one is saying anything. When African leaders such as President Jacob Zuma speak, they speak for Gaddafi but not for the people who are now being routinely murdered at the hands of the rebels - the people who are today in power across large swathes of Libya.

African newspapers and television channels report on the conflict as if they are European, Chinese or American. We never write about the fact that over the past few months anyone with a dark skin has been stopped in the streets of Libya and searched. It is almost like the days of apartheid. These people are then either arrested, tortured or murdered.

No one cares about their fate. They are black after all, and black life is cheapest among Africans. That is why we are not up in arms.

The killings in Libya have cover. Gaddafi, at the beginning of the conflict, used his considerable wealth to hire mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa to terrorise locals and push back the rebel advance. The mercenaries were from everywhere. There were Nigerians, there were veterans from the wars in Ivory Coast and word is that there were even South Africans among them.

These were some of the hired guns of Gaddafi's regime.

These mercenaries would be the ones staging shows of force as Gaddafi shook his fist at the free world. They drove around in Jeeps, shot into the air and pretended that all was fine in the world.

It was not. Now Gaddafi has fallen. Many of the mercenaries have returned home, their hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away. What is left in Libya are the ordinary black people, the ones who have been cleaning for the Libyans all along, building the roads and doing the menial jobs that the rich Libyans would not do.

They are the ones who are dying now. On August 31 an Amnesty International team reported that black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans "are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces".

"An Amnesty delegation visiting the Central Tripoli Hospital last Monday witnessed three thuwwar revolutionaries (as opposition fighters are commonly known) dragging a black patient from the western town of Tawargha from his bed and detaining him. The men were in civilian clothing.

"The thuwwar said the man would be taken to Misratah for questioning, arguing that interrogators in Tripoli 'let killers free'. Two other black Libyans receiving treatment in the hospital for gunshot wounds were warned by the anti-Gaddafi forces that 'their turn was coming'."

Amnesty International is being extremely diplomatic with its language. Human rights activists are reporting that black people have been disappearing all over Libya over the past nine months as the rebels started taking out Gaddafi forces. As rebels arrived in towns, they merely sought out blacks and either killed them on the spot or arrested them. Many have died of starvation in those "prisons".

Wherever alleged Gaddafi forces are found to have been executed, most of those murdered have been black. Video footage of ordinary black men who have been working in Libya being executed is available on the internet. Their sin is that some black mercenaries worked for Gaddafi, and their sin now is that they are black.

The US and Nato, after helping the rebels bomb Libya, have been quiet on this issue. They have blood on their hands. Would they be so quiet if whites were being murdered in such large numbers in Libya?

And where are the Africans? The AU is petulant, refusing to speak or intervene, while their brothers and sisters are being murdered.

What a courageous bunch.

Rival anti-Gaddafi groups clash, 12 killed

Πηγή: ninemsn
Sun Sep 11 2011

At least 12 people have been killed and many more wounded when two groups of fighters opposed to Muammar Gaddafi turned on each other in Libya's west, two officials say.

The fighting, which has its roots in ancient rivalries and pitted combatants from the towns of Gharyan and Kikla on the one side and from Asabah on the other, broke out on Saturday, according to the chief of the Gharyan council and confirmed by the head of the military council of Asabah.

The towns are on the eastern edge of the Nafusa mountains and were important centres of resistance to Gaddafi's forces in months of fighting to oust the strongman.