One year has passed since the Tawerghans fled their coastal town during Muammar Gaddafi’s violent overthrow, and displaced residents are still waiting for a chance to return.
The security situation in Libya remains tense as violence by way of car bombings, political assassinations of high-ranking government and military officials, attacks on foreign diplomatic staff and NGOs, and young men sorting out minor disputes with AK-47s continues unabated.
Pregnant women miscarrying due to mistreatment, detainees mainly from sub-Saharan Africa denied adequate food and water. Small cells crammed with 80-100 detainees subjected to arbitrary justice by Libya’s volatile militias, politically persecuted Somalis forcibly repatriated to Mogadishu, and hundreds of boat people dying trying to flee Libya for a better life in Europe.
“The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi,” Nasser al-Hawary, researcher with the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights tells IPS.
On election day long lines of people from Sabha’s impoverished community of Tayuri waited to vote under the harsh Saharan sun. Four hundred miles from the Mediterranean coast, Sabha is tucked into the volatile southwest bordering Algeria, Niger and Chad.
Libyans appear to be putting their hopes in Mahmoud Jibril’s liberal National Forces Alliance (NFA) to cement a coalition and build bridges between Libya’s fractious militias. Many believe the party can also unite other ideologically opposed political parties, and both opponents and supporters of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
On the eve of Libya’s historic elections for a General National Congress on Saturday, Jul. 7, the seaside capital’s bustling streets are lined with hundreds of campaign posters advertising electoral candidates - including those of women and youth - jockeying for a stake in their country’s future.
With Libya's first election in more than four decades looming, a vocal group of people in the east of the country is far less enthusiastic about this democratic milestone than those in the west.
Going from being a country with a highly controlled press to one that has free, independent and functioning media in roughly a year is a tall order.
As dusk settles over the isolated Saharan town Kufra, young guards order a few hundred migrants lined up at a detention centre to chant "Libya free, Chadians out", before they kneel down for evening prayers.
The Arab Spring sent scores of sick and injured Libyans, fleeing their war- torn country, straight to Jordan, where the influx of patients is putting a lot of pressure on Jordanian hospitals and disrupting the lives of Libyan and Jordanian patients alike.
At the battered terminal of Tripoli’s tiny Mitiga airport, over 150 young men and women jostle to be repatriated home to Nigeria on Libya’s Buraq airlines. This journey to Lagos is one of hundreds the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has facilitated since the start of the uprising against Gaddafi’s regime over a year ago.
This week more than half the residents eligible to vote in Libya’s embattled coastal city of Misrata cast their ballots for local council representatives in their first democratic election in decades.
A year after the Libyan uprising that overthrew dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the National Transitional Council (NTC) has yet to provide adequate security. Many armed groups are still calling the shots, as the NTC moves to restore normalcy.
When Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin briefed reporters recently, he offered some biting criticisms of the growing political manipulation of the most powerful body at the United Nations: the 15-member Security Council.