Children in Beirut's Shatila refugee camp. Credit: Rebecca Murry/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
BEIRUT, Dec 28 2013 (IPS)

As refugees from Syria continue to pour into Lebanon, the majority of children are not going to school, spurring concern that they will become a ‘lost generation’.

Awad, 12, and her little sister Eman, 10, are among the vulnerable new arrivals. Having fled Damascus after their father was killed, they settled with their mother in a squalid room in overcrowded Shatila refugee camp.

Originally built for Palestinian refugees in 1949, the makeshift camp now shelters a new wave of impoverished Syrian refugees searching for affordable housing, Palestinians fleeing Syria, and migrant workers.“We only eat one meal a day that our mother cooks, in the evening."

“We were meant to move in with our grandfather, but he died when we got here,” explained Awad. “We felt very far away from home and afraid.”

Their mother remarried, but her Lebanese husband soon abandoned her, leaving her pregnant and penniless. “We now have a problem paying the owner rent – we have no money,” said Awad.

The two sisters stay home all day, leaving only three times a week to visit a local NGO for activities like drawing and a rare opportunity to mix with kids their own age.

Mostly they rely on their colouring books to keep themselves entertained. They lack schoolbooks, television and a social life to occupy their time.

And the girls are hungry. “We only eat one meal a day that our mother cooks, in the evening,” admits Awad. “Today we will eat the leftovers from yesterday.”

Zuhair Akkawi, a social worker at the Beit Atfal al-Summoud community centre, which runs activities for Palestinian and Syrian children in Shatila, says they are overwhelmed.

“There is a very big problem – there are so many refugees from Syria,” she said. “Maybe during Ramadan we can help with food. Some charities send us meals to give. But otherwise, we are overstretched.”

Out of the more than 1.1 million Syrian child refugees worldwide, 385,000 are registered in Lebanon with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In an alarming report, ‘The future of Syria: Refugee children in crisis’, the agency says that 80 percent of the 270,000 school age Syrians in Lebanon are not getting an education.

“The low enrolment rate is linked to a range of factors including school capacity, cost, transportation and distance, curriculum and language, bullying and violence, and competing priorities such as the need for children to work.”

Lebanese law states that education is free and compulsory until age 12. Recent legislation has upped the mandatory age for education to 15 years, but it has not been implemented.

UNHCR says the refugee influx has had an enormous impact on Lebanese schools. “In some schools,” the report said, “the entire dynamic in the classroom has changed. Not all teachers have been trained to work with refugee children suffering from psychological distress. Coupled with a lack of adequate resources, some Syrian students complained that the quality of education they receive in public schools is poor.”

Syrian psychologist Khalil Yosef counsels Syrian children in Lebanon’s northern city Tripoli. He says that among the obstacles preventing Syrians from staying in school are expenses, the need for children to work instead, and the Lebanese curriculum, half in French or English. Syrians, with their Arabic-only education, can’t keep up and often drop behind, or drop out.

Then there is bullying. “Syrian children were being harassed by Lebanese students,” Yosef said “They told me they didn’t want to go to the same school.”

Now the area’s overcrowded Lebanese schools have produced a separate afternoon shift for Syrians after Lebanese students finish at lunch, where they learn from a translated Arabic curriculum.

Yosef says the children are often traumatised by violence in Syria, and have difficulty adjusting to the challenges of insecure lives in Lebanon.

“They are aggressive towards other students and the teachers themselves,” he said. “They don’t listen, skip classes, and when it comes to attending school in the afternoon, it’s hard because the whole day’s routine has to change. They return home from school at night.

“What is positive about this is they have a routine. That’s good for limiting their hyperactivity, and engaging them.”

Fatima, 11, is a Palestinian who fled from Homs with her family. Her father, a house painter, cannot find work in Beirut and all their relatives stayed behind in Syria. “I felt very lonely when I got here because I had no friends. It took time,” she said.

She now attends a school for Palestinians run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and stumbles over the English-Arabic curriculum. She relies heavily on her mother and neighbours to tutor her after school.

“My father says he needs his children to be in school. It’s important to be there, and not in the streets.”

Reconstruction at Nahr El Bared has been slow, and has left refugees deprived and unhappy. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
NAHR EL BARED, Dec 15 2013 (IPS)

As the Syrian war intensifies sectarian clashes in Lebanon’s northern coastal city Tripoli, Palestinians in the area worriedly watch the violence from the sidelines.

In the summer of 2007, the Palestinian refugees of Nahr el Bared, just 16 kilometers north of Tripoli, paid a devastating price in the battle between the Lebanese army and a small militant group living in their midst, Fatah al Islam.

The three-month fight emerged from a power vacuum left by competitive Palestinian factions unable to effectively police the community themselves. It destroyed the camp and its regional market for local Lebanese farmers and smuggled Syrian goods.“I think the community is broken. The neighbourhood has changed, and the memories that make us think about the old times have gone.”

Over 30,000 refugee families fled to one of the other 11 official Palestinian camps in Lebanon, leaving their homes, possessions, and jobs behind.

In Vienna the following year, international donors pledged to fund reconstruction by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of the camp’s thousands of homes. To date, only a fifth of the community has returned to the now declared military zone, and building funds are about to run out.

A combination of the war in Syria and donor fatigue is to blame, and the area’s impoverished Palestinian community – at risk again of being sucked into the nearby violence – sees itself as a low priority for international help.

Shadi Diab, 40, a barber from Nahr el Bared, lives in the camp’s temporary housing while waiting for his own home to be totally rebuilt. He said he fled the camp with his wife and children on the third day of the fighting. When he returned he found the seaside community isolated by security checkpoints, and his building destroyed.

“We are being punished for something we didn’t do,” he said. “Nahr el Bared is not the same – it’s worse than before. The marketplace economy is ruined, and is now only for us. For people to come in there are a lot of military restrictions – not anyone can enter now.”

Palestinians in Lebanon are legally banned from owning property and from work in about 70 professions. Although the labour law was recently revised, very little has changed on the ground, forcing the impoverished population to compete with the influx of Syrian refugees over manual work for meagre wages.

UNRWA is restricted to rebuilding 5,000 homes in the ‘old’ UNRWA-mandated camp, established in 1949, and not in its larger outlaying areas, nicknamed the ‘new camp’. Having completed the development of four out of eight parcels of land, the agency estimates 2,500 families will move back by spring 2015, which is when funding ends.

UNRWA director Ann Dismorr said the agency received around 345 million dollars in pledges. “We still need about 50 percent of that. If the money was there we could finish the whole camp in a few years, but the problem is that it isn’t.”

Reconstruction has been slow and plagued by challenges. Among the allegations is that it has been heavily bureaucratic, favouring construction contractors aligned with politicians, with political grandstanding over issues like the discovery of an archeological site. And then there is the controversial shape of the newly built camp itself.

The new homes are smaller and the streets wider, to allow the army – historically banned from patrolling inside Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps – to drive their armoured vehicles through.

In Vienna, the Lebanese government had promised that the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared would serve as a model for the other camps. But Sahar Attrache, a researcher for the International Crisis Group, does not believe it has turned out that way.

“Nahr el Bared was not just a model for reconstruction, but a model for the state and Palestinians. That Lebanese and Palestinians could reconcile in a way, and Palestinians could go under the authority of the Lebanese state,” Attrache said.

“Unfortunately all parties failed in this, mostly on the Lebanese side. All the promises that have been given to Palestinians have not been realised, and in fact have helped to fuel resentment and undermine credibility.”

The charity Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has had a unique role in Nahr el Bared, navigating Lebanon’s opaque legal system to rebuild houses, with European Union money, on land adjacent to the ‘old’ town, Mohajareen.

Originally bought by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Lebanese landowners, Mohajareen was built to house Palestinian refugees fleeing the massacre in Tel al Zaatar camp in 1976. However, the land sale was never officially registered with the state.

After 2007, the destroyed neighbourhood was handed over to the Islamic Waqf, or charity, which in turn donated its use for the over 100 Palestinian families who lived on the land.

The NRC, after a drawn-out period of legal wrangling, is slated to hand over nearly 90 finished homes, hooked up to electricity and water, to Mohajareen’s old residents in February. But they recognise the Palestinians’ disappointment.

“It is the same number of families going back in, but with less space which is an area of particular difficulty,” said NRC director Niamh Murnaghan. “One of the conditions of rebuilding was that the pathways between accommodation space are wider, so the inevitable loss is from housing space.

“If you have been displaced for 65 years and you feel that something more is taken away, then inevitably it’s hard to feel positive,” she said.

Fouad el Haj, is a 24-year-old from Mohajareen. As a site supervisor he is proud of his role in rebuilding his community. But he said his biggest challenge is dealing with his old neighbours, upset with the architecture and the wait to move back in.

“I think the community is broken,” el Haj said. “The neighbourhood has changed, and the memories that make us think about the old times have gone.”

Palestinian camps in Lebanon are just some of the places Syrian refugees find shelter in. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
SIDON, Lebanon , Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

This week the Islamic world marks one of its holiest holidays, Eid al-Adha – honouring Ibrahim’s commitment to sacrifice his first-born son to Allah. The festival involves large family gatherings, bountiful lunches and generous gift giving.

While most are celebrating, despair is palpable among the poverty-stricken female Syrian refugees receiving psychological counseling at a community centre run by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) in the coastal town of Sidon.

“I don’t want to leave the house,” quietly sobbed Fatima, a 32-year-old mother of four who fled Aleppo after family members were killed and her husband’s business was destroyed by the war a year ago.“Our displacement from our country has made us old.”

Her tear-stained face framed by a cheap black burqa, Fatima said she now lives in a crowded school with other Syrian families in the volatile Ein al-Helweih refugee camp, Lebanon’s largest settlement established to house Palestinian refugees more than 60 years ago.

Since they arrived, Fatima’s family anxiously watched from the sidelines as a battle raged at the camp between the Lebanese army and supporters of a firebrand Sunni cleric in June. This is a congested, hostile environment where they must navigate checkpoints daily.

“I have sympathy for the Palestinians because they live in bad conditions, and I know that we make their situation worse,” she said.

Fatima recently sold two of the family’s blankets for 15 dollars, a decision she says she regrets as the winter draws near. But she was desperate for money.

“My children don’t have shoes and I can’t afford them,” she said. “Their teachers say they should come in decent shoes. My son is psychologically torn apart. He sits alone at school while the other children play together. He was not like this before.”

Fatima has no plans to celebrate Eid. “We used to give each other all sorts of things. That’s why I won’t step outside.” She sighed. “Our displacement from our country has made us old.”

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says there are almost 790,000 refugees from Syria registered in Lebanon. But the government claims the number exceeds a million – which is almost one quarter of Lebanon’s population.

Women, like those who attend the community centre, are often the most vulnerable refugees during wartime. Social worker Almaza Elchami provides a rare source of solace to those that visit her.

“A few weeks ago it started to rain and the women started crying,” Elchami said. “They realised winter is coming, with the cold and rain. Their children have nothing to wear. Often their homes have no doors or windows. The rain was a reminder of what they are up against.”

For women like Asma, a teenage mother who fled the bombing in Damascus, life in a cramped common shelter is an emotional pressure cooker. Her husband can’t find work and she has to take care of her one-year-old.

Forty families struggle to share two toilets and showers. The men apply strict rules to preserve privacy in this chaotic environment.

“We have lots of fights about this situation,” Asma said. “The men want to control everywhere we go.”

Hillary Margolis, a women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, believes these living conditions increase the proclivity towards violence.

“There is a real sense of frustration and sadness because they have lost their lives and homes, there are not a lot of job and education opportunities, and so they are lingering without much to do. All these things contribute to more violence in general.”

Poverty forces some Syrian women to beg on the streets. Some face pressure to swap sex for services or goods. Negative stereotypes of Syrian women as prostitutes are pervasive in Lebanon.

“Almost every woman we spoke with had a real sense of feeling insecure going outside and feeling verbally harassed regularly, sometimes approached by men, certainly harassed by employers, sometimes landlords, or on the street in public,” said Margolis.

Elchami agreed. “They are facing a lot of bullying,” she said. “One refugee said a Lebanese woman told her she was ruining the mosaic of Lebanon. She was putting on make-up at the time and the woman said, what are you doing? Your country is all messed up and you are putting make-up on?”

Last week women gathered at the community centre to discuss plans for Eid. Elchami said they were worried about doing nothing, but when someone suggested taking the kids for a walk along the water as a treat, a woman retorted, “What if my child wants a balloon or another gift on display?”

“This Eid my children will have no school, but I have no place to go,” said Fatima. “At these times there is a need to be at home with family. So to me this holiday is opening up a wound, and it hurts all over again.”

Tebu security staff at Saharan oil fields in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Rebecca Murray
SOUTHERN LIBYA, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Kaltoum Saleh, 18, is elated to graduate from her overcrowded high school in the remote Saharan town of Ubari, near the Algerian border.

Saleh, a member of Ubari’s indigenous Tebu tribe, says that for decades under former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan Tebu suffered from state-sanctioned discrimination, which stemmed in part from the failure of the semi-nomadic tribe to register under Libya’s 1954 citizenship law.

Gaddafi’s subsequent “Arabisation” campaign, intended to erase indigenous language and culture, also contributed to discrimination against the Tebu, many of whom were deprived of citizenship papers. As a result, they were barred from decent health care, education and skilled jobs. They often worked for low pay or as subsistence cross-border smugglers.

The tribe was swift to join the revolution against the regime in 2011, and with Gaddafi’s overthrow, the Tebu hoped to attain what they had long been struggling for: their full rights as citizens.

More than two years after the revolution, Saleh proudly says that her father, once a security guard, is now a hospital manager. She herself has considerable ambitions and is striving to become a human rights lawyer and fight for Tebu rights.

“The revolution was good for our self worth,” she says optimistically. “Now I feel like a Libyan citizen.”

But the revolution has not produced all the gains the Libyan Tebu have sought.

They lack sufficient representation in the Tripoli-based government, are in conflict with neighbouring Arab tribes, partly over resources in the current power vacuum, and are still branded by some Libyans as ‘foreigners’.

Guarding southern borders

In their quest for equal rights, Libya’s Tebu are now positioning themselves as valuable and natural guardians of the country’s vast southern borders.

Stretched across Libya’s south, the Tebu live in Ubari, Sebha and Murzuq in the west, and across the Sahara nearly 1,000 kilometres to the Kufra oasis in the east.

The desert terrain, with no roads across its width, is rich in underground water – which is diverted to ninety percent of Libya’s population along the coast – as well as oil and precious minerals.

It is also a haven for illegal cross-border trade, with weapons, government-subsidised gasoline and food smuggled out, and migrants and drugs transported in.

At the beginning of the revolt in 2011, Gaddafi promised both the indigenous Libyan Tebu and Tuareg citizenship papers and rights in exchange for their support.

While the Tuareg threw their lot in with his regime, only to find themselves on the losing side, the Tebu say they instead took Gaddafi’s weapons, and turned them and their desert expertise against him.

“Our forefathers came here hundreds of years ago,” explained Ibrahim Abu Baker, a Tebu archeologist from Ubari. “When we hold the sand, even in the night when the moon is shining, we know where we are.”

Although the Tebu were heralded for their revolutionary role guarding Libya’s southern borders and oil wells, with just two Tebu representatives out of 200 in the current General National Congress (GNC), their fight for equal rights is just gearing up."The Tebu want to close the chapter so they can get their citizenship, healthcare and education."
-- Mohammed Sidi

“During the revolution, people were perfect, excellent,” said Ali Ramadan, a Tebu military commander. “But when we returned to normal life, we found all the same people in their old positions, doing the same thing.”

In 2012, brutal clashes erupted between Tebu and Arab tribes in the desert towns of Sebha and Kufra. Mostly over power and resources, including smuggling routes, the fighting left hundreds dead and wounded, destroyed infrastructure and deepened animosity between neighbours.

Now an enormous wall and wide ditch encircles Kufra, built and controlled by the Arab Zwai tribe, who share the town with the minority Tebu. A tense ceasefire – not peace – is in place.

There is more optimism in Sebha. Last month, community elders successfully hammered out a reconciliation agreement between the western town’s Tebu and Arab Awlad Suleiman tribes.

“The Tebu want to close the chapter so they can get their citizenship, healthcare and education,” said Mohammed Sidi, one of the chief negotiators.

But Sidi still had reservations. “The wise people are together,” he said. “But the young people are separated now. The bad people – like those working in smuggling – are still together. They can’t negotiate because their experience is low. How do we bring those people together?”

Ubari, over 100 kilometres west of Sebha, is the last in a chain of fertile desert oases surrounded by sand dunes before the Algerian border. Dominated by the semi-nomadic Libyan Tuareg, who are also indigenous and have strong cross-border ties, this desolate corner thrived as a tourist destination until the 2011 revolution.

Now Ubari is known as a stop on the rumoured smuggling routes south to Mali and for its lucrative oil fields. It is also where Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of Muammar Gaddafi, was apprehended while trying to flee Libya after the fall of Tripoli.

The Tebu, along with Tuareg and Arab militias, maintain an uneasy presence here, legitimised and paid for as part of the Ministry of Defence’s auxiliary Shield of Libya brigades and by private oil field security companies.

For now, they are the border guard presence. While the Tebu loosely patrol the southern border from Niger to Egypt, the Tuareg control Libya’s far southwest corner and the Algerian frontier running north to Ghadames.

Keeping an uneasy peace

The war in Mali, the terrorist attack against the nearby Amenas oil field in Algeria, the French Embassy bombing in Tripoli and rumours of Islamists trafficking weapons and fighters south have heightened community tensions.

“Libyans were very worried when the French intervention started in Mali,” a western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “Their main concern is that Islamists being flushed out by French jets could seek refuge in the kind of ungoverned space in southern Libya. They are worried about extremist groups moving through the region.”

Concerned about Libya’s porous frontier, the European Union and countries including the United States and United Kingdom are providing “advisory” roles in building up the government’s border guard.

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has established a military base for drones on the south side of the Libyan border, in Niger.

“Broadly speaking, there are localised rivalries, ethnic rivalries and tribal rivalries in the south,” said the western diplomat. “A long-term solution for border security would most probably include both Tebu and Tuareg because they know the region and they live on the borders.”

Chaotic downtown Ubari is filled with migrants, most from Mali and Niger, who congregate on damaged sidewalks hoping for work, while Tuareg and Tebu tribesmen, wrapped in elaborate scarves to shield themselves from the dust, drive by in honking Toyota pickups.

Chieftains work hard to maintain the peace in mixed Libyan Tebu and Tuareg communities, like Ubari. They understand their shared battle is to overcome discrimination from Libya’s Arab population and to secure their rights.

Shamsideen Khoury, an 18-year-old Tebu student in Ubari, fought in the revolution and has faith in the future. He seeks a different path from his deceased father, who was a low level security guard. “I want to be an architect,” he says quietly. “I want to build a new Libya.”

Sanaa's walls profile people gone missing under the Saleh regime. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
SANAA, Apr 1 2013 (IPS)

Yemen has launched its six-month National Dialogue but creating a just law is proving a formidable task.

The debate is being conducted through a conference that finally kicked off in the capital on Mar. 18. The Dialogue is designed to unify the fractured country since ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ouster.

Nasser Asbahi’s violent and meaningless death is one of hundreds to for such dialogue to address.

On the morning of Sep. 18, 2011, Asbahi, a 34-year-old father of three, left his construction job early to join the protests in downtown Sanaa against Saleh’s three-decades-old rule.

“That day Nasser walked at the back of the march, holding hands with an old man,” recalls his older sister Fikriah. “But when he heard bullets he told the man to take cover, and rushed to rescue those on the frontline.”

Nasser was shot at four times by government security forces, with a bullet to the head, two to the chest, and another to his stomach.

Abdullah Al Alafi, 17, a former student of Nasser’s and eyewitness to his death, said Nasser’s dying words were to urge him to leave the violent chaos, saying, ‘I think it’s too late for me’.

The same forces killed Al Alafi with six bullets the following day.

Over 2,000 people were killed, and an estimated 22,000 injured during the revolution.

Saleh’s resignation in February 2012, in exchange for immunity brokered by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states with U.S. support, paved the way for President Abdurabu Hadi’s one-candidate election and the National Dialogue.

But there is widespread public outrage at Saleh’s status, which allows him to retain his Sanaa residence, his amassed wealth, and position as head of the long-standing political machine, the General People’s Congress (GPC). President Hadi is the party’s deputy.

“The Saleh immunity deal is a local political arrangement by the GCC,” says Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashhour. “At the international level it is not acknowledged. The UN Human Rights Council, even (UN Special Advisor to Yemen) Jamal Benomar has said, when asked on television, that this is not legal.”

Nasser’s sister Fikriah is adamant about her demands.

“What we want is justice,” she says. “We are not seeking revenge – we are seeking justice. Saleh is a billionaire with our money and killing us, and we can’t even question him. The moment we can question him as an equal – that’s when I would feel some justice.”

But what justice means to all Yemenis remains unclear.

Aziz Alsurmi, co-founder of the national Yemen Centre for Transitional Justice, explains. “People will not feel relief that a little justice has taken place unless we go through stages of transitional justice,” he says.

“First, we have to identify the acts. Then, we will find those who possibly committed those acts, and if they can be held in the court of law. And then they need to apologise. These violations have to be clear in the country’s history.”

Alsurmi agrees that the terms for immunity and reparations needs to be defined, as well as which time period the investigation should cover.

Transitional justice is intended to span civil wars, southern grievances of discrimination, land theft and a redundant workforce, as well as the forced disappearances and detention of political opponents, and massacres committed in 2011.

While some Yemenis argue for an inquiry to start at the end of British rule in 1967, others point to the beginning of Saleh’s rule in north Yemen in 1978, or from the unity of north and south Yemen in 1990.

“We will create unhappy people if we select a certain time frame,” Alsurmi says.

A damning report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) prompted a presidential decree signed on Sep. 22 last year, which established a Commission of Investigation focused on human rights violations committed in 2011. Seven months later, it is still not set up.

More far-reaching legislation, initially called the ‘Transitional Justice and National Reconciliation’ law was given to the president when the working inter-ministerial committee deadlocked.

Since then, the president’s office gutted the legislation and conspicuously renamed it the ‘National Reconciliation and Transitional Justice’ law. It is now stalled in parliament.

“The President and his regular advisors are from the ex-regime. They changed it,” says Minister of Human Rights Hooria Mashhour. “So me and the Legal Affairs Minister Mohammed Al Mekhlafi announced to the media that we were not responsible for this draft.”

“The title has also changed, which is significant,” says Anne Massagee from the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). “It is understandable that people are upset about reconciliation before the justice process.”

Alsurmi concurs. “It gives more immunity – we already have immunity,” he says. “It is limited to 2011. And it puts reconciliation first, which means forgiveness from the victims and reparations, perhaps, and then transitional justice. There is no apology from the perpetrators. You will not see Saleh go to the people and say he is sorry.”

The pressure is now on the National Dialogue’s transitional justice group, announced last week, to hammer out the scope and ramifications of a passable bill.

The broad National Dialogue is carved up between 565 seats, with the GPC claiming 112, followed by traditional opposition parties.

Those on the revolution’s frontlines – independent youth, women and civil society – are allotted 40 seats each, in addition to a 30 percent quota for women and 20 percent youth quota, across party lines.

Baraa Shiban was nominated to the Dialogue’s independent youth bloc, and is focused on transitional justice. He says it is difficult working alongside allies of the revolution’s violent perpetrators.

“We have to be very careful that when we talk about victims and families of victims that we pass a law that doesn’t look like immunity to these people, but instead looks towards the future,” he says.

“If the law is not passed, problems in the country will continue,” asserts Minister Mashhour.

“Revenge in the country is a widespread practice. If people do not get access to justice, they are going to take revenge in their own hands. We don’t want this bloody scenario. We want justice for all.”

Some protesters still remain hopeful on the anniversary of the revolution in Yemen. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
SANA'A, Feb 16 2013 (IPS)

This week in Sana’a thousands of Yemenis – mostly youth – crowded the highway near the landmark ‘Change Square’ to celebrate the second anniversary of the revolution. Adjacent to the university, this was the site of a tented encampment that drew tens of thousands of demonstrators throughout 2011.

But in contrast to the violence between Islamists and southern separatists that marred a similar gathering in Yemen’s port city of Aden, the capital’s parade was subdued and brief.

“The revolution is only half done,” sighed Ziad, a Sana’a university student as he headed home after the parade. “The most important thing we are calling for is justice.”

Inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian protests, Yemen’s youth were at the forefront of the 2011 uprising. They were united by a common cause to end former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year dictatorial rule.

“In the revolution’s first few months youth felt they had the power, that they were shaping the situation, and that their voices were the most important – without the need to go to the political parties,” says youth activist Bara’a Shaiban.

But two years later, many of those youth are disillusioned.

“Sometimes I regret we had the revolution – like we fooled ourselves,” says Shatha Al-Harazi, a 27-year old journalist. “But at least he is out and we are forced into a new era. If it were not for us we would be voting (Saleh’s son) Ahmed Ali into office. But if we are realistic we know he still has power…”

Many believe their revolution was hijacked when longtime government allies, like former General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar of the powerful First Armoured Division swapped sides in what was deemed a cynical move for self-preservation, after the definitive Juma’at al-Karama (Friday of Dignity) massacre on Mar. 18, 2011.

That day an estimated 52 peaceful protestors were killed and hundreds injured at Change Square by thugs while the robust Central Security Forces, led by Saleh’s nephew, Yahya Saleh, stood idly by.

Although Saleh was forced to step down in November 2011, he still resides in the heart of Sana’a, protected by an immunity deal hammered out by the U.S. and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.

Amnesty International described the deal as “a smack in the face for justice,” and angry protestors took to the streets during the brief United Nations Security Council visit last month, demanding a trial for Saleh.

President Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, ushered in through a one-candidate presidential election last February, now faces the formidable challenge of rooting out the elite old guard entrenched in the government and military.

Yemen’s problems are many. The security and economic outlook has deteriorated and the youth face bleak education and employment prospects, as the country remains shackled to a corrupt system based on tribal networks and nepotism.

The troubled National Dialogue process has been pushed back to Mar. 18. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) brokered it in an attempt to unify disparate interests – including civil rights issues, transitional justice, and the demands of northern Houthi and southerners calling for federalism or a separate state.

“The problem with delays is that it pulls people further apart and we lose momentum,” says Nadia Abdulaziz Al-Sakkaf, member of the National Dialogue Preparatory Committee.

“Saleh has gradually become stronger and I think he feels he is coming back. He is gaining strength, and his strength is relative to the National Dialogue’s weakness. I don’t see his immunity revoked, there is pressure for him to leave politics… In Yemen we do things that save face, and we don’t want to create enemies.”

Yemen’s venerable political parties dominate the National Dialogue’s 565 seats, with only 40 seats allocated to ‘independent’ youth and a 20 percent youth quota across party lines. Independent women and civil society claim another 40 seats each.

Outraged by this marginalisation, Nobel Peace Prize winner and revolutionary youth leader Tawakkol Karman says she will boycott the six-month National Dialogue, and will instead work outside the conference to bring change.

‘Youth’ is defined by the National Dialogue as those between 18 to 40 years old, and make up the majority of Yemen’s mostly rural population of 24 million. But those in rural areas – with scant access to electricity, Internet and social media – have largely been left out of the process.

“When the GCC agreement was signed in November, there was huge resistance to it,” says Bara’a Shaiban. “We should have then realised that a political process would start, and we should start reacting to it.”

Shaiban believes they need to nurture new advocacy methods to combat challenges in the National Dialogue. Powerful political parties and endemic corruption threaten to drown out the voices of the less experienced, and more divided, youth delegation.

Illustrative of the country’s predicament are the findings of the Human Rights Watch investigation into the stalled trial process around the Juma’at al-Karama killings. More than half of 78 men indicted for the crime remain at large, and only eight are in jail.

“Our research found the prosecutor’s investigations were deeply flawed and marred by political meddling,” Human Rights Watch researcher Letta Taylor tells IPS.

“Nearly two years later justice is still nowhere in sight for this crime,” she says. “If the government can’t properly prosecute this emblematic attack, it doesn’t bode well, and raises serious questions about its ability to bring the significant change that protestors sought, and in some cases died for.”

Shatha Al-Harazi now holds television debates with youth activists nationwide to raise awareness about the National Dialogue. What she discovered was that very few activists themselves understand the process.

“There is a very big gap between urban and rural areas,” Al-Harazi says. “The National Dialogue means a lot to the political elites. But it doesn’t mean much to the larger crowd because they don’t know much about it.

“When I saw the list of the National Conference names I was depressed. They were those who were against youth and killed youth. And the leaders of parties didn’t give the chance for youth to lead. But the youth have the power and will continue to fight.”

Twenty-one-year-old Aisha clings to her child as she recounts her tale of being trafficked. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Rebecca Murray
ADEN, Yemen, Jan 2 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-one-year-old Aisha clings to her two children as she recounts her tale of horror. Growing up in the Somali capital Mogadishu, she fell in love and bore a child out of wedlock four years ago. When her family threatened her life for destroying her ‘honour’, Aisha escaped.

She braved the hazardous journey with smugglers across the Indian Ocean to Yemen, and to what she thought was a better life.

Instead, Aisha now squats with four other women in the sprawling, cinderblock slum of Basateen, in the eastern seaport city of Aden. They beg for money in the shabby southern seaport every day, often prostituting themselves for two dollars a trick. They split their meager earnings with their controlling pimp.

“I just want to go to a safer place for my children,” Aisha sighs. “In another country.”

Human trafficking networks with international reach are expanding in Yemen, and with poverty being a key factor, sexually exploited women are the most vulnerable victims.

Bleak as Aisha’s future may look, her fate is better than that of a 17-year-old Ethiopian girl who died alone in a hospital in Haradh, near the Saudi Arabian border.

Bought and sold within the trafficking network operating across Yemen, she was repeatedly raped and beaten until she died. She is now buried far from home and the trafficker who murdered her remains free.

“Between 2011 and 2012 there has been a significant increase in smuggling and trafficking, and of reported cases of violence and abuse perpetrated against new arrivals,” says Edward Leposky, an officer with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

In 2011 UNHCR recorded over 103,000 new arrivals in Yemen. This is the largest influx they have seen since they started documenting statistics six years ago, and Leposky suspects an increase for 2012. The real numbers are thought to be much higher.

Female migrants, mostly Ethiopian and Somali, often flee poverty and violence at home. They fork out hundreds of dollars to reach transit points in Djibouti or Puntland, and also for the dangerous, overcrowded boat rides – which can last one to three days – to Yemen.

Their goal is to reach Gulf states like Saudi Arabia for work. But along the way migrants are frequently gang raped, suffocated from overcrowding or thrown overboard by smugglers, as well as taken hostage by traffickers once they reach Yemeni soil.

“The most trafficking we see happening here is of those coming from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia,” says Eman Mashour, part of the counter-trafficking team with the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) in Yemen.

“There is a network,” she says. “Females can be badly exploited by the traffickers. Women told us they were providing sex to smugglers along the way.”

Confirmation lies in the grim findings of October’s groundbreaking study, ‘Desperate Choices’, conducted by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS).

“Criminal networks extend through Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia,” the report says. “It seems highly likely that these gangs would have contacts in other countries.”

Local women fall victim to trafficking

But not all victims of sex trafficking in Yemen are migrants.

The brief marriages between young Yemeni girls and visitors from the Gulf states – a practice commonly known as ‘sex tourism’ – are the result of poverty among large Yemeni families, mostly in rural areas.

“Girls as young as 15 are exploited for commercial sex in hotels and clubs in the governorates of Sanaa, Aden, and Taiz,” says the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 trafficking report.

“The majority of child sex tourists in Yemen originate from Saudi Arabia, with a smaller number possibly coming from other Gulf nations. Yemeni girls who marry Saudi tourists often do not realise the temporary and exploitative nature of these agreements, and some are subjected to sex trafficking or abandoned on the streets of Saudi Arabia.”

A victim of another kind of sex trafficking, Leila, was 15 years old when she finally found refuge at a secret women’s shelter, tucked away in a quiet Sanaa neighbourhood.

Beaten by her family, Leila had run away from home two years before and lived off the streets. An older woman soon picked her up, bringing her to a neighbourhood brothel.

The girls were photographed having sex as blackmail to make them stay, given drugs and forced to service clients at night. The woman pocketed the clients’ cash.

Leila and the female pimp were arrested just before Leila was to be trafficked to Saudi Arabia. Leila served two years in prison for her ‘crime’. Her family disowned her, accusing her of destroying her honour, and her brother issued death threats.

Through a prison visit by staff from the Yemeni Women’s Union, Leila found out about the small women’s shelter – a rarity in Yemen – and was one of their first cases. With psychological help and class work consuming her days, Leila stayed at the shelter until the staff resolved the family dispute.

Yemen’s penal code proscribes ten years’ imprisonment for those engaged in buying or selling human beings. Although acknowledging the country’s ongoing political crisis, the U.S. State Department report stresses the utter lack of government efforts to counter trafficking this year.

“The Government of Yemen was unable to provide law enforcement data to contribute to this report, and it did not institute formal procedures to identify and protect victims of trafficking or take steps to address trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation.”

Nicoletta Giordano, the head of IOM’s activities in Yemen, warns against the inactivity. “There is a flourishing smuggling and trafficking business. It is an international business… Many Western countries are focused on piracy issues and attention to smuggling and trafficking has fallen by the wayside,” she says.

“If we were to look at border management in a more holistic way, so that those that require assistance and protection are referred, and those that might pose a threat are dealt with, this would be in the interest of all countries concerned.”

*Sex trafficking victims’ names have been changed to protect their identity.

The destroyed Tabu neighbourhood at Gadarfai in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
KUFRA, southern Libya, Oct 20 2012 (IPS)

Safia’s six-year-old body is riddled with scars from the rocket that hit her home in February. With her immediate family all killed in the violent attack, this sole survivor smiles shyly as she visits the medics that fought to save her life.

Their makeshift clinic is in Kufra’s impoverished and war-torn Gadarfai neighbourhood, a segregated stretch of flimsy dwellings, piles of rubbish and scorched earth occupied by the indigenous Tabu tribe.

Spent ordnance and a gaping hole left by a mortar round in the clinic’s compound is a reminder of the recent brutal clashes between the Tabu and the town’s majority Arab tribe, the Zwai, over local power sharing and lucrative cross-border smuggling routes.

As fighting got under way, Tabu medical staff at Kufra’s downtown government hospital were threatened.

“I worked there for ten years as a nurse,” says Khadija Hamed Yousef. “The Zwai security guard and ambulance driver came in with Kalashnikovs and warned: ‘This is your last day or we will shoot you’.”

Since the July ceasefire, the Tabu clinics in Gadarfai and Shura are still overcrowded, and lack equipment and medicine. Two North Korean doctors recently assigned to the facilities by the Ministry of Health speak only their native language.

Fearful pregnant Tabu women bring Zwai acquaintances to Kufra’s hospital during childbirth to ensure their safety, and Tabu with serious injuries or illnesses now travel outside for care.

The small oasis town of Kufra lies hundreds of miles south of the Mediterranean, in Libya’s isolated Saharan corner bordering Egypt, Sudan and Chad.

While Kufra’s Zwai tribe benefited from Gaddafi’s favouritism, the semi-nomadic Tabu were deprived of citizenship and ID cards, accused of being ‘foreign’ despite generations born on Libyan soil. They faced state-sanctioned discrimination in jobs, education and housing.

Local roles during the revolution against the Gaddafi reflected this pecking order: the Zwai largely backed the status quo while the Tabu – whose networks stretch west to Sebha, and south into Chad, Niger and Sudan – joined the rebellion to fight for their rights.

Once the revolution was won, Kufra’s tribal-driven conflict over the spoils was ignited last November at a desert checkpoint.

A weak response from the Tripoli-based government and international community did little to quell a raging battle in February, which broke out again in April and June.

Almost 200 were killed, the majority Tabu, with hundreds more injured before the ceasefire took hold.

While the Tebu move freely across the area’s desert, the Zwai control Kufra’s local government, downtown commercial zone and the airport. During the clashes the Zwai held sway over who entered the town, including humanitarian aid.

The defence ministry’s decision in March to assign as peacekeepers the Shield of Libya – a loose-knit collection of ill-disciplined militias from the northeast – disastrously backfired.

Biased towards Zwai claims that Kufra was under attack from Tabu ‘outsiders’, the fighters soon aimed their weapons at the Tabu in besieged Gadarfai and Shura communities.

Halim Abdullah Mohammed, 26, was a core staff member working a 24-hour shift throughout the February clashes at the Gadarfai clinic, sandwiched between two Zwai checkpoints and often under direct fire.

They received over 200 patients then, half of whom are recorded as women and children.

She admits her first aid training was hopelessly inadequate for the patients they received. There was the 12-year old girl whose head was partially blown off by a mortar and died, and the 29-year-old man with a bullet in his head that they managed to save.

“We controlled bleeding with bandages, used local anesthetic and sutures,” Mohammed says.

With electricity cuts there was no water, no refrigeration, and little medication. They operated with flashlights, using dirty well water and direct blood transfusions.

Unable to bury the dead for fear of being shot themselves, the medical staff stacked bodies in the compound’s guardroom. They decomposed in the desert heat.

Across town, in Shura neighbourhood, Rajab Hamid Suri quietly sobs as he recounts the death of his 16-year old son Mohammed. Hit by a mortar targeting their home, he bled to death slowly at Shura’s makeshift clinic next door. “He was talking. We didn’t expect him to die,” he says.

Tabu medical staff underscore the lack of aid they received under siege, and describe how they were forced to ferry some seriously wounded across the desert hundreds of miles west to Murzuq for treatment.

They say they received no support from the local Red Crescent Society, and that the Tripoli-based International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted medical evacuations only.

In April, Amnesty International released an urgent statement appealing for humanitarian access. “We also asked that individuals should not be denied health care based on their identity, and should be protected when seeking care in the Kufra hospital,” says Libya researcher Diana Eltahawy.

“In terms of the Red Crescent, there is some truth to what the Tabu are saying,” she explains. “However, when a member of the Red Crescent tried to deliver aid someone on the Tabu side attacked him and no one tried to intervene. So the picture is a bit mixed.”

Laurent Perrelet, an ICRC protection delegate, was in Kufra in June during an evacuation of wounded. “It was most dangerous transporting Tabu from the clinics to the airport in vehicles,” he describes.

“What was striking were the clinics. There were a lot of wounded and not enough space to accommodate them. They were outside the clinic – within the compounds, but outside.”

Perrelet believes training Tabu and Zwai Red Crescent volunteers should be a primary focus, as well as figuring out “how we can work together in Kufra, and with the Red Crescent.”

Halima Salah, an energetic 28-year old nurse, juggles her intensive schedule at the Shura clinic with caring for a son with cerebral palsy, and her civil society organisation that promotes dialogue between Tabu and Zwai.

“I still talk with one of my close Zwai friends,” she says. “During the clashes we couldn’t because it involved families. But now we do and we ask each other: ‘Why are you sending mortars instead of tomatoes?’”

The Tabu border guard in the Sahara in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Walter García and Rebecca Murray
ZWEILA, Southern Libya, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

A group of Tabu fighters with mud-splattered trucks rest on the outskirts of Zweila, a small historic slave-trade stop in Libya’s southwest Sahara.

Far from their home base of Kufra, hundreds of miles to the east, these men belong to a desert border patrol loyal to charismatic Tabu commander Issa Abdel Majid Mansour.

They police the country’s vast and seemingly impenetrable southern frontier with Sudan, Chad and Niger – an arduous off-road trek over towering sand dunes, volcanic rock and scattered minefields – using smugglers’ markers and the stars as a guide.

The indigenous, semi-nomadic Tabu, marginalised by Muammar Gaddafi under his ‘Arabisation’ campaign, staked out a leading role during the 2011 revolution with a goal to secure their civil rights.

Combining their intimate knowledge of the Sahara with a tribal network spanning both sides of the borders, they forged a successful blockade against pro-regime reinforcements.

When the revolution was won, a grateful transitional government controversially awarded Mansour oversight over vital desert crossings to the detriment of Kufra’s majority Arab Zwai tribe.

The Zwai, whose ties stretch over oil-rich territory to Ajdabiya, 150km south of Benghazi, previously benefited from Gaddafi’s divide-and-rule tactics.

Besides securing national oilfields, Mansour says their priority is to prevent extremist militias, including Al Qaeda, from the lucrative business of smuggling subsidised fuel and food out of Libya, and ferrying weapons and drugs in.

“I worry about terrorists,” he says intently. “They are dangerous – we need to stop them getting more power in the desert.”

Security is a critical concern for the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi by a suspected Islamist militia last month.

Jolted into action by a subsequent outpouring of public outrage, the government now faces an uphill battle to integrate or disarm poorly trained armed groups loosely affiliated with the state security apparatus along Libya’s coastal belt.

But often overlooked is the volatile, less populous south, home to significant oil reserves, rare minerals, Gaddafi’s man-made river project which feeds water to the north, and the profitable cross-border smuggling of illicit goods.

The Tripoli-based government has failed to address tribal and economic grievances at the heart of this year’s deadly clashes between Tabu and Arab tribes in the southern trade hubs of Kufra and Sebha, now governed by fragile ceasefires.

On an international level, competing regional interests have reduced information-sharing between foreign embassies and a cohesive approach to government ministries.

The U.S. believes Islamic extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, are trying to forge supply lines through southern Libya to its neighbours. It appears poised to introduce a more robust role for the U.S. Africa military command, AFRICOM, in its expanding ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, the French strive to retain a monopoly on the mineral-rich region, which they traditionally regard as their post-colonial backyard.

Navigating east across the steep, Saharan sand dunes, a surreal concrete enclave looms in the distance. This is the remote Kufra oasis, once a welcome sight for tired desert travelers.

When Kufra’s violence ended in an uneasy ceasefire last June, the Zwai erected the barrier, encircling the bitterly divided town and its population of 44,000.

The Zwai are convinced that the town’s Tabu community is mostly foreign, and is seeking to carve out an autonomous homeland. Their other concern is control over the south’s most profitable livelihood, smuggling.

Victors in the revolution, Tabu smugglers eek out a subsistence living quite freely, crisscrossing the borders in small Toyota pickup trucks loaded with cheap fuel and migrants.

But the large commercial trucks owned by Zwai businessmen – who until recently made small fortunes from illicit border trade – currently stand idle.

“The Zwai, economically speaking, want to control the area from Kufra towards the Egyptian and Sudanese border because of smuggling. They call it trade, but it’s actually smuggling,” says Fathi Baja, professor of political science at Benghazi University.

“There are also Islamist groups that want to control borders,” he adds.

Tabu and Zwai residents now stick to their heavily guarded neighbourhoods in Kufra.

Small numbers of official army troops guard the town’s invisible borders, having replaced the Shield of Libya auxiliary forces initially dispatched as a neutral buffer after clashes in February.

“The Minister of Defence gave orders to Islamists to go down, control the borders and sort out the issue,” says Rami Al-Shahiebi, one of the few journalists who travelled to Kufra in February.

The undisciplined Shield soon turned their weapons on the Tabu, Al-Shahiebi says. Convinced by the more media-savvy Zwai and Libyan broadcasts from Tripoli that ‘foreigners’ were invading, fighters trekked from as far as the coastal town Misrata for battle.

After hundreds were killed and the Tripoli government was sufficiently embarrassed by the role of their appointed ‘peacekeepers’, a ceasefire was brokered between the Shield and Tabu in June.

Fawzia Idris, an outgoing 37-year-old Tabu nurse in Kufra’s Shura district, is part of a volunteer effort to plant one-foot-tall saplings amongst the piles of rubbish. “To make the neighbourhood beautiful,” she explains.

“Racism and control of the border are the big things,” Idris says. “We are Muslim, but maybe because we are black and not white they think we are not Libyan. The same people who are working with Gaddafi are still in charge. There is no change.”

The Tabu maintain close familial ties in Chad, Niger and Sudan. Although many don’t own Libyan citizenship papers, first issued under King Idriss in 1954, they can trace family ancestors back to the same Libyan tracts of land.

The Tabu bore the brunt of Gaddafi’s rage over the defeat of Libya’s war with Chad over the mineral-rich Ouzou Strip in 1996. Many were stripped of citizenship, deprived of education, health and work, and had their homes demolished.

An estimated 4,000 of Kufra’s Tabu residents are now hemmed into the impoverished ghettos of Gadarfa and Shura. Rotting piles of garbage surround shacks built with sticks, cardboard and jagged pieces of corrugated iron. Homes, schools and the makeshift clinics are pockmarked or blackened by mortar rounds from the recent fighting.

The Tabu talk with deep bitterness about what they see is the transitional government’s betrayal of promises to grant them equal rights after their revolutionary role, and the prognosis for a Libyan constitution inclusive of minority rights appears dim.

Hassan Mousa, a Tabu military spokesman from Kufra, is direct. “The stability of the south depends on Tabu rights. And Libya’s stability depends on the south’s stability,” he warns.

A militia group in Tripoli. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Walter García and Rebecca Murray
TRIPOLI, Sep 21 2012 (IPS)

The dark rain clouds and circling military helicopter accentuated the mood of the small, sombre crowd gathered in Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to commemorate Libya’s dead heroes.

The quiet assembly was in stark contrast to the euphoric Feb. 17 rally on the same spot marking the one-year anniversary of the uprising against the Gaddafi regime. Then thousands of Libyans – some holding framed pictures of ‘martyred’ loved ones – thronged the downtown sidewalks and expressed optimism for a future of democracy, prosperity and peace.

That optimism has been replaced by anxiety. The killing of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi has highlighted the dangers posed by a proliferation of armed groups since the revolution. Many are part of the loose-knit, undertrained government auxiliary forces that seem to act with impunity throughout Libya, and fuel the anxious public perception that the government is too weak to rein them in.

The government’s call for citizens to voluntarily hand in their weapons is now pushed back to the end of September because of security concerns. Prime Minister Mustafa Abu Shugar has proposed giving cash for weapons.

After fighting in the revolution and receiving three weeks formal training, Rami Ezzadine Tajari, 22, and Mohammed Nagy, 19, wearing mismatched military uniforms and carrying battered AK47s, are part of the Ministry of Interior’s sprawling auxiliary force, the Supreme Security Council (SSC).

The SSC, like the Ministry of Defence’s affiliated Shield of Libya brigades, is a collection of armed groups operating across Libya under the interior ministry’s loose control.

“A lot of people came to hand in their weapons,” says Tajari. “We told them to bring them back on the 29th. After that, citizens will be forbidden to carry them.”

Human rights lawyer Salah Marghani, commended by Human Rights Watch for his advocacy work with detainees under the Gaddafi regime, is outraged by the buy-back weapons scheme. “It will create a lucrative trade of arms for profit and won’t take many arms off the street,” he says. “What we need to get rid of is the heavy weapons.”

Marghani divides Libya’s armed groups operating in the government security vacuum into five categories. He explains that three are “easy to deal with”: former revolutionary fighters who believe their sole duty is to protect citizens and will voluntarily disarm; those who guard national interests motivated by a mix of doing public good and making profit; and those who benefit exclusively from small economic kickbacks.

“The remaining two categories are the dangerous ones,” says Marghani. These are ex-convicts who commit violent crimes, including armed robbery and drug dealing, or groups of “phantom-like” fighters that operate under a banner of Gaddafi loyalists or Islamist extremism.

In light of the Benghazi attack, he describes Libyans as feeling a collective ‘shame’. “They are scared right now,” he adds. “They don’t want their country to be another Somalia with warlords.”

An International Crisis Group (ICG) analysis of Libya’s armed groups sheds light on the new government’s complex challenge.

ICG states that the Gaddafi regime’s ‘divide-and-rule’ policy manipulated communities with a draconian security apparatus and selective disbursal of Libya’s rich resources.

“Once the lid was removed, there was every reason to fear a free-for-all, as the myriad of armed groups that proliferated during the rebellion sought material advantage, political influence or, more simply, revenge,” says the report. “This was all the more so given the security vacuum produced by the regime’s precipitous fall.”

Bill Lawrence, ICG’s North Africa analyst, in an interview with IPS says that Salafist leaders he has met blame rogue elements for the Benghazi attack. “Salafists who are in general skeptical of the political transition in Libya in some cases – not in every case – are definitely disassociating themselves from this act of violence, and condemning both the assassination and the film (on Islam that is leading to worldwide protests in Muslim countries).”

Some Libyans voice concerns that the U.S. drones, intelligence and military personnel in Libyan territory since the ambassador’s death might be here to stay.

Sami Khaskusha, professor of international relations, is a driving force on Tripoli University campus. An active member of the civil resistance against Gaddafi, he energetically organised a wide range of civil society discussions after the capital’s liberation under an ambitious banner: ‘Tripoli University’s programme for rebuilding Libya’.

“Suddenly we turned the university into a huge workshop,” Khaskusha remembers. “There was a lot of euphoria and enthusiasm then.”

But he says the mood changed and activities were curtailed when the transitional government’s more traditional, conservative mindset inherited power at the ministries.

“At that same time every thug took over offices and declared himself to be a military brigade. They submitted lists to the defence and interior ministries and demanded money and cars, and extorted businesses,” Khaskusha says.

“The Ministry of Interior is now run by the militia rather than the opposite. The ministry gave armed groups the legitimacy to arrest, interrogate, and secure banks, government offices and embassies in the absence of state power.”

An escalation of crime with impunity, tribal clashes and intolerant attacks against religious sites and non-governmental organisations are contributing to an atmosphere of instability and fear.

Salah Marghani is working against this. In light of torture in detention centres documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, he educates armed groups – including former prisoners now supervising jails – to adhere to human rights protocols.

“In one incident, I asked a military brigade if they torture inmates. One man said: ‘No we don’t, we only do ‘falaqa’ (beating prisoners’ feet). What struck me was he didn’t comprehend this is wrong,” sighs Marghani.

“I think it will take ten to 15 years for people to understand the role of democracy and civil society,” Khaskusha says. “We need to practise a peaceful struggle of ideas, culture of tolerance and acceptance of ‘the other’. Now when we disagree, we run to our weapons.”

A housing estate in Tripoli. Property disputes have hit the Palestinian refugee community hard. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
TRIPOLI, Aug 23 2012 (IPS)

Just before the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime one year ago, Huda and her Palestinian family were forcefully evicted from their Tripoli home.

“This was last August and there was a lot of violence. There was no government. My husband had suffered a heart attack and we were scared,” says Huda, an anxious middle-aged woman clad head to toe in black. She breaks into tears.

“We begged for more time to look for another place, but the owner’s children came and yelled bad words. We left our home with all its furniture. We were kicked out violently.”

The original homeowner had his properties confiscated by the government in 1978 under the far-reaching housing Law 4, which decrees only one residence allowed per family.

When the revolution erupted last year, Huda says the owner demanded some properties back, but felt assured when he instructed his children to “leave the Palestinian family alone.”

Originally from Acca in Palestine, Huda’s parents fled the violence in 1948 to south Lebanon. Three decades later, Huda and her husband escaped from another brutal war. They went to Libya on Lebanese travel documents, finally finding a job, house and stability.

After shelling out nominal government rent for over three decades, Huda switched to paying the owner five times the amount. But when he died last year, his children came knocking to claim their inheritance.

Since Libya’s revolution, property disputes have emerged as a primary threat to Libya’s national security. Although mostly relevant to Libyans, the crisis has hit the Palestinian refugee community hard. With more Palestinians arriving from Syria, it underscores the heightened vulnerability of their ‘guest’ status in the face of future government legislation.

There are an estimated 45,000 to 70,000 Palestinians in Libya today. Statistics are hard to pin down especially after last year’s conflict, because many fled the country, are internally displaced or have irregular status.

A signatory to the 1965 Casablanca Protocol, which protects Palestinian rights in Arab states, Libya has generally welcomed Palestinian refugees from across the region, including Gaza and Lebanon. Many have provided skilled labour for Libya’s oil and gas industry, and received subsidised housing, free education and healthcare.

Although Gaddafi trumpeted the Palestinian cause – variously favouring one Palestinian faction over the other, including recruiting a Palestinian mercenary force for his war with Chad – the population also suffered the brunt of his political grandstanding in a series of mass-expulsions.

Gaddafi’s political media stunt in 1995-96 to prove the Oslo Accords a sham was disastrous, resulting in thousands of Palestinians expelled, and thousands more stranded in tents at the border with Egypt.

“Since the Palestinian leaders claim they have now got a homeland and a passport,” Gaddafi said, “let the 30,000 Palestinians in Libya go back to their homeland, and let’s see if the Israelis would permit them to return. That’s how the world will find out that the peace it’s been advocating is no more than treachery and a conspiracy.”

Many Palestinians who managed to return to Libya found they had lost their relative safety of subsidised homes and jobs, exacerbating their insecure status and displacement.

Dr. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, a researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, says when the revolution kicked off in 2011, it was a frightening time for Palestinians, who staked out a position as bystanders.

“A few individuals I spoke to claimed they were being attacked by pro-regime forces for not engaging in armed activities, or being attacked by the anti-regime movement because of an assumed association with the pro-regime,” she says.

The Palestinian community had the sting of Gaddafi’s ‘Oslo’ expulsions fresh in their minds.

According to Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “many wanted to sit tight and stay and not lose their houses and economic opportunities that they hoped would return once the situation calmed down.”

Dr. Al Mutawakel Taha, the new Palestinian Ambassador to Libya, says the biggest challenge is that more than half the Palestinians carry expired documents because they are afraid to report to authorities.

“The Libyan government will soon ask Palestinians for residence permits,” he warns. “With new laws things are going to change – socially, economically and legally.”

Taha predicts the new government’s free market policies will drive up prices for Palestinians by eliminating food subsidies, and will narrowly define who can receive free health, education, housing and utilities.

An obvious casualty will be Anwar, a 67-year old Palestinian, who came to Libya from south Lebanon in 1972. Recently evicted from his house, he says the former owner waved a piece of paper in his face and told him to leave.

“There is no law that protects me,” he says. “I knew if I said no there would be trouble because my neighbours were evacuated by force.”

Anwar now struggles to support his wife and children in an apartment with a much higher rent. Four of his children suffer genetic disabilities – and are entirely dependent on their parents and Libya’s health care system.

Housing Law 4 is still on the books, with new a legislative proposal awaiting the incoming government’s decision.

“Probably those evictions were illegal,” says human rights lawyer Salah Marghani. “But the court system has almost collapsed in the past few months. If someone forcefully evicts you and you went to the court, it is unlikely you’d find a judge to put you back. And you could get a piece of paper. But if the owner has a khatiba (militia) behind him, what can you do?”

Shakr Mohamed Dakhil spearheads the growing Libyan Property Owners Advocate’s Association, composed of those who had their properties confiscated by Gaddafi. He admits it is challenging to control some of his members from resorting to violence.

“The Palestinian ambassador was very worried. We made a small protest outside the embassy about four months ago about all the properties occupied by Palestinians that our members want back. The protest was a warning.”

Ambassador Taha says he met Dakhil’s group, and is waiting for them to draw up a list of all Palestinians living in disputed properties so he can determine their economic status, case by case. He has also amicably moved his embassy from Dakhil’s childhood villa to a new site.

“If you feel your home is threatened, you feel insecure,” says Salah Marghani. “And insecurity is damaging to social peace. Most property occupiers are Libyan. But foreigners are weaker than nationals. They are an easier target.”

A Tawerghan with a list of internally displaced persons at the Fallah camp. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
MISRATA, Libya, Aug 21 2012 (IPS)

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.

“We were under heavy bombardment, many were killed, and we ran without belongings,” recalls Huwaida, a 23-year-old college student, who squats with 200 other Tawerghans in Tripoli’s derelict Fallah construction site.

Many residents of Tawergha, a town near the rebel stronghold Misrata, were believed to have supported the Gaddafi regime and fought against the rebels. The residents were mostly of sub-Saharan origin.

Her family and friends are scattered between Tripoli, Benghazi, and the southern desert town Sabha. Huwaida believes all 30,000 members of the Tawerghan community are being punished collectively for the bloody deeds of pro-Gaddafi fighters among them.

Neighbouring Misrata was one of the hardest hit during last year’s brutal conflict. After its liberation last August, Misrata militia drove nearly 40 kilometres east to Tawergha to exact revenge. They systematically searched and destroyed each deserted building, one by one.

The Tawerghan community has apologised to Misrata for their role in the fighting, signaling a willingness for reconciliation. They also voted in the Jul. 7 elections, with Tawerghan candidate Maree Mohamed Mansour Raheel winning an independent slot in the incoming national congress.

Now Tawerghans say they need a strong central government body to broker an effective and fair reconciliation process.

“The people of Tawergha acknowledge and apologise for what some of them did,” asserts Dr. Abdel Rahman Mahmoud, a local Tawerghan leader based at the Fallah site.

“The second step is whoever broke the law from both sides should be brought to court. The Misratans should give us the list of names of ‘wanted’ Tawerghans. This is what we are waiting for,” he says. “People are fed up this is taking such a long time.”

“There are two types of Misratans,” Mahmoud adds. “The youth and reckless who don’t want us to return. But the wise men and religious people do, and for this matter to end.”

For Tawerghans daily life remains precarious, and their future still uncertain.

Unable to work, they rely on charities and old government salaries for support. There has been a pattern of violent attacks by militia on internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Tripoli and Benghazi. Fearful of abduction, detention and torture, Tawerghans avoid stepping outside the confines they live in.

For one year Huwaida’s family has occupied a shabby trailer at the Fallah site. Although a Turkish company abandoned the area at the onset of the revolution, the IDPs can be evicted as soon as the builders return.

On Mar. 2, the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry published a damning report on Misrata’s actions since the revolution:

“The Misrata thuwar (armed groups) have killed, arbitrarily arrested and tortured Tawerghans across Libya. The destruction of Tawergha has been done to render it uninhabitable. Murder, torture and cruel treatment, and pillaging, which occurred during the hostilities, constitute a war crime.

“Where they have continued since, they violate international human rights law. The torture and killing by Misratan thuwar would also, given the widespread and systematic manner in which they have occurred here, be capable of constituting a crime against humanity, and the facts indicate crimes against humanity have taken place.”

The blue Mediterranean Sea breaks gently along a deserted beach outside of Misrata. This stretch of white sand is the relaxing refuge of Ahmad El-Wash, 50, a local fisherman, avid book reader and wounded fighter during the revolution.

“The Tawerghans have no chance to return here,” he says calmly. “I was shocked what they did during the revolution. We cannot be stung twice.

“Libya is a big country,” he adds. “They can make a small town for the Tawerghans – somewhere in the south.”

The long, bloody battle in Misrata killed hundreds of residents and destroyed the heart of its downtown. But the most contentious allegations during the fighting were those of mass rape and torture of Misratans at the hands of Tawerghan fighters.

“Killing is not the big issue,” says Dr. Salim Beit Almal, the newly appointed head of Misrata’s local council. “It was the rape and torture. Rape is the red line for the whole thing.”

In April, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Louis Moreno-Ocampo visited Misrata to investigate the sensitive rape charges as part of a wider case against members of the former regime.

Ibrahim Beit Almal, director of Misrata’s military intelligence, waves a list of 3,000 ‘wanted’ Tawerghans that he says he gave to the current reconciliation committee in Benghazi over two months ago. He says he hasn’t heard anything since.

Dr. Salim Beit Almal blames the transitional government’s failure to address grievances. “If you are a victim and the government doesn’t act, then you are forced to take your rights by your own hand.

“Let me tell you frankly,” he says intently. “We know all Tawerghans are not criminals, without a doubt. But I think the government needs to build them a city far from Misrata. Tawerghans cannot live next to Misratans, at least for a couple years.

“The problem is they need protection and we cannot put a guard on every person. And we can’t control individuals. Imagine if they come back and a guy with a gun goes there and kills some Tawerghans. What would be the situation then?”

According to Bill Lawrence, an International Crisis Group researcher, the ‘wanted’ lists can illustrate steps being taken towards justice, and away from collective punishment. However, he warns: “If Libya stays in a retribution mode – even if you’ve got lists and are acting in a sanctioned and regularised way – this could go on for years and have very bad consequences. It could also unravel into local long-term conflicts.”

Back at the Fallah site, Mahmoud talks about growing up in Misrata, and the friends he had before the revolution.

One is Lt. Col. Ramadan Ali Mansur Al-Zurmuh, now head of Misrata’s military council. “He lost a son,” Mahmoud says. “I lost my brother, his wife and their children. The family is completely gone.” He sighs. “We have to deal.”

Voters in Sabha want peace in a new Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
SABHA, Libya, Jul 12 2012 (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.

Tayuri’s non-Arab Tabu and Tuareg excitedly voiced hope to validate their Libyan status, and live a better life. Systematically discriminated against by the Gaddafi regime which promoted an ‘Arabisation’ campaign in Libya, the majority of voters interviewed by IPS said Mahmoud Jibril’s winning liberal National Forces Alliance (NFA) party best represented their interests. Voting began last weekend and was only completed Wednesday.

“I want equal rights between people, identification papers and education,” says Mohammed Lakba, 35, an unemployed Tuareg family man. “I hope our situation gets better. There is no opportunity. There are tribal problems, and we need security and stability.”

In a last minute controversial twist to appease Libya’s east, the National Transitional Council (NTC) stripped the new National Congress’s power to appoint a 60-member constitutional committee proportionally from each of Libya’s three regions. Instead they say Libyans will vote for the committee members directly.

Of the 90,000 Libyans registered in the sixth electoral district of Sabha and Al Shati, nearly half are female. The area’s total population is an estimated 150,000, with seats allotted for seven independent candidates and nine political parties.

Libya’s total population is an estimated six million – most residing along the coast – with 2.8 million registered voters nationwide.

The country’s vast southern desert swathe – with Sabha to the west and Kufra’s oasis in the east – is where Gaddafi’s ambitious ‘man-made river project’ pipes underground water to the thirsty, populous north. It is also home to huge oil reserves, rare minerals, and lucrative cross-border trafficking of weapons, gasoline and goods out of Libya, and drugs, alcohol, and sub-Saharan migrants into the country.

Libya’s long, porous border has attracted the attention of Europe and the United States’ African military command, AFRICOM, which hopes to prevent migrants reaching European shores, and stop the spread of Al Qaeda in the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’.

Yet many Sabha residents complain that the NTC in Tripoli has largely neglected their tattered city and southern borders, with loud Federalist proponents from Benghazi dominating Libya’s media landscape and political discourse.

“We understand the NTC is very busy in Tripoli,” says Ayoub Alzaroug, head of Sabha’s local council. “But we urgently need security. And we want stronger border security and we want the world to stand with us.”

Once a hub for international tourists venturing into the Sahara, Sabha’s shabby housing estates, destroyed hotels and piles of garbage are a picture of neglect. Hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans rest in groups on broken sidewalks after an arduous desert trek into Libya. Gun battles are heard at night, and security, jobs, health and education are the priorities here.

Fada Hassan, 25, dressed in a colorful abaya, sleepily mans a rudimentary kiosk filled with tinned goods in the Tayuri neighbourhood. She is Tabu; a traditionally semi-nomadic, darker-skinned indigenous tribe with ties to southern Libya, Sudan, Chad and Niger.

The Tabu endured decades of harsh discrimination under the Gaddafi regime, especially during Libya’s losing war for Chadian territory in the 1980s. According to a United Nations Human Rights Council report in July 2010, the government revoked many Tabu citizenships in 2007.

This has exacerbated confusion over which of the Tabu are from Libya, and who is ‘foreign’, and contributed to the delay of Kufra’s Tabu vote, which was completed Wednesday.

The Tabu were one of the first to join the revolution against the Gaddafi regime last year, utilising their desert networks to block the southern borders against sub-Saharan mercenaries aiding the loyalists.

Fada’s husband Othman Suleiman is Tuareg. Nomadic pastoralists who also live in Algeria, Niger and Mali, the Tuareg too are marginalised, with generations born in Libya discounted by the government. Gaddafi often deployed the Tuareg as fighters, including during the revolution, by promising citizenship documents in return.

Last year Fada and Othman fled to the south from Benghazi, fearing revolutionaries who suspected most black people of being Gaddafi loyalists or mercenaries.

Tayuri’s estimated 15,000 families live in illegal, ramshackle houses. Rubbish lines the unpaved roads, pipes lead to makeshift water wells, and sewage is stored in septic tanks. The area’s dilapidated school holds 50 students to a class, and the clinic was converted from a livestock barn. There are scant jobs for residents besides the illicit jobs in cross-border trade.

Without identification, residents are denied access to free education and healthcare, legal housing and formal jobs. They are unable to move through checkpoints.

Ironically, Tabu and Tuareg live peacefully together in Tayuri although many fought on opposing sides of the revolution.

“Gaddafi used the Tuareg to fight to get identification,” says Adoum Ahmad, the Tabu local council head for Tayuri. “The Tabu understood this, and how their life was miserable. They have no fight with the Tuareg.”

In late March, during ferocious clashes between Tabu and the Arab tribe, Abu Seif over a payment dispute, heavy weapons leveled houses in the poverty-stricken Tabu neighbourhood of Hajara.

Only when Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib and the national military leadership visited did an uneasy ceasefire take hold. In total 147 people were killed, with an estimated 400 injured from the fighting.

Popular independent candidate Abdul Ghader Swilhi explains. “First we didn’t know what was happening. There was a dispute over money and some Tabu were killed. But the Tabu made a mistake and attacked the airport, the hospital and the army headquarters. So we all came out to defend the city. When we realised it was about money, and not about the Tabu taking over Sabha, we withdrew.

“We have to sort out the disenfranchised,” he says adamantly. “In the future we need to put people in mixed neighbourhoods to avoid creating anger. Those living here for ten years should get Libyan identification, and eventually citizenship. And those who entered illegally should be returned.”

Striking a conciliatory note, another of Sabha’s candidates for the National Congress, Abdul Jalil Seif Nasser, agrees. He is a member of a tribe that was involved in the fighting. “We need peace for all Libya by talk, not guns.”

Migrants being loaded on to a cargo plane in Kufra. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Rebecca Murray
KUFRA, May 13 2012 (IPS)

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.

Most of the prisoners in the small, squalid compound called the Freedom Detention Centre – run by Kufra’s military council – are from Chad. Hundreds more, from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia, were moved to bigger facilities due to overcrowding.

Almost 1,000 miles from the Mediterranean coast in Libya’s desolate southeast desert, the Kufra oasis strategically lies near the long and porous borders of Egypt, Sudan and Chad.

“The two main hubs are Kufra and Sabha in Libya,” explains Emmanuel Gignac, head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Libya. “All West African migrants are going through Sabha via Chad or Niger, and those originating from the Horn of Africa are going through Sudan to Kufra… then either directly to Tripoli or Benghazi. Those are roughly the routes.”

Despite the most recent outbreak of deadly violence between Kufra’s Zwai and Tabu tribes, migrants continue to arrive at this lucrative smuggling point for people, weapons, drugs and fuel. Both tribes are said to have benefited from the trade.

Bernham is a thin, 35-year old Eritrean, held in a small, crowded room near the Kufra compound’s entrance. Guards tell IPS that other migrants have identified him as a human smuggler who took their money. Bernham vehemently denies the charges.

“These men have been victims of traffickers and travel by foot in the desert,” explains Abdul Rahim Ab Wazzah, a senior guard, pointing to the crowd of praying migrants.

“Bernham is part of a network of connections coming from Sudan. He takes money from men who want to go from Sudan to Kufra, and then to Tripoli. Each leg costs 400 dollars,” Ab Wazzah says. “His job was to collect Somalis, and ultimately receive money for their boat ride to Europe.”

“Kufra is safer than Benghazi,” volunteers Moussa Habib Mohammed, 30, a Chadian prisoner who shares a tiny, dank room with up to 15 other men. One month ago he was caught in the coastal city without a passport, and sent back to Kufra.

Since the uprising, many dark-skinned Africans are suspected of having been mercenary fighters for Gaddafi during last year’s conflict. They are at risk for imprisonment by Libyan militias and, according to watchdogs like Human Rights Watch, torture.

In Kufra however, the conflict is uniquely local. Members of the predominant Arab Zwai tribe accuse many of the marginalised, dark-skinned Tabu – who joined the uprising against Gaddafi – of being from Chad and intent on establishing a regional homeland and resource monopoly.

Exacerbating the issue is Gaddafi’s confiscation of Libyan Identity cards from Tabu citizens in Kufra four years ago. Semi-nomadic Tabu tribes are from Libya, Chad, Niger and Sudan. With no papers, Libyan members of the Tabu tribe are in danger of being caught up in the mass arrests of undocumented foreigners.

In a scathing 2009 report by Human Rights Watch, ‘Pushed Back, Pushed Around’, sub-Saharan migrants interviewed in Malta and Italy most frequently cited Kufra as a place of detention in Libya – during entry or deportation.

The report states that most migrants were convinced that the police and smugglers worked together. Migrants who were being deported “would be released from Kufra prison – often directly into the hands of smugglers who would take them into custody, demand more money from their families, and take them once again to the cities along the coast.”

“All fear being dumped in the desert,” the report says.

Fred Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch advisor, told IPS: “The government is overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with the migrant flow…The government doesn’t have control of its borders and the detention system. In this chaotic post-conflict environment, militias and armed groups are filling the void.

“Some militias are doing the right thing,” he says. “Others have been very problematic, with reported cases of abuse and forced labour. There are worrying trends of hiring out migrant detainees to local businesses and farmers. Generally the migrants get paid but in some cases they have not been, which is happening increasingly.

Al Sanussi Bashir Attwati of Kufra’s Red Crescent Society provides food and first aid to the detention centre. He says the government is building a larger facility for migrants seven miles north of Kufra in the desert, instead of flying them to the coast.

“Three weeks ago, 25 men walked here barefoot through the desert and their feet were lacerated. We provided them treatment and shoes, and transferred them to Benghazi,” Attwati says.

Under the mid-day sun, hundreds of mostly Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopian males sit on the tarmac of Kufra’s airport runway, about to enter an army cargo plane bound north to Benghazi and the Ghanfouda detention centre. The military in charge did not inform the migrants where they were headed.

Suel Abdullah, 20, from Mogadishu, surrounded by friends near the airplane, shares a common story. “Al Shabaab wanted to kill us and we lived in fear in Somalia,” he says.

On his trek north, Abdullah was imprisoned for brief periods in decrepit Ethiopian and Sudanese jails. “Then our trafficker took us from Sudan to Libya, and dumped us in the desert. We were captured by men who said they were Libyan forces, but they were really from Chad,” he says.

“There were 800 of us, and they packed us in like animals and asked for 700 dollars each. Finally, the Libyan army came and there was a gunfight. We were brought to Kufra.”

Libya is variously a destination and transit hub to Europe for migrants. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) records up to one million migrants in Libya before the Gaddafi regime fell, while the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) documents 50,000 migrants attempting the sea crossing last year.

Jeremy Haslam, IOM head in Libya says a big challenge is for relevant embassies – if present in Libya – to prove a migrant’s citizenship and produce temporary papers to return them home.

“Although Libya is host to some refugees, the country is not signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not currently process asylum cases,” says Haslam. “Thus the numbers continue to grow and detention sites are reaching bursting point.” (END)

The recent outbreak of violence between the largely segregated Zwai and Tabu tribes in Libya’s remote, Saharan town of Kufra shattered the uneasy calm that held since last February’s clashes, resulting in more than 100 deaths. The clashes illustrate the challenges in building a new state.

Young militia members in Kufra. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

In the power vacuum following Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow, the fighting over turf and rights at this lucrative smuggling hub – nearly 1,000 miles from Libya’s coast bordering Egypt, Sudan and Chad – threatens Kufra’s equitable participation in June’s national elections and the stability of Libya’s southeast region.

Days before Kufra’s violence reignited, adult students from both tribes gathered under a tree at a vocational institute downtown to voice fears about the town’s security, and their future in it.

“It’s not easy to get employed in Kufra, and nepotism plays a role,” says Omasayad, 26, a medical student from the Zwai tribe. “There are too many people and not enough jobs,” she adds. “From a security point of view, under Gaddafi it was better.”

Her 25-year old Tabu classmate, Kadisha Jacky, is married with four children. “Security is less than under Gaddafi,” she interjects. “But life is still better.” Jacky says priorities should be security, peace and human rights.

Kaltroun Toushi, 23, is a computer student from a Tabu family. “The tribal conflict is chronic,” she says. “I feel secure at school, but not in the city.”

Kufra’s Tabu population is an estimated 4,000 out of a total of 44,000 of mostly Arab Zwai inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the darker-skinned Tabu tribe has ties to Sabha, a trade hub in Libya’s west, as well as to Sudan, Chad and Niger. The Zwai clan is spread north from Kufra through the oil rich desert to coastal Ajdabiya.

The Tabu suffered chronic discrimination under the Gaddafi regime, exacerbated by a violent territorial war with Chad over minerals, that Libya eventually forfeited in the 1980s.

A United Nations Human Rights Council report in July 2010 says Kufra’s Tabu, accused by Gaddafi of being Chadian, were stripped of their citizenship in 2007. They were subsequently barred from education and health services, and subject to arrest and house demolitions.

The Tabu played a crucial role in last year’s overthrow of Gaddafi. Tabu networks were activated across southern borders to block the flow of sub-Saharan mercenaries to the old regime.

Libya’s new transitional government subsequently assigned Tabu leader Issa Abdelmajid Mansur to watch over Kufra’s vast Saharan corner, with its lucrative legal and illicit cross-border trade of food, fuel, migrants, weapons and drugs.

“We are mainly concerned with the traffickers network,” says Col. Suliman Hamed Hassan, head of Kufra’s military council. “Issa Abdelmajid is with them, controlling the border points. We asked him to stop and he didn’t. He is making money from this.”

“The Tabu have made fortunes from this and the Zwai have made fortunes from this,” asserts Bill Lawrence, North Africa director for the International Crisis Group.

The death of a Tabu taxi driver triggered the current violence between the Tabu and those they accuse of the crime, the Libyan Shield Brigade. This militia, allied with the military council, was directed by the defence ministry from Benghazi to keep the peace.

“Basically, this is an old chronic problem between two tribes,” Col. Abdul Rami Kashbour, an army advisor sent to Kufra, says. “It’s bigger than before because of the availability of weapons.

“One of the causes is identity. So many Tabu have a problem with identity, and the government should resolve this. Then we control the borders.” He adds, “All conflicts only happen in border areas. It happens because every side wants to control the border.”

Bill Lawrence agrees. “The conflict between the Tabu and the Zwai is partially over control of smuggling routes, partially who is a Libyan, and partially revenge over violence.

“All conflicts in Libya share fault lines that existed throughout the Gaddafi era, but below the radar and suppressed by the authoritarian regime,” he says. “When you take the lid off, it all starts percolating again.”

Critically, Kufra’s violence has diverted attention from the difficult task of building up local democratic institutions from scratch. Unlike war-ravaged towns like Misrata that rapidly voted in its municipality, Kufra’s local council chairman is appointed, with no elections slated soon.

All students interviewed by IPS say they know little about the national constitutional elections on Jun. 19. They are not informed about registering to vote, about political parties, candidates or the critical issues.

“I know something about the national elections, but not really,” admits architecture student Fateh Hamed Mabrouk, 25. “No one is telling us what they are about. The local council is not telling us…Like our brothers in other cities, we want local community elections.”

Al Sanussi Salem Al Gommi, head of Kufra’s election committee, claims Tripoli’s government still hasn’t provided voter registration details. The town violence, he says, has affected an electoral awareness campaign, and electing a local council is postponed until a new Libyan government is voted in.

“Some Tabu have threatened to stop the election process here until they register some more families of theirs to become Libyans. They don’t have documents to prove this though,” he says.

“The issue of citizenship and documents is a massive mess,” says Fred Abrahams, an advisor with Human Rights Watch. “In south Libya you have some Tabu without documents that do deserve them, and some who do have them, but don’t deserve them.

“It’s going to cause considerable problems in the upcoming elections because the Tabu fear they may be disfranchised.”

Abrahams dismisses Tabu cited aspirations for regional homeland covering their tribal base. “At this point I think they are posturing. They are divided themselves and this is not a serious option,” he says.

“What is serious is the nervousness those claims reveal. There is a high level of distrust and suspicion, and now blood has been spilled.”

Abdullah Aldiamy (right) outside his family shop at Omar Zerti's occupied building. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
TRIPOLI, Apr 17 2012 (IPS)

The future is uncertain for the gregarious Alhasairi family, living in a downtown apartment block battle-scarred from last year’s overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. Like countless of similar cases across Libya, the property itself is now contested, as the original owners want to return home.

“This is the holy inheritance of Omari Zerti,” declares the colorful graffiti across the whitewashed entrance. The government took the modern, three-storey building from the Zerti family in 1978, under the new stringent Law No: 4 pulled from the dictates of Gaddafi’s Green Book, limiting citizens to ownership of one property each.

Hafed Alhasairi, father of five children, explains how Gaddafi’s wife Safia bestowed Zerti’s residential building to a friend. Ten years ago, Hafed paid over 40,000 dollars for the right to live in, not own, one of the structure’s nine small apartments.

Although oil-rich Libya’s population is just over six million, for years the majority of steadily expanding families have been hemmed in by low-income government jobs and chronic housing shortages.

When Law No: 4 was passed, countless of residential and commercial properties were confiscated by the regime – then given away, sold on, or rented out. Some real estate owners, like Alhasairi’s neighbour on the next block, remain. He resides in a corner apartment in his former building, surrounded by former tenants who pay the government rent.

“This was originally thought of as taking from the rich to give to the poor, but it is only partly correct,” says Saleh Marghani, a Tripoli-based lawyer.

“Many valuable properties were taken by the regime and given as favours, and the original owners were the victims,” he says. “This has created an issue now – as many residents living in them today are not rich, and have nowhere to go.”

This is the case of the Alhasairi family. Belonging to the Amazigh sect – a minority Berber community discriminated against under the Gaddafi regime – Hafed secured a government job in the capital after years working in a coastal oil refinery.

“My wife recently received a visit from the Zerti family at our house,” he says. “They were nice and polite. But they said this was their building, and we had to leave. They are bringing the matter to court.”

Hafed is sympathetic to the Zerti family’s claims but he worries his family, with five young children, will have nowhere to go. “It will take time for the case because the law is still on the books. They are preparing a new law now, and residents might be moved to another apartment. But right now this housing is still under construction,” he points out, referring to Gaddafi’s ambitious plan to build sprawling concrete flats on desert land outside cities like Benghazi and Tripoli.

Colorful shirts on hangers adorn the cheap clothing shop on the building’s ground floor. Abdullah Aldiamy, 22, keeps an eye on the family business. They pay their landlord 2,000 dollars in monthly rent, and Aldiamy believes the landlord in turn pays as little as ten dollars to the government for the space; raking in a handsome profit. The Zerti family has dropped by four times to talk with him, Aldiamy says. He shrugs and drags on a cigarette. “I gave them the landlord’s phone number,” he says.

After enduring international isolation in the eighties and nineties, as part of Libya’s ‘opening up’ period, Gaddafi, prodded by his son Saif al-Islam, established a property compensation committee in 2007, led by the current transitional government head, Mustafa Abdul Jalil.

“Some people were provided compensation but it was of very little value,” explains Marghani. “Many did not dare to apply, especially those who fled the country. And many did not think it was serious. Saif’s project for Libya was not legitimate.”

Marghani believes time is one of the biggest challenges to untangling property disputes. “Properties have changed hands since the initial confiscation, and many don’t know who the original owners are. When Gaddafi ordered the destruction of the land registry in 1982, very important evidence was lost,” he says.

“Now some are having a hard time proving they own the properties. Some have a certificate from 1970, but this is no guarantee they did not sell it before 1978,” he says. “Also, some of the occupiers had rented the properties from the original owners before 1978, and the families stayed and continued to pay rent to the government.”

Last month the Ministry of Justice convened a committee to review the complex Law No: 4, and propose fair solutions for the unique circumstances of current occupants, and compensation for original owners. But the committee’s decisions have not yet been made public, and former owners are growing impatient.

Marwan El Jondi grew up in exile in California after his father, a successful Tripoli businessman, had his properties confiscated by the Gaddafi government. Last year, his family took the risk to return and file a petition with the compensation committee. “Someone on the committee said, ‘I’ll give you six million but give one million to me,” El Jondi says in disgust. “His property was worth a lot more than that. But you can’t blame people for paying a bribe, this is how the country worked.”

El Jondi is one of 400 members of a property owners’ advocacy, spearheaded by Shakr Mohamed Dakhil, the son of one of Libya’s most prominent businessmen in the 1970s.

Dakhil fondly remembers growing up in the villa in Tripoli’s leafy downtown, now home to the Palestinian Embassy. “We had property that valued about 300 million dollars in the 1970s,” he says. “They confiscated it all in a couple weeks – they issued some laws and took everything.”

Dakhil’s organisation is petitioning Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib’s office to repeal Law No: 4 immediately. He claims the majority of their members are not wealthy, and are eager to reclaim their homes for retirement.

“Properties were confiscated overnight, and this is how they should be returned,” he says. “We don’t want compensation, we want our properties back. Those tenants that can afford to pay rent in apartments can stay. The government should subsidise those that cannot, until they can move them into new housing.

“Many owners want to take the law into their own hands, and take back their properties by force. They are going in with guns bringing some of their friends. Of course we don’t want our members to do this.”

At a crowded corner of the Tripoli Medical Centre, people gather every morning to submit paperwork for medical treatment abroad, or worriedly scan new lists of approved names plastering the walls.

Kaltoum Alhadi bound for Italy for corrective surgery stands before a list of approved patients. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

Kaltoum Alhadi Marwan, 29, is one of the lucky ones. She won a visa and the go-ahead for surgery in Italy to correct a congenital bone deformity in her right leg. She is at the TMC – Tripoli’s largest hospital – to collect a cheque from the Libyan government for her airfare.

Kaltoum is a manager at a local disability clinic. But she has little faith in the quality of Libyan healthcare. “I had another deformity in my finger and had corrective surgery in Tripoli,” she says. “It was useless. It made it worse than before.”

Dr. Arbi Gomati, a UK-trained surgeon at the TMC, takes a breather during another hectic day. He is one of 11 decision makers on a committee to choose candidates for treatment abroad under the auspices of the Ministry of Health. His Tripoli group is one of three nationwide; the others are in Benghazi and Sebha. Five more are opening soon.

Dr. Gomati says since they started in November his committee reviews up to 250 patient files per day, of which an estimated 20 percent qualify. These are usually Libyans suffering from severe ailments like cancer, kidney failure, pediatric surgery and congenital heart failure. Common destinations for the pre- approved treatment are Germany, France, UK, Italy, Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia.

“In Libya we have shortages in medication,” says Dr. Gomati. “You can have an up-to-date MRI or CT scan, but no single radiologist who can look at the film or give an accurate report. Many cases we send are just because we need someone to do an intervention for radiology, that’s it.

“Because there were no health services immediately after the revolution and too many people needed them, the only way was to send people outside. But we don’t like the system and we’d like to stop it.”

Dr. Gomati’s committee is a separate entity from the transitional government’s programme to send injured rebel fighters for treatment abroad. Recent outrage over substantial abuses of the plan, to the detriment of some genuine candidates – including procedures like plastic surgery, fertility treatments, extended hospital stays and overbilling – has cost an embarrassed Libyan government an estimated 800 million dollars and forced a revision of the oversight.

Tripoli Central Hospital, an Italian-era built trauma facility in the capital’s downtown, has posters of missing people lining its emergency room walls.

“It was risky to go out, and the ER was also very unsafe – most people had guns. There was a shortage of medicine, staff and doctors,” says Dr. Ezdeen Elnaam, a young neurosurgeon who spent many nights in a row working there.

Some things are no better now. “Many days the CT scan isn’t working, or the MRI isn’t working, and we lack ultrasounds,” says his colleague, Dr. Naili Samar. “As for most of the doctors, the emphasis is on salary and not on treatment.”

“The hospitals here are terrible,” Fawzia Toshani remarks sharply. She is a media spokesperson with the health ministry, a place she’s worked for 15 years.

The health ministry just received an estimated 2.3 billion dollars in the recent government budget. “There is a problem with bureaucracy and mismanagement,” she says. “Corruption? Yes, that’s true.

“Libyan professional doctors go abroad first to study or get better money. Here the doctors get around 1000 dinars (800 dollars) a month. Patients would prefer to go to a private clinic if they had money. But that doesn’t mean you’ll get better treatment.”

Dr. Rami Ben Ahmeida, general practitioner at the private Libyan British Medical Centre, equipped with an ambulance and surgery bay, disagrees. “This place is better. It has good hygiene, better staff, and is well organised. There is no waiting list for operations, while at the government hospital you can wait up to one month.”

A two-tier health system matured under the Gaddafi regime to accommodate wealthier citizens and businesses has yielded a multitude of private facilities like the Libyan British Medical Centre.

As nurses from the Philippines bustle through the small white corridors, patients interviewed by IPS say they had health insurance through work with banks, construction and oil companies.

In post-Gaddafi Libya, as the national economy’s largely oil revenue ramps up and commercial businesses and investment start to return, the debate around a new model for Libya’s new governance, and healthcare system intensifies.

Dr. Gomati from the Tripoli Medical Centre says he would like to see medical insurance companies introduced nationwide, and encourage a public-private system. “People should pay for health services. Right now it’s costing the country money – draining money.”

“I can tell you there is a need to improve the quality of health services here, or maybe market it better,” says an official from the recently reopened U.S. embassy in Tripoli. “Libyans really do have this firm belief they cannot get appropriate health care in their country.

“But we’ve done extensive medical surveys of the facilities here, just when we were coming back and in terms of contingency planning, and there is actually very good care available here in Libya in both (government and private facilities).”

At the busy private Al Mokhtar Clinic in one of Tripoli’s more affluent neighbourhoods, Salma Gouma, supervisor for the mostly foreign nurses from the Philippines, Ukraine, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, says they reduce prices for poorer families.

“I don’t know why people go away for medical treatment. People don’t trust Libya, but we have done a lot of procedures correcting mistakes from Tunisian hospitals.”

A few hundred police cadets in ad hoc camouflage uniforms march up and down the grounds at a training centre in the coastal town Zawiyah. “You are the people protecting the revolution and symbol of our pride,” proclaims the scrawled writing on the wall behind them.

The police training camp at Zawiyah. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

Integration of rebels into the Libyan national army and police, or their return to civilian life, is critically important to the country’s ability to navigate the fragile post-conflict period of elections, reconstruction and institution building.

But despite promises by militias like the Zintan and Misrata brigades to hand Tripoli’s security over to government authorities, deadlines have passed repeatedly.

Sporadic shootouts between militias and armed criminal activity in the capital are not uncommon, as well as violent protests by some rebels who did not receive a one-time payment by the transitional government – 4,000 Libyan Dinars (3,200 dollars) per family, or 2,400 LYD (1,900 dollars) per individual – for their role in the conflict.

“Because the government is still new, they are not strong enough to control the situation,” says Col. Yazin Fituri, operations head of the Tripoli Military Council, the coordinating body for the capital’s military brigades.

“The thuwar first hesitated to join the army, but now they have accepted the situation and would like to join,” he affirms, acknowledging a missed recent deadline to sign up. “Many times we discussed with the Misrata brigade to leave, and we started to talk with the Zintan on the same issue. We are trying to make it peaceful. We don’t want to fight with brothers.”

A further complication to the militias’ integration process is the uncoordinated and overlapping registration of rebels by key institutions.

The Warriors Affairs Commission for Rehabilitation and Development (WAC) was established during the conflict, with the prescient view that when the fighting stopped, rebels needed to be reintegrated back into society to avoid instability.

Regarded as a ‘human resources’ centre for former fighters, the WAC was intended as the first port of call for reintegration registration. The estimated 200,000 rebels in their database are given the choice to join the police or army, or to return to civilian life.

One qualification for registration is an ID that affirms the candidate belonged to a brigade. But there are allegations that some of those on the rolls were not genuine fighters in the uprising.

Starting this month the WAC will conduct interviews and skills training for civilian jobs, and evaluate those who might be suitable for the government armed forces.

The problem, says WAC deputy director Mohammed Shaeiter, is that the ministry of the interior and the ministry of defence pursued parallel registration processes without consulting the WAC first. “This creates confusion. They should have come to us first, before them. The MOI and MOD have not given us their lists yet, and we don’t know when they will.”

At Zawiyah’s training facility, Souhail Ali Milad, 25, is one of the police cadets with a monthly starting salary of 600 Libyan Dinars (480 dollars). He has been promised his first paycheck at the end of March.

The freshly painted barracks was a former military facility for the Gaddafi regime. It reopened in November after sustained damage by NATO bombing and looting. There was fierce fighting in this strategic Mediterranean town, 30 miles west of Tripoli.

Since Gaddafi’s state security infrastructure was mostly destroyed, makeshift bases like Zawiyah’s double up to accommodate both army and police cadets across the country. This site, rebuilt with local council and private funds, has rudimentary equipment, and lacks sleeping quarters.

“The goal is to bring the thuwar to the training centre,” says veteran army commander Ramadan Shnety, who runs the facility. “But the army has not been paid so far. This does not encourage thuwar to sign up.”

The MOI and MOD have agreed upon an initial estimated force of 25,000 men each to secure this vast, oil- rich desert country of just over six million people. “The army will be strong, and won’t let the militias act on their own accord,” says MOD spokesman Col. Adel El Barrassi.

In a new building downtown, Col. Jamal Ibrahim Safar spearheads the MOI’s strategic development and coordination team. He says more than half the police force will be trained outside of Libya.

Jordan is committed to mentor up to 10,000 police, with Turkey, Italy, France and Sudan pitching in with specialty training like border surveillance and election security. Key advisors include the United Nations, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.

Border security was highlighted at a governmental regional conference this month in Tripoli. The threat of weapons proliferation, Al Qaeda groups and undocumented refugees headed to Europe topped the agenda. But the actual size of the force is undecided; as is the ministry it will report to.

“This is the million dollar question right now, because the MOD and MOI are sort of fighting over this issue,” says a U.S. embassy official in an interview with IPS. “Sometimes it looks like they’ve reached a resolution, and sometimes they haven’t.”

The U.S. Army Command (AFRICOM) has an increasing presence across the region. “We’re looking for ways in which we can be helpful,” says AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham.

“I think the Libyans and U.S. would like to see improvements in Libya’s border security infrastructure, and there is a real need to develop some sort of border security force to provide the training and the equipment.

“Libya in general is part of AFRICOM’s sphere, and I think the Libyan government really welcomes the idea of a robust military to military relationship with the U.S.,” the official adds. “They appreciate the value added having a strong relationship with the U.S., so we are just in the very initial phases now of figuring out what that means.”

At the Tripoli Military Council offices located next to the city’s small Mitiga airport – recently retaken from the government by the Suq Al Juma brigade – Col. Yazin Fituri says, “If the government is strong enough, all the thuwar will give back their weapons and go back to civilian life.

“But the government is not strong enough and the revolution is still new. It needs one to two years to become stronger.

“Most brigades are in Tripoli,” he adds. “We know everyone – their names, ID, and the places they stay… Most of them went home, but when we need them we will call them.”

By Rebecca Murray and - -
TRIPOLI, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

Young men and women socialise together at Tripoli University’s ‘campus B’ tarmac parking lot as they prepare to sit for examinations during this tumultuous school year.

Student union members in Tripoli. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

Male students who took time off to serve as rebel fighters against Gaddafi’s regime now volunteer to secure the university’s perimeter, to the detriment of their studies, some say. Libyan women also played a key, but less visible, role in the resistance.

A sleek but unfinished multi-storey complex, intended as the new campus, towers over aging low-slung classrooms, overgrown grass, scrawled graffiti and a bombed building which previously housed pro- Gaddafi militants.

Unfortunately construction on the new structure is now halted. Student union members say contractors forgot to lay down plumbing before pouring the foundation.

Despite their battered surroundings, the students – many wearing fashionable skinny jeans and sweaters – are empowered and optimistic when asked about their future, but often vague about specific changes.

Mohammed Al Harby, 27, head of the Student Union, sits comfortably on a sofa with peers in the dean’s office at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. “We want to build a connection between the students and the administration,” he says. “For many years there was a big gap.”

Overall, he says, Libya faces big political challenges. “Everything is going too slow – everything. People are starting to compare the government to a turtle. There are promises; some have been done, some have not.”

Al Harby, whose group has 250 members, says there a stigma attached to a student union. “People have this old idea about an organisation inside the university – that it’s a group of people who were kind of secret intelligence. People still fear to do the same mistake.

“Also, to be honest with you, people our age are tired, really tired. They don’t have energy any more to work hard in a union or party – they say just give me a good salary and life – I have just been waiting and waiting.”

Youth dominate Libya’s demographics; nearly half the population is under 20 years old, with an estimated unemployment rate of 30 percent.

Al Harby is happy with the government’s recent promise that all students will receive a 60 dollar monthly stipend, but concedes he doesn’t know how the funds will be distributed.

Posing a similar quandary is the lack of student awareness about the mechanics and content of the electoral process – rules, registration, political party and independent candidate platforms, public forums and debates. Libya’s national elections are due in June.

The winners of this critical election will subsequently form a committee to draw up the constitution.

Lujeena, 19, along with fellow student, Rula, 22, are two of the few women on campus that do not wear hijab.

“We hope they will apply Sharia as there is no danger in that,” says Lujeena. “But if they use the name of Islam to prohibit things – that’s what we are afraid of. Basically if women cannot drive, if they take away our freedom, make us wear hijab.

“Islamic groups are very active on the campus as well as in the neighbourhoods,” Lujeena adds.

“Women today should take positions in the government, but not the presidency,” comments classmate Basher Al Jfeiry, 22. “Because of the Gaddafi mentality, and how men are going to see it. If a woman will be the president of Libya they won’t go for it. Hopefully in the future this will change.”

The crowd in Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square (formerly Green Square) at the recent Feb. 17 anniversary of the uprising was remarkably festive, with men, women and children lighting floating lanterns to express joy over their new hard-earned freedom.

Haja Saber and her best friend, Rowaida Mokhtar, both young English students, were in the crowd celebrating with their families. They are adamant about gender roles in a new Libya.

“We have high goals as women, and we can do some of the men’s jobs,” says Saber. “But men have the big power.”

Mokhtar agrees. “Women should stay in their homes. They could do small things like being a teacher – but limited jobs. The country is about men, not women,” she adds.

This does not fit the agenda of Issraa Murabit, 20. She is a dynamic leader with the local NGO, Voice of Libyan Women, that emphasises women’s access to healthcare, education and public understanding of gender-based violence.

The organisation is practical in setting out what it can achieve. It believes shelter houses for women will be difficult to implement in a conservative society, and that women tend to distrust hotlines – one of which was set up by the former Gaddafi regime, but used to abuse, rather than help, vulnerable females in distress.

Educating Libyan women about the electoral process, political transparency, and gender representation are primary to the organisation’s goal.

The NTC leadership agreed under pressure from women’s groups to scrap a ten percent quota initially proposed for women in the electoral law. Now the country will be split into constituencies based on geography and demographics, with 120 seats going to individuals and 80 to political parties.

Men and women will share equal representation in the amount of seats won by each political party; and women’s groups are banking on the potential of a larger female voice because of this.

As for youth participation: “There are two sides of a coin,” Murabit says. “One, youth have been raised not to take action. The mentality of a lot of youth is, why isn’t the government listening to us?

“Two, the government isn’t listening to them. Right now it’s an older guys’ game, those who have been waiting 42 years. But they should be involving and recruiting youth with energy.”

Excerpt:

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.

IOM estimates that one million migrant workers were in Libya sending remittances home before the crisis, a heavy footprint for a Libyan population of under seven million.

Early on in the uprising, workers from Asia, the Middle East, and neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt fled across Libya’s borders. But Somali and Eritrean political refugees continued to arrive in Tripoli throughout the war; braving the harrowing journey north through Sudan.

IOM’s current flights are now filled with West Africans who traversed Niger and Chad to Libya seeking a better economic future, but whose ultimate hardships have forced them to return.

At Mitiga, many Nigerians don the brand new green sports jackets and shoes given to them by IOM, with their meagre possessions stuffed into plastic suitcases and shopping bags.

“The major problem is citizenship verification and temporary travel documentation,” explains Jeremy Haslam, IOM’s mission chief in Libya. “If they don’t have their documents – which I can say is (true for) over 90 percent – the first thing we have to do, before we can even think about repatriation, is confirm where they are from.”

While a few Nigerians look relieved to return home and laugh with comrades, the majority are in despair. After a costly and arduous car trip with smugglers over the desert into Libya, they have spent most days searching for piecemeal day labour, and living in perpetual fear of being harassed, robbed and detained by the Libyan militias policing the streets. They will now return to families – often indebted to smugglers – empty-handed.

“When I got to Tripoli I worked at a car wash and got up to 50 Libyan Dinars (40 dollars) a day,” says Dennis, a soft-spoken 24-year old. “When the war came however, it was hell. I lost my passport and money to the militia. They arrested me for 20 days and beat me up. During the war the militias were always stopping me, so I stayed indoors.”

Migrants interviewed by IPS often had their passports confiscated or lost early on, and none possessed entry visas. Libya is not a destination country for most, but a stepping-stone to Europe. While stigma towards Sub-Saharan migrants may have lessened since the war – when Muammar Gaddafi employed black mercenaries to fight against the rebels – racism is still pervasive, they say.

Many Nigerians at the airport terminal know each other. Each forked out around 1,200 dollars for a dangerous boat ride to Europe late last year, only to be apprehended by Libyan authorities while at sea and jailed in Tripoli’s Ain Zara prison for the past three months.

One among them is Shauna, a 38 year-old mother to daughters Angel, 4, and Blessed, 1. She was heavily pregnant when her husband reached Italy by himself at the start of Libya’s conflict. She gave birth to Blessed in an apartment in Tripoli, and then paid for a boat ride.

She was arrested with both daughters, and all three spent time in prison. “I don’t have any money,” Shauna says, opening her fake leather handbag full of torn, waterlogged documents and children’s drawings. “What am I to do?”

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that roughly 50,000 people attempted to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2011, and close to 2,000 drowned. Rumours persist that Gaddafi encouraged the crossings to Europe in retribution over NATO strikes. However, the numbers are small in the context of last year’s overall migration from Libya; the largest in the region since World War II.

“It’s a very complicated picture,” says IOM’s Haslam. “Migrants may have been moved from a basement of a house where they were protected for some time, and then whoever was protecting them couldn’t handle it any longer. They pass them to the next entity, person, group, militia – and they are bouncing all over the place. They may have been working in forced labour to earn their keep.

“Maybe some opportunistic types have seen they can actually trade migrants,” says Haslam. “It gets into the whole debt-bondage deal. Migrants are being sold on now for 260 – 800 LD (208 – 642 dollars) per person. You come across enough cases to see a trend. We saw a discount on one particular day of 21,000 LD (16,875 dollars) for 78 people – that’s a knocked-down price for West Africans, with women and children among them.”

Economic and political refugees now face another new threat. Libya’s minister for labour, Mustafa Ali Rugibani, has declared a Mar. 4 expulsion deadline for irregular workers. Despite the lack of a transparent system to process people in place, he says, “if they are not legalised they will be deported.”

“I hope they won’t expel people who should not be expelled, such as asylum seekers and refugees, or people in need of international protection,” says Emmanuel Gignac, UNHCR’s mission head in Libya.

On a sodden, winter day at a Tripoli railway yard that a Chinese company was building before the war, hundreds of refugees from Somalia and to a lesser extent, Eritrea, live in ramshackle housing. The government-owned property is now ‘managed’ by a local militia, replete with 4×4 trucks patrolling with anti-aircraft guns, and a detention cell.

This militia is entrepreneurial – charging refugees 24 dollars each per month to stay, and assigning them laminate ID cards. They offer ‘protection’ and paid daily labour – as well as harassment, the residents claim.

Seventeen-year-old Ayan is originally from the war-torn Ogaden region in southeast Ethiopia, but had been living in Mogadishu. It took her seven months to reach Libya, and after some boys accidentally hit her during an overcrowded car ride through the desert, she developed physical pain that won’t go away. Her friend, Fawza, 20, is also from Mogadishu. “In Somalia, there is forced marriage and no education. Every day people are dying from the war,” she says.

All the residents interviewed by IPS say they want to go to Europe, despite the fact that 15 recently washed-up bodies from a shipwreck were Somalis from their camp.

“I am going to Italy, I have many friends there,” exclaims Theodras from Eritrea, who is able to find work three days a week loading trucks. When asked about the labour ministry’s threat of expulsion, he replies: “Who cares – we will get to where we are going.”

Meanwhile, across Tripoli in an Italian-era Catholic church a festive crowd gathers in glittering gowns and headdresses. This is a Nigerian wedding, replete with traditional musicians, food, and a chance for dancing, gossip and laughter. On this rare morning, the tight-knit migrant community can forget their daily hardships, at least for an hour. (END)

By Rebecca Murray and - -
TRIPOLI, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

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.

A rare moment of joy at a Nigerian wedding in a Tripoli church. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

Early on in the uprising, workers from Asia, the Middle East, and neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt fled across Libya’s borders. But Somali and Eritrean political refugees continued to arrive in Tripoli throughout the war; braving the harrowing journey north through Sudan.

IOM’s current flights are now filled with West Africans who traversed Niger and Chad to Libya seeking a better economic future, but whose ultimate hardships have forced them to return.

At Mitiga, many Nigerians don the brand new green sports jackets and shoes given to them by IOM, with their meagre possessions stuffed into plastic suitcases and shopping bags.

“The major problem is citizenship verification and temporary travel documentation,” explains Jeremy Haslam, IOM’s mission chief in Libya. “If they don’t have their documents – which I can say is (true for) over 90 percent – the first thing we have to do, before we can even think about repatriation, is confirm where they are from.”

While a few Nigerians look relieved to return home and laugh with comrades, the majority are in despair. After a costly and arduous car trip with smugglers over the desert into Libya, they have spent most days searching for piecemeal day labour, and living in perpetual fear of being harassed, robbed and detained by the Libyan militias policing the streets. They will now return to families – often indebted to smugglers – empty-handed.

“When I got to Tripoli I worked at a car wash and got up to 50 Libyan Dinars (40 dollars) a day,” says Dennis, a soft-spoken 24-year old. “When the war came however, it was hell. I lost my passport and money to the militia. They arrested me for 20 days and beat me up. During the war the militias were always stopping me, so I stayed indoors.”

Migrants interviewed by IPS often had their passports confiscated or lost early on, and none possessed entry visas. Libya is not a destination country for most, but a stepping-stone to Europe. While stigma towards Sub-Saharan migrants may have lessened since the war – when Muammar Gaddafi employed black mercenaries to fight against the rebels – racism is still pervasive, they say.

Many Nigerians at the airport terminal know each other. Each forked out around 1,200 dollars for a dangerous boat ride to Europe late last year, only to be apprehended by Libyan authorities while at sea and jailed in Tripoli’s Ain Zara prison for the past three months.

One among them is Shauna, a 38 year-old mother to daughters Angel, 4, and Blessed, 1. She was heavily pregnant when her husband reached Italy by himself at the start of Libya’s conflict. She gave birth to Blessed in an apartment in Tripoli, and then paid for a boat ride.

She was arrested with both daughters, and all three spent time in prison. “I don’t have any money,” Shauna says, opening her fake leather handbag full of torn, waterlogged documents and children’s drawings. “What am I to do?”

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that roughly 50,000 people attempted to cross the Mediterranean by boat in 2011, and close to 2,000 drowned. Rumours persist that Gaddafi encouraged the crossings to Europe in retribution over NATO strikes. However, the numbers are small in the context of last year’s overall migration from Libya; the largest in the region since World War II.

“It’s a very complicated picture,” says IOM’s Haslam. “Migrants may have been moved from a basement of a house where they were protected for some time, and then whoever was protecting them couldn’t handle it any longer. They pass them to the next entity, person, group, militia – and they are bouncing all over the place. They may have been working in forced labour to earn their keep.

“Maybe some opportunistic types have seen they can actually trade migrants,” says Haslam. “It gets into the whole debt-bondage deal. Migrants are being sold on now for 260 – 800 LD (208 – 642 dollars) per person. You come across enough cases to see a trend. We saw a discount on one particular day of 21,000 LD (16,875 dollars) for 78 people – that’s a knocked-down price for West Africans, with women and children among them.”

Economic and political refugees now face another new threat. Libya’s minister for labour, Mustafa Ali Rugibani, has declared a Mar. 4 expulsion deadline for irregular workers. Despite the lack of a transparent system to process people in place, he says, “if they are not legalised they will be deported.”

“I hope they won’t expel people who should not be expelled, such as asylum seekers and refugees, or people in need of international protection,” says Emmanuel Gignac, UNHCR’s mission head in Libya.

On a sodden, winter day at a Tripoli railway yard that a Chinese company was building before the war, hundreds of refugees from Somalia and to a lesser extent, Eritrea, live in ramshackle housing. The government-owned property is now ‘managed’ by a local militia, replete with 4×4 trucks patrolling with anti-aircraft guns, and a detention cell.

This militia is entrepreneurial – charging refugees 24 dollars each per month to stay, and assigning them laminate ID cards. They offer ‘protection’ and paid daily labour – as well as harassment, the residents claim.

Seventeen-year-old Ayan is originally from the war-torn Ogaden region in southeast Ethiopia, but had been living in Mogadishu. It took her seven months to reach Libya, and after some boys accidentally hit her during an overcrowded car ride through the desert, she developed physical pain that won’t go away. Her friend, Fawza, 20, is also from Mogadishu. “In Somalia, there is forced marriage and no education. Every day people are dying from the war,” she says.

All the residents interviewed by IPS say they want to go to Europe, despite the fact that 15 recently washed-up bodies from a shipwreck were Somalis from their camp.

“I am going to Italy, I have many friends there,” exclaims Theodras from Eritrea, who is able to find work three days a week loading trucks. When asked about the labour ministry’s threat of expulsion, he replies: “Who cares – we will get to where we are going.”

Meanwhile, across Tripoli in an Italian-era Catholic church a festive crowd gathers in glittering gowns and headdresses. This is a Nigerian wedding, replete with traditional musicians, food, and a chance for dancing, gossip and laughter. On this rare morning, the tight-knit migrant community can forget their daily hardships, at least for an hour.

Excerpt:

Spent ordnance at the Misrata war memorial. Credit:Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
MISRATA, Libya, Feb 25 2012 (IPS)

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.

“The elections were great,” says family man and aid worker Mohammed Amer, 31. “They went very smoothly. I went to the centre and elected someone, and my wife elected someone else,” he laughs. “It was like a big celebration. Everyone was happy. It is especially great for old men and women to see this.”

The 28 winners from a total of 242 candidates now form Misrata’s local government. These tangible results contrast with what is widely perceived as an opaque and complex national electoral process announced by the National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Tripoli. The NTC have slated elections in June for a national assembly, which will pick a committee to draw up Libya’s constitution.

Misrata, Libya’s third largest city with an estimated 300,000 residents, is still recovering from a brutal siege last year. A street side museum commemorates the city’s victorious role in the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in October. The memorial is crowded with spent ordnance, memorabilia scrawled with graffiti, identification cards belonging to Gaddafi’s mercenary fighters, and a wall lined with pictures of Misrata’s dead and disappeared.

Multi-storey buildings remain pockmarked or gutted, especially along Tripoli Street, the main commercial artery. Queues are omnipresent outside banks to withdraw limited amounts of cash, and at gas stations. Egyptian migrant workers stand patiently at busy intersections holding paint cans and brushes to advertise their services, and a few business owners pour savings into the reconstruction of their small shops.

But Misrata, like other cities in Libya, has yet to receive reconstruction funds from the transitional government. Houses and businesses, including those owned by the previous government, lie damaged and dormant.

Mohammed Abdullah Ashab has sunk over 20,000 dollars into rehabilitating an upscale bookshop and a boutique filled with glittering gowns. These stores are in stark contrast to the piles of rubble and scrawled graffiti facing them.

“The NTC came to look at the damage,” he says. “But we won’t be compensated until a government is established. I am doing the reconstruction out of my own pocket.”

Atiya Al-Dreini, administration director for Misrata’s executive committee, and a winning candidate in the local elections, proudly shows off the refurbished Ottoman-era building housing the municipal offices. A destroyed wing is walled off; strewn with rubble and garbage. A brand new police car and two newly recruited traffic officers stand in the middle of the street in front.

“There is no national reconstruction budget yet,” Dreini says, noting that they took the money to clean up the office out of the current operating budget. “The committee to evaluate building reconstruction has finished its work, but is just waiting to include some people who fled their houses and are returning.

“This all takes time,” Dreini adds. “We had 42 years of corruption and need to break with the past. We are changing the whole system of the country, and this needs big money.”

Another stumbling block was bleakly illustrated in an Amnesty International report released this month. The report also covered Misrata, and warns that militias are one of the biggest threats to Libya today:

“Hundreds of armed militias, widely hailed in Libya as heroes for their role in toppling the former regime, are largely out of control. Their actions, and the refusal of many to disarm or join regular forces, are threatening to destabilise Libya, hinder the much-needed building of accountable state institutions based on the rule of law…”

“Most (brigade) members want to return to their professions – Misrata is a commercial region,” says Dreini. “Even during the tyrant’s day, most people didn’t want to join the security or police services. The mentality is still like that. But when they hear of clashes, like in Bani Walid, they will be ready to fight and join back with their brigades.”

Hasan Al-Homa, 31, sits outside a large sports complex with half a dozen young men in military fatigues and guns – part of an affiliated 200 militia that fall under Misrata’s military council leadership. He left his factory job to join a brigade during last year’s war. He wears the militia’s name on a laminated identification card.

Homa was wounded by a sniper during a ferocious battle in Misrata’s Tripoli Street, but recuperated in time to participate in the fall of Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte. He is married and has a two-month-old daughter. He is ready to return to his old job “once the national elections are over,” he says. “Even then, if there is a big (military) operation, we will join up to do it together.”

“We have about 200 brigades,” says Misrata’s military council head, Ramadan Ali Zarmouh, who reports directly to Tripoli’s Ministry of Defence. “Some rebels have gone back to their normal lives, but the brigades themselves still exist.

“Everyone knows that the brigades are temporary and must be dissolved at some point, and go back under police, military or civilian life,” he says. “We are currently establishing committees to work on short-term contracts for the Ministry of Defence. Those starting out will make 600 Libyan Dinars (around 480 dollars).”

International Crisis Group researcher Bill Lawrence is doubtful about an immediate capacity to rebuild the national army. “In Libya’s exceptional case there are no foreign troops or peacekeepers. So they are going to have to bring people in from the outside as trainers.

“No matter how many times the militias say they are going to disband, it’s not going to happen. The government doesn’t have strong institutions and is going to have to live with these militias, who are not ideological, but are defending turf and local issues under the military and civil councils.” (END/IPS/MM/IP/HD/RA/RM/SS/12)

On the first anniversary of Libya’s revolution, Sirte brigade members lounge on leather couches in the lobby of the upscale Mahari Hotel, supervising its reconstruction. A base for the Misrata rebels during October’s fierce fighting, the hotel is notorious as the site where 65 alleged Gaddafi loyalists were executed on its seafront grounds.

Two Sirte residents in badly damaged District 2. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

“This hotel was full of bodies and blood and so we volunteered to clean it up,” says Monam Abdallah Bashir, a local construction company owner and opposition fighter against Gaddafi’s forces.

Hundreds of civilians, loyalists and anti-Gaddafi forces were killed and wounded during the battle in Sirte, which ended Gaddafi’s 42-year rule.

Since Gaddafi’s violent death on Oct. 20 last year, Bashir’s brigade is one of a handful in Sirte allied with Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) trying to maintain security in the devastated and emotionally fraught town.

“I once paid a bribe in order to build a road for Gaddafi,” Bashir says. “I joined the fighting because I was 100 percent convinced this guy shouldn’t lead because he was corrupted.”

“It is not safe now, so we cannot put down our weapons,” says fellow fighter Feraj Hassan. “If the government pours in money, then things will get better. The biggest challenge is security, and then housing. But nothing has happened yet.”

While most of Libya is celebrating their newly won freedom after the overthrow of a brutal dictator, a few historically pro-Gaddafi towns like Sirte are the exception.

Home to his small tribe, Gaddafi invested heavily in what was the small village of Sirte and its residents over the years, to the detriment of other coastal cities like Misrata and Benghazi. He envisioned a ‘United States of Africa’ with Sirte at its administrative core, and built vast, sprawling structures like the Ougadougou Conference Centre.

Nearly four months after the end of battle, three of Sirte’s neighbourhoods, including District 2, the final stronghold for Gaddafi loyalists, are reduced to rubble and littered with unexploded ordnance. Only 60 percent of the town’s pre-war population remains, pro-Gaddafi graffiti is scrawled over cinderblock walls, and a GRAD rocket was found lodged in a main city street as recent as this week.

“We are finding a variety of munitions, it’s quite staggering,” says Max Dyck, programme manager for the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) in Libya. “Finding them is not hard. The hard part is trying to coordinate with the locals. When you go in you can’t just plant a flag and say we are going to start clearance. You have to break the ice – you produce and gain trust. It’s a slow process.”

“In Sirte the people are very angry. It is very ‘green’ and they are not scared of saying this,” says Michael Morrison, area coordinator in Sirte and Misrata for the international development organisation, the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED). “Sirte really feels like they’ve been left out by the NTC, who are late coming to the most damaged city,” he says. “Pre-war Gaddafi there were perceptions that Sirte benefited a lot from handouts.”

During the fighting, ACTED was present on the outskirts of town. “When we were there to help internally displaced persons (IDPs), some loyalists refused to accept help from us,” Morrison says. “Reconciliation will be a long process.”

Fifteen young men in bright orange jackets work on the seafront road lined with shelled out buildings, clearing spent ammunition and debris and leveling out the tarmac. ACTED pays residents a daily wage of 30 dollars for help clearing their town.

Hassan Alswaey, a 37-year-old computer engineer, says he is proud of community involvement to clean up their neighbourhood. “Now it is a country after war, and many people have died or run away. Many of those in the houses have left, and feel bad. Before this I lived side by side with my neighbours – it’s very hard.”

The head of Sirte’s local administration, Mohammed Kablan, has been working on critical short-term issues like shelter and food distribution, but says Sirte has not received money and that residents are impatient.

Bill Lawrence, researcher for the International Crisis Group, believes the reconstruction of Sirte should be considered a long-term goal, after democratic elections usher in legitimate representatives.

“For Sirte, and Bin Walid, and other ghost towns – there is an argument for fast action, but we are arguing against fast action. The NTC is relatively weak with legitimacy issues,” he says. “There needs to be more openness and transparency. This has got to happen immediately.

“In the case of Sirte, the debate is whether to reconstruct. I am saying the residents should decide, and build it as a symbol of the new Libya,” says Lawrence.

Lawrence cites the lack of cash flow into the country’s banks and unpaid government employee salaries as critical. “The humanitarian crisis is immediate,” he adds. “IDPs, detainees, food and housing.”

For Mohammed Kablan, another concern is the integration of local military brigades into formal institutions. “Around the country, we are trying to find the right mechanism – whether to put people into the army or the police.”

However, Kablan adds, “There is a controversial issue between pro and anti Gaddafi groups inside the city. It holds us back a bit – it’s a problem in itself.”

The NTC have recently agreed upon an electoral law, and national elections for a constitution-making body are scheduled for June. Subsequent general elections are likely to be held in early 2013.

Georg Charpentier, the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General with the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), believes “there is little common knowledge on about electoral law and process…(The NTC) needs to reach out and explain.

“It is risky to go into a competitive process like an election with a disjointed security environment. Some argue that we should go into a political process after the brigades have been transformed. On the other hand, the electoral timeline is very short and brigades fill the security vacuum.”

A red flare lights up the moonless night at a remote military outpost in southern Kandahar, a signal to land for the incoming helicopter. Bordering Pakistan, this desolate strip of desert is deadly, especially during peak ‘fighting season’ every summer between NATO-ISAF military forces and the Taliban.

A gunner in an MRAP. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

U.S. troops with a stretcher rush toward the hovering Blackhawk dispatched alongside armed ‘chaser’ helicopters from Kandahar Air Field (KAF), a 20-minute flight away. Medics rapidly load in a pale but stable 20-year-old soldier whose armoured vehicle hit one of the region’s ubiquitous improvised explosive devices (IEDs), its shrapnel ripping up his left leg.

“IEDs are the most common call we get,” says Sgt. Megan Bergman, a 22-year-old medic with the 52nd Aviation Regiment’s ‘Artic Dustoff’ company from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, and assigned to KAF to respond to the past year’s record-breaking attacks.

“They just blow the body to pieces – blows your limbs and breaks your body, and burns too. When you have dismounted IED (attacks) you only get one or two casualties, but in an MRAP (mine resistant ambush protected) or Stryker vehicle you get five or so,” she explains.

Senior medic First Sgt. Jeffrey Pinnell, who has served on three continents, including the war in Iraq, agrees. “You can look at war ever since I joined the army and you won’t see the same traumatic injuries as you do here.”

KAF is the largest military base for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and a priority destination in Afghanistan’s south for the critically wounded before they are transported to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany.

TGI Fridays and Nathan’s Hotdog franchises, souvenir shops, a running track, hockey rink and basketball court lie next to the world’s busiest single runway, where medivac helicopters jostle for priority over fighter jets, armed drones, troop carriers, commercial craft and small planes belonging to the U.S. embassy, NATO and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and the United Nations.

On the side of the tarmac, body bags are discreetly unloaded from military craft outside KAF’s morgue, tucked behind NATO’s new state-of-the-art ‘Roll 3’ hospital run by the U.S. Navy to handle the influx of serious injuries.

The Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) documents a record-breaking 13,983 operations by armed opposition groups in 2011 – the highest in the past five years of the war. Forty-four percent of these attacks are from IEDs and indirect fire of mortars and rockets.

According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS), total Coalition Force fatalities in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion have reached 2,876, with U.S. troops accounting for 1,730. There were 252 deaths from IEDs in 2011: just over 51 percent of the year’s total fatalities.

“The IEDs here are much larger,” says Cpt. John Mastalski, a U.S. Navy doctor in KAF’s Roll 3 trauma bay, who also worked in Iraq. “It seems over time as we make bigger armour, the IEDs become bigger.”

“We see a number of people that need triple amputations, double amputations, and single amputations are not uncommon at all,” says Role 3 Commanding Officer, Cpt. Bruce Meneley.

“Probably the biggest change to saving lives is the training of the army medics,” Cpt. Meneley adds. “They are trained to a level they have never been historically. We would see people in Iraq that bled to death basically. Now the use of tourniquets is so prevalent and so well taught, we are getting people alive despite tremendous injuries.”

Cameron Kerr, 24, was a platoon leader in the 1-75 Calvary Regiment based on Forward Operating Base Wilson in volatile Zahari district, Kandahar, in 2010 and 2011. Because IEDs are commonly planted on roads, Kerr often led patrols that jumped walls and waded through orchards.

It was in a grape field last February that he stepped on an IED, the blast throwing him five feet away. A medivac unit soon flew him to KAF’s Roll 3 hospital, where his left leg, outfitted with a tourniquet, was immediately amputated below the knee.

Kerr returned to the U.S. for rehabilitation at the military’s Walter Reed hospital. “There were just as many double amputees, and several triple amps. It gave me perspective,” he says. He laughs as he says those with single amputations were nicknamed “papercut”.

While the CRS records 14,342 total injuries from the 2001 invasion until October 2011, real numbers are suspected to be much higher. These include undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs), often debilitating mental damage from the force of blasts.

The U.S. Department of Defence says 229,106 troops have suffered variations of TBI from October 2001 to November 2011, based on electronic health records of soldiers’ screening and diagnosis test results. The Department for Veteran’s Affairs officially estimates up to one in five soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan this past decade suffer from PTSD.

Graham Clumpner, 27, is an ex Army Ranger who served in eastern Afghanistan. In February 2005 after a night raid in a village mistakenly stretched until dawn, Clumpner’s humvee was rocketed, and flipped. He was hurled into a wall and blacked out for what he describes as over ten minutes. When he regained consciousness he drove back to the base. “It was just actions, I was doing what I was told,” he says. He finished the remaining two months of his rotation.

Clumpner says his company was asked to fill out forms evaluating their mental health before they returned to the U.S. He didn’t know what TBI was. “We were told if we replied ‘yes’ to the question, ‘are you angry?’ we would be kept in country,” he says. All the troops he was with marked ‘no’.

Clumpner suffered short-term memory loss, mood swings, and depression. He is grateful for the understanding of his college professors, which enabled him to graduate college.

He also credits Iraqi Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which provided him a strong support network. “We have developed good ways to keep people alive,” he says. “But when you get back to the U.S. there is no rehabilitation, especially as you are an individual, and removed from your unit.”

Last month the first cargo train crossed the ‘Friendship Bridge’ from Uzbekistan to the border town Hairatan in northern Afghanistan, and rolled along 75 kilometres of newly laid track to Mazar-e-Sharif.

The railroad at Hairatan. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

The importance of the northern trade route – which connects Central Asia’s Northern Distribution Network (NDN) to Afghanistan – has increased since the U.S. and Pakistan’s relationship drastically soured.

Since the bombing of Pakistani troops by coalition forces in December, Afghanistan’s two major border crossings with Pakistan at Torkham and Spin Boldak have been closed to military trucks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The focus now is on the border crossing at Hairatan, which currently receives 70 percent of Afghanistan’s fuel imports, and 60 percent of the coalition forces’ non-lethal goods.

The small stretch of railroad – built by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and run by the Uzbek government until Afghanistan creates a rail authority – marks the first phase of an ambitious national rail system to shadow the country’s ring road, linking Afghanistan to its Central Asia neighbours and beyond.

The planned transportation route is the centerpiece for what the U.S. optimistically envisions as a ‘new Silk Road’ that would serve as a profitable regional trade corridor for the war-torn and heavily aid-dependent country once coalition forces withdraw in 2014. It would also play a key role in transporting Afghanistan’s natural resources out.

Afghanistan’s rich resources – which include iron ore, copper, gold, cobalt, lithium, oil and gas – were identified for exploitation by the Soviet Union decades ago, and further mapped out by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in conjunction with President Hamid Karzai’s government. The U.S. estimates Afghanistan’s untapped mineral wealth at 1 trillion dollars.

Among the major concession bids that Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines has so far awarded is a 30-year lease for the Mes Aynak copper mine in Logar province – with an estimated mineral deposit worth up to 88 billion dollars – to the state-owned China Metallurgical Group for 3 billion dollars.

An Indian mining consortium with state ties and Canada’s Kilo Goldmine Ltd. won the gigantic 1.8 billion metric ton Hajigak iron ore mine in Bamiyan. And a 700 million dollar oil and gas deal has just been inked with the China National Petroleum Corporation in the country’s northern Sari Pul and Faryab provinces.

Local watchdog Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA) says over 100 small, medium and large mine agreements have been signed by public and private companies so far.

“Right now up for bid is gold and copper,” Abdul Jalil Jumriany, director of policy and promotion at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines tells IPS. “The gold deposit is in Badakhshan, and then we have another gold and copper deposit that USGS says could be the best in the world, in Ghazni.”

However, the country’s rugged terrain, widespread insurgency and decades-long insecurity pose a formidable challenge to the successful extraction and export of this precious and heavy cargo.

In consultation with the Ministry of Mines, the second phase of the ADB railroad project would construct an estimated 500 million dollar railroad following Afghanistan’s northern border with Turkmenistan, from Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat near the Iranian border, passing oil and gas fields. A feasibility study for the railroad will be conducted this year, and funds are being raised for the project.

“We are very aware of the high risk involved in building a railroad and keeping it running, and security is one of our biggest concerns,” says Juan Miranda, director of ADB’s Central and West Asia Department, in an interview with IPS. He names Japan as the rail’s largest donor, followed by various European countries, the U.S. and New Zealand.

Besides ADB’s ambitious agenda, the Indian consortium at Hajigak has just announced plans to build a separate rail link through the centre of the country to the Iranian coast. And a high-profile side deal in the Aynak Chinese concession agreement – still unpublished since it was signed in 2008 – promises to construct a railroad line from the mine, just south of Kabul, to the northern border “if feasible”.

“This Mazar line will go to Bamiyan, where there is a huge iron ore deposit, and then through Kabul, where it connects to the copper mine at Aynak, and then connects to Torkham on the Pakistani border,” explains Jumriany.

However, the China Metallurgical Group has not started studying the construction project yet. “If they build it, they will. If they don’t, we will,” says Miranda, who estimates Afghanistan’s entire rail network to be up and running within the decade, at a cost of roughly 1 billion dollars.

Thomas Ruttig from the Afghanistan Analyst’s Network (AAN) has his doubts. “I think that railroads in particular are very vulnerable in a situation of war which does not look as if it is going to end soon,” he says. “This is not to speak about the terrain which would make building a rail from central Afghanistan (Hajigak and Aynak) something like an engineering miracle.”

Javed Noorani, a researcher for IWA, flags crucial issues like those associated with the Aynak copper mine. There are divisive land disputes between community members who were promised compensation from the government to move, a grave threat of water depletion from mining activities, as well as a vulnerable archeological site in the copper mine’s midst.

“Social fragmentation is already happening. The huge mass of land is already dividing people,” says Noorani, who believes the Ministry of Mines tries to prevent his trips to inspect the community. “There is discord between people. They start suspecting each other.”

“In Afghanistan, international companies need Afghan partners,” says Ruttig. “Many mines already operate at a very low level technically, and are often owned or run by people who are either warlords or commanders or linked to them. This also does not bode well for social and economic sustainability.”

Also questioned is Afghanistan’s geo-political role in the region once the coalition forces withdraw. The former Soviet Union states, Iran and Pakistan already export goods on a massive scale into Afghanistan, and a predominance of Chinese and Indian companies are now reaping the largest Afghan concessions, with a scarcity of European companies, and none from the US, securing bids.

Jumriany from the Ministry of Mines disagrees. “We have a very good team from the U.S. Department of Defence called the Task Force for Business Stability Operation that is helping us promote these tenders,” he says. “We have a multi-cultural investment coming together. That’s why we are going to London and Canada next, to promote these investments.”

Soma was a teenager in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif when her grandfather arranged her marriage to a husband she had never met.

Brought up in a household with no father, Soma felt she had no choice when she underwent the traditional wedding ceremony and moved to her father-in-law’s home in Kabul to start a new life. But upon her arrival, she was shocked to learn she had been married to an eight-year-old boy, and was forced to work as a prostitute instead.

Every night Soma’s father-in-law hosted parties, where for 200 dollars visiting men could eat, drink alcohol and watch Soma and her two sister-in-laws dance. The girls would then be forced to sleep with up to four men in one night. Soma said she was regularly injected for her blood, which was then displayed on bed sheets as ‘proof’ to clients she was a virgin.

Soma was lucky. After two years one client took pity on her and helped her escape to the police, where she reported the crime before being sent to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Her safety however is not guaranteed; she is now back in the home of her grandfather in Mazar-e-Sharif, and the man who subjected her to sex slavery in Kabul has eluded arrest.

“If you compare sex trafficking in Afghanistan with other developed countries you definitely will see some differences,” says Nigina Mamadjonova, a programme manager for the International Organisation of Migration (IOM), which tracks trafficking cases nationwide.

“For instance, post-Soviet Union countries are mainly the sending countries for sex trafficking. I cannot say it doesn’t happen here – it happens sometimes – but it has another nature. Deceiving relatives are doing it; it is more family-orientated. It’s mostly internal, and is not so organised like in other countries.

“Here we see many forced or early marriages,” explains Mamadjonova. “Families will sell their women and they will work as prostitutes. The reason we don’t see many cases is because of the nature of the culture. These women don’t have options because a lot of the time the families won’t accept them back because of shame. And they cannot approach social workers or organisations for help as they might be ultimately killed.”

Afghanistan’s decades-long violence has resulted in the displacement of millions, and chronic poverty, and increased the vulnerability of women and children sold into forced early marriages before the legal age of 16 years, and harmful labour.

A recent survey by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) found that over 60 percent of women and children trafficking was internal. Of those, 45 percent were girls, and 38 percent were women. Domestic exploitation was the biggest motivation for internal trafficking, followed by prostitution.

In 2009 the Afghan government enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law, which criminalises acts like forced marriage. In July this year the Combating Kidnapping and Human Trafficking law was passed.

However, many human rights activists point to the lack of capacity of government ministries to implement the laws effectively; it is often the female victim who is branded a criminal by the justice system, and imprisoned.

“Because of a weak and corrupt government, it is hard to prevent human, sex and child trafficking, and the judicial system is not paying attention to this – saying it is more of a family issue, not a court issue,” says Hamid Safwat, regional manager for the Cooperation Centre for Afghanistan (CCA) in Mazar-e-Sharif.

CCA recently protected a girl who was kidnapped at age 12 at the city’s famous shrine of Hazrat Ali – commonly known as ‘The Blue Mosque’ – and held for eight months by men she described as government officials. She was raped repeatedly before she escaped and hid out at a shelter for a couple years, in fear of being killed for shaming her family. She is now married with a child, and is reported to have re-established a relationship with her mother and father.

Across town, the Women and Youth Support Centre gathers names from the police of suspected prostitutes, and pays house calls to deliver aid and advice.

“Some of their husbands are pushing them to make money by sex,” says the centre’s director, Nilofar Sayar, who says poverty is the main driver, and that prostitutes usually work out of their family homes to feed their children. “Some of them are young girls whose fathers were pushing them. For instance, the men are addicted to drugs like heroin and hash. We study their backgrounds, and usually the father and mother were divorced, or one had died.”

Sayar recalls one of the women she met. “The husband was pushing her to have illegal sex when she got married at 15 or 16 years old. The husband was bringing strangers to the house and she was pushed to sleep with them. So she set herself on fire when she was 18 to avoid this. She is now 25, and her face, hands and neck are burned,” Sayar sighs. “She is still with her husband because she has four children.”

“Civil society organisations and clean people in the government are weak in preventing trafficking,” explains Hamid Safwat. “We are also weak in observing the level of trafficking in Afghanistan. There is not a national vision for preventing such activities. There are rules, but there is no implementation or taking action. So the rules are useless.”

Activists voice concern that Afghan women’s rights continue to be marginalised, and nowhere is gender inequality more starkly illustrated than in the country’s flawed justice system.

Afghan women in Herat. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

Yasmin’s case is one. Although the legal age for female marriage is 16 years, she was only eight when her family, in a remote area of Nangarhar province, arranged her marriage to a 60-year old man. After four unhappy years, Yasmin fled with a man she was in love with from her village.

When the couple was arrested for running away and marrying again, she was pregnant. Having her baby in prison, Yasmin has since been released. She has moved to a Kabul shelter, fearful that her family and first husband, now 70, will kill her to protect their honour.

“The first step we are planning for her is to get a divorce – she is 18 and has that right,” says Huma Safi, programme manager for Women for Afghan Women, an organisation that provides female shelters, legal and family counseling. “The second step is to arrange a proper marriage with the second husband who she loves. This marriage will decrease her husband’s sentence also. Then she will go and live with him.”

When the second Bonn Conference on Afghanistan convened on Dec. 5, Afghan women fought for a voice at the table, exactly one decade after the international community initially gathered in the German city to plan Afghanistan’s institutional road map with an emphasis on civil rights.

The priorities of Bonn II, within the context of a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of international coalition forces, is the security transition, peace talks with the Taliban and future regional relationships.

The World Bank has warned of Afghanistan’s dependency on international aid – more than 90 percent of its 17.1 billion dollar national budget – and Bonn II is a marker for cuts in donor cash. Afghan women advocates worry their projects will be some of those hard hit.

Selay Gaffar from the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), a national coalition of women’s organisations, had just three minutes at the conference to urge continued support of women’s rights. Bonn II’s concluding statement briefly linked gender equality to the Afghan constitution in governance and with peace negotiations.

Female activist have made an impact raising awareness of gender rights, and improving access to education and healthcare, mostly in urban areas. Women’s shelters have also been established, including for those released from prisons and now stigmatised from returning home, but the women in them say they don’t feel safe or have freedom of movement.

Despite these advances, a Thompson-Reuters poll released in June 2011 ranked Afghanistan as the world’s most dangerous country for women due to violence, poverty and lack of healthcare.

“From 2001 to about 2003 there was a lot of attention on women’s rights, and then it decreased,” says Huma Safi. “Our main concern is that we don’t want to go back to the situation we had 15 years ago. Not only during the Taliban, but also before the Taliban.

“During the Mujahedeen’s civil war a lot of women were raped,” she explains. “People then were so tired from war and we were forgotten by the international community.”

On the eve of Bonn II, President Hamid Karzai pardoned Gulnaz, a 21-year-old rape victim sentenced by an Afghan court for adultery, who bore a child in prison from the rape.

But the presidential pardon in the high-profile case of was an anomaly; the majority of the roughly 700 women in Afghanistan’s variously overcrowded and squalid prisons are convicted for crimes of adultery or “zina” (sex outside marriage), usually their punishment for running away from forced marriage or chronic abuse. Many have their children jailed with them.

“There are two main types of cases, with plenty of variation, you hear over and over again,” explains Heather Barr, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. “One is usually young girls about to be forced into a marriage against their will who run away to avoid it. Sometimes on their own, or sometimes with a man who helps them, but not who they are romantically involved with.

“Another category are women who have married someone almost always against their will, and there is abuse at home,” she says. “Usually physical abuse, sometimes just cruelty, and they run away. These often turn into zina cases because there might be a man accompanying them.”

Barr says that while all the women she interviewed had defence attorneys, the quality of representation appeared poor, and the trials lack investigation and proof. “Sometimes a man manages to bribe his way out, but the woman does not,” she adds.

“Zina is in the penal code, but running away is not. When I talked with judges or lawyers about this, they say that by running away the woman are at risk for zina.”

A large part of the population still relies on traditional mechanisms within communities to resolve disputes outside of the formal court system, Human Rights Watch says.

In 2009 President Karzai signed the Shia Family Law, which included provisions for 14-year-old girls to marry, and for married men to forcibly have sex with their wives. After an outcry by civil society and the international community, the Shia legislation has been amended.

The same year, the Afghan government enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law which criminalised acts like early or forced marriage and rape.

A United Nations analysis of its implementation last month says, “Judicial officials in many parts of the country have begun to use the law – but its use represents a very small percentage of how the government addresses cases of violence against women.”

Female victims like Zuhra continue to get blamed. Living in Kabul, she was 12 years old when she was married to an older man who already had three wives. He forced her into a daily living of prostitution until their house was raided. After her arrest and two-year prison sentence, she is now 17 and living in a shelter.

“We got her a divorce, but now she wants to marry again. We are trying to make her understand she has time, there is no rush,” says Huma Safi. “I cannot blame her when you are out of prison, the only option they are thinking is if you have a husband you are protected.”

*Names of women have been changed to protect their identities.

By Rebecca Murray
KABUL, Dec 16 2011 (IPS)

While Afghanistan’s violent decades-long war has claimed thousands of lives, the last known state-sanctioned execution was in June under the direct order of President Hamid Karzai.

The Pul-e-Charki prison in Kabul. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

In the subsequent groundswell of public outrage against the two surviving attackers, Zar Ajam from Pakistan and Afghan citizen Mateullah, President Karzai approved their deaths by hanging in Kabul’s notorious Pul-e-Charki prison.

“Karzai was under enormous pressure from the public that these two men should be executed,” says Horia Mosadiq, Amnesty International’s Afghanistan researcher. “There were a lot of people talking to the media pushing the government to execute these people, they really wanted to see something to happen.”

Amnesty International says 139 countries worldwide have abolished the death penalty by law or practice. But Afghanistan is not one of them. More than 100 people are currently estimated to be on Afghanistan’s death row, including some women.

“Our biggest concern is the Afghan judiciary is not able to provide a fair trial,” Mosadiq says. “First, a presumption of innocence is lacking. Second, they are not trying testimony or evidence or witnesses. Third, the police are unprofessional and normally use torture to gain confessions from the accused.

“So many people under pressure from torture may falsely confess to a crime they have not committed. Finally, corruption plays a part, and also political pressure and connections as well.”

In 2007, 15 state executions took place. And it is believed that President Karzai bowed to domestic political pressure, especially before his re-election, when he opposed a United Nations resolution for a moratorium against the death penalty in 2008.

“Although Afghan courts continue to impose death sentences, Amnesty International has not recorded executions in the country in the past two years,” the watchdog reported after the June execution took place. “The death penalty was widely used by the Taliban regime until its overthrow in 2001. The new government’s reduction in executions was welcomed by the abolitionist movement as an encouraging sign.”

Shabeer Ahmad Kamawal, director of the International Legal Foundation of Afghanistan (ILF-A), which provides pro-bono defense services for criminal detainees, claims the judicial process was unfair in one of their murder cases.

He believes in the innocence of their client, Mohammed, now on death row, who was embroiled in a violent dispute with his brother Hakim in a marriage arrangement between their children. According to Kamawal, Mohammed’s five sons killed Hakim and one of his sons in the street, and then fled. Mohammed and another son, at home during the crime, were arrested and tried for the murders instead.

“The fact is that the main doers were not found, and penalties were given to innocent people,” says Kamawal.

“Officially we don’t have a death penalty abolition campaign, but we can talk with the judge about turning the death penalty to life imprisonment,” he adds. “Abolition is not a priority right now. When you do a campaign it takes a lot of effort, and now the people won’t welcome it.”

While the central government in Kabul works to implement a national rule of law system, traditional justice is still practised, especially in rural communities.

In a high profile case last month, a widow and her daughter in eastern Ghazni were publicly stoned and shot by armed men, believed to be affiliated with the Taliban, for “moral crimes” while community members watched.

In July, the killer of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother and Kandahar’s major controversial power broker, was dealt an especially swift and brutal punishment.

Bodyguard Sardar Mohammad shot Karzai to death at close range in his office, before being killed by other bodyguards in the compound.

“It was shocking,” says Horia Mosadiq. “I was disgusted when President Karzai said the Taliban killed his brother, but that he had forgiven his killer. How could he forgive him because he was immediately killed, hung on the back of a police car and then in the bazaar.”

Mosadiq says it reminded her of the infamous murder in 1996 of the former Afghan president Najibullah, who was pulled from exile in a United Nations guest house by the invading Taliban, dragged through the streets and then publicly hung.

Mohammad Farid Hamidi, a commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), says he isn’t aware of local activists working specifically on ending the state-sanctioned death penalty, and that the AIHRC’s position is complex.

“On one side the people support it, and it’s in the context of Afghan religious and cultural issues, as well as the constitution and the criminal code,” he says.

“However, with the current status of rule of law, where there is corruption in the government, policing, the judiciary, and culture of impunity, the big concern for AIHRC is how to apply fair trials for the death penalty,” he says.

“The official stance therefore is the AIHRC asks the president and government for a moratorium, so they can stop corruption, strengthen the judiciary and government mechanisms.”

“For a long time it seemed there was an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty by the government,” says Human Rights Watch researcher Heather Barr. “But the Kabul Bank attackers was an exception to that. We don’t know if this is an isolated incident or return to using the death penalty more broadly.”

*Names in the ILF-A case have been changed to protect the client’s identity.

Excerpt:

Land has become a major source of disputes in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Rebecca Murray
NANGARHAR, Afghanistan , Dec 4 2011 (IPS)

A small plot of urban land has pitted Assadullah, 55, against an unwelcome neighbour in a bitter personal property dispute that has stretched on for almost a decade.

Assadullah’s story is a common one. A working-class barber who fled Jalalabad, in Nangarhar province, to Pakistan during the Soviet war in the mid-eighties, he returned after the Taliban regime fell in 2001. There he found a strange businessman in a new house built on the 450-square metre tract that Assadullah purchased from the government before he left.

Moving his family into an old dwelling along the edge of the plot, Assadullah showed the newcomer his official land deed and receipt as proof the land was his. He says the man, flush with cash from a timber business, was friends with powerful politicians and in turn produced a “fake” customary deed.

Since then the neighbours have been locked in an acrimonious battle for ownership of the residential land, which has soared in value over the years. The men only see each other now in court.

After two failed attempts to solve the case through a Jirga – a traditional community decision-making body – Assadullah filed his claim in a government court. He won the case, but the court of appeals overturned the ruling.

Assadullah’s case now lies in the Supreme Court for a final verdict. “I am not sure if the court decision will take place soon,” he says. “I don’t believe the government; the system is complicated and the courts are corrupt.”

Nangarhar is the agricultural breadbasket of Afghanistan’s east. Its rich natural resources and major transportation route connecting Kabul to Pakistan attracts returning Afghan refugees and migrants from the more volatile surrounding provinces, as well as nomadic tribes for grazing grounds.

This huge population influx has transformed the majority Pashtun province into one of the most crowded corners of the country and hiked up the value of the land.

Almost 90 percent of Afghanistan’s mostly rural and agricultural land belongs to the government. Land allocations are classified and documented under a 2008 land law, and managed by the Afghanistan Land Authority (Arazi).

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the threat of violence over land disputes has increased dramatically. Land grabbing by corrupt government officials and warlords is endemic throughout the country, and absentee land is often resold or occupied, without the original owner’s knowledge.

In Kabul, makeshift dwellings snake up the sides of mountains, while power brokers grab prime central real estate for themselves. Last summer, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, mayor of Kandahar City, was assassinated in supposed retaliation for tearing down illegal structures built on government land.

“It is part of our culture that people kill each other over two issues,” explains Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, the Jalalabad programme manager for the governmental Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). “One is for land, and the second is women.”

“Big issues like tribes fighting the government over land is what we have problems with because there are a lot of politics involved, and if we share it with a minister, maybe that minister is involved,” Bidar says. “The price of land is getting very high, and there is a lot of corruption.”

Land disputes are most commonly fought between individuals, including family inheritance claims. Others pit the government against individuals or tribes, or tribes versus tribes.

The majority of landowners prefer to abide by customary law and resolve disputes using traditional mechanisms because it takes less time. The courts are regarded as time consuming – always an expensive undertaking for those involved – and are suspected of corruption.

The Liaison Office, an Afghan NGO that has researched land disputes, says roughly 30 percent of land ownership deeds are registered in the east, and although 85 percent are registered in the south, the documentation is out of date.

On a warm morning, local legal advisors for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Nangarhar travelled to the fertile northern district of Kus Kunar, bordering volatile Kunar province. They are consulting on the formation of a Jirga that will decide a female inheritance case.

Ten men sip tea in a circle inside a small, carpeted room. Outside is a small plot of land with livestock and bundles of hay enclosed by a high mud compound wall. The property owner’s father had died, leaving his three sons portions of land, but not the daughters. By law, one son gets twice a share as two daughters. The Jirga was called by a middle-aged daughter deciding to fight for her inheritance claim.

Town representatives, called Maliks, approved by the district judge and the Jirga, listen to all sides and then make a decision. The customary outcome will be drawn up in a document, fingerprinted, and submitted to the local court.

Chief Justice Arhamullah Nafi, in the dingy district court nearby, says they solve land disputes by both Jirga and in the court. “We face a lot of problems,” he says. “We have no transportation or electricity. Security is the main problem. The police are here, but they say they don’t belong to us.”

The most controversial and violent land dispute in Nangarhar this year has been between two Shinwari sub- tribes in the southern Achin district, and is illustrative how interwoven land disputes are with Afghanistan’s complex politics and violence.

The Sepai and Alisherkhel sub-tribes are fighting over a 15 square-kilometre strip of desert land. Although worthless as agricultural land, the influx of migrants and increasing population makes it ideal for construction.

Two years ago the Sepai were armed by the U.S. as part of a local policing programme to maintain stability. These weapons have since been used in violent clashes against the Alisherkhel instead, who complained U.S. forces and the Afghan government had taken sides in the dispute.

After a realignment of coalition and government support for the Alisherkhel, and three high profile Jirgas to resolve the dispute, the Sepai mounted an attack on Nangarhar Governor Gul Agha Sherzai in October. Coalition forces retaliated by bombing the Sepai which resulted in multiple casualties.

“I am concerned with people fighting with each other using weapons in land disputes,” says the AIHRC’s Dr. Bitar. “But there is no clear process which deters people not to use weapons.”

U.S. military sweep a street in Jalalabad in search of bombs and weapons. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
JALALABAD, Nov 30 2011 (IPS)

A night raid in Hakimabad in the heart of eastern Nangarhar province shows the face of U.S.-led presence in Afghanistan, and what it means to local people.

Qari Mohammad Bashir heard his niece scream from his backyard a little before midnight on Oct. 27. Bashir, 33, a religious leader and shopkeeper in the remote Khogyani district farming town, grabbed a torch and ran outside.

“Don’t move! We are ISAF (International Security Assistance Forces),” yelled a group of heavily armed men, who had scaled the compound’s walls and rushed towards him.

Bashir say the foreign soldiers, accompanied by Afghan interpreters, ordered him and his brother to strip and kneel outside. They were handcuffed and blindfolded. “They were behaving in a harsh manner, pulling my beard and neck and asking me if I knew certain Taliban leaders, but we didn’t know about them,” he tells IPS.

The military conducted house-to-house searches in Hakimabad all night, rummaging through furniture and confiscating weapons that inhabitants in this insecure region traditionally store for self-defence. In some cases residents interviewed by IPS claim soldiers also took their money.

At one house 18-year-old high school student Zabihullah says his father, a logistician for a government infrastructure project, had been threatened earlier by Taliban to stop work. Zabihullah thought the Taliban were attacking when the soldiers blew their door in with explosives.

Neighbour Asif Amin, a lecturer at Nangarhar University’s English Department in the provincial capital Jalalabad, says he was visiting home when his family compound was searched. “They made a mistake because these are very ordinary people. If the coalition forces sent them a request to come in for questioning they would have. They pay taxes and know the rules. This is why people can turn against them.”

That dawn, ten males – including Bashir, Zabihullah and 16-year-old high school student Raees Khan – were led blindfolded on foot to the district’s army base, then flown by helicopter to the coalition’s Forward Operating Base (FOB) Fenty in Jalalabad. Nine of them were held in small, solitary rooms and questioned over a one to three-day period about their daily activities before being released separately outside Fenty’s main gate. They were each given 20 dollars for transport home.

Bashir alone was loaded blindfolded onto a military plane and flown to what he only guesses was Bagram airfield, a common destination for U.S.-led coalition detainees. There he was questioned repeatedly about his contacts before being returned to FOB Fenty and discharged days later.

“There was faulty intelligence,” Bashir says. “We cannot ignore there are Taliban, but not all the people are Taliban. They just blast everything.” After this experience he adds, “When a chopper is hovering the children get scared and say, ‘they are coming to take you!’”

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai addressed the national Loya Jirga in Kabul Nov. 16, calling for an end to night raids conducted by the U.S. and coalition Special Operations Forces as a condition for American military presence beyond 2014.

The U.S. embassy praised the proposal by the non-binding Loya Jirga – a national assembly of 2,000 participants handpicked by government officials – which affirms American military bases on Afghan soil for years to come.

A September study by the Open Society Foundation and Afghan NGO The Liaison Office suggests that military conduct has improved in finding targets, integrating Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and reducing civilian casualties, abuse, and property destruction.

Despite these positives, the study warns insurgent attacks have not decreased and, “the dramatic increase in the number of night raids, and evidence that night raids or other operations may be more broadly targeting civilians to gather information and intelligence appear to have overwhelmed Afghan tolerance of the practice. Afghan attitudes towards night raids are as hostile as ever, even more so.”

IPS has previously documented “well over” 1,500 civilian deaths based on analysis of official U.S. and NATO night raid statistics over a ten-month period in 2010-2011.

“I think they will continue with night raids as long as they see it as successful and think it reduces civilian casualties,” Susanne Schmeidl, co-founder of The Liaison Office tells IPS.

“ISAF/NATO forces are moving towards a model of conducting all night raids with ANSF in the lead, and claim to be nearly there,” adds Peyton Cooke, The Liaison Office’s justice programme officer.

“US Special Operations Forces (operating with a degree of independence although technically under ISAF/NATO control) may or may not be moving towards this model as well,” he says. “I am not aware of their offering any public commentary on the matter, but part of their mission is to work closely with, and mentor, Afghan forces. As such, Karzai’s condition may turn out to be minimal – although, without fuller public information on U.S. SOF, that is unknowable.”

In a reaction to the Loya Jirga, on Nov. 20 an estimated 1,000 Nangarhar University students angrily took to Jalalabad’s streets demanding a stop to permanent U.S. military bases, night raids and foreign-run prisons.

Across town Rafiuddin, 36, still tries not to cry when he recounts the details surrounding the night raid at his home in Koshkaky, in the province’s Surkh Rod district, in May last year.

Just past midnight, coalition forces launched a surprise attack on the walls and roof of Rafiuddin’s house. His startled watchman raised his gun and was shot first. Then his brother Hafizuddin was instantly killed by a bullet to the head.

Finally, Habibuddin, his 17-year old son, ran to rescue his uncle and was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. He died a slow death in the garden where the family was held throughout the night. A farmer and four sons living on the property heard the chaos and rushed to help. They too were all shot. Ten civilians were killed that night.

Bound and questioned until the next morning, Rafiuddin found out the coalition forces were looking for Taliban fighters, and suspected one of the farmer’s sons. Rafiuddin, a driver for an opposition parliamentary member, says three generations of the same farming family have lived on the land, and he was unaware of any Taliban involvement.

“I told the interpreter they had just killed all the people close to me. I said, ‘Please tell them exactly what I am saying’.” The interpreter replied, “False intelligence was given about your own house…. I feel sorry for you.”