Heavily damaged and destroyed buildings on the frontline in Tripoli's Jabal Mohsen area. Credit: Shelly Kittleson /IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

In northern Lebanon’s largest city, Tripoli, Syria Street cuts through neighbourhoods that back opposite sides of the war raging in Syria, 30 km away. Clashes between them resumed this weekend after a cross-border rocket attack.

The frontline of the Jabal Mohsen area, overlooking the rival Bab Al-Tabbaneh, has been heavily scarred by 18 rounds of clashes since 2008. The area bears brutal signs: burnt shops, buildings pockmarked by mortar shelling, sheets of canvas riddled with bullet holes that have been hung across streets for protection from snipers.

Past checkpoints manned by the military, which was given control of security for six months after late November clashes left several dead and scores wounded, numerous schoolboys can be seen roaming Jabal Mohsen’s streets.“But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”

While Bab Al-Tabbaneh is predominantly Sunni, the majority in Jabal Mohsen is Alawite.

Lebanese from the Alawite sect, the same minority group and offshoot of Shia Islam that Syria’s Assad regime belongs to, account for approximately 11 percent of the population.

“There are no elementary or high schools here and it isn’t safe for the boys to cross into Sunni areas,” said one shop owner.

Emad Salman, a 28-year-old house painter, told IPS he had been unable to leave the area for work since November and even those requiring medical care needed army escorts to get out.

“They’re all Al-Qaeda down there,” he said. “Fifteen men who left Jabal Mohsen to go to work were stopped and shot in the legs.”

The latest round of hostilities seems to have been sparked by attacks on two Sunni mosques, allegedly by members of the Jabal Mohsen community, in late August. Two car bombs exploded in front of the mosques, killing at least 47 people and injuring over 400.

Ali Eid, founder of the community’s Alawite Arab Democratic Party, did not comply with an Oct. 30 summons to answer to charges of smuggling a key suspect in the case across the border into Syria. His son and the party’s political leader, Rifaat Eid, then allegedly made inflammatory statements against the Lebanese security services.

A number of episodes targeting Alawites ensued, followed by clashes. The city was put under the control of the army for six months on Dec. 2.

On a visit to the area, IPS found the walls of Jabal Mohsen plastered with graffiti hailing the Syrian regime. A popular “trinity” poster showing the smiling faces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, his father Hafez and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah were ubiquitous.

In impoverished Bab Al-Tabbaneh, a group of adolescents told IPS with an air of defiance that two Alawite men had been stabbed as part of a “family” feud with the Sunni community.

In the cold wintry air, boys in their early teens warmed themselves in a garage that would be invisible from the hilltop of Jabal Mohsen. They said they were “getting ready for the revolution.”

A Sunni woman wearing a headscarf showed her torched shop, in front of which soldiers stood. The woman placed much of the blame on caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati.

Lebanon’s Tripoli is the birthplace of Miqati, a Sunni in the Hezbollah-dominated March 8 political coalition and the richest man in Lebanon, who made much of his wealth through a telecommunications company that works in Syria and emerging markets. Lebanon has not had a government since late March when the one under Miqati resigned.

Mustafa Allouch, head of the Tripoli section of the Future Movement that is part of the March 14 political coalition, holds the Syrian regime and its decades-old interference in Lebanon responsible for the unrest.

Syria maintained a military presence in the country for around 30 years until 2005, when it was forced to pull out after massive protests and international pressure following the assassination of then prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Hezbollah, allied with the Assad regime and heavily funded by Iran, has never been forced to lay down its weapons, and is generally deemed more powerful than the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Allouch, chief surgeon at a local hospital, noted that Hezbollah had long openly admitted to taking part in the Syrian Civil War.

Acknowledging that a number of figures from the March 14 Coalition had also been accused of sending weapons into Syria to back the rebels, Allouch said he, too, had been accused of it – by his own cousin.

“My mother is Alawite,” he said, “and I have an uncle who is a general in the Syrian regime. He told his son this, and he believed it. I just laughed and told him that if I had the means to do so, I would,” said Allouch, who as a teenager fought as a Marxist with the Palestinian forces early in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).

In any case, the amount of arms entering Syria from Lebanon is nowhere near that coming in from Syria’s other borders, he said. “But this is Lebanon. There are weapons and ammunition planted everywhere.”

Protesters battle police in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the second anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 revolution. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS.

By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, Jan 29 2013 (IPS)

Concerns are mounting over Egypt’s future after the outbreaks of violence that marked the second anniversary of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution. Massive anti-government rallies led to ongoing clashes between protesters and security forces that have left at least 40 people dead. Cities along Egypt’s Suez Canal faced a government-declared state of emergency.

“The revolutionary fervour that erupted on Friday in ten out of Egypt’s 27 provinces has not been seen since the uprising two years ago,” Ahmed Maher, general coordinator of Egypt’s 6 April youth movement, which participated in the anti-government demonstrations, told IPS.

In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, revolutionary, liberal and leftist parties and groups called on Egyptians to mark the occasion with nationwide protests against President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from which he hails. Hundreds of thousands answered the call on Friday, joining marches and rallies in Cairo, Alexandria and other major urban centres.

Protesters’ demands included the amendment of Egypt’s newly approved constitution, prosecution of anyone implicated in killing protesters, and guarantees that upcoming parliamentary polls – expected in April – would be conducted transparently. Protesters also voiced opposition to the perceived ‘Brotherhoodisation’ of state institutions.

Although protest organisers had called for “peaceful rallies” and “the avoidance of violence,” this was not to be the case.

Saad al-Kitatni, president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), blamed opposition political forces for the escalating violence. “The political forces that called for these rallies, of which they appear to have lost control, are responsible for the bloodshed,” he declared via Twitter.

Opposition figures, for their part, were quick to blame the crisis on President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. “Morsi, his administration and the FJP are all responsible for the current violence,” said 6 April’s Maher. “By ignoring the demands of the opposition, Morsi is behaving just like Mubarak.”

The Muslim Brotherhood condemned the violence. “Egypt’s January 25 Revolution was peaceful in nature,” the group stated. “But yesterday’s demonstrations included attacks by armies of thugs on police, state institutions and private property.”

The Brotherhood blamed Egypt’s private media, much of which is owned by influential businessmen known for their antipathies towards the Islamist group, for “inciting the public against Egypt’s elected government.” It went on to assert that violence had been planned in advance by “elements seeking to derail the course of the revolution.”

The group also condemned opposition groups for condoning the violence. “It is unacceptable that those demanding ‘justice for the martyrs of the revolution’ engage in actions that lead to more people dying,” the statement read.

The situation became even more explosive on Saturday morning when a court sentenced 21 men from Port Said to death. The men had been charged with responsibility for last February’s Port Said stadium disaster in which scores of Egyptian football fans were killed.

Upon announcement of the sentences, clashes erupted in Port Said between police and families of the condemned men. At least 30 were killed in the ensuing violence, including some security personnel. Soon afterwards, the military began deploying in and around the city of Port Said.

On the same day, the National Salvation Front (NSF) – Egypt’s main opposition umbrella group – upped the ante, threatening to boycott upcoming parliamentary polls if President Morsi failed to meet a shortlist of demands. These include immediate constitutional changes, replacement of the current government with a ‘national salvation’ government, and the dismissal of Morsi-appointed prosecutor-general Talaat Ibrahim.

If these demands weren’t immediately met, the NSF said, it would stage further demonstrations this week to call for the re-activation of Egypt’s previous 1971 constitution (albeit with some modifications), and snap presidential elections.

According to Maher, Morsi’s only way out of the current crisis is to “form a new government drawn from various political forces and constitution-amending committee comprised of scholars; dissolve the Shura Council (the upper house of Egypt’s parliament currently endowed with legislative powers); and accept the resignation of the prosecutor-general.

“If he fails to do this, we will escalate our demands,” he added, in a veiled reference to possible calls for Morsi himself – elected only seven months ago – to step down.

FJP spokesman Murad Ali rejected such ultimatums. “The opposition has the right to demonstrate – peacefully – anywhere it wants to,” he told IPS. “But no political group has the right to demand the democratically elected president’s ouster, while the use violence is of course a red line.” (END)

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.