The government of Mali and Touareg rebels representing Azawad, a territory in northern Mali which declared unilateral independence in 2012 after a Touareg rebellion drove out the Malian army, resumed peace talks in Algiers last week, intended to end decades of conflict.

The talks, being held behind closed doors, are expected to end on July 24.

Negotiations between Bamako and representatives of six northern Mali armed groups, among which the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) is the strongest, kicked off in Algiers on July 16. Diplomats from Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and other international bodies are also attending the discussions.

Moussa Ag Assarid, MNLA spokesperson. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

IPS spoke with writer and a journalist Moussa Ag Assarid, MNLA spokesperson in Europe.

You declared your independent state in April 2012 but no one has recognised it yet. Why is that?

We are not for a Touareg state but for a secular and democratic multi-ethnic model of country. We, Touaregs, may be a majority among Azawad population but there are also Arabs, Shongays and Peulas and we´re working in close coordination with them.

Since Mali´s independence in 1960, the people from Azawad have repeatedly stated that we don´t want to be part of that country. We do have the support of many people all around the globe but the states and the international organisations such as the United Nations prefer to tackle the issue without breaking the established order.

And this is why both the United Nations and Mali refer to “jihadism”, and not to the legitimate struggle for freedom of the Azawad people.

However, we are witnessing a reorganisation of the world order amid significant movements in northern Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe, as in the case of the Ukraine. It´s very much a clear proof of the failure of globalisation and the world´s management.“We [the people of Azawad] do have the support of many people all around the globe but the states and the international organisations such as the United Nations prefer to tackle the issue without breaking the established order” – Moussa Ag Assarid

The French intervention in the 2012 war was seemingly a key factor on your side. How do you asses the former colonial power´s role in the region?

The French have always been there, even after Mali´s independence, because they have huge strategic interests in the area as well as natural resources such as the uranium they rely on. In fact, you could say that our independence has been confiscated by both the international community and France.

The former Malian soldiers have been replaced by the U.N. ones but the Malian army keeps committing all sort of abuses against civilians, from arbitrary arrests to deportations or enforced disappearances, all of which take place without the French and the U.N. soldiers lifting a finger.

Meanwhile, Bamako calls on the French state to support them under the pretext they are fighting against Jihadism.

Another worrying issue is the media blackout imposed on us. Reporters are prevented from coming to Azawad so the information is filtered through Bamako-based reporters who talk about “Mali´s north”, who refuse to speak about our struggle and who become spokesmen and defenders of the Malian state.

So what is the real presence, if any, of the Malian state in Azawad?

Mali´s army and its administration fled in 2012 and the state is only present in the areas protected by the French army, in Gao and Tombouktou. Paris has around 1,000 soldiers deployed in the area, the United Nations has 8,000 blue helmets in the whole country, and there are between 12,000 and 15,000 fighters in the ranks of the MNLA.

We coordinate ourselves with the Arab Movement of Azawad and the High Council for the Unity of Azawad. Alongside these two groups we hold control of 90 percent of Azawad, but we are living under extremely difficult conditions.

We obviously don´t get any support from either Mali or Algeria and we have to cope with a terrible drought. We rely on the meat and the milk of our goats, like we´ve done from time immemorial and we fight with the weapons we confiscated from the Malian Army, the Jihadists, or those we once got from Libya.

You mention Libya. Many claim that the MNLA fighters fought on the side of Gaddafi during the Libyan war in 2011. Is that right?

Many media networks insist on distorting the facts. Gaddafi did grant Libyan citizenship to the Touaregs but he later used them to fight in Palestine, Lebanon or Chad. In 1990, they went back to Azawad to fight against the Malian army and, even if we had the chance, we did not make the mistake of fighting against the Libyan people in 2011.

Gaddafi gave Touaregs weapons to fight in Benghazi but the Touareg decided to go to Kidal and set up the MNLA. It´s completely false that the MNLA is formed by Touaregs who came from Libya. Many of our fighters have never been there, neither have I.

Do Islamic extremists still pose a major concern in Azawad?

In January 2013, AQMI (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), MUJAO (Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa), a splinter group of AQMI and Ansar Dine attacked the Malian army on the border between Mali and Azawad.

Mali´s president asked for help from Paris to oust them but it´s us, the MNLA, who have been fighting the Jihadists since June 2012. The United States, the United Kingdom and France claim to fight against Al Qaeda but it´s us who do it on the ground. Ansar Dine has given no sign of life for over a year but AQMI and MUJAO are still active.

One of the most outrageous issues is that Bamako had had strong links with AQMI in the past, or even backed Ansar Dine, whose leader is a Touareg but the people under his command are just a criminal gang. Today, the Jihadists backed by Bamako have become stronger than the Malian army itself.

Are you optimistic about the ongoing talks with Bamako?

So far we have signed all sorts of agreements but none of them has ever been respected. Accordingly, we have already discarded the stage in which we would accept autonomy, or even a federal state. At this point, we have come to the conclusion that the only way to solve this conflict is to achieve our independence and live in freedom and peace in our land.

Mali has never fulfilled its word so that´s why we call on the international community, France and the United Nations.

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.”

A militia group in Tripoli, Feb. 17, 2012. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

While the tenth anniversary last month of Washington’s invasion of Iraq provoked overwhelmingly negative reviews of the adventure except among its most die-hard neo-conservative proponents, a more recent – albeit far less dramatic and costly – intervention has faded almost completely from public notice.

Nonetheless, nearly 18 months after Western-backed rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi in the city of Sirte, the intervention by the U.S. and its NATO allies in the civil war in Libya appears increasingly costly on several levels.The operation took place under the auspices of the Responsibility to Protect but it turned into a mission of regime change, and that has made the Russians and Chinese feel that they were deceived.

That assessment applies not only to Libya and its North African neighbours, especially Mali, but also to relations among the great powers – most immediately with respect to Syria, where Russia and China have firmly resisted any western effort in the U.N. Security Council to undermine the government of President Bashar al-Assad or support the insurgency against him.

While the decision of China’s new president, Xi Jinping, to make his first overseas visit to Russia last month was by no means attributable only – or even primarily – to Western intervention in Libya, their strong objections to the way NATO interpreted a Security Council resolution to protect civilian lives as licence for “regime change” in Tripoli certainly contributed to a renewed sense of solidarity between the two former Communist rivals.

“We are living through an era of flux and change,” Xi told a university audience in Moscow in a thinly veiled reference to the West. “No country or bloc of countries can again single-handedly dominate world affairs.” For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the two countries’ “strategic partnership” on the Security Council.

Indeed, the Libya precedent was even evoked during this week’s crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

“This land is neither the Balkans nor Iraq and Libya,” boasted the official North Korean news agency in a reference to three other recent U.S. interventions against countries that, unlike Pyongyang, either lacked or, like Gaddafi, abandoned their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons that could presumably have been used to deter external attack.

Acting on a verbal threat by Gaddafi to exterminate rebels in their stronghold of Benghazi in the early stages of the civil war, the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 1973 by a vote of 10-0 with five abstentions – Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, and India – on Mar. 17, 2011.

Pursuant to the emerging “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) legal doctrine, the resolution authorised member nations to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians under threat of attack, including by creating a “no-fly zone” over the country’s air space.

As the civil war intensified – albeit inconclusively – over the following months, however, some Arab and key Western governments, notably Britain, France, and the U.S., took more aggressive measures in support of the rebels. These ranged from on-the-ground training to supplying arms and providing real-time tactical intelligence, until Tripoli fell in late August and Gaddafi was killed two months later.

Thus, an operation undertaken purely for humanitarian reasons eventually became one dedicated to regime change.

While a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits is premature, an initial balance sheet would appear to confirm the notion that military intervention often reaps unintended – and negative – consequences.

On the positive side with respect to Libya itself, a long-ruling and ruthless dictator is no longer in power, and the country’s oil production has bounced back with surprising speed.

On the other hand, the central government has proved unable to reassert its control over much of the nation, leaving a huge security vacuum filled by a multitude of militias – including radical Islamists who may have been responsible for the killing of the U.S. ambassador and two of his staff in Benghazi last September.

“Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state at all,” according to Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in an article published Thursday “…(A) descent into worse chaos cannot be ruled out.”

That vacuum also permitted the wholesale looting of Gaddafi’s massive arsenals. “The weapons proliferation that we saw coming out of the Libyan conflict was of a scale greater than any previous conflict – probably ten times more weapons than we saw going on the loose in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan,” Peter Bouckhert of Human Rights Watch told the Washington Post earlier this year.

That looting resulted in the first instance in the destabilisation of Mali where Tuareg mercenaries previously employed by Gaddafi returned home to northern Mali, quickly evicted the army, which, in turn, overthrew Bamako’s democratically elected government.

With the intervention of French and Chadian military forces earlier this year, Bamako has since retaken control of the more populous parts of northern Mali. But the region, now being patrolled by U.S. drones, is still subject to attack by Islamist forces aligned with Al-Qaeda, and the country’s future and unity remain uncertain at best.

Nor has Mali and other Sahelian countries been the only destination for Gaddafi’s former arsenal.

Substantial amounts of Libyan weapons have been traced to Syria, fuelling that civil war, and to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where Bedouin tribes – some with ties to radical Islamists – have defied local authorities and occasionally even challenged the army in the tumultuous post-Mubarak period.

But the Libyan intervention may have wrought its most consequential damage on great-power relations, particularly with respect to the prospects for future agreement among the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to authorise military intervention in civil wars, even for humanitarian purposes.

“The operation took place under the auspices of the Responsibility to Protect,” noted Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “but it turned into a mission of regime change, and that has made the Russians and Chinese feel that they were deceived.

“And that perception in Moscow and Beijing has fed into their position on Syria and makes it unlikely that China and Russia will anytime soon again approve a humanitarian intervention,” he told IPS.

And just as North Korea feels Gaddafi’s fate vindicated its decision to risk international isolation by building a nuclear weapon, hard-liners in Iran, who are convinced that Washington also seeks to overthrow the Islamic Republic, have been citing the Libya precedent in the run-up to this week’s talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, to argue against any concessions on the fate of its nuclear programme.

According to former top CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar, Iranian leaders have only to look at Washington’s intervention in Libya “…that overthrew a Middle Eastern regime after it had reached an agreement with the United States to give up all its nuclear and other unconventional weapons program.

“In hindsight, the intervention in Libya makes clear that even interventions that appear successful in the short term can have negative knock-on effects that call into question their value,” according to Kupchan.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

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?’”

Farrah Hamary looks the picture of despair as sweat trickles down his face in Tripoli’s heat and humidity. Hamary is too afraid to give his full name or to allow his picture to be taken.

He shows IPS the scars criss-crossing his back, the cigarette burns on his arms, and the bones in his left hand which failed to heal properly when it was broken by Libyan militiamen.

Hamary, 39, is from Sudan’s war-torn and economically deprived region Kordofan. He came to Libya several years ago to eke out a living selling vegetables and fruit from his street stall in the Suq Al Ahad market in Tripoli’s Kasr Ben Gashir neighbourhood. His meagre earnings were sent back to his wife and child in Sudan.

Hamary now lives in fear. He has become victim of a militia brigade, (Katiba in Arabic), who control his local neighbourhood through fear, intimidation and extortion.

By day the Fatih Katiba, whose chief calls himself Izzedine, wear Libyan army fatigues. By night he and his group exchange military uniforms for civilian clothing, steal and demand protection money, predominantly from sub-Saharan Africans in the area.

Hamary came to the attention of the Fatih militia when a friend was involved in a car accident in July near Kasr Ben Gashir, and he went to help. Shortly afterwards Izzedine’s men arrived on the scene. They took Hamary back to their headquarters where he was beaten and tortured over two days though he had committed no crime.

“I was hung upside down and beaten on the soles of my feet. They beat me repeatedly with an iron bar on my back and arms until I was bleeding. I was also beaten with a chair and cigarette butts were extinguished on my arms. My hand was broken during the beating and it still hasn’t healed properly,” Hamary told IPS.

The Katiba confiscated Hamary’s passport, took his car and demanded he pay them 5,000 Libyan Dinars before they would return his passport. On his release Hamary reported the incident to the Sudanese embassy in Tripoli, which gave him a letter to take to the police. Sudanese embassy staff have themselves lost several cars to armed hijackings.

“The police were not interested and told me to leave. They are afraid of the militia who have

previously attacked the police station and stolen guns. There is no law and order in this country,” said Hamary.

The Sudanese migrant’s next step was to hire a lawyer, who went with him to see Izzedine and tell him what his men had done. “He just laughed and said ‘God be with you. You can leave now.’”

Issa Ibrahim from Darfur is among the lucky few to have got away. He escaped to Libya fleeing Khartoum’s Janjaweed militia, who have carried out a scorched earth policy at the behest of the Sudanese government. In Tripoli he opened a small clothing shop in the Al Rasheed neighbourhood to help support his wife and children back in Darfur.

“I’ve made friends with my Libyan neighbours and they look out for me if anybody starts to make trouble with me,” Ibrahim told IPS. “So far nobody has hurt me physically. They have only called me insulting names because I’m black. There are a lot of Libyans who look down on black Africans.

“But I have to take a lot of precautions. I don’t go out after 7pm because the streets are dangerous, especially if you are black and foreign. I also avoid certain neighbourhoods and some cities such as Misrata I would never go anywhere near.”

During the revolution former dictator Muammar Gaddafi hired African mercenaries to fight the rebels. A significant number of black Libyans, particularly those from the town of Tawergha near Misrata, sided with Gaddafi and are alleged to have committed atrocities against the civilian population of Misrata.

Libya has long attracted migrants from neighbouring countries and other parts of the world seeking economic opportunities unavailable to them in their home countries, or using it as a transit point to Europe.

Under Gaddafi, Libya, with a small population and rich oil reserves, relied heavily on hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers to prop up the economy. Many of the migrants managed to escape during the civil war, but others chose to take their chance in Libya because conditions in some of their homelands were even more dire.

“The situation in the country has not yet stabilised and there is no central power capable of governing of the whole territory,” the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in conjunction with the NGO Migreurop reported in June after visiting a number of migrant camps in Libya.

“So armed militia groups and individuals have taken it upon themselves to decide on the treatment of migrants, outside of any legal framework. The militias control, arrest and detain migrants in improvised retention/detention camps. Invoking security concerns to justify the ‘clean-up of illegals’, they hunt migrants down, with sub-Saharan Africans as their prime targets.”

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.”

Startling new evidence of the torture, unlawful rendition, and other abuse of Libyan anti-Gaddafi rebels in U.S. detention facilities during the George W. Bush administration was revealed Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The groundbreaking report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: U.S.-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya”, was made public one week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Justice Department’s decision to cease investigations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners.

The investigation, which initially began with the examination of 101 prisoner cases, was reduced to that of only two already dead prisoners. Additionally, the investigation only encompassed the abuses which were unauthorised by Bush.

Thus, the investigations did not include alleged waterboarding and other forms of torture which were approved by the president, according to Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at HRW and author of the report.

Pitter told IPS, “The investigation needs to be reopened, it needs to be broadened, and the U.S. needs to make a full accounting of what went on at these sites.”

Pitter’s report unveiled, for the first time, secret service documents recovered from Tripoli, as well as many personal testimonies of former detainees who were released after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi a year ago. These documents and testimonies shed light on unlawful and unethical practices of detention programmes and CIA investigation tactics that had been kept in the dark for years following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks.

Fourteen former detainees were interviewed, all of whom reported being transported back to Libya after their capture outside of the country, in what is known as rendition. Most of these detainees who had worked to overthrow Gaddafi were involved in the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group (LIFG).

All persons interviewed report having been returned to Libya by the U.S. or other collaborating countries at a time when it was clear they would be tortured by the Libyan government.

International law strictly forbids this sort of rendition, as well as all acts of torture and ill-treatment. Other countries in collaboration with Gaddafi’s regime and the renditions were the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sudan, and Thailand.

In addition to these reports of renditions, five detainees described various methods of torture and cruel treatment by the CIA secret prisons in Afghanistan prior to their transport. Two men described experiences of water torture tactics, and one accurately described what is known as waterboarding.

Pitter wrote, “The allegations cast serious doubts on prior assertions from U.S. government officials that only three people were waterboarded in U.S. custody. They also reflect just how little the public still knows about what went on in the U.S. secret detention program.”

Other reports of physical abuse include being forced into cramped spaces and denied the ability to bathe for nearly five months, being denied food and sleep, and being chained to walls naked. One man, Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, described a time when he was chained and abused.

According to Pitter’s report, al-Maghrebi said, “I was there for 15 days, hanging from my arms, another chain from the ground. They put a diaper on me but it overflowed so there was every type of stool everywhere, the temperature was freezing.”

Pitter’s 154-page report brings to light never before seen evidence of what could be a very serious offence against International Law. The Tripoli Documents highlighted in the report show how the United States may have tried to side-step the law against rendition through extracted promises from Libya that the prisoners would not be ill-treated.

The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions set down protections against unfair rendition and ill-treatment, and HRW claims that the United States “violated its international legal obligations”.

Pitter told IPS, “Failure to account for past abuses undermines the United States’ credibility when trying to argue for human rights in other places.”

“It’s in National Security’s interest, really, to acknowledge past mistakes so they can make clear this was a mistake and it’s never going to happen again.”

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.”

The scene of a bombing outside a hotel in Tripoli. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS.

By Mel Frykberg
TRIPOLI, Aug 14 2012 (IPS)

The security situation in Libya remains tense as violence by way of car bombings, political assassinations of high-ranking government and military officials, attacks on foreign diplomatic staff and NGOs, and young men sorting out minor disputes with AK-47s continues unabated.

IPS spoke with armed Gaddafi loyalists who vowed they will step up their fight. Government sources alternately claim the perpetrators are former President Muammar Gaddafi loyalists or Islamists bent on revenge.

This murky situation is further exacerbated by a clamp down on the dissemination of information in the local media, and Libyan security forces preventing foreign journalists from covering the scenes of attacks first-hand or taking pictures.

For the second Saturday in a row this reporter was woken by a car bomb exploding outside my hotel in downtown Tripoli, the second of its kind since Gaddafi’s death in October 2011.

A security vehicle belonging to members of the Libyan military staying at the Four Seasons hotel in Omar Al Mukhtar street was the target. The previous Saturday morning another car bomb went off outside the headquaters of Tripoli’s military police just down the road. One person was injured in the latter attack.

“We believe former supporters of Gaddafi are behind this attack and the attack last Saturday,” said a member of the security forces sitting in one of several security vehicles which rushed to the scene to cordon off the street.

“These Tahloob (Arabic for Gaddafi loyalists) are talking big, saying they will carry out a counter-revolution against the February 17 movement (when Libya’s revolution against Gaddafi began). They will only be able to carry out small acts of sabotage, nothing major,” one of the security men told IPS.

Shortly afterwards the information blackout began when  heavily armed soldiers prevented pictures being taken, and said journalists were forbidden from the area. A Libyan interior ministry official refused to comment further.

Last week a number of Tahloob were killed when Libyan security forces raided a farm where loyalists were hiding out after they were said to have coordinated the car bombing outside the headquarters of Tripoli’s military police.

One of the members who survived was alleged to have set up sleeper cells in Libya and to have been criss-crossing Libya’s border with Tunisia from where he and several comrades were allegedly smuggling weapons into Libya to “destabilise the country post-Gaddafi”.

Libyan intelligence also allege the group were in possession of another seven bombs, one of them intended for another Tripoli hotel. Documents linking them with one of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, who is under house arrest in Niger, were also said to have been found on the survivor.  Saadi warned earlier in the year that he was in contact with sleeper cells who were organising underground resistance.

IPS managed to get an exclusive interview with Gaddafi loyalists in the Abu Salim neighbourhood of Tripoli, one of the last bastions of Gaddafi supporters and scene of some of the fiercest fighting between loyalists and rebels during the revolution.

Shortly before Gaddafi was killed, Abu Salim was flooded with weapons in a last ditch attempt at resistance against the revolution.

“We are waiting for the right moment. We will not give up. If they (the new government) think we are a spent force they are mistaken,” Ahmed, who fought with Gaddafi’s forces and managed to escape from a rebel detention camp last year, told IPS.

Ahmed claims to have killed a number of rebels, and is now in hiding. He and the others interviewed would not consent to their last names being published nor their pictures being taken for obvious security reasons.

“Every man in this neighbourhood is armed but our guns are buried underground because the area is raided regularly by the security forces searching for weapons and wanted men,” Muntasser, another loyalist told IPS.

Meanwhile, during the last three weeks over two dozen high-ranking military or government officials have been assassinated in Benghazi. Many of the men were former Gaddafi loyalists who defected to the rebels after formerly serving in Gaddafi’s regime.

Some claim Islamist insurgents are behind the attacks, as Libyan weapons flood conflicts in neighbouring countries including the Sinai, Mali, Nigeria, and Syria where dozens of fighters have joined up with the Free Syrian Army.

In another incident, on Friday eight prisoners managed to escape Al Fornaj prison in Tripoli after a coordinated attack. Gunmen in pickup trucks outside the prison shot at security guards while prisoners inside set sections of the prison on fire and managed to overpower a number of guards within the prison. This was the third attack on the prison since the revolution, and it took the authorities many hours to re-establish control.

During the last few weeks, security buildings and hotels in Benghazi have been rocked by bomb attacks and attempted attacks. Foreign diplomatic staff and embassies have also been attacked or been the targets of attempted attacks. U.S. embassy staff in Tripoli escaped an attempted carjacking last week.

A grenade and rocket attack on the Misrata offices of the International Red Cross last week forced the evacuation of several ICRC buildings, and the organisation to temporarily suspend its work.

Kidnapping and abductions too continue, with the whereabouts of a delegation from the Iranian Red Crescent kidnapped in Benghazi several weeks ago still unknown. Minor street disputes regularly erupt into gun battles. On Thursday an AK47-wielding thug threatened to put a bullet in my head after I witnessed one out of control gunfight.

Internally displaced persons outside a camp in Kufrah in South Libya. Credit: UNHCR.

By Mel Frykberg
TRIPOLI, Aug 8 2012 (IPS)

Pregnant women miscarrying due to mistreatment, detainees mainly from sub-Saharan Africa denied adequate food and water. Small cells crammed with 80-100 detainees subjected to arbitrary justice by Libya’s volatile militias, politically persecuted Somalis forcibly repatriated to Mogadishu, and hundreds of boat people dying trying to flee Libya for a better life in Europe.

Such are the conditions of Libya’s approximately 80,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) post the revolution. The refugees comprise Libyans ethnically cleansed from towns and cities due to their perceived support for former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and those who have fled the continued fighting between rival militias across the country.

Economic and transitional migrants, and those seeking political asylum from neighbouring countries are amongst the 80,000 being held in 25-30 detention centres and refugee camps run by the government, militias, the army and the police. Many of the centres receive aid from Libyan and international NGOs but their resources are limited.

“Since May alone 100 boat people died trying to cross from Libya to Europe on overcrowded and unseaworthy boats. Every month there are thousands of refugees who make the dangerous journey because they are so desperate,” chief protection officer Samuel Cheung from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Tripoli tells IPS.

“The most vulnerable are on the boats, including pregnant women and men with gunshot wounds who are unable to get adequate medical attention,” says Cheung.

About 20,000 of the approximately 35,000 internally displaced Tawergha, black Libyans of slave descent, many of whom were supporters of Gaddafi, fill a number of refugee camps in Tripoli and Benghazi after they were ethnically cleansed from Tawergha and Misrata during the revolution.

Tawergha town was used by Gaddafi as a base to attack the rebel stronghold Misrata 38km away.

Nafisa Muhammad’s home is now a cramped, stiflingly hot room in a prefabricated building on a former Turkish construction site located on the airport road in Tripoli. Muhammad, 31, a former secretary at Misrata university has the “luxury” of having the room to herself, unlike most of the other 400 displaced Tawergha refugee families at the Fillah refugee camp who are forced to sleep on thin mattresses on the floor.

“My one-year-old son was killed during the fighting in Misrata between pro-revolution rebels and Tawergha supporters of Gaddafi. Two of my brothers died in the war, one during the fighting. The other, who was a civilian, was abducted at Benghazi Airport by Misrata militiamen and beaten to death within a day of arriving at a detention centre in Misrata,” Muhammad tells IPS.

Muhammad’s cousin died when he, together with a group of pro-Gaddafi fighters, was immolated after pro-revolutionary rebels filled a fire truck with petrol, doused the men and set them alight. Videos of the mutilated corpses were then sent to family members. This was payback for alleged atrocities committed by the Gaddafi loyalists against Misrata’s civilians during the siege of the city.

Hannah Jaballah, 25, Muhammad’s neighbour, fled with her husband and two little girls from Misrata during the fighting. Her daughters now spend their days playing amongst the trash and the windswept gravel which surrounds the rows of prefabricated dorms which fill Fillah camp.

A month ago her husband was abducted by Misrata militiamen in downtown Tripoli as he ran a banking errand.

“I visited my husband a month ago in a detention centre in Misrata. He had a broken shoulder and had been beaten, and I have no idea when they will release him,” Jaballah tells IPS.

Muftah is Fillah camp’s IDP coordinator. He would not give his surname for security reasons. He too escaped from Tawergha during the war but is now afraid to leave the camp for fear of being abducted by Misrata militiamen who raid the camps on a regular basis and abduct young men, many of whom are never seen again.

“Although we are free to leave the camps, most of the young men don’t do so. We rely on the women to bring food and other necessities into the camp,” Muftah tells IPS.

Cheung says “Libya’s IDPs also include people who have fled their hometowns and cities due to ongoing fighting between rival militias. Some of the roots of the fighting go back to tensions during the Gaddafi era with some of the violence revolving around tribal land disputes, which have now become points of tension following the war.”

The UNHCR is concerned about the abuse meted out to Libya’s internally displaced and the lack of due judicial process.

“Many of the refugees have fled political persecution in their home countries and fled to Libya to escape repression but a lot are being forcibly repatriated including Somalis who face possible death on their return. Others have come to Libya for economic reasons because Libya’s economy has traditionally been a source of employment for many foreigners,” Cheung tells IPS.

The conditions under which transitional, economic and political refugees from neighbouring countries are being held is also of major concern to the organisation.

“Many of these conditions fall well below international standards and this situation is exacerbated by the lack of international funding which further deprives these centres of the necessary resources to care for the detainees by providing  them with adequate medical care  and consistent access to food and water,” says Cheung.

Minority neighbourhoods have been targeted by groups who rebelled against Gaddafi. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Mel Frykberg
TRIPOLI, Jul 14 2012 (IPS)

“The human rights situation in Libya now is far worse than under the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi,” Nasser al-Hawary, researcher with the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights tells IPS.

Hawary showed IPS testimonies from families whose loved ones have been beaten to death in the custody of the many militias that continue to control vast swathes of Libya.

“At least 20 people have been beaten to death in militia custody since the revolution, and this is a conservative figure. The real figure is probably far higher,” says Hawary, pointing to photos of bloodied bodies accompanying the testimonies.

Hawary is no fan of the Gaddafi regime. The former Salafist and political oponent of Gaddafi was imprisoned numerous times as a poitical dissident by Gaddafi’s secret police.

Hawary emerged from his periods of incarceration beaten and bloodied, but not broken. Far worse happened to his Islamist friends under the Gaddafi regime which was fiercely opposed to Islamic fundamentalism.

Hawary eventually escaped to Egypt where he remained until Libya’s February 17 revolution in 2011 made it safe for him and other Islamists to return.

Revenge attacks, killings and abductions against former Gaddafi supporters and against black men, who the rebels perceive as having worked as mercenaries for Gaddafi during the war, continue well after the “liberation” of the country.

Several months ago Muhammad Dossah, 28, was abducted by armed militia men at a checkpoint in the northern city Misrata as he was driving his employer Forrestor Oil Company’s car from the city Ras al Amoud to capital Tripoli.

“I don’t know if he is dead or alive. We haven’t heard from him since he disappeared from the militia checkpoint and the police investigating his disappearance say the trail has gone cold,” his brother Hussam Dossah, 25, tells IPS.

The police managed to trace the car through several cities down the eastern side of Libya but there the trail ended. There has been no sighting of Muhammad since then, and his family have no idea what has happened to him.

“He could have been abducted because he is black or because the gunmen wanted the car he was driving. We are Libyan but my father is from Chad,” says Hussam.

Hussam’s story is one of many of abductions, random killings, torture and robbery as militia men continue to take the law into their hands.

Despite the interim National Transitional Council’s (NTC) pledge to bring the more than 6,000 detainees currently in detention to trial or to release them, only some have been freed while the atrocities committed by pro-revolutionary rebels have been overlooked.

Armed militias controlling the streets and enforcing their version of law and order is a problem even in the major cities where the NTC has supposedly retaken control.

Gunfire punctuates the night regularly in Tripoli, and sometimes the day. “All the young men here have guns,” former rebel fighter Suheil al Lagi tells IPS. “They are accustomed to sorting out political differences and petty squabbles this way, or they rob people using weapons. The high unemployment and financial hardship is aggravating the situation.”

While security is an issue in Tripoli, the situation in the provinces is worse. Unshaven, ragtag militia men dressed in mismatching military fatigues often extort money from people travelling through their checkpoints, particularly if they are foreign or black.

Travelling from the Salloum border crossing with Egypt to Tripoli involves crossing dozens of checkpoints manned by numerous militias, comprising local clans with divided loyalties.

At a Misrata checkpoint that this IPS correspondent passed, a bearded militia man decided that foreigners would have to undergo Aids tests before they could have their travel documents returned. Only intervention by others prevented this.

At a number of checkpoints in the Tobruk area, migrant Egyptian labourers were forced to pay bribes of up to 30 dollars each by militiamen before their passports were returned.

“We are aware of the problems facing our country and are trying to resolve the issues,” says Hassan Issa, member of the NTC from Ajdabia city. “It is not easy for us to bring all the groups under control at this point in time,” NTC member Abdel Karim Subeihi tells IPS.

“This is not the new Libya we fought for and we may have to take up arms again if the corruption and greed continue. This time against the new government,” warns al Lagi.

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.”