A protest in Peshawar against the killing of civilians by the army. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Feb 2 2013 (IPS)

–“We demand an immediate end to the military operation in Khyber Agency because it has not brought any results during the past three years,” says Iqbal Afridi from the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf party. “The military operations are killing the local population while the militants remained unharmed.”

Afridi from the Khyber Agency unit of the party led by former cricketer Imran Khan spoke with IPS near the Governor’s House in Peshawar, the northern Pakistani city adjacent to the Khyber Agency region in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Party members had brought bodies of 18 local people reported killed by Pakistani security forces in nearby Alamgudar village.

Thousands of local tribal people, including students, civil society members and leaders of political parties joined the bereaved families in the protest against the army.

“The military operations have brought lives of the eight million population in FATA to a standstill,” Afridi said. “The seven tribal agencies have remained under curfew and the population has become completely idle.”

Juma Khan Afridi from the family of some of those killed told IPS what happened. “We were asleep when security forces scaled the walls of our home. They asked the women to get aside,” Khan Afridi, a student of the same family told IPS. He said he survived because he put on a veil and stood with women.

This is not the first time the army has killed innocent people in Khyber Agency, he said. “It is because of the growing anger that bereaved families brought the coffins of their dead relatives to protest.”

Wazir Muhammad, political analyst at the University of Peshawar, said people of FATA had been bearing the brunt of the U.S.-led war on terror for the past four years, but had remained silent due to fear of reprisals by the army.

The protest by Hazara communities in Quetta in Balochistan over their dead had given strength to local tribal people in FATA, he said. More than 100 people, including 83 Shias were killed in two bomb explosions in Quetta Jan. 11. The relatives there had refuse to bury their dead immediately in protest.

Only after braving three nights in Quetta’s freezing temperatures next to their slain loved ones did the families of the bombing victims end their protest and bury the bodies amid strict security measures in a Hazara graveyard. They did so after the government imposed governor’s rule in Balochistan.

“Anger is growing over the acts of terrorism everywhere in the country. The people are rightly protesting over the army’s killing of the innocent,” Muhammad said.

The Khyber Agency incident has opened a new chapter of protests against the army. “It is for the first time that people have chanted slogans against law enforcement agencies for their failure to provide protection. It will continue in the future if the army doesn’t mend its ways,” Umar Farooq, whose younger brother was among the dead, told IPS.

“It was not just the brutal killing – the army took away the slain bodies from the site of the protests and buried them on their own. Being Muslims, we wanted to give bath and have funerals before lowering them to the graves.”

The killings come after a dubious army record. In 2009 the Pakistan army, he said, was shown in a video to be shooting from close range at seven boys in Swat. The army had argued that they were Taliban but they looked innocent and juvenile, he said.

“The incident caused international outrage and the U.S. – the main sponsor of the Swat Operation – briefly withheld aid,” Farooq said.

In October 2010 the U.S. sanctioned six units of the Pakistani military operating in the Swat valley under the Leahy Law – which requires the U.S. State Department to certify that no military unit receiving U.S. aid is involved in gross human rights abuses. The law requires that when such abuses are found, they must be thoroughly investigated.

Despite pledges, Pakistan did not take any action to hold the perpetrators accountable as required under the law.

In several instances in Swat, Balochistan and the tribal areas, U.S. aid to Pakistan has continued in apparent contravention of the Leahy Law.

Human Right Watch said in its 2012 report that conditions had deteriorated markedly in the mineral-rich Balochistan, with disappearances of civilians, and an upsurge in killings of suspected Baloch militants and opposition activists by the military, intelligence agencies and the paramilitary Frontier Corps.

“The government appeared powerless to rein in the military’s abuses,” it said. Human Rights Watch recorded the killing of at least 200 Baloch nationalist activists in 2012.

In April 2010, the Pakistan army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, apologised for the deaths of dozens of civilians during air raids near the Afghan border. The civilians were members of a pro-government tribe which had resisted Taliban influence.

On Jan. 17, shortly after the last killings, the army was severely criticised in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly. Lawmaker Saqibullah Khan said such incidents were bound to create anger against the army among the people, and should immediately be stopped.

“The federal government should immediately stop military operations against militants as these have failed to establish peace. They have become the main source of creating problems for the civilians.”

Member of the National Assembly from the Awami National Party Bushra Gohar told IPS that the military campaigns have displaced 1.2 million people in FATA and had adversely affected the lives of tribal people. “Since 2005, we have started military operations in most of the seven tribal agencies of FATA, but militants are gaining strength while the poor people are suffering.

“We demand an end to the military operation in FATA,” she said. (End)

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.