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Title: Migrants forced to fight for Gaddafi 'They said we must stay to fight when the Americans come,' a Ghanaian worker tells Al Jazeera from a refugee camp.
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Published: Apr 9, 2011
Author: Anna Branthwaite
Post Date: 2011-04-09 20:34:40 by tom007
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Views: 35
Comments: 2
Migrants forced to fight for Gaddafi 'They said we must stay to fight when the Americans come,' a Ghanaian worker tells Al Jazeera from a refugee camp. Anna Branthwaite Last Modified: 09 Apr 2011 16:14 Many migrants from sub-Saharan Africa fled Libya when fighting began. Some say they were kidnapped and forced to fight alongside Muammar Gaddafi's forces [Anna Branthwaite/Al Jazeera] Among the reports of atrocities occurring in Libya are claims from African migrants that they were abducted and forced to fight with Gaddafi's forces. A former Nigerian police officer, who had worked in Libya for eight years as a technician, alleges he was abducted in mid-March at a military checkpoint in Tripoli, along with other men from Ghana, Mali and Niger, before being taken to a military centre. "There was up to 100 people in the courtyard and military trucks were arriving and leaving with more people. They started beating people, I saw them shoot one Ghanaian in front of me. The atmosphere was very intimidating," he explained. "They put us into a vehicle and we were driven into the desert. I saw an oil refinery, there was evidence of bomb strikes, burnt out vehicles and a strong smell. I think it was Ras Lanouf." A Ghanaian worker claimed to have been abducted by Libyan military when they stormed his house in Sirte. "They asked us why we were trying to leave the country and that we must stay to fight for when the Americans come," he explained. "We were taken to a police station and then to an underground hospital which they ordered us to clean." Importing mercenaries Reports of foreign mercenaries being shipped into Libya and shooting protesters emerged within the first weeks of the uprising. "There's certainly evidence that Algeria sent pilots in before the no-fly zone and provided military transporters to move people, possibly mercenaries, maybe even equipment… but it is difficult to get them into the country," explains Jeremy Keenan, a professor specialising in the Maghreb who suggests that between 5,000 and 10,000 mercenaries may have entered Libya during this uprising, but that there is no concrete evidence. "If you've got a million migrants milling around in Libya, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, all paperless with no ID, I suspect he's using them, not Libyans, as human shields… the key thing is he (Gaddafi) has got them over a barrel, they can't leave," said Keenan. "I think the opposition people, when they bump into anyone fighting against them who is speaking another language and looks black, irrespective of how they got into Gaddafi's hands, they are using the word mercenary. There is a lot of confusion there." Gaddafi has supported past Tuareg rebellions and allegedly backed candidates in recent elections in Niger, who may be beholden to support him. Local African media have recently reported the recruitment and movement of young men into Libya, but others indicate that Tuaregs were recruited by the Libyan military several years beforehand. What is certain in recent weeks is that more people are leaving Libya than entering. "Certainly Gaddafi uses mercenaries from abroad and from the foreign community in Libya. In Misurata, there are reports that the Africans are on the frontline, but the snipers are foreigners, mostly from Belarus, Eastern Europe," says Sliman Bouchuiguir, secretary-general of the Libyan League of Human Rights. "He has already used poor Africans as a political weapon against Europe saying he will let this African population go to Italy and Europe." Gaddafi has used the specture of refugess flooding out of Libya into Europe as a reason why the West should allow him to remain in power [Anna Branthwaite/Al Jazeera] One million sub Saharan migrants, among them political refugees, are estimated to live in Libya, but there is virtually no documentation of the population. Many make the treacherous journey through the desert into Libya, either en route to Europe or to settle in oil rich Libya. On entering Libya, thousands of migrants have been arrested and held in detention centres. Many of them are now escaping Libya and can speak openly about the appalling living conditions in the centres, torture resulting in scores of deaths, corruption, lack of legal and medical aid, all of which corroborates with earlier reports made by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Global Detention Project. Libya has never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, and after allowing the UNHCR to provisionally re-open its office in Tripoli last year, the UNHCR has only ever been allowed to visit a few centres. "There are 27 centres known to us. We can't even find out where the detention centres are, there is so little information. I would have little confidence that the treatment of detainees would be to EU standards," explains Michael Flynn, a researcher at the Global Detention Project based in Geneva. Italy and other EU countries have made it policy to manage immigration from the source of its origins, and in recent years have collaborated with Gaddafi in stemming the flow of African migration – following the 2008 Friendship Pact, Italy has provided Libya with funding to build detention centres and surveillance equipment; the European Commission offered Libya up to 50 million Euros in aid last year to stop the flow of immigration. "I don't know to what extent there were benchmarks built into these agreements between EU countries and Gaddafi, many of these were verbal agreements," explains Flynn. "There may have been some sort of reporting requirements on conditions, but I would have very little confidence that these requirements would have been met in Libya." 'I need to start again' With the violence continuing in Libya, journalists and independent observers unable to access many parts of the country, the blight of Libyan and non-Libyans civilians remains largely unknown, but events inside Libya will have far reaching consequences beyond its borders. As thousands of migrant workers return to their respective countries, Mediterranean and Western countries wrangle over their obligations to the displaced and refugees, neighbouring African states may face the migration of armed mercenaries crossing their desert borders, if, or when, they are no longer required in Libya. Back in the desert camp in Tunisia, over 60,000 people have been evacuated by the UNHCR and the IOM to their respective countries, with on average of 2,000 flown out each day. Others nationalities - Somalians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iraqis and now Ivorians - with no safe country to be returned to, know they will be here for weeks if not months and attempt to make their desert camp as bearable as possible whilst awaiting to told where they will be resettled. Nearly all the families with young children belong to this group. Waiting his turn to be told when he will be allocated a seat on a flight to Nigeria, the former police officer speaks of his future: "I left everything behind in Libya, all my clothes, savings, property and now I don’t even have one dinar with me. I need to start again. If I can go home I will start to look for a job." He currently shares a tent with five other men, all facing the same predicaments. "But even though I should be relieved to be going home, I’m still very worried about the people who are trapped inside Libya, the ones who can't get out and have been left behind. I have a bad feeling about what will happen to them." Anna Branthwaite worked at the Choucha transit camp in Tunisia, taking photographs and interviewing case studies as a freelancer for the Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR.
Nearly all migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who arrive at the desert refugee camp in Tunisia, have fled in fear of violent reprisals by Libyans who accuse them of being mercenaries. The extent to which Gaddafi's military has used foreign mercenaries, or press-ganged migrants into fighting, remains unclear. 
In an interview with French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, in February Gaddafi warned, "You will have the immigration of thousands of people who will invade Europe from Libya, and there will be nobody to stop them."
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
Lynch Law and Summary Executions in Rebel-Held Libya “The world’s most imperial-dependent, ill-disciplined and whining ‘liberation movement’ is still blaming black ‘mercenaries’ and soldiers from Chad for its failures in the field.” Chad, meanwhile, has officially asked the “international coalition” to protect its civilians from the rebels, who have executed “dozens” of Chadian migrant workers. In rebel-held Libya, black Africans and Gaddafi supporters are the people in need of protection. “Dozens of Chadians have been ‘singled out’ and ‘executed,’ falsely accused of acting as mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, according to Chad.” The African nation of Chad has called on Libya’s Euro-American “humanitarian” overseers to protect Chadian citizens from lynching at the hands of rebels backed by the West. The government in N’Djamena, which certainly has no interest in antagonizing the Euro-American juggernaut that has assumed a “responsibility to protect” whomever it designates as “civilians” in the territory of its northern neighbor, issued a formal request for “international coalition forces involved in Libya and international human rights organizations to stop these abuses against Chadians and other migrant Africa workers." Dozens of Chadians have been “singled out” and “executed,” falsely accused of acting as mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, according to Chad, 300,000 of whose citizens were among the 1.5 million black African migrant laborers in Libya at the time of the February revolt. Numerous reports from migrant workers who escaped from rebel-held areas indicate hundreds of black Africans have been lynched, including black Libyan citizens. (See “Race and Arab Nationalism in Libya,” BAR, March 9.) A Turkish oil worker related an especially horrific account to NPR: “We left behind our friends from Chad. We left behind their bodies,” he said. “We had 70 or 80 people from Chad working for our company. They cut them dead with pruning shears and axes, attacking them, saying you're providing troops for Gadhafi. The Sudanese, the Chadians were massacred. We saw it ourselves.” “Western media have lent sympathetic ears to rebel claims that assaults by Gaddafi’s black ‘mercenaries’ drove ‘the people’ to commit ‘excesses.’” Although many western journalists have been all but embedded with the rebels for many weeks, until recently there has been precious little high profile corporate media reporting on the political complexion of Gaddafi’s armed opposition, atrocities against black Africans, or summary executions of prisoners, which are war crimes under international law. Western media have lent sympathetic ears to rebel claims that assaults by Gaddafi’s black “mercenaries” drove “the people” to commit “excesses.” As usual, it is only after the U.S. government has embarked irrevocably on the warpath that corporate media reveal the flaws in the rationale. In the April 3 New York Times Sunday Magazine, reporter Robert F. Worth passes on the rebel’s version of one of their first confrontations with “mercenaries” in Benghazi: “The next day, the protests resumed and grew more violent as the first groups of mercenaries appeared, in yellow construction hats, to fight the protesters. Some were Africans; some appeared to be foreign workers, including Bangladeshis and Chinese. Many were not mercenaries at all, but dark-skinned men from southern Libya or hapless African migrants in search of work. Some of the ones I talked to, in makeshift rebel prisons, said they had been tricked with promises of jobs and never paid at all.” What is obvious from the account, is that the anti-Gaddafi crowd (mob) encountered polyglot groups of yellow-hatted foreign construction laborers (total foreign workers in Libya numbered over 3 million) in their march through Benghazi, and assaulted them, with black Africans receiving especially brutal attention. “They wanted to kill the black soldier.” The April 1 edition of Britain’s Globe and Mail reports on a “bitter struggle” among the rebels on “how to contain the anger unleashed after decades of oppression.” Translation: How to stop the summary executions of captured, or reputed, Gaddafi supporters – especially the black ones. “Rebels have frequently treated dark-skinned prisoners more harshly than men of Arab ancestry,” Graeme Smith reported: “That distinction was made brutally obvious to doctors at the intensive care unit of Al Bayda’s main hospital on Feb. 17 when they admitted two men – one black, the other with the local olive-skinned complexion – who stood accused of fighting the rebels. A crowd gathered outside the hospital, calling for blood. Some armed rebels pushed their way into the ward. “’They had guns and knives,’ said Mahmoud Anass, 27, a resident on duty that night. ‘It was really scary. They wanted to kill the black soldier.’ “Doctors managed to hold off the enraged youths until a few hours after midnight, when the rebels dragged the two patients into the street. “’An old man tried to stop them,’ said Faraj Khalifa, a doctor. ‘He said our religion does not permit the killing of unarmed men. But the youths were very, very angry. They hanged the black man in front of the hospital.’ “The patient with lighter skin was beaten, shot, and returned to the emergency room, Dr. Khalifa said.” “Racism against black Africans, including black Libyans, appears endemic in eastern Libya.” Here we have both a war crime and a racial hate crime – a microcosm of the mob rule that has swept regions of rebel control. As the Globe and Mail wrote: “Paranoia about mercenaries remains strong among the rebels, despite assurances from human-rights groups that most of the fighters among the pro-Gadhafi forces are Libyan citizens.” More accurately, racism against black Africans, including black Libyans, appears endemic in eastern Libya. The same article shows convincingly that rebels executed more than a dozen captured government soldiers at the town of Darna early in the rebellion, then buried their bodies at a crossroads next to a wall on which it is written, “killed by Gadhafi.” It is likely that scores of soldiers whose bodies were found in a Benghazi barracks, burned beyond recognition, met the same fate. Rebels initially claimed the men were killed by Gaddafi officers for refusing to fight their own people. The Super-Powered ‘Revolution’ The world’s most imperial-dependent, ill-disciplined and whining “liberation movement” is still blaming black “mercenaries” and soldiers from Chad for its failures in the field – that is, when they aren’t crying about not having a 24/7 umbrella of full-spectrum American dominance of the skies. On March 31, the Interim Transitional National Council (ITNC) – half of whose members remain “secret” and many of whom may now be mere fronts – claimed that a unit of 3,600 Chadian troops have killed and wounded thousands of rebels since hostilities began. This phantom Chadian army, fighting more than a thousand miles from its impoverished homeland and supply lines, was supposedly to blame for the rebels’ military setbacks around the city of Brega, according to ITNC spokesman Ahmed Bani – evidence that “paranoia” about black enemies of the Libyan “revolution” is not limited to the mob. The rebels are in fact stymied by the Americans, who show their Libyan dependents who is boss by periodically withdrawing the protection of U.S. airborne kill-at-will systems. President Obama signaled loud and clear that the council in Benghazi will not rule the country, when he intoned, from Chile, that “forty years of tyranny has left Libya fractured and without strong civil institutions. The transition to a legitimate government that is responsive to the Libyan people will be a difficult task.” That’s U.S. Imperial-Speak for: We will run the country for you, until you are ready to stand on your own, traumatized feet. Like Haiti. “The Americans show their Libyan dependents who is boss by periodically withdrawing the protection of U.S. airborne kill-at-will systems.” The U.S. is attempting to regain its regional balance as the winds of the Reawakening whip the Arab world. Washington has seized the opportunity in Libya to appear as an uber-protector of emerging forces for change, while positioning itself to quash any substantive threat to imperial interests. As added bonuses, the largest oil reserves in Africa are to be pillaged by multinationals, and the U.S. military can envision a huge new arena for AFRICOM, much larger than the U.S. facility in tiny Djibouti, on eastern coast. The militant Islamist presence among the rebels will be worked to U.S. advantage, an embedded rationale to bring Libya wholly and permanently into the War on Terror theater of operations. Should an “insurgency” erupt with the fall of Gaddafi, all the better for a U.S. war machine that runs on bogeymen. But, don’t be overly shocked and awed by the ferocity of the Euro-American counter-offensive. Arab nationalism, in its many manifestations, represents an existential threat to imperial survival. After generations of suppression of the Left in Arab lands, nationalism (and anti-imperialism) now often finds its expression from the Right, in religious form and language. Nevertheless, all nationalisms among subject peoples are ultimately antithetical to imperial rule.
These rebels are in for a world of hurt when the rest of their black clan in Africa learns of this. They will go north to seek revenge. Imagine the first black president of the USA siding with those killing blacks.
God is always good!
#2. To: bush_is_a_moonie (#1)
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