By Rania Hadjer

“We have always been on the margins of the state, but we have never been outside our homeland.”

Abdulbaqi Hamdi, a Tuareg in his early 20s, sums up in a single sentence the paradox that defines his life. Like thousands of others in the southwestern Libyan region of Fezzan, he was born in Libya and grew up there without ever obtaining official recognition from the state.

“We have tried, like our parents and grandparents before us, every possible avenue to obtain an identity card or a passport. The procedures were an endless labyrinth,” Hamdi told Middle East Eye.

“Every attempt ends in refusal or indefinite postponement, under the pretext of a ‘security file review’ or ‘insufficient evidence’,” he added.

For Tuareg in Libya, the absence of citizenship is not an administrative accident, but the result of a long history of unfulfilled promises, political marginalisation and institutional collapse, exacerbated since the 2011 uprising that toppled long-term autocrat Muammar Gaddafi.

An indigenous Amazigh people of North Africa, traditionally nomadic and spread across five states - Libya, Mali, Niger, Algeria and Burkina Faso - the Tuareg have been marginalised by policies that view them as difficult to control.

From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, many Tuareg families from Mali and Niger settled in southern Libya, fleeing Sahelian droughts and armed rebellions. During Gaddafi’s reign, their presence was tolerated, and at times even encouraged.

“Many were recruited into the army or paramilitary camps, with the promise of eventual naturalisation. But that promise was never fulfilled,” Mohamed, a former tour guide who became a community mediator for NGOs in the Fezzan and is now a refugee in France, told MEE, using a different name for security reasons.

“Gaddafi deliberately maintained this ambiguity to keep these populations under control, through a form of administrative blackmail,” he added.

The fall of Gaddafi in 2011 marked a brutal turning point. The Tuareg of the Fezzan were quickly suspected of loyalty to the former administration, due to the involvement of some of them in Gaddafi’s army.

“They paid twice,” Mohamed said. “First by serving the state in order to survive, and then by being stigmatised after its fall.”

Since 2014, Libya has been divided between two rival administrations competing for legitimacy and control of the territory: the UN-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU), based in Tripoli, and a parallel government backed by eastern commander Khalifa Haftar, based in Benghazi.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/libyas-stateless-tuareg-forgotten-human-rights-crisis-risk-imminent-explosion