While much of the world’s attention was focusing on crude oil prices and the Libyan pipelines in the east of the country– human right groups say rebels are committing crimes against humanity.
In east Libya, African hunt began as towns and cities began fall under the control of Libyan rebels, mobs and gangs. They started to detain, insult, rape and even executing black immigrants, students and refugees.
In the past two weeks, more than 100 Africans from various Sub-Sahara states are believed to have been killed by Libyan rebels and their supporters.
According to Somali refugees in Libya, at least five Somalis from Somaliland and Somalia were executed in Tripoli and Benghazi by anti-Gaddafi mobs. Dozens of refugees and immigrants workers from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Mali and Niger have been killed, some of them were led into the desert and stabbed to death. Black Libyan men receiving medical care in hospitals in Benghazi were reportedly abducted by armed rebels.
They are part of more than 200 African immigrants held in secret locations by the rebels.
In many disputes involving Libyan residents and black Africans, the Libyans are turning in the Africans as mercenaries.
Thousands more Africans caught up in this mercenary hysteria are terrified. Some barricaded themselves in their homes, while others hid in the desert. Insulted, threatened, beaten, chased and robbed. Their only crime was being black and therefore treated as “mercenaries” of Gaddafi.
Rebels hold a young man at gunpoint between the towns of Brega and Ras
While the airing of Gaddafi’s so called “black mercenaries” by Western media has ignited the issue, some say an xenophobic attitude towards these refugees and labourers has existed for years. They say the current attacks are racially motivated because the rebels have released many actual Libyan mercenaries and soldiers under a tribal agreement.
They believe many Arabs felt their Libyan leader was abandoning them for black Africans ever since he became a “pan-Africanist”. Many immigrants were regularly victims of racism. In many situations, Gaddafi and his inner circle preferred black Africans and Libyans from the south over Libyans from the east. Now the angry mobs using the revolutionary movement across Arabia and North Africa are hunting down black people.
Mohamed Abdillahi, Somaliland, 25, was sleeping at his home in Zouara, when the mobs arrived. “They knocked on the door around 1 o’clock in the morning. They said get out, we’ll kill you, you are blacks, foreigners, clear.”
The testimonials and are very similar among the thousands of Africans that saw the ugly side of Libya in the past weeks. “They have attacked us, they took everything from us,” said Ali Farah, Somali laborer 29 years.
“They wanted to kill civilians, they beat many of us. To me, they are animals,” says Jamal Hussein, 25 years Sudanese worker.
Many of the fleeing Africans are terrified to tell their stories. At the checkpoint, they do not mingle with others. When asked about their ordeal, they just freeze, “they stopped us many times and said not tell what has happened here, say there are no problems,” Elias Nour from Ethiopia said.
“For the past seven days, my whole family has been holed up at home without any food, running water or electricity, we appeal for urgent intervention,” Mohamed Abdi from Somaliland told local reporters by cellphone.
In the latest reports reaching Somalilandpress from Tripoli, forces loyal to Col. Muammar Gaddafi have reportedly began kidnapping African and Libyan youths from their homes and universities. They are said to be preparing them for a showdown against the rebels. The kidnapped youths include five teenagers from Somaliland.
Many Africans have virtually nothing after years in Libya, many have been looted, robbed, while others saw their living quarters and apartments go in flames. Now they are praying to God to send them home.
While the international leaders are busy drafting resolutions to dismantle Muammar Gaddafi, the African Union has not yet commented on the situation in Libya.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court is said to have started a formal inquiry into possible crimes against humanity in Libya that will investigate the Libyan regime.
The "OPEN SEASON"
Media habitually tells us that Libyan rebels are noble freedom fighters, struggling against a bloodthirsty tyrant. But after all the buckets of half-truths and blatant lies, that news poured on our heads, treating us
viewers like brainless sheep and feeding us half-baked reports that often got disproved the next day, some of us started to look further and investigate.
What they found out, is extremely disturbing. Say, from the very beginning of war we've been hearing reports about "Gaddafi's black mercenaries". We even saw photos and videos of several people that,
supposedly, were these mercenaries. But the whole truth is much more complicated - and scary.
Yes, there indeed are several divisions of black Africans and citizens of Chad in the army of Libya, that is formed on the principle of territorial militia. But they can hardly be considered mercenaries - not
more than French Foreign Legion or non-American citizens in US Army. In general, the status of black men of Libyan army's various units is civil servants.
In a country with 6 million inhabitants, one third are black (the most oppressed group in the country). Would not it be easier for the rebels to call for their solidarity and ask them join the rebel ranks? But not
only black Libyans do not join the rebellion - they flee in terror.
The first wave of reports and evidence of beatings of black Africans began in February and March. The rebels, under the trademark of fighting with the mercenaries from Chad, were slaughtering all black people with no mercy. They even started to post various Youtube videos with their actions filmed
The victim was the Libyan citizen Hisham Mansour, born 22-02-1983. Back in early March, the Human Rights Watch even warned black migrant workers on the need to flee the revolutionary terrain.
"We left behind our friends from Chad. We left behind their bodies. 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 Gaddafi. The Sudanese, the Chadians were massacred. We saw it ourselves. I am a worker, not a fighter. They took me from my house and [raped] my wife", - a Turkish oilfield worker, who fled Libya, told BBC in February 25.
One of the editors of the Monthly Review, Yoshie Furuhashi, writes:
"The black African workers now live in fear in the territories held by the rebels in Libya. Some have been attacked by mobs, some have been imprisoned and some of their houses and shops have been torched. Many African workers say they felt safer under the regime of Gaddafi".
In March, a reporter from the Daily Mail was in Benghazi and reported:
"Africans I saw ranged from a 20 year old and a late forties, with a grizzled beard. Most wore casual clothes. When they realized that I spoke English erupted in protests. "We did nothing," one told me, before he was silenced. "We are all construction workers in Ghana. Do not harm anyone. "
Another accused, a man in green overalls, showed the paint on their sleeves and said: "This is my job. I do not know how to shoot a gun "
Abdul Nasser, 47, protested: "They lie about us. They took us out of our house at night when we were asleep. " While still complaining, they were taken.
International Business Times published an article on March 2 that says:
"According to reports, over 150 black Africans at least a dozen different countries escaped from Libya by plane and landed at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, with horrific stories of violence."
"We were attacked by locals who said they were mercenaries who killed people. I mean blacks who refused to see "Julius told Reuters Kiluu, a construction supervisor for 60 years.
Michel Collon with a fact-finding delegation were in Libya in July and when he learned what had happened, he said:
"I met these people during my research in Tripoli. I could talk to some people. They were not "mercenaries," as the rebels and the media tell. Some were dark-skinned Libyans (much of the population is of African type, in fact), others were black civilians from African countries whostayed in Libya for a long time. All support Gaddafi precisely because he opposes to racism and treats them as Arabs and Africans on an equal footing. On the contrary, the rebels in Benghazi are known for their
racism, and blacks were victims of terrible systematic atrocities. The paradox is that NATO wants to bring democracy to a section of Al Qaeda and Libyan Ku Klux Klan-type racists".
Here's another footage, with English explanations given.
After the rebels entered Tripoli, numerous reports of black men being killed appeared again. Twitter explodes with rebels' messages about killing "African mercenaries". In the chaos of embattled Tripoli, black people are being simply seized from the streets and taken somewhere openly.
On the photo above we can see that the lying people's hands are tied with plastic handcuffs and their clothes are relatively clean. This means these people were captured not after a fight, but deliberately.
The Colonel was being building good relations with the south of Africa. NATO plan of destabilizing Libya might as well include having the black Africans turning away from this country forever, using contempt and xenophobia of the rebels as a driving force of the persecution. After all, lynching black people simply for being in Africa sounds ridiculous.
But results are pretty much of the same racist kind, and they are not funny at all.
Some more old reports during the struggle:
Black life is cheap in Libya
They are killing black people in Libya. They are killing them in the street, they are killing them in hospitals, they are killing them in transit camps, they are killing them in their houses.
They are not killing any old African. They are killing black Africans, the dark, sub-Saharan Africans. Skin tone, the darkness of one's skin, has become for many blacks in Libya the difference between prison and freedom, death and life.The rebels who gunned for the toppling of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi have for the past six months been killing anyone who looks dark. Given that there are between a million and two million black Africans in Libya, a slow and under-reported massacre is unfolding in that country.
No one is saying anything. When African leaders such as President Jacob Zuma speak, they speak for Gaddafi but not for the people who are now being routinely murdered at the hands of the rebels - the people who are today in power across large swathes of Libya.
African newspapers and television channels report on the conflict as if they are European, Chinese or American. We never write about the fact that over the past few months anyone with a dark skin has been stopped in the streets of Libya and searched. It is almost like the days of apartheid. These people are then either arrested, tortured or murdered.
No one cares about their fate. They are black after all, and black life is cheapest among Africans. That is why we are not up in arms.
The killings in Libya have cover. Gaddafi, at the beginning of the conflict, used his considerable wealth to hire mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa to terrorise locals and push back the rebel advance. The mercenaries were from everywhere. There were Nigerians, there were veterans from the wars in Ivory Coast and word is that there were even South Africans among them.
These were some of the hired guns of Gaddafi's regime.
These mercenaries would be the ones staging shows of force as Gaddafi shook his fist at the free world. They drove around in Jeeps, shot into the air and pretended that all was fine in the world.
It was not. Now Gaddafi has fallen. Many of the mercenaries have returned home, their hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away. What is left in Libya are the ordinary black people, the ones who have been cleaning for the Libyans all along, building the roads and doing the menial jobs that the rich Libyans would not do.
They are the ones who are dying now. On August 31 an Amnesty International team reported that black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans "are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces".
"An Amnesty delegation visiting the Central Tripoli Hospital last Monday witnessed three thuwwar revolutionaries (as opposition fighters are commonly known) dragging a black patient from the western town of Tawargha from his bed and detaining him. The men were in civilian clothing.
"The thuwwar said the man would be taken to Misratah for questioning, arguing that interrogators in Tripoli 'let killers free'. Two other black Libyans receiving treatment in the hospital for gunshot wounds were warned by the anti-Gaddafi forces that 'their turn was coming'."
Amnesty International is being extremely diplomatic with its language. Human rights activists are reporting that black people have been disappearing all over Libya over the past nine months as the rebels started taking out Gaddafi forces. As rebels arrived in towns, they merely sought out blacks and either killed them on the spot or arrested them. Many have died of starvation in those "prisons".
Wherever alleged Gaddafi forces are found to have been executed, most of those murdered have been black. Video footage of ordinary black men who have been working in Libya being executed is available on the internet. Their sin is that some black mercenaries worked for Gaddafi, and their sin now is that they are black.
The US and Nato, after helping the rebels bomb Libya, have been quiet on this issue. They have blood on their hands. Would they be so quiet if whites were being murdered in such large numbers in Libya?
And where are the Africans? The AU is petulant, refusing to speak or intervene, while their brothers and sisters are being murdered.
What a courageous bunch.
