Post by Admin on Aug 9, 2021 19:02:14 GMT
FROM UPRISING TO INSURGENCY
Less than a week after Hosni Mubarak's ouster, Muammar Qadhafi's vulnerabilities also seemed exposed after a supposedly Cairo-like “day of rage” began in Benghazi on February 17, 2011. The protest started ostensibly as a response to the arrest two days earlier of a well-known human-rights lawyer, Fethi Tarbel, who had begun to represent the families of victims of prison massacres. Judges, lawyers and students assembled outside a police station and demanded his release. As eyewitnesses later described, Tarbel's arrest at this time was “the regime's big mistake.”72
With protests soon spreading across the historically restive city, Qadhafi's old policy of “keeping the East poor as a means by which to limit the potential political threat” — as described in a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2008 — seemed to be proving a severe miscalculation. As U.S. officials had predicted, a poor Benghazi meant there would be “many young eastern Libyan men … [with] nothing to lose by participating in extremist violence at home.”73 Peaceful at first, the demonstrators carried images of Omar al-Mukhtar, the martyred symbol of Libyan resistance to Italian occupation, and declared themselves “the grandsons of Omar.”74 The Benghazi movement quickly appeared to grow into a much bigger insurgency, with mass labor strikes and a number of prominent tribal leaders announcing their support.75 Making matters worse for Tripoli and giving the uprising a harder edge, reports began to circulate of army and airforce defections in Benghazi and Tobruk (also in the east); two pilots had even flown their planes to Malta.76
Still in command of the oil-producing regions, Qadhafi quickly promised a massive $24 billion housing and development fund, most of which was to be spent on regenerating the now-rebellious eastern provinces. Fatefully, however, his firebrand personality seemed to be leading him into the same sort of trap as his counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, especially after he took to the airwaves on February 20 to deliver an “unrepentant speech” that threatened bloody retribution against the dissenters.77 Making matters worse, only a day later the once pro-reform Saif al-Islam appeared on television to deliver a disjointed, rambling and threatening speech in defense of his father's regime. Blaming the Benghazi emergency on drunken or drugged Islamists along with “coffee-drinking Arabs,” he tried to whitewash the deaths of any protesters, attributing them to “planning errors,” while at the same time promising “rivers of blood” for those who continued to resist. Ominously, he concluded that the government would “fight to the last minute and to the last bullet.”78
With the uprising soon reaching Tripoli and state television headquarters being stormed, the collapse of the regime seemed imminent, at least according to the international media. As the days went by, however, the capital appeared to remain quite firmly in Qadhafi's hands, with the much-anticipated nationwide revolution simply failing to materialize. Explained away with stories of pro-government thugs being unleashed in residential areas to keep people off the streets, along with busloads of paid Qadhafi supporters arriving in public squares and — according to the Qatarowned Al-Jazeera — aircraft and helicopter gunships mowing protesters down, the true extent of regime violence during this crucial period has nonetheless been repeatedly called into question. Notwithstanding the Qadhafi family's incendiary speeches, The New York Times hinted nearly a month later that the regime's initial response may not have been as repressive as many had made out. Describing how “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda,” its correspondents believed the rebels were “claiming non-existent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qadhafi's forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.”79 Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, by then in his final months in office, along with the department's Admiral Michael Mullen, stated in a press conference that they had read the media reports but agreed there was “no confirmation whatsoever” that the Qadhafi regime had been using airpower to attack civilians.80 After a lengthy investigation, the director of the International Crisis Group's North Africa project concluded that Al-Jazeera's stories of the strafing of protestors were indeed untrue.81
Apart from some accounts of Serbian guns being used by regime forces, there was little mention in the media of the weapons its thugs were supposed to be using, and certainly no references to the millions of dollars’ worth of British and other European arms and crowd-control equipment that had been sold to Libya up until a few months earlier.82 There were, however, myriad reports being filed that claimed the regime was clinging to power because it was deploying thousands of dark-skinned mercenaries from Mali, Niger and Chad. Rebel eyewitnesses, for example, described to Reuters in detail how French-speaking West Africans had attacked the protesters, while Libya's permanent representative to the United Nations — who had almost instantly defected in February — soon told the world, “We are expecting a real genocide in Tripoli. The airplanes are still bringing mercenaries to the airports.”83 The head of the working group on mercenaries for the UN high commissioner for human rights was only slightly more cautious, stating that the evidence of mercenaries being used was “not 100 percent but it does seem likely,” and it was reported that “he was aware of accounts describing Eastern European as well as African mercenaries in Libya.”84
Others have been much more circumspect, with Cambridge University's George Joffe suggesting the dark-skinned fighters may have been part of Qadhafi's Deterrent Battalion, a foreign legion set up nearly 20 years earlier to counter tribal mutinies.85 Some have been even more critical of the mainstream narrative, contending that the “real genocides” of the Libyan uprising were, in fact, the bloody and largely ignored reprisals and revenge attacks perpetrated by rebels against populations of black Libyans and African expatriates accused of fighting for the regime. As Concordia University's Maximilian Forte argues, this was a side to the conflict that the “white, Western world, and those who dominate the conversation about Libya, have missed … and not by accident.”86 On February 26, for example, an apparently impartial Turkish construction worker told the BBC, “We had 70 to 80 people from Chad working for our company. They were massacred with pruning shears and axes, accused by the attackers of being Qadhafi's troops.” He also stated, “The Sudanese people were massacred. We saw it for ourselves.”87
Just two days after this, only 11 days after the uprising began, it was reported that “dozens of workers from sub-Saharan Africa, it is feared, have been killed and hundreds are hiding because angry opponents of the government are hunting down black African mercenaries, witnesses reported.” Reuters, too, claimed that “hundreds of black immigrants from the poorest African countries, who work mainly as low-wage day laborers in Libya, have been wounded by the rebels. From fear of being killed, some of them have refrained from going to a doctor.” The victims also told Reuters that the rebels were using the pretext of revolution to “accuse [black Africans] of being murderous mercenaries. But in reality they simply refuse to tolerate us. Our camp was burnt down. Our company and our embassy helped us get to the airport.”88 In March 2011, the Los Angeles Times published an equally disturbing account of how dozens of the rebels’ prisoners, mostly black Africans, were being paraded in front of journalists in a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Although its correspondents were prevented from speaking to the prisoners, they still recalled seeing “one young man from Ghana bolting from the prisoners’ queue.” As they described, he shouted in English at them, “I'm not a soldier! I work for a construction company in Benghazi! They took me from my house.” A guard had then reportedly shouted, “He lies … He's a mercenary.”89
A few months later, with a bitter civil war raging, Human Rights Watch observed that “dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans face particular risks because rebel forces and other armed groups have often considered them pro-Qadhafi mercenaries from other African countries.” Its report noted that “we've seen violent attacks and killings of these people in areas where the [rebels] took control.” Amnesty International gave much the same warning, noting there was a “disproportionate detention of black Africans in rebel-controlled Al-Zawiya, as well as the targeting of unarmed, migrant farm workers.”90 In August 2011, even the African Union warned that “[rebels] seem to confuse black people with mercenaries” and that this meant for “one-third of the population of Libya, which is black, [they are] mercenaries.” Its chairperson further reported that “[the rebels] are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them,” and, making a broader point, complained that “the [rebels'] attitude has been negative all along. I went to Benghazi. We have treated them equally.”91
While some dismissed the African Union's conclusions on the basis that Qadhafi had long been one of its most vociferous supporters, it was harder to ignore an investigative report that appeared a few weeks later in the Daily Telegraph. Describing the “ethnic cleansing” of the predominantly black and slave-descended inhabitants of the Libyan town of Tawergha, it detailed how its population of about 10,000 had been collectively accused of remaining loyal to Qadhafi. The reprisal also led to a “large number of houses, and virtually every shop, being systematically vandalized, looted or set on fire” and with “even the local hospital vandalized. The beds were dragged out of the wards and ripped.” One nearby rebel unit was even described as having painted a slogan on the road leading into Tawergha declaring they were “the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin.”92
As the war dragged on, it was also clear that the majority of the regime's armed forces seemed to have remained loyal. As King's College London's Robert Springborg argues, in part this may have been due to the prominent role of the kataib, or “special battalions,” that either answered directly to Qadhafi or were commanded by one of his sons.93 Although some Libyan scholars have argued that, by 2011, tribalism was only superficial,94 the loyalty of tribes also seemed to matter. The Zintan, for example, had clearly embraced the rebel movement and had pushed their elders to end relations with Qadhafi, but many others — such as the powerful Warfalla — had clearly continued to endorse the regime, even if they experienced some high-profile defections and had previously mutinied against Qadhafi.95 In this sense, the mainstream explanations put forward by Al-Jazeera and other outlets for the revolution's marked lack of progress, namely that Libya simply had a better-armed and -financed military than had been expected, were largely bogus.96 The inconvenient reality that few seemed willing to discuss at the time was that the Qadhafi regime was still regarded by many Libyans as the least worst alternative when faced with the prospect of a rebel-led government.
Less than a week after Hosni Mubarak's ouster, Muammar Qadhafi's vulnerabilities also seemed exposed after a supposedly Cairo-like “day of rage” began in Benghazi on February 17, 2011. The protest started ostensibly as a response to the arrest two days earlier of a well-known human-rights lawyer, Fethi Tarbel, who had begun to represent the families of victims of prison massacres. Judges, lawyers and students assembled outside a police station and demanded his release. As eyewitnesses later described, Tarbel's arrest at this time was “the regime's big mistake.”72
With protests soon spreading across the historically restive city, Qadhafi's old policy of “keeping the East poor as a means by which to limit the potential political threat” — as described in a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2008 — seemed to be proving a severe miscalculation. As U.S. officials had predicted, a poor Benghazi meant there would be “many young eastern Libyan men … [with] nothing to lose by participating in extremist violence at home.”73 Peaceful at first, the demonstrators carried images of Omar al-Mukhtar, the martyred symbol of Libyan resistance to Italian occupation, and declared themselves “the grandsons of Omar.”74 The Benghazi movement quickly appeared to grow into a much bigger insurgency, with mass labor strikes and a number of prominent tribal leaders announcing their support.75 Making matters worse for Tripoli and giving the uprising a harder edge, reports began to circulate of army and airforce defections in Benghazi and Tobruk (also in the east); two pilots had even flown their planes to Malta.76
Still in command of the oil-producing regions, Qadhafi quickly promised a massive $24 billion housing and development fund, most of which was to be spent on regenerating the now-rebellious eastern provinces. Fatefully, however, his firebrand personality seemed to be leading him into the same sort of trap as his counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, especially after he took to the airwaves on February 20 to deliver an “unrepentant speech” that threatened bloody retribution against the dissenters.77 Making matters worse, only a day later the once pro-reform Saif al-Islam appeared on television to deliver a disjointed, rambling and threatening speech in defense of his father's regime. Blaming the Benghazi emergency on drunken or drugged Islamists along with “coffee-drinking Arabs,” he tried to whitewash the deaths of any protesters, attributing them to “planning errors,” while at the same time promising “rivers of blood” for those who continued to resist. Ominously, he concluded that the government would “fight to the last minute and to the last bullet.”78
With the uprising soon reaching Tripoli and state television headquarters being stormed, the collapse of the regime seemed imminent, at least according to the international media. As the days went by, however, the capital appeared to remain quite firmly in Qadhafi's hands, with the much-anticipated nationwide revolution simply failing to materialize. Explained away with stories of pro-government thugs being unleashed in residential areas to keep people off the streets, along with busloads of paid Qadhafi supporters arriving in public squares and — according to the Qatarowned Al-Jazeera — aircraft and helicopter gunships mowing protesters down, the true extent of regime violence during this crucial period has nonetheless been repeatedly called into question. Notwithstanding the Qadhafi family's incendiary speeches, The New York Times hinted nearly a month later that the regime's initial response may not have been as repressive as many had made out. Describing how “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda,” its correspondents believed the rebels were “claiming non-existent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qadhafi's forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.”79 Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, by then in his final months in office, along with the department's Admiral Michael Mullen, stated in a press conference that they had read the media reports but agreed there was “no confirmation whatsoever” that the Qadhafi regime had been using airpower to attack civilians.80 After a lengthy investigation, the director of the International Crisis Group's North Africa project concluded that Al-Jazeera's stories of the strafing of protestors were indeed untrue.81
Apart from some accounts of Serbian guns being used by regime forces, there was little mention in the media of the weapons its thugs were supposed to be using, and certainly no references to the millions of dollars’ worth of British and other European arms and crowd-control equipment that had been sold to Libya up until a few months earlier.82 There were, however, myriad reports being filed that claimed the regime was clinging to power because it was deploying thousands of dark-skinned mercenaries from Mali, Niger and Chad. Rebel eyewitnesses, for example, described to Reuters in detail how French-speaking West Africans had attacked the protesters, while Libya's permanent representative to the United Nations — who had almost instantly defected in February — soon told the world, “We are expecting a real genocide in Tripoli. The airplanes are still bringing mercenaries to the airports.”83 The head of the working group on mercenaries for the UN high commissioner for human rights was only slightly more cautious, stating that the evidence of mercenaries being used was “not 100 percent but it does seem likely,” and it was reported that “he was aware of accounts describing Eastern European as well as African mercenaries in Libya.”84
Others have been much more circumspect, with Cambridge University's George Joffe suggesting the dark-skinned fighters may have been part of Qadhafi's Deterrent Battalion, a foreign legion set up nearly 20 years earlier to counter tribal mutinies.85 Some have been even more critical of the mainstream narrative, contending that the “real genocides” of the Libyan uprising were, in fact, the bloody and largely ignored reprisals and revenge attacks perpetrated by rebels against populations of black Libyans and African expatriates accused of fighting for the regime. As Concordia University's Maximilian Forte argues, this was a side to the conflict that the “white, Western world, and those who dominate the conversation about Libya, have missed … and not by accident.”86 On February 26, for example, an apparently impartial Turkish construction worker told the BBC, “We had 70 to 80 people from Chad working for our company. They were massacred with pruning shears and axes, accused by the attackers of being Qadhafi's troops.” He also stated, “The Sudanese people were massacred. We saw it for ourselves.”87
Just two days after this, only 11 days after the uprising began, it was reported that “dozens of workers from sub-Saharan Africa, it is feared, have been killed and hundreds are hiding because angry opponents of the government are hunting down black African mercenaries, witnesses reported.” Reuters, too, claimed that “hundreds of black immigrants from the poorest African countries, who work mainly as low-wage day laborers in Libya, have been wounded by the rebels. From fear of being killed, some of them have refrained from going to a doctor.” The victims also told Reuters that the rebels were using the pretext of revolution to “accuse [black Africans] of being murderous mercenaries. But in reality they simply refuse to tolerate us. Our camp was burnt down. Our company and our embassy helped us get to the airport.”88 In March 2011, the Los Angeles Times published an equally disturbing account of how dozens of the rebels’ prisoners, mostly black Africans, were being paraded in front of journalists in a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Although its correspondents were prevented from speaking to the prisoners, they still recalled seeing “one young man from Ghana bolting from the prisoners’ queue.” As they described, he shouted in English at them, “I'm not a soldier! I work for a construction company in Benghazi! They took me from my house.” A guard had then reportedly shouted, “He lies … He's a mercenary.”89
A few months later, with a bitter civil war raging, Human Rights Watch observed that “dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans face particular risks because rebel forces and other armed groups have often considered them pro-Qadhafi mercenaries from other African countries.” Its report noted that “we've seen violent attacks and killings of these people in areas where the [rebels] took control.” Amnesty International gave much the same warning, noting there was a “disproportionate detention of black Africans in rebel-controlled Al-Zawiya, as well as the targeting of unarmed, migrant farm workers.”90 In August 2011, even the African Union warned that “[rebels] seem to confuse black people with mercenaries” and that this meant for “one-third of the population of Libya, which is black, [they are] mercenaries.” Its chairperson further reported that “[the rebels] are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them,” and, making a broader point, complained that “the [rebels'] attitude has been negative all along. I went to Benghazi. We have treated them equally.”91
While some dismissed the African Union's conclusions on the basis that Qadhafi had long been one of its most vociferous supporters, it was harder to ignore an investigative report that appeared a few weeks later in the Daily Telegraph. Describing the “ethnic cleansing” of the predominantly black and slave-descended inhabitants of the Libyan town of Tawergha, it detailed how its population of about 10,000 had been collectively accused of remaining loyal to Qadhafi. The reprisal also led to a “large number of houses, and virtually every shop, being systematically vandalized, looted or set on fire” and with “even the local hospital vandalized. The beds were dragged out of the wards and ripped.” One nearby rebel unit was even described as having painted a slogan on the road leading into Tawergha declaring they were “the brigade for purging slaves [and] black skin.”92
As the war dragged on, it was also clear that the majority of the regime's armed forces seemed to have remained loyal. As King's College London's Robert Springborg argues, in part this may have been due to the prominent role of the kataib, or “special battalions,” that either answered directly to Qadhafi or were commanded by one of his sons.93 Although some Libyan scholars have argued that, by 2011, tribalism was only superficial,94 the loyalty of tribes also seemed to matter. The Zintan, for example, had clearly embraced the rebel movement and had pushed their elders to end relations with Qadhafi, but many others — such as the powerful Warfalla — had clearly continued to endorse the regime, even if they experienced some high-profile defections and had previously mutinied against Qadhafi.95 In this sense, the mainstream explanations put forward by Al-Jazeera and other outlets for the revolution's marked lack of progress, namely that Libya simply had a better-armed and -financed military than had been expected, were largely bogus.96 The inconvenient reality that few seemed willing to discuss at the time was that the Qadhafi regime was still regarded by many Libyans as the least worst alternative when faced with the prospect of a rebel-led government.