Civil War in Libya

[PanzerJaeger]

They? One man?

I've documented the plight of black Africans under rebel control throughout this thread from multiple, well regarded sources over and over and over and over again, and it is hardly contained to a few isolated incidents. Libyans are an incredibly racist people, and have been long before this 'revolution'. They have long resented the presence of black Africans - abd, or slaves, as they call them - in their country, and have taken advantage of the situation - and NATO - to permanently put the blacks in their place.

This is not some rhetorical game I'm playing; it is the bitter reality we, the West, have imposed on millions of Libyans. The truth is that this is not a revolution for all Libyans, it is revolution for a very specific group of Libyans to the detriment of an already vulnerable minority. These people, declared war criminals, should not have Western backing.

And who; Got his ID? Would suck if he turned out to be a mercenary, eh?

Are you actually suggesting that there is any scenario in which such behavior is appropriate?

Also, your outrage at the unconfirmed use of foreign mercenaries is rather laughable. What do you think NATO is?

lol, you can't be serious. Firstly, a lack of evidence as seen by one person, does not debunk anything at all. Secondly, there is nothing in the first link nor the second to support such a confident conclusion (there are no obvious links between the two articles, either). One should not be surprised at the lack of captured mercenaries, why would a man getting paid by a tyrant to fight his people want to get captured by said people?

It was not a single person, it was one of a growing list of human rights organizations that have conducted the only actual (instead of anecdotal) research I've yet seen on the issue and found no traces of foreign mercenaries in Libya... or any of the other claims used to justify NATO intervention.

Human Rights Watch says it has seen no evidence of mercenaries being used in eastern Libya. This contradicts widespread earlier reports in the international media that African soldiers had been flown in to fight rebels in the region as Muammar Gaddafi sought to keep control.

In an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide in Libya, Peter Bouckaert from Human Rights Watch said he had conducted research and found no proof of mercenaries being used. Investigator Bouckaert, who has been in the region for two weeks, told RNW that he had been to Al Bayda after receiving reports that 156 mercenaries had been arrested there.

Here's evidence of mercenaries from Chad, ID papers shown to camera at 03:13 (from outside Adjabiya in March)

Have you ever heard of dual citizenship? It's rather common in Libya. Moving right along...

But not only sub-Saharan African countries are accused of providing mercenaries, there has also been claims that Algerians have been fighting for Gaddafi; and early on in the conflict, it was claimed that the pilots of a regime yet that was shot down had Syrian passports. A couple of days ago, they also claimed to have capture mercenaries from Ukraine in Tripoli. I cannot confirm any of this stuff, but of course it would be convinient for the opposition fighters to convince themselves that most of the men they are fighting are not countrymen, but rather foreigners - making their fight more noble.

Of course you cannot confirm any of it, because it is based in unsupported hysteria.

Way to miss the point. From the very start of this war, PJ has tried to discredit the opposition fighters, first by claiming that they were al-Qaeda sympathisers, and when that turned out not to be so efficient, they were racists instead.

Not at all. The rebels have discredited themselves with countless public lynchings, beheadings, and mutilations of innocent black workers. I will be glad to link to any and all of the above if the moderators OK it.


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A single youtube video in a different language is pathetic evidence for something you claim is wide spread. If this sort of thing happened on a large scale, do you not think the news agencies would have caught wind of it considering there is no real internal security to stop such information leaking? It's not like the Qaddafi era where journalists movement is restricted, in the East the journos could move freely.

Oh but they have... The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal.... If you choose to ignore the truth, that is between you and your conscience.

Yes, ISOLATED incidents of such attacks have been reported but it isn't widespread and more importantly orchestrated as you suggest. The coordination of affairs and the administrative functions of the NTC has been pretty impressive considering the lack infrastructure. Those rebels also seem pretty disciplined too, or would you care to explain why the "lynch mobs" you predicted haven't been seen on my tv screen yet? or is it some sort of NATO conspiracy?

There's my favorite phrase! Isolated incidents. If only.

I find it remarkable that you, an American, are trying to sing the praises of a regime which is directly responsible for the death of hundreds of your countrymen. I can't comprehend why you herald the death of the Desert Dog with almost a sense of remorse.

I could care less about what happens to Mr. Kaddafi. That being said, I would be willing to wager that many more Americans were killed by Eastern Libyans in Iraq than over Lockerbie - many are the same Libyans who the West is now supporting.

Sure, things could get worse, but is all of it not even a little bit worth it if in a decades time we can look at Libya and say yes, what happened here was a good thing?

But it wasn't. That's the thing. This was a horrible event for millions of innocent Libyans that has permanently altered their already vulnerable status in Libyan society. This was a good thing for a very narrowly defined group of disenfranchised eastern Libyan Arabs - at the expense of their black countrymen.

These things may take place in isolated incidents but you have to remember, this is war. Look what happened when the Russians swept into Germany..

Are you seriously citing the rape of Eastern Germany as an example of a positive occupation and outcome?

And speaking of war, why are proponents of this conflict so hypocritical in their suspension of morality? 'It's war'... 'These things happen'...

Well, you're right, the truth is, this was a war from the outset. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, the Eastern Libyans immediately sought to violently wrest control of social buildings, police stations, and armories from the government, as they've been trying to do for years.

Here's another, somewhat less convenient truth. No Western nation would tolerate similar acts. The US, for example, has put down several violent rebellions with equally violent force. Here's what happens when you storm an armory in America with an intent to incite a rebellion.

So why then is it an atrocity when Kaddafi and the internationally recognized legitimate government of Libya resists an armed rebellion while the widespread, vicious ethnic cleansing of the nation's black population is written off as a few isolated incidents? Selective outrage?

If factions within Libya - most of whom were perfectly comfortable working for Kaddafi until it was convenient not to - want to engage in civil war and all the nasty excesses that go along with it, that is their business. I'll lament the dead and move on. However, I'll be damned if I'm going to be even indirectly implicated in such a mess, especially under the guise of protecting civilians from a nonexistent impending genocide when the closest thing to such an event is actually being carried out by our 'allies'.

Human rights organisations have cast doubt on claims of mass rape and other abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have been widely used to justify Nato's war in Libya.

Nato leaders, opposition groups and the media have produced a stream of stories since the start of the insurrection on 15 February, claiming the Gaddafi regime has ordered mass rapes, used foreign mercenaries and employed helicopters against civilian protesters.

An investigation by Amnesty International has failed to find evidence for these human rights violations and in many cases has discredited or cast doubt on them. It also found indications that on several occasions the rebels in Benghazi appeared to have knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence.

...

Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who was in Libya for three months after the start of the uprising, says that "we have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped".

She stresses this does not prove that mass rape did not occur but there is no evidence to show that it did. Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women's rights at Human Rights Watch, which also investigated the charge of mass rape, said: "We have not been able to find evidence."

In one instance two captured pro-Gaddafi soldiers presented to the international media by the rebels claimed their officers, and later themselves, had raped a family with four daughters. Ms Rovera says that when she and a colleague, both fluent in Arabic, interviewed the two detainees, one 17 years old and one 21, alone and in separate rooms, they changed their stories and gave differing accounts of what had happened. "They both said they had not participated in the rape and just heard about it," she said. "They told different stories about whether or not the girls' hands were tied, whether their parents were present and about how they were dressed."

Seemingly the strongest evidence for mass rape appeared to come from a Libyan psychologist, Dr Seham Sergewa, who says she distributed 70,000 questionnaires in rebel-controlled areas and along the Tunisian border, of which over 60,000 were returned. Some 259 women volunteered that they had been raped, of whom Dr Sergewa said she interviewed 140 victims.

Asked by Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International's specialist on Libya, if it would be possible to meet any of these women, Dr Sergewa replied that "she had lost contact with them" and was unable to provide documentary evidence.

The accusation that Viagra had been distributed to Gaddafi's troops to encourage them to rape women in rebel areas first surfaced in March after Nato had destroyed tanks advancing on Benghazi. Ms Rovera says that rebels dealing with the foreign media in Benghazi started showing journalists packets of Viagra, claiming they came from burned-out tanks, though it is unclear why the packets were not charred.

Credible evidence of rape came when Eman al-Obeidy burst into a hotel in Tripoli on 26 March to tell journalists she had been gang-raped before being dragged away by the Libyan security services.

Rebels have repeatedly charged that mercenary troops from Central and West Africa have been used against them. The Amnesty investigation found there was no evidence for this. "Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released," says Ms Rovera. "Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents."

Others were not so lucky and were lynched or executed. Ms Rovera found two bodies of migrants in the Benghazi morgue and others were dumped on the outskirts of the city. She says: "The politicians kept talking about mercenaries, which inflamed public opinion and the myth has continued because they were released without publicity."

Nato intervention started on 19 March with air attacks to protect people in Benghazi from massacre by advancing pro-Gaddafi troops. There is no doubt that civilians did expect to be killed after threats of vengeance from Gaddafi. During the first days of the uprising in eastern Libya, security forces shot and killed demonstrators and people attending their funerals, but there is no proof of mass killing of civilians on the scale of Syria or Yemen.

Most of the fighting during the first days of the uprising was in Benghazi, where 100 to 110 people were killed, and the city of Baida to the east, where 59 to 64 were killed, says Amnesty. Most of these were probably protesters, though some may have obtained weapons.

Amateur videos show some captured Gaddafi supporters being shot dead and eight badly charred bodies were found in the remains of the military headquarters in Benghazi, which may be those of local boys who disappeared at that time.

There is no evidence that aircraft or heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were used against crowds. Spent cartridges picked up after protesters were shot at came from Kalashnikovs or similar calibre weapons.

The Amnesty findings confirm a recent report by the authoritative International Crisis Group, which found that while the Gaddafi regime had a history of brutally repressing opponents, there was no question of "genocide".

The report adds that "much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime's security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators who presented no security challenge".