African Mercenaries: In Mythology and Reality

July 6-8, 2011
last edits October 26, 2011

Note, July 11: There are renewed and more credible reports of people who could almost be described as foreign African mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi. These are covered separately, for reasons explained there. This post is dedicated to the disastrous and unfounded accusations of February that helped make excuses for the excesses of the uprising.

Accusations:
One of the most widespread claims of the Libyan civil war is the Gaddafi regime's use of sub-Saharan African mercenaries to crush the protests and turn back the first military gains. The "people of Libya," we heard, were up against well-paid, black-skinned, black-hearted killers from the sandy or steamy depths of the continent Libya sits at the northern edge of. It's so prevalent a claim as to be bland and no longer shocking - hundreds of articles, reports, and videos cite Gaddafi's "African mercenaries" as self-evidently behind a range of atrocities.

There's no real controversy over the Libyans regime's occasional use of foreign mercenaries, from farther south in Africa, to supplement the small military Libya can cull from its six million people. But the over-the-top and reflexive allegations here seem to flourish with ignorance, not scrutiny. It seems to be a racist mass hysteria - or something more calculated - at work.

My article Anti-Black racism among Libyan rebels explains some of the background tensions and how they've played out this year. It's ultimately nothing new, with Gaddafi's pan-African vision, aid across the continent, exchanges and moves toward unification going back years, along with racial tensions and violence erupting, occasionally in massive race riots. But this time, it's really been whipped up with specific allegations, claiming special knowledge that, in retrospect, seems to not have existed.

One rather troubling series of tweets from supposed rebel insiders I re-posted here. It uses the term "protesters" interchangeably with "mercenaries," and the paranoid idea seems to be the same:

"Abdallah: yes there are pro gaddafi protests: but they are not Libyan, they are Africans they are killing everybody. As libyans we expected this from #gaddafi, recruiting protesters to fight us from Africa namely Chad #Libya #Feb17 he warned us about this. #Qaddafi has threatened to flatten #Benghazi and rebuild it, and place in it African Migrants. African mercenaries now in #Benghazi #Libya sources in Libya say they're chasing and killing people with knives and swords. We only fear God"

ABC News (US), Feb 22: Gadhafi's Private Mercenary Army 'Know One Thing: to Kill

Moammar Gadhafi is using foreign mercenaries from Africa who don't speak Arabic, as a private army to protect his regime and they have shown no hesitancy to fire on civilian protesters, witnesses have said.

A doctor in Benghazi told ABC News several foreign mercenaries were captured by Libyan police who have sided with the protesters. [...] "They know one thing: to kill whose in front of them. Nothing else," said the doctor who was reached by phone, but asked to not be publicly identified. "They're killing people in cold blood."

The doctor said he didn't know which country the mercenaries were from, but said they were black, spoke French and were identified by wearing yellow hats. "They have special forces bringing in from outside Libya," he said. "They bring from Africa some military forces, I don't know, some special army, put them in Benghazi and in Tripoli now."

These yellow helmets can be seen famously bobbing around in a crowded street, as they're said to be terrorizing or massacring protesters. This video is something I've analyzed in detail in another post, in video and words. It only shows some kind of security men guarding some green doors. Two or maybe three possible protesters run into their ranks and perhaps get arrested. At the end, the gaurds get the door open and start going inside.

An insightful early article by T. Miles (Feb 20) delved into Libya's  racism problem in connection with these emergent allegations.

CNN has just prominently shown a Libyan woman, tear stained, crying out on the newly liberated streets of Egypt. She calls for justice for her people, for the killing to end, begs Obama to intervene, and then repeats “Gaddafi is killing us with his Africans!” She is not alone in arranging this revolution between the Libyan people on one side, and Gaddafi, his family, and dark-skinned “outsiders” on the other.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the use of a map, Libyans are Africans. But Africans here means “black people” and there is a very long very pernicious racism in their part of the world towards “black Africans”, not unlike that in my part of the world. When I see tweets like the following, I cringe. I also see a history of fear and contempt slipping out in a time of unparalleled suffering.

Gaddafi is ordering african mercenaries to break into homes in #Benghazi to RAPE Libyan women in order to detract men protesters!

This last was a common theme, supported with no credible evidence. In connection with mass rape charges, Afro-Mercs are frequently invoked as sexual boogeymen, as can be seen in the post "Rape Allegations Ganging up on Gaddafi."

The examples of reckless mainstream media bullhorning of these alarmist allegations are too legion to bother with. Just two egregious examples from one outfit, the UK Telegraph will stand-in: a video of Feb 20: 'foreign mercenaries using heavy weapons against demonstrators' and an article of Feb 27: African mercenaries in Libya nervously await their fate.

Some took the notion of Black African fighters to ridiculous extremes. One Canadian Twitter twit accused these villains of being government slaves raised from birth to kill. "Confirmed the African mercenaries were raised in campus [sic] around Sabha and West Mountain since childhood as salves [sic]." [source] If these bred killers had lived in Libya since childhood, are they really foreigners?

Another silly take passed on by Maximilian Forte, Monthly Review, April 20

While a spokesman for the TNC alleged that a whole army of 3,500 fighters from Chad was responsible for the slaughter of "thousands" of opposition fighters and their withdrawal from frontline cities between Benghazi and Tripoli, actual footage obtained from Al Jazeera, showing government forces moving through one such frontline area, shows absolutely no evidence of this Chadian army or of any apparent mercenaries. As far as I know, TNC spokespersons have remained silent on this.

A strangely credulous dispatch from the UK Guardian, February 22, which I previously overlooked, adds some detail to the allegations.

Witness accounts seem to bear out the claims. One resident of Tripoli was quoted by Reuters: "Gaddafi obviously does not have any limits. We knew he was crazy, but it's still a terrible shock to see him turning mercenaries on his own people and just mowing down unarmed demonstrators."

Saddam, a 21-year-old university student in Bayda, claimed mercenaries had killed 150 people in two days. "The police opened fire at us," he said. "My friend Khaled was the first martyr to fall and seven others died with him. "The next day, we were shocked to see mercenaries from Chad, Tunisia, Morocco speaking French attacking us ... We captured some of the mercenaries and they said they were given orders by Gaddafi to eliminate the protesters."
[...]
Ibrahim Jibreel, a Libyan political activist, told al-Jazeera that some had been in the country for months, based in training camps in the south, as if in anticipation of such an uprising. Others had been flown in at short notice, he said.

That's some specialized and unlikely knowledge these guys claim to have. And did these simple folks understand the importance of what they were witnessing with their own eyes and reporting truthfully?

Implications:
The negative fall-out of these troubling claims were of two broad types - those against the government of Libya (intended), and those against non-mercenary black men in Libya (if not intended, not hard to predict either)

Implications for the Libyan government said to employ these savages:
The main hit against the Gaddafi regime of this Afro-Merc fever was helping create the image the leader had lost his legitimate military to defections to the rebel side - they went to "the people." It was later noticed how little of the army - aside from its weapons - showed up in the rebel ranks, and how much of it NATO had to bomb. But before these twin facts became clear, Gaddafi was presented as stripped of the native force's loyalty, explaining why he bought up some cheap slaves as a "personal army" to throw at "his people."

A point that was quickly decided about these foreign mercenaries is that they must have been flown in to kill innocents, especially to airports in the south (where some of the Black soldiers were flown from there). This in turn became a factor in imposing a no-fly zone and air embargo against the regime, to prevent the arrival of more "mercenaries."

The merc meme has also damaged by discrediting Gaddafi's long-standing policy of African unity. It re-brands his empowering policies, continent-wide aid projects, and encouragement of immigration into a crime against humanity.

And paying the Afro-Mercs to replace the army was a factor in the U.S. freezing of tens of billions of dollars of Libya's sovereign funds - at least $10,000 for each man, woman, and child on all sides, who won't get it back 'til they agree to shake Gaddafi.

Although the idea has faded some with time (see below, it was debunked), as recently as July 25, Newsweek ran an "expert" and his poetic opinions. In part,he said:

As for Libya, Gaddafi has no future. The day his mercenaries grow weary, he will fall.

Implications For Black Men in Rebel Hotspots:

Christian Science Monitor's credulous report of Feb 28 Libya's mercenaries pose difficult issue to resolve 

Muammar Qaddafi is likely relying heavily on African mercenaries, but if Libya falls to the anti-Qaddafi protesters, they're the ones who will have to figure out what to do with them.

Oh they figured it out, as it fell to them bit by bit. As an unnamed rebel soldier was quoted referring to the unfounded allegations of mercenary violence: "After what happened here, we lost faith in every black guy that’s walking around. So especially if he doesn’t have a passport, we just grab him.” [source]

Some suspects were released quietly as innocent after all, but others were first lynched, bludgeoned, burneed, tortured, decapitated, and so on. Rebel treatment of suspect mercenaries who weren't quick enough to flee can be to some extent seen here: http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2011/04/rebel-atrocity-videos.html. Routinely, black-skinned prisoners were singled out for worse treatment and more frequent, and brutal, degradation and summary execution. And then more degradation, usually. What can you expect from irrational fanatics who run around believing things like these guys were part of a murder and rape conspiracy against themselves? Based on skin color, maybe language, paperwork...

Many other were thus chased away in fear. Refugees fleeing racist-infesteed Misrata, especially, in rickety refugee ships that have an unhappy habit of sinking - at least four so far, with many hundreds left dead. (Italy, swamped with most of the survivors, likely breaths a sigh of relief mixed with sadness each time).

American National Public Radio did a piece on February 25 (after earlier reporting mercenaries as fact), called "In Libya, African Migrants Say They Face Hostility." What kind of hostility did they claim to face? A Turkish oil field worker had to speak for some of them:

"We left behind our friends [so-workers] 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 Gadhafi. The Sudanese, the Chadians were massacred. We saw it ourselves." 

A famous video published on Feb 19 (still at left) shows the corpse of an "African Mercenary" killed and shown to a camera, described as seeming to be from Chad. But as has been noted, he seems to be wearing the uniform of Libya's internal security forces. As far as anyone knows, they only hire Libyans. The "Chad mercenary" was, according to an online posting, killed in Az Zintan, south of Tripoli. He seems to have been tortured - perhaps into confessing he was a mercenary. What else explains these grave injuries to a finger, his nose, and his cheeks?

Others fled or otherwise left that town in the same days - in March the same security man was re-discovered dumped in the desert, and in late May, at least twelve bodies of black men were found in the desert south of Az Zintan. Each in his unique civilian clothes and frozen in his own final pathos, they were found half-mummified by prolonged exposure. I suspect they died there about two months prior.

The sickening description at that Liveleak posting (by a "Mr. Creosote" no less) says: "The survivors [sic] of a gang of Nigerian mercenary wretches [sic] who were forced to flee into the desert south of Az-Zintan are kept alive [??] by the heroes of free Libya. The gang fled into the desert without water, after coming under concerted attack." Why did the "mercenary wretches" cross the Sahara? To get to the other side? I don't think so.

At the end of the video, at least two living black man are shown being watered and cared for by someone. These tack-ons look emaciated, but clearly not "survivors" of the same doomed party as it was found and shown. Perhaps they were the ones who made it back to town after they were all dropped off for dead.

In the long run, this epic episode of violence is likely to create a lasting rift between Africa and Libya, if the rebels who oversaw the slaughter manage to gain control. And in the short-term, it robbed uprising hot-spots of a known source of regime support. Blacks there, especially dual-nationals and immigrants, tend to support Gaddafi just as Blacks in the United States tend to vote democrat. They make as obvious a target to anti-Gaddafi rebels as certain Florida voters did to anti-Gore Bush family members in 2000.

I now have a video on this subject, showing much of this and more. I'll go ahead and re-embed it here. Do be warned, it's meant to be upsetting stuff. There's blood and hate, dead people and bad people, and spooky music.

Refutations:
The refutations started coming in almost as soon as the allegations, but were somehow ignored as the implications rolled ahead heedless.

VOA Nearly Level, Souare's Doubts
Voice of America even, on March 1, cited two experts, one supportive of merc use and one not, neither supporting anything like the massive threat the rebels claimed to fear.

It is unclear how many mercenaries Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has deployed against Libyan protesters, but African analysts such as Na'eem Jeenah, executive director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, suggest the number is relatively low.

"It is difficult to say exactly how many mercenaries are operating in Libya and how widespread it is, but I think it is safe to say that they number at least in the hundreds," said Jeenah. Jeenah and other analysts says Gadhafi has a long history of using mercenaries [...] "And so yes, they can be called up at short notice therefore, called up at short notice, transported in to the country as [some have] been, etc."

In contrast, Issaka Souare, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies:

"The reason why I doubt the thesis is that we started hearing these claims just the third day of the revolt, and I would imagine it would take some time before you really can go and have recourse to these mercenaries, unless you are foreseeing that your own army is not going to be loyal to you," said Souare. [...] I don't exclude the possibility through migration that some sub-Saharans have integrated, having taken the Libyan nationality, have integrated [into] the Libyan army, or that Gadhafi at some point created a militia formed mainly of these people, and that these are deployed, and then protesters see these, conclude that no they are mercenaries." [emph. mine]

The bolding is important to consider - a basic reason the whole paranoid construct fails to even make much sense. The whole rebellion was a surprise - protests were known of, unrest likely, but this ... if they'd known, there are other things besides pre-positioning Afro-Mercs that would have been done (like beefing up the defense of army bases).

Mr. Souare was also cited by the Guardian. On the 22nd, he was reported as saying:

"In the south of Libya you do have people of sub-Sarahan origin, including Hausa speakers. Some might have integrated into the Libyan army and these would probably be among the first to be deployed. It will then be easy for people to say they are foreign mercenaries.

"People started talking about this issue on the third day, but I think Gaddafi should have had sufficient resources to deal with the protests before resorting to mercenaries. How long would it take Gaddafi to get mercenaries together and deploy them? Maybe a week. So I see it as unlikely at this stage, but it could happen if army defections continue."

HRW and Bouckaert: "No mercenaries in eastern Libya"
In a March 2 interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Peter Bouckaert - emergencies director for Human Rights Watch - refuted the claims, after going to Al Baidah. This was to investigate reports that 156 mercenaries had been arrested there, and should be a good opportunity to verify at least a few.

The rights investigator said that what he found there were, in fact, 156 soldiers from the south of Libya and not from another African country. After talking to them he found out that they were all black Libyans of African descent. The soldiers have since been released by the protesters.

According to Bouckaert, the support of the black southern Libyans for the Gaddafi regime is explicable as Gaddafi fought to counter discrimination against this group in Libyan society.

http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/hrw-no-mercenaries-eastern-libya-0

“Thousands of Africans” have come under attack in Libya, fueled by “hysteria” that mercenaries are involved in significant fighting. “Many of these Africans have been the target of attacks by enraged Libyans because of these rumors,” said Bouckaert.[...]

“There are dark-skinned Libyans in the south of the country who are largely loyal to Qaddafi because he did take steps to end systematic discrimination against dark-skinned Libyans,” said Bouckaert.

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=246936

[The claims about mercenaries] were rashly disseminated by local residents and carelessly peddled by the foreign press. “This is a prime example of lazy, irresponsible journalism on the part of the mainstream media who publish rumors as truth,” said Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch.

CIRET-AVT/CF2R
International Center for Research and Study on Terrorism and Aid to Victims of Terrorism (CIRET-AVT) and the French Center for Research on Intelligence (CF2R) sent a joint team of their top people and a translator to sort through "disinformation" and chatter to get a clear view. Throught the month of April they visited both sides, received statements and supporting evidence, and reported at the end of May. Their findings on Mercenaries adds some nuance, finding foreign fighters presence at some fairly early point, but under circumstances much different from those alleged. There's no evidence any of these real foreign fighters were among those lynched by the hundreds and arrested by thousands.

July: The Smack-down: Amnesty International, HRW, Others, Dismiss the Hoax with Force
AI and other experts, including HRW again, came out in late June with more solid doubts yet.
Independent, UK:

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.

My observation here - their more astute plotters learned from watching the best - the Anglo-American propaganda machine against Libya, the ones responsible for the travesty of the Lockerbie "investigation."

My take on this development, with larger excerpts 

A critical re-posting at a rebel propaganda site (see comments)

Update, October 26: New series of articles "Mercenary Myths" deals with specific cases of alleged Afro-merc activity. Two entries so far, none more promised.
Mercenary Myths: The Aruba School Captives (al Baida, Labraq airport)
Mercenary Myths: A Confession in Benghazi (Benghazi's main courthouse, Feb 25)