The Site that Asks: Is the "dictator" justifying intervention by killing innocents? Or is someone else doing it for him? (previously The Libyan Civil War: Critical Views)
Warning
Warning: This site contains images and graphic descriptions of extreme violence and/or its effects. It's not as bad as it could be, but is meant to be shocking. Readers should be 18+ or a mature 17 or so. There is also some foul language occasionally, and potential for general upsetting of comforting conventional wisdom. Please view with discretion.
Update, June 14: The report is now complete and published. The current (best, final?) version is available in PDF at the new CIWCL site. (Direct PDF link there - go there!)
This post will be the spot for the first report of the Citizen's Investigation into War Crimes in Libya to be discussed, its portions published so far linked and organized, and whatever. Right now, I wanted to show the cover art. The document stands as of June 1 at 144 pages total.
At left, the cover design.
Below, the sections there will be, pages (pp) and progress in % complete. (99% is the highest until the whole report's done). The few sub-sections where I've posted a rough draft online are so linked. This helps me spot the last errors as well as show off the biggest sections, with the most new bits, that are approximately done and worth adding to the site.
(June 1: I don't feel like updating all this below - it's much further along and nearly done across the board.)
Part 1: Introduction (section) 1.1: Report Overview (3 pp, 75%)
1.2: About the CIWCL and this Report (2 pages, 40%)
1.3: A "Holocaust" Scene on the World Stage (7 pp, 99%)
In short, "why it matters." I've found this is an important thing to clarify up-front. Rough draft online
1.4: Another Khamis Prison Massacre (7 pp, 99%) Rough draft online Presaging some of the problems with the larger massacre, a contemporaneous case a few miles away of six killed, 50-100 escaped unharmed.
Part 2: Problematic Witnesses (section) 2.1: So-Called Witnesses and Injustice (3 pp, 90%) If it's happened before, why rule it out here? (Special emphasis on false testimonyfrom Tawerghan teens about rape parties in Misrata)
2.2: Cataloguing the Witnesses (5-7 pp, 96%) Rough Draft Online (minus some intro material) New draft for the report will include the Mohammed Bahir/Bashir al-Sedik/Germani/Omar cluster of clownish confusion, pressed in an under-stated way into the intro.
2.3: The Captive Soldiers “Confess” (7 pp, 98%)
(a bit expanded from what we have collected here)
2.4: Believe Whom? (13 pp, 98%) Rough draft online Sorry,you'll have to decide which witnesses to believe and which must be wrong, time and again.
2.5: "See-Through Salem" and the Fakers He's Touched (11 pp, 98%)
(not much different from what we have collected here)
Part 3: An Alternate Evidence-Based Explanation (section) 3.1: Racist Brutality, up to the Shed (13 pp, 99%) Rough-draft online
A fast-paced yet relentlessly dense summary of summary executions of Africa wherever the Rebels found it. Essential background knowledge for the next sub-section.
3.2: Un-Burned Victim Clues (7-8 pp, 75%)
(a bit compressed from what we have collected here and here)
Why are most of those prisoners killed after escape black, while none of the dozens that lived are?
3.4: Timeline Clues for a Rebel Massacre (9-10 pp, 90%)
(a bit expanded from what we have collected here)
The date of the massacre, August 23, is one of the few points the rebels and witnesses seem likely to be correct on. So why do clues keep popping up that the rebels controlled this base by the 23rd, and had a pile of 140 bodies to explain by dawn on the 24th?
I have an old Lockerbie research friend, Eddie, to thank for this tip and the intital research, to which I (and then contributors, via comments here) added a lot. It was thanks to my work he saw the significance when he stumbled across this character Dr. Salem al-Farjani. In two important ways this man may be relevant to our understanding of the mysterious massacres across the capitol in August and September.
First, an Associated Press Article by Vanessa Gera, December 10, explains al Farjani's relevance in "liberated Libya" as a big wheel in the NTC's search for the war's missing and unidentified. He's to specialize in the names without bodies and bodies without names, anonymous corpses in mass graves, from both sides but especially rebel people, since Gaddafi loyalists were the evil killer side. In part, his job will likely be to help the NTC put acceptable identities on the victims of massacres carried out by their own forces - disappearing loyalists, replacing them with more martyrs, made-up if need be, and more black paint for the past.
The governing National Transitional Council has founded a national commission to deal with the matter [of the thousands reported missing]. It is headed by al-Farjani, a cardiac surgeon, and a DNA specialist, Othman Abdul-Jalil [sic].
The DNA part of this "National Missing Persons Commission" can be quite helpful if done right, and I have no cause to doubt the credibility of his co-chair, actually named Dr. Mohamed Othman. But Dr.al Farjani, as we'll see, has known issues.
Dr. Salem's audition for his part of the job, as Gera describes it, was an insurgency-long, life-and-family-endangering, one-man fact-finding mission. On about February 20, “bodies of protesters that were brought to his sprawling 1,200-bed Tripoli Medical Center were seized by Gadhafi forces before their families could recover them." This fiendish behavior has been widely alleged, but never well illustrated. The doc plans to change that, and has for nearly a year now been taking careful note of the cartoonish villainy, even going outside the hospital on "fact-finding missions to the sites of suspected massacres or mass graves."
Did he take one of these trips, on August 27, to the Yarmouk military base south of town, site of a likely rebel massacre a few days earlier?
Field Work
Now for what the guy looks like, which-aside from the "Dr." part and "Salim" part, and proximity to massacres part, is what caught Eddie's attention: The photograph used in that article was also cited in a news blurb: “In this Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011 photo, Dr. Salem al-Farjani, 43, speaks to a militia member as they stand in front of photos of men who went missing during Libya's civil war.” The photograph (cropped view below) shows a man who looks rather similar to another Tripoli-based Dr. Salim/Salem, who spoke to several media outlets in late August about a massacre he treaveled to the site of - though not far, he says.
The largest mass-killing allegation of all, over 150 people killed with guns and grenades, the alleged Khamis Brigade shed massacre with too many witnesses including himself, was right by this doctor's house south of Tripoli, he says. He saw it all happen, he told Agence France-Presse (AFP), Sky News, Anthony Loyd, Human Rights Watch, Liberation, perhaps the New York Times and even more, depending.
The facial similarity between the two is not overwhelming at all, but it is there. On closer inspection (keep reading), it gets better. I see the same distinct hairline, same eyebrows and eyelids, muscular, furrowed brows shading his eyes. I see a consistent long nose, cheeks, chin, and ears. He seems to have lost about ten pounds and grown in his beard between the two images. He could have more of a tan now as well, but the washed-out video (lightened more here) is not too clear. The taste in shirt colors is consistent enough too, if not any major clue.
Faces aside, recall that both men shown above are massacre-obsessed or massacre-witnessing, rebel-assisting Tripoli doctors named Salim/Salem (as given, anyway). What stands in the way of linking the two as one is the different last name, and that we have no reason to believe that Dr. Salim al-Farjani, one of the NTC's top massacre-solving and ID-deciding people, is such a total faker. Other than the fact that he may have been caught faking, known reason or not.
But faces not aside, two further images from between his Fat Elvis and Thin Elvis pahses show the transition. Felix found a valuable Youtube video that sinks it.
لقاء مع الدكتور سالم الفرجاني عضو اللجنة الوطنية للتعرف على هويات ضحايا حرب التحرير
[auto-translate: "A meeting with Dr. Salem Ferjany member of the National Committee to get to know the identities of the victims of the war of liberation"]
It was posted October 1, so presumably from shortly before that date. I had hoped a video would reveal enough of his voice to make a clear match, but in fluent Arabic Dr. Salem sounds little like Dr. Salim in his halting, funny-sounding English. The raw video is a bit too dark to be sure, but with enhancement (adjustment of "levels" in Photoshop - is that "gamma?" -may have over-done it, sorry), the man's face is uncanny in its similarity to Rajip's, as opposed to his own about two months later.
As a nail in the coffin goes, contributor Petri Krohn notes (in the comments here), and the image above confirms, both men have a distinctive gap in their lower teeth, apparently just left of center (our right). I suspect that upon seeing something, perhaps the October video, someone alerted the doctor how much he resembled the guy on the news. It was perhaps this that spurred him to start jogging heavily and to stop shaving, in the hopes no one else would notice.
More images: Dr. Rajub speaking to AFP, late in the afternoon, from a Spanish-dubbed broadcast. Tooth gap visible here too. Note the blue alligator shirt Dr. Rajub wears here, as when speaking to Sky News earlier (above).
Interesting then, as if we needed it at this point, is Dr. al-Farjani wearing the same shirt, when speaking about the "more than 1,700" prison massacre, on September 26. From an Al Arabiya video. He's starting a mustache it seems, suggesting the October 1 video was some days or weeks old as it was posted.
The Doctor's Dad
The Gera article metions how with even his wife out of the loop, the doctor's "only confidant was his father, who would travel with him on fact-finding missions to the sites of suspected massacres or mass graves. He hoped the presence of a 70-year-old man would make him seem less suspicious to Gadhafi’s men."
Survivor Fathallah Abdullah
- the doctor's dad?
It is noteworthy that among the too-many alleged miraculous escapees, there is one rather toothsome 70-year-old man who turned up at the massacre site and spoke with Bild (Germany) and BBC. This was on August 27, as "Dr. Salim Rajub" was there. He was named Fathallah Abdullah al Ashter, as given, and said he escaped but lost his three sons in the onslaught, none of them named Salem or Salim. It could be true, I suppose.
Further Adventures of See-Through Salem
See-Through Salem: "Dr.Salim" Speaks, Coach Salem Manages
The man called Rajub, on Aug. 27: What he said, to whom, and how he interacted with the other "witnesses," as seen on camera. Plenty of speculation, but no shortage of decent evidence to support it. Was he the puppet master here?
A "Dr. Salim," a "Mr. al Farjani, and a Key Escapee.
The link "Dr. Rajub" showed in apparently coaching escapee witness Atiri/el Hitri brings to point the question whether the Dr. is also Mr. Ahmed al Farjani, who says he sheltered the escapee. This, the el Hitri link, and their teamwork on getting this story to the International Criminal Court are explored here.
Al Farjani Hits the Big Time
Ramsay and Loyd and perhaps Worth were only the start for Dr. al Farjani's clandestine "fact-finding" missions at the Yarmouk shed. Within a month he was in the government's committees to solve massacres, and by November he was returning again and again to the massacre site with more influential people yet. On November 3, it was UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. On the 23rd, it was ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The last has a video finally with the tour guide, wearing a jacket if not a tie, speaking in Dr, Rajub's English.
See-Through Salem Arrested?
It seems so, at Tripoli Medical Center, and he was carrried away by armed men. The details of why, by whom, and what next remain unclear.
Standing Questions / Troubling Implications
If he's not able to skate through with arguments that he didn't lie, what are the proper charges for the Libyan people to file for this crime against reality? Because behind this apparent deceit is a likely rebel massacre it was designed to conceal, and in front of it is the very real danger that the good doctor was hired to do much more of the same.
So ... Dr. Salem al-Farjani wants to help since “people are suffering. They want to know the fate of their loved ones.” There are families attached to the approximately 150-180 government soldiers and/or civilian others, many alleged "mercenary" types, who were apparently slaughtered at or near the Yarmouk military base. They never turned up acknowledged as captive, dead, or alive, though some said they "fled like rats" to nowhere in particular. From the timeline clues, one could fairly surmise that they were killed at their stations by NATO bombs and/or the Misrata Brigades, before the latter started burning their corpses after capturing the brutalized base late on the 23rd - the specified date of the massacre (see the link, entry "Wednesday, 6:15 am").
Will Dr. Farjani be helping solve that one, after fire has erased the best direct clues who the victims really were? After Dr. Rajub went there and pretended to see the vanishing soldiers themselves kill the same number of perhaps invented 'rebular' Libyan guys? After two dozen uninjured escapees, partly shepherded by the doctor, swore they escaped somehow from as many different versions of the massacre?
Our subject alleged regime use of acid to erase clues - fire was known to be used to erase clues at Yarmouk, and the rebels were apparently in control when the fire was set. Dr. al-Farjani might have been there when the cover-story was inserted in the place of those lost clues. He may have helped seed the lie himself, in a fact-making mission to a massacre site. And he even says Libya "won’t have reconciliation" until his work is enshrined in the nation's new legal history.
I must say this closing line from from the Gera piece is extremely reassuring as to how his commission will perform:
Officials stress that they want to help find the missing on all sides.
“We don’t discriminate,” said Hatem el-Turki, the head of the Libyan Society of the Missing.
Suddenly Relevant
A recent turn of the news has spurred me to finally finish this long-neglected draft post. At least fifty-three more people have been found killed in the expanding Tripoli massacres, burnt to literally skeletal remains. These were found, still smoldering, on August 26 or 27 (accounts vary) in a warehouse next to the base of the demonized Khamis brigade, long reported to engage in serious crimes against humanity. Thus the crime is blamed saqurely, by location and by several self-described escapees of the massacre, as committed by the Gaddafi regime against those in the uprising.
The incident remains, in this researcher's mind, extremely questonable. I will wait until I've reviewed the evidence closer to to see if it still seems that way then. Most who hear these reports will, however, just presume it's all the truth, and not possibly made up by the rebel forces or the suspiciously numerous but relatively consistent eyewitnesses.
The temptation to just believe is understandable. After all, this heinous cinderization of families, freedom-seekers, and a few soldiers who wanted to defect, matches a previously "known" pattern: Gaddafi troops charring people like this, especially the mutinous military folk, in moments of extreme peril. Just before or maybe just after rebel fighters overwhelm some notorious government positions and kill them or send them running, Gaddafi's thugs allegedly often make a decision to burn the hell out of someone noble who's simply standing up for what's right.
Really?
This previous pattern is something I've somehow managed to gloss over almost completely, even at the epic Rebel Atrocity Videos. I've been meaning to fix that and note the alleged burning, alive, of government soldiers, by the government, along with my suspicions that something else was going on there.
As the claims stood back in February, this extreme death was usually ordered for those heroic soldiers who refused to attack protesters as ordered. However, this same motive was claimed for a certain 22 soldiers (among 130 total!), bound and executed by gunshots to the head in or around al Baida. They wouldn't shoot protester, so their officers shot them, before just disappearing themselves.
And in the case of the al-Baida massacre, the rebel claim falls apart on scrutiny. A separate video (posted by rebels, later pulled, and in-between found and shown by Libyan TV) shows at least one of the men killed, among nine men with several possible matches with the heroic dead, still alive and being sentenced to die by their captors - bearded, civilian, "protesters," clearly. Their crime was pronounced as daring to shoot back as the terrorists attacked their position, which they had a right to do, "to defend themselves." (The bodies of these heroic martyrs, by the way, were cursed by rebel viewers the following day as dogs who deserved their fate. Odd considering what they told the outside world.)
So if the victim is charred to a crisp, is the same rebel story of who killed them and why any more credible?
Firestarters
For starters, the rebels/"protesters" were the known fire bugs in these early days, destroying police stations with fire in many cities, as early as February 15. Three internal security stations in Benghazi alone were reportedly burnt on the 16th, in raids that led to some of the first, low-key "protester" deaths there.
Secondly, burning of bodies made mostly of water is not the most efficient way to ensure the death of mutineers. Here is one video of a "protester" attempt, on a man already killed, that failed. It is however a conveniently cruel method, and would help to demonize oneself, if that was one's bag. Perhaps that facts explains why the rebels, so intent on demonizing their enemy, decided to do these barbecue attacks, as well as educating the world on what really happened.
I believe there are multiple videos of different instances of "soldiers burned alive" in the uprising's first couple of days. But for now I'll focus on this widely-seen one, from the Benghazi front, posted February 21 (video is below). A "news" article from the next day referred to this find and gave the following, indirectly useful, information:
Five charred bodies were found Monday in military barracks in Benghazi, the second-largest city in Libya and a stronghold of anti-Gaddafi protesters. According to one of our Observers, the bodies were those of soldiers savagely massacred for refusing orders to fire against Libyan civilians protesting in the African nation.
Government-run Jamahiriya News Agency (JANA) reported last week that the Al-Fudhail bin Omar base, home of the barracks where the bodies were found, was an important target of anti-Gaddafi protests.
Benghazi fell to protesters on February 18. Two days later, demonstrators headed to the military compound to demolish the building they regarded as a symbol of Gaddafi’s authoritarian rule. JANA reported that the building had been pillaged by "rioters" but did not mention that the bodies of five burned soldiers had been found.
Actually, Benghazi didn't fall in a meaningful way until the 20th, when the sprawling, walled-in barracks in the center of the city, sometimes called the Katiba, finally fell after days of "protester" attacks. It was a major symbol indeed, and much-hated, and indeed the same base where these bodies were found. A UN report (advance unedited version, PDF link) mentioned "incidents of protestors being injured by government forces were reported in Benghazi (in front of Al-Fadhil bin Omar Katiba) [...] on February 18." That's exactly where "protesters" were killed that day and others - right next to the military base, if not exclusively than overwhelmingly.
On February 20 the armed attacks on the Katiba's walls, ongoing daily since the 17th, took a drastic turn. They were decisively breached, and an uncounted number, probably scores at least, of government soldiers were killed within the compound, with at least one beheaded by the enraged masses. A "heroic" suicide bomber, Mahdi Ziu, had let them in. The armory was freely looted for tanks and other heavy weapon to carry out better attacks in other cities. The remaining Katiba soldiers, hundreds of them, were forced to take refuge in various buildings. Several buildings were torched by the rebels, and left gutted and smoke-stained, as later video shows. Only Interior Minister Abdel Fateh Younis was able to arrange the safe departure of those remaining, as part of his defection deal the night of the 20th.
More Martyrs on Display
Anyway, here is the video filmed in some Benghazi barracks the following day, of these exactly five carbonized soldiers:
And there's another video around of clearer resolution, posted as "people of libya is burning." This one reveals enough detail to see that one of the victims at least is missing his head (see image below).
User Ibnomar, who posted the first one, explained there:
Footage of burned soldiers Gaddafi had killed because they would not commit the brutality commanded to them
By the heaven, holding the big stars (1) And by the Promised Day (i.e. the Day of Resurrection); [yadda yadda]
In reality, when you see anything like this, consider it more than likely another rebel atrocity. If the above narrative alone doesn't do it for you, here's more food for thought.
The Real Victims - Martyrs for What?
A reader first tipped me off a while back to see the UN Human Rights Council report on abuses, on both sides, in the early civil war period. [PDF link, accompanying press release] Among their findings was endemic abuse of black Africans, men and women, and especially those from Chad. One of the more shocking which they found credible enough to pass on was this:
4. Violations committed by opposition groups. The Commission received several accounts of attacks on migrant workers carried out by armed opposition groups. […] Another case reported to the Commission related to the extra-judicial killing of five Chadian nationals who had been arrested on the basis of their nationality, and taken tothe military barracks in Benghazi. Dozens of armed persons either in military style or civilian clothing were said to have poured kerosene on their bodies and burned them to death on 21 February.
Hey, isn't that the same exact day this video was shown? Is this video of "Gaddafi crimes" in reality corroboration of this horrific rebel war crime? (Or is it a "protest" crime? Is there a tribunal for that?) Often the black-skinned dead are proudly shown on video, signs of horrific torture and all, and called African mercenaries (which they were not). But there's a whole different potency in calling the skeletons, race and clothing indeterminate, brave government soldiers, like those in al Baida, killed for their heroic stand "with the people."
Maybe the rabbles at the Katiba were left, by Younes' bargain, with less real soldiers to slaughter and play PR games with than they had hoped for. So they had to go snag five Chadian workers, arresting them as "mercenaries." But once they'd been burned alive, they were good, presumably Arab, soldiers to look up to, and just found that way in the base that had just been held by the wicked government.
Stopping Bloodbaths?
Thank God the West intervened to stop this kind of regime brutality. And now the "Freedom Fighters" are discovering dozens of even more charred bodies in Tripoli itself, in areas that had just been held by the wicked government. And again, they have the explanation all ready for us. Again, a horrific blood bath was occurring there just before the FFs pulled in. They saved countless other lives, but a little too late to save at least 400 regime victims reported to date across the holdout neighborhoods of Tripoli.
And in this case, they were just barely too late - the video of the remains show them still smoldering.
Be skeptical here folk, hard as I know that's going to get. The moral stakes are very high, and the greatest powers in the world are intent on seeming to have backed the good guys who really are stopping slaughters, not initiating and fobbing them off.
Update Sept. 6: I've got a video for this now.
Update Sept. 7: And a line from Clive Baldwin from Human Rights Watch, via Sky News, about his look at the scene of August's massacre:
[Baldwin] said the scene was similar to other ones he had witnessed. The warehouse was apparently used to execute people who refused to kill civilians. He said it appeared that pro-Gaddafi forces had shot detainees in the last few days before rebel fighters entered Tripoli. "We have also seen people in military uniforms," he said. "This is similar to March when we had evidence of members of the Libyan army refusing orders and being killed.
Yes indeed, it's quite similar, but that shouldn't cloud our vision of the facts on the ground. Just because it was clearly rebels burning innocent black men alive the first time doesn't necessarily mean the same thing happened here. By "March," I presume he's going by memory that he wrote about Gaddafi's crimes against humanity on March 1, holding this news in mind at the time, though it didn't seem he mentioned it there.
It seems the rebels recently made good on their promises to help Tawergha's people "liberate themselves," or alternately to leave en mass and/or be "purged" as "slaves, black-skin." It was the latter that came to be, it seems, but not as horrific as it might have been feared, from the little we've been able to see and learn (a separate post on this is coming). Misratans say they sleep easier with a threat removed, but the cost was high - admitting they could only free some cities "for the people" by clearing them of their people.
The main point of this post is one of the reasons they gave why they had to do this. Most prominently, and probably true, is the rebel accusation of government rocket attacks from Tawergha, killing innocents in their homes as well as combatants trying to overthrow the government. There was also the reported, and logical, action of Tawergha natives among the fighters they've had to deal with to keep their stolen city.
But among the most volatile charges, given what we know of the racism in the rebel ranks, is that the black-skinned inhabitants of Tawergha have been employed by the regime to go into Misrata and surrounding areas and rape their women in large numbers, and often by large numbers.
When you see that allegation repeated about, remember that it almost surely refers to the only known evidence, explained and analyzed below.
New allegations from the BBC's Andrew Harding of mass rape come from two young black men captured in Misrata. They confess in some detail to being forced into a huge cue to rape some young rebel women.
Was there a systematic campaign of rape by forces loyal to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi during the battle for Misrata?
Two young prisoners in a detention centre in the city tell me the answer is almost certainly "yes", and that they took part in the gang-rape of four women.
The men, aged 17 and 21, are sitting on a sofa - heads bowed - in the same filthy, bloodstained army fatigues they were captured in two weeks ago.
They are obviously nervous, but speak clearly.
The authorities in this rebel-held city were reluctant to let us interview them, but finally agreed on condition we do not reveal the soldiers' names.
Before I go any further, let me acknowledge that it is clearly in the rebels' interest to portray Col Gaddafi's forces in the worst possible light.
It is also possible that the soldiers were coerced into telling us lies.
And there is a big difference between individual acts of violence committed during wartime and a systematic campaign to target civilians.
Indeed, on all three counts. However, Mr. Harding says "my impression was that the men were telling the truth," and he passes that on. In part:
"The mother was screaming and when we pointed the gun at her, she stopped screaming.
"Then we tied up the mother and father and their boys [three of them] by their feet and hands. Then we shot every one of them in the leg.
"There were four girls aged between about 20 and 24. They were conscious [during the rapes]. I raped one.
"The girls said nothing. They were tired and they were in bad shape because there were 20 officers before us. It happened in the morning, and lasted about an hour and a half. The officers brought in a music system and listened to pop music, and smoked and danced during the rapes.
"I'm not happy with what I did but I don't feel nervous or frightened now, and I want to emphasise that the officers forced us to rape.
Nice infidel behavior mixed in - again, the rebels and their Arab patrons want us to know the battle is between God and Gaddafi. Note the assertion of no nervousness when Harding said they were "obviously nervous." The last part is interesting: these black men (mercifully called "soldiers" and not "African mercenaries") did this on evil regime orders, not from their own wild African lusts. That allows them to use these guys as propaganda without having a lynch mob to appease or oppose. And it helps soften the rebel camp's previous, well-earned reputation for being horrible racists who use black men's lives like dirt to score cheap political points.
A few more bad signs, and I thanks Mr. Harding for gathering details with this report:
"They told us that if you rape any girls, we will give you money and we got 10 dinars [$8, £5] each afterwards.
"This was my first time to have sex. I have four sisters at home."
I asked the men if they knew of other instances of rape, and whether it happened often.
"I think it happened so many times. Most of the people who raped families here were from the special forces and we heard on the radio [their military radio system] that there were about 50 families that experienced rape."
The rebel authorities in Misrata say they believe there may be hundreds of victims, but so far no-one has made an official complaint. There are many possible reasons for this.
Dr. Fortia is quoted at length, and again, the social taboo against reporting rape is cited. [to add: I know of no taboo about having your sister raped while you were shot in the leg, and no one's reported that either]. Another obvious reason [for a lack of reports] is that these paid for, regime-forced, disco-dancing, smoking and probably drinking, bragged-about-on-the-radio, mass rape parties didn't actually happen.
A Professional Agrees
Only later did I see, prominently run in the UK Independent in late June, a confirmation of my suspicions from one of Amnesty International's top experts on the subject. She doesn't specify the case she cites is from Misrata, but it's clearly in reference to the same Tawergha kids cited by Mr. Harding.
...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."
In Misrata and nationwide, there is no evidence that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war, but it's plainly evident the rebels used the allegation of rape in their information war. The racist and perhaps brutal aspects of the fall of Tawergha, among many other episodes over the last half a year in Libya, will sometimes show its deadly consequences.
From Both Sides
Also in June, a top UN investigator who'd just been to Libya finding facts dismissed the broad sweep of rape charges, if not each and every one, as the product of a "massive hysteria," M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born UN human rights investigator of high repute, panned the separate "Viagra" claims thusly:
"[rebel sources told me] we arrested or found bodies of people dead with Viagra pills and contraceptives on them. So we go over to Tripoli and we sit with 30 NGO’s and guess what the same story comes up. This time it’s the government people who are telling us you know what the opponents have a policy of rape and we have discovered that they are giving out contraceptives and Viagra pills and so I told them this is exactly what the other side told us and I communicated to both and I said what it is, at least my interpretation of it is, when the information spread out and the society felt so vulnerable it created a massive hysteria.”
The same both-sides hysteria comes across with Misrata rape parties. We've seen the rebel version, and as for the government's - well, it's worse yet. As I mentioned in passing at the post Rebel Atrocity Videos, the Libyan government, legitimate and beseiged as it is, implausibly claims rebels there have raped loyalist women in mass, mothers and daughters together, and slaughtered them, slicing off their breats, and having festive dinner parties with the trophies laid on the table (see here for the video and transcript of a confession). Is it alright if, like Bassioumi on the Viagra claims, I reject both versions of the Mirata rape party phenomenon?
Conclusion
The only known basis for the claim of systematic rape of Misratans by Tawerghans was the two youths who swore they took part. But if their stories didn't match, were internally inconsistent, too convenient, too implausible, and possibly coerced, we can say there's a damn good chance they were just coerced.
This means someone was going out of their way to consciously create such a fiction against a city they already had reason to take out. Someone decided to fill the fighters' hearts with hateful images of black men raping their family before going into battle against them. Is it right, legal, or ethical to pump your fighters up in this way before "purging" a whole city? Might that not lead to abuses of the kind that seem to have happened in the shadows of the fall and purge of Tawergha?
And of course, via Mr. Harding and the credulous media at large, they sought to explain to the world - with this same fiction - why their final solution for their southern neighbors was justified.
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"
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
“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.
[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."
Amnesty International, the premier Human Rights group - by some measures, I would presume - has just the other day taken an unusual stance vis-a-vis the Libyan civil war. A blanket discreditation of several prevalent conspiracy theories about the Libyan government's behavior. To keep it simple, here's a big excerpt from the UK Telegraph's story on it, and a link for the rest.
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.
The findings by the investigators appear to be at odds with the views of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who two weeks ago told a press conference that "we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people."
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week said she was "deeply concerned" that Gaddafi's troops were participating in widespread rape in Libya.
My money's on Mrs. Clinton and Mr. M-O being wrong here. Hands down.
Again, by this, the claims rebuffed are:
- Gaddafi ordered mass rapes (accepted by M-O as a basis for arrest warrants)
- Gaddafi used foreign mercenaries (M-O's basis for wanting to arrest Saif Gaddfi was for recruiting these)
- Gaddafi employed helicopters against civilian protesters (not to mention fighter jets, allegedly)
And it goes past AI to other prominent voices in the Human Rights world, willing now to rock the boat.
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."
The Telegraph had to counter:
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."
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."
Such is the title of a French-language report from the International Center for Research and Study on Terrorism and Aide to Victims of Terrorism (CIRET-AVT) and the French Center for Research on Intelligence (CF2R). Translating to "an uncertain future," it's based on a month-long tour of Libya, rebel-held and government-held, in the month of April. The report says it was completed in May, so it's at least a month old by now as it finally comes to my attention.
It was mentioned more recently by RFI English, and by the conservative National Review Online - because it's a Democrat's war, I presume. As both these note, the report focused on the terrorist/Jihadist aspect of the rebel uprising, finding it a significant part of the mix making up the rebel fighting force and leadership. This joins former al Qaeda prisoners of Guantanamo Bay and others seeking an Islamic emirate with conservative Libyan monarchists (including former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil), opportunistic defectors, and a minority of true pro-democracy forces that the whole lot has been portrayed as.
The al Qaeda element has, in my opinion, been over-played by the Libyan government and American conservatives. It's a handy way to cause doubts, when standard appeals to fairness and truth fall flat. Islamists like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, al Qaeda in the Maghreb, former aQ detainees like Sufyan bin Qumu and Abdelkareem al-Hasadi are involved in the fighting, especially in Dernah. There is no doubt of that, and any video shows that about 50% of all rebel vocabulary consists of Allahu Akbar.
But despite their enthusiasm, they will not in my opinion be running Libya once this is done. The main danger they pose is putting up an awkward fight as they're told this and refuse to accept it right off. And if their number are high enough, and the specter of TNC-brokered NATO control feared enough ... well, it might be a concern. My opinion could be wrong, and it's all worth more study.
The report also makes some other very interesting observations, as translated in the NRO piece:
Little by little, [Misrata] is starting to appear like a Libyan version of Sarajevo in the eyes of the “free” world. The rebels from Benghazi hope that a humanitarian crisis in Misrata will convince the Western coalition to deploy ground troops in order to save the population.
[...]
It is thus now obvious that Western leaders — first and foremost, President Obama — have grossly exaggerated the humanitarian risk in order to justify their military action in Libya.
The real interest of Misrata lies elsewhere. . . . The control of this port, at only 220 kilometers from Tripoli, would make it an ideal base for launching a land offensive against Qaddafi.
It is a little-known fact that Benghazi has become over the last 15 years the epicenter of African migration to Europe. This traffic in human beings has been transformed into a veritable industry, generating billions of dollars. Parallel mafia structures have developed in the city, where the traffic is firmly implanted and employs thousands of people, while corrupting police and civil servants. It was only a year ago that the Libyan government, with the help of Italy, managed to bring this cancer under control.
Following the disappearance of its main source of revenue and the arrest of a number of its bosses, the local mafia took the lead in financing and supporting the Libyan rebellion. Numerous gangs and members of the city’s criminal underworld are known to have conducted punitive expeditions against African migrant workers in Benghazi and the surrounding area. Since the start of the rebellion, several hundred migrant workers — Sudanese, Somalis, Ethiopians, and Eritreans — have been robbed and murdered by rebel militias. This fact is carefully hidden by the international media.
(bolding mine throughout)
Up until the end of February, the situation in western Libyan cities was extremely tense and there were clashes — more so than in the east. But the situation was the subject of exaggeration and outright disinformation in the media. For example, a report that Libyan aircraft bombed Tripoli is completely inaccurate: No Libyan bomb fell on the capital, even though bloody clashes seem to have taken place in certain neighborhoods. . . .
The consequences of this disinformation are clear. The U.N. resolution [mandating intervention] was approved on the basis of such media reports. No investigative commission was sent to the country. It is no exaggeration to say that sensationalist reporting by al-Jazeera influenced the U.N.
During the three weeks [that Az Zawiyah was controlled by the rebels], all public buildings were pillaged and set on fire. . . . Everywhere, there was destruction and pillaging (of arms, money, archives). There was no trace of combat, which confirms the testimony of the police [who claim to have received orders not to intervene]. . . .
There were also atrocities committed (women who were raped, and some police officers who were killed), as well as civilian victims during these three weeks. . . . The victims were killed in the manner of the Algerian GIA [Armed Islamic Group]: throats cut, eyes gauged out, arms and legs cut off, sometimes the bodies were burned . . .
Ooh, a Small but Noisy Controversy!
The claim of mass rape by the besieged regime of Muammar Gaddafi is regularly made to and passed on by the Western media, and generally met with widespread credulity. From rebel-affiliated doctors, supposed neutral experts, and anonymous comments via Twitter and Youtube, we've heard of mass rape, abuse, and humiliation of women, children, and men in the thousands perhaps by now.
We only hear a few direct accounts, and are told nearly all the victims are silent due to the stringent social taboo against discussing rape or accepting "dishonored" survivors. The Islamic prohibition against lying is another, less acknowledged, potential factor in the dearth of reports.
The body of accusations from this handful includes the famed banshee of the Rixos, Iman al-Obeidi, and her globetrotting theatrics. It includes the ridiculous Viagra claims pushed by Susan Rice to dropped jaws at the UN Security Council. Even the Leader's son Saadi Gaddafi is on the record ordering the rape of male prisoners by African mercenaries, and his top official Abdullah Senoussi is accused of personally sodomizing an old man with a stick in an underground dungeon. These are to some extent collected at this post, which has been getting a lot of views lately.
This renewed interest was triggered by a new twist - on June 9, the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, added to the ICC's accepted evidence against Col. Gaddafi orders for mass rape. This, he said, was based on "some information" that had them "more convinced" than before of sexual warfare, a "new aspect of the repression" not included in his original set of highly politicized charges. By politicized, I mean they're so technically vague they can only point lazily to the very top shelf - the Leader Muammar Gaddafi, his son and likely successor Saif al-Islam, and Mr. Senoussi. The last was nabbed for a more direct "participation ... in the attacks against demonstrators." Was it below ground level, Mr. M-O?
Immediately after this announcement, a verbal conflict broke out among the Human Rights experts at the United Nations. On one side is M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-born UN human rights investigator. He just finished heading up the first-ever official fact-finding mission to Libya and as he announced their findings of regime war crimes, he also managed to cast doubt on Moreno-Ocampo's latest decision (see below for details).
Semantics-Based Quibbles Over "Hysteria"
On the other side are at least two scholarly women, both focused largely on Bassiouni's use of the word "hysteria" to describe the exaggerated and largely baseless claims of mass rape, as alleged against both sides in the conflict. As the Canadian paper National Post reported:
“It is unfortunate that UN investigators of Libyan human rights violations have chosen words which downplay rape allegations and suggest that the main problem was the use of such claims to spread the fear of atrocities, rather than the commission of the atrocities themselves,” Anne Bayefsky, a Canadian political science professor who heads the New York-based monitoring group Eye on the UN, told Postmedia News.
“Investigator Bassiouni’s use of the word ‘hysteria’ in this context is especially insensitive in light of the oft-repeated use of such vocabulary to diminish the credibility of rape victims.”
This is fair enough as a semantical exercise, but it doesn't work any further. Hysteria - in general usage - is one mindset that clouds judgment of what's true. The context of Bassiouni's statements (see below) makes clear that he means not personal hysteria of the pseudo-medical type, but social hysteria of the mass type. That may or may not be a good description of what's going on, but it's clearly something that's not likely to be straight truth.
The first bolded part presumes the atrocities really were carried out, which is the opposite of what Bassiouni implied. In fact, Bayefsky's argument is almost as perverse and criticizing critics of the Salem witch trials for using the term "witch-hunt." Just because the town went mad in its pursuit of witches doesn't excuse the evil done by the witches.
In short, the use of this singular word is nothing to get hysterical over.
Squeezing the Controversy
The other opposing view presented by the National Post is clearly more of a professional - Margot Wallstrom, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict
Wallstrom defended Moreno-Ocampo’s claims, saying there were “consistent reports from people, from organizations, from UN entities and others on the ground.
“It is difficult to give a figure, but this is part of the arsenal of the Gadhafi troops,” she said.
[...]
Wallstrom, a former Swedish minister, told reporters that armed groups continue to use rape as a weapon of war because it is “cheaper, more destructive and easier to get away with than other methods of warfare.”
[...]
On Bassiouni’s use of the word hysteria, she said officials should “avoid such language.”
“This has been called history’s greatest silence,” she said of the crime of rape. “For too long, it was not considered proper to mention rape and sexual violence.”
Oh, enough with the dramatics! To the extent silence about sexual violence is the problem, loudly proclaiming false rape charges and having the "world community" bully it into legal realty is not the right antidote.
"Consistent" reports, as far as I can see, means they all share the traits of screaming rape, and pointing the weapon at the demonized government. To the extent I've been able to verify, each report or support does so based on murky evidence and unclear methodology. Is a pile of that collectively more or less reliable than its individual parts?
The bolded phrase, “cheaper, more destructive and easier to get away with," is the kind of talk that eggs on those who would try to stop the alleged crime, and who already were doing it, by targeting the regime for destruction. Every new claim only helps justify the course already chosen from day one for other reasons entirely.
In summary of Wallstrom's comments, it's hard to imagine that someone trying to be honest and level could squeeze that much political poison out of this disagreement. It is a simple clash between her perception of reports and Mr. Bassiouni's findings from going there. And to publicize the difference and grand-stand like this, she had to first commence, as the National Post put it, "squabbling in a way that critics say is causing an unnecessary distraction as the war in the country rages on."
Why He Didn't Quite Buy it
The critical reader who still sides against the alleged down-player might wonder here "who is this Cherif Bassiouni? Some out-of-touch Gaddafi supporter at the UN, as well as a horrible sexist pig?"I can only offer his Wikipedia page, which I haven't even read. He just headed the first ever official fact-finding mission to Libya for one thing, to actually investigate the rumors that have already sort-of justified about 3,000 NATO strike sorties.
He doesn't come across as pro-Gaddafi. The investigator seems to be gripped by the same general assumptions as most about how the conflict unfolded. As Voice of America noted on June 9, the same day he spoke of mass hysteria:
The chair of the Commission of Inquiry, Cherif Bassiouni, does not mince his words as he presents the conclusions of the fact-finding mission to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
“There have been many serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by government forces and their supporters amounting to war crimes. They include attacks on civilians and civilian objects and targets, attacks on humanitarian-related personnel, attacks on medical units and transports using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions,” Bassiouni said. [source]
It's not clear if these attacks on civilians are of the warfare type where one side is called civilian, or the more crucial (alleged) slaughter of non-violent demonstrators in the first few days. Crimes happen during wars, and the rebels started it. Any other country would have stomped twice as hard as Tripoli did in response to the early rebel outrages.
But the investigators seems to feel differently, and I'll nod to their superior knowledge - for once that seems justified. But it's only on the one issue of mass-rape where the chairman seems to be very at odds with the general lynch mob mindset descending on Gaddafi from all sides. Below is much of an article from the Herald-Sun (Australia), conveying his actual statements on that, including hints of just what the ICC's "new" evidence for mass rape really is:
But Cherif Bassiouni, who is leading a UN rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the claim was part of a "massive hysteria".
Mr Bassiouni told journalists that he had heard those claims when he visited rebel-held eastern Libya. But when he went to Tripoli, "the same story comes up."
"This time it's the government people telling us, 'you know what? The opponents have a policy of rape, we have discovered that they are giving out contraceptives and Viagra pills'," he recounted.
"So I told them, 'this is exactly what the other side told us'," he added. "What it is, at least my interpretation of it is, when the information spread out, the society felt so vulnerable... it has created a massive hysteria," said Mr Bassiouni.
The investigator also cited the case of a woman who claimed to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse.
However, when the investigators asked for these questionnaires, they never received them.
"But she's going around the world telling everybody about it ... so now she got that information to Ocampo and Ocampo is convinced that here we have a potential 259 women who have responded to the fact that they have been sexually abused," Mr Bassiouni said.
He also pointed out that it did not appear to be credible that the woman was able to send out 70,000 questionnaires in March when the postal service was not functioning.
The circumstances of these 259 alleged reports do sound fishy, especially considering the explosive nature of rape charges and their history of being marred by a very steep convenience-to-plausibility ratio. It's possible rebel networks augmented delivery in lieu of the post office, but to get 60,000 responses back, roughly 1% of Libya's total population, and expect them to be honest, would be a bit much. How many were done in the same hand and ink? Were there really zero mailed-in claims of rape by rebel forces, as the reportage implies? A ratio of 259:0 just doesn't seem plausible to me, if the sampling was at all representative.
There are many variables we don't know, but this is reportedly what convinced Mr. Moreno-Ocampo to modify the charges. And those are against the men at the very top, suggesting further evidence - or imaginings - tying these 259+ possible rapes to orders from on high.
Mr. Bassiouni said he'd be looking into the questionnaires claim further, despite his doubts, and for once I get a slight sense of sanity and a hope that he'll look fairly. He also added:
For the moment, the team has only heard of three cases [of rape by government forces]. "We've not investigated these cases, we hope to be able to investigate them. These would be in the midst of a military operation, a field operation. These would clearly be a war crime."
So he doesn't completely dismiss that rape in a military context might well have happened in at least three cases (besides that of Iman al-Obeidi). But its origin from on high cannot honestly be drawn from these few cases or even from 500, beyond general responsibility. Some "hysteria" to demonize the other side seems to be behind the massive narrative laid out for us, added to by each publicized and believed claim.
As is clear, the 259-victims-by-questionnaire claim adds little to the credibility of this complex of often cartoonish allegations. The ICC and Moreno-Ocampo just don't seem to find that important.
