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May 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
As we discovered during a sometimes frightening journey across northern Libya
for the Channel 4 documentary series Unreported World, some militias abuse
their power to terrorise local populations and exact horrific reprisals on
their enemies. David Cameron stated a year ago that Britain’s intervention
in Libya was intended to end dictatorship and install democracy. This aim
has so far met with only partial success. Gaddafi has been replaced by what
is in effect a patchwork quilt of local dictatorships. Even Tripoli is at
the mercy of approximately a dozen rival militias. Ultimately they may not
settle down until an agreement is reached over who controls the nation’s oil
reserves.
The long battle to place Libya on a more stable and humane footing begins next
month when the country goes to the polls to elect a 200-strong national
assembly, whose task it will be to draft the national constitution. This
will be followed by full elections, which will probably be held next year.
The emergence of parliamentary democracy should, in theory, legitimise the
creation of a Libyan state with a strong national army that can absorb or
confront the militias.
But for the time being the politicians are still figureheads, and the power is
exercised by armed gangs. The government is desperate for these militias to
return to civilian life before the elections, and has embarked on a hugely
expensive programme to buy off fighters with cash payments worth
approximately £1,000 each. But this programme is open to corruption.
Hours after our arrival, we came across a roadblock manned by fighters. We got
out of the car and walked towards the gunmen. There were about a dozen of
them, young men with AK-47 machine guns, all in an excitable state. They had
set fire to wooden furniture they had placed in the road. One of them knelt
down and aimed his gun at the camera – the first of a number of occasions we
had guns aimed at us during the trip.
We asked what they were doing. ‘We are revolutionaries. We have saved Libya,
we want to be paid,’ they said, claiming that they had been excluded from
the cash payments. At that moment a police convoy, lights blaring, came
hurtling down the road. The militiamen let loose a volley of warning shots.
The police swiftly turned round and drove away.
Two days later, about five miles from Tripoli airport, we came across a much
larger and more serious militia, a detachment of maybe 200 heavily armed men
with weapons mounted on the backs of trucks. They told us they came from
Zintan in Libya’s western mountains, and that the airport belonged to them.
Here was another example of the extreme weakness of the NTC – it appeared to
be unable to take back the airport from the armed men who had ‘liberated’ it
from Gaddafi forces in the revolution. The Zintan rebels told us that they
had heard a rival militia was planning to take control – and had gathered to
repel the assault. Abdul Razzak, a wild-looking militiaman who we were told
had fought with outstanding heroism through the revolution, said that he
didn’t trust the NTC: ‘I say to the minister and the government, don’t
provoke the Zintan rebels. We don’t want another militia controlling the
airport, smuggling drugs and weapons.’
Like many other Zintan fighters Razzak believed that the NTC was so weak and
compromised that it lacked the ability to send a genuine national army to
run the airport. He believed the airport would be taken over by a rival
militia. As we talked the tension eased – word came through that reports of
a rival militia takeover were only a rumour, and the Zintan fighters went
back to their bases.
The struggle over the airport is a metaphor for post-revolutionary Libya. Last
year tens of thousands of armed men came together to drive out Gaddafi. But
his departure has only created a fresh conundrum: who exactly owns the
revolution? No clear answer has emerged. Until it does, there must be a
chance that Libya will lapse into some kind of civil war as every different
town and village is controlled by different groups of armed men.
These increasingly powerful militias are enforcing their rule by a reign of
terror. Let’s examine the case of Misurata, the third largest city in
Libya which, as a stronghold of the revolutionary forces, was under siege
for three months last year by Gaddafi’s army. In February it became the
first major city to hold local free elections in post-Gaddafi Libya and is
now governed by a local council consisting of 28 seats.
But just to enter the town is like crossing a national border, with long
queues as papers are carefully scrutinised by heavily armed militiamen. A
giant arch at the entrance powerfully signals Misurata’s aggressive
isolation. Inside the town the physical devastation left behind by three
months of street fighting is all too evident, with almost every public
building pockmarked by machine gun fire, and many gutted altogether.
The mental scars are every bit as obvious – the Misuratans are taking a
pitiless revenge on neighbouring towns and tribes whom they accuse of
fighting alongside Gaddafi. This became horrifyingly clear as we made the
short drive from Misurata to the neighbouring town of Tawergha. We entered
an area of devastation. In total silence, broken only by birdsong, we walked
along what had been a residential street full of once-attractive and
peaceful houses with gardens and patios. Every one had been fire-bombed, in
a deliberate warning to the inhabitants not to return.
Tawergha, which has been inhabited for centuries by people from the black
African tribe that carries its name, was used as a base for Gaddafi forces
during the war. There is ample evidence that some Tawerghans carried out
terrible atrocities during that time. But since then the Misuratans have
been responsible for an awful punishment. Every single one of the 30,000
inhabitants of the town from before the revolution has gone. Some have been
jailed or disappeared, and others gone abroad or to makeshift camps in
Tripoli and elsewhere.
Through contacts we tracked down Walid (not his real name) to a remote farm
where he was hiding. Though not a Tawerghan, he too was accused of being a
Gaddafi loyalist. By the time we reached him Walid was in need of urgent
specialist medical attention. He said that last year he had been seized by a
Misuratan gang in broad daylight off the streets of central Tripoli and
taken to a former Gaddafi detention centre where he had suffered torture for
several months, mainly beatings and electrocution. Eventually he had started
to cough blood and to faint; one of his captors had taken pity on him and
helped him to a hospital, from which he had been released three days before
our meeting. He was very lucky to be alive, and several members of his
family were still in that jail. Walid denied being a Gaddafi loyalist. He
believed that his persecutors’ real motive was to obtain his family farm.
This kind of torture has become routine in post-revolutionary Libya. According
to Nasser Hawari of the Libyan Observatory for Human Rights, ‘In the
beginning the militias did not use torture because the main issue was
fighting against Gaddafi. But this changed after the revolution.’ Hawari,
who worked as a tradesman until the fall of Gaddafi, told us there had been
thousands of cases, ‘even more than there were in Gaddafi’s time’. Torture,
he said, was used to sort private feuds, enforce control, intimidate
political opponents. He said there was no chance of justice, and that while
he had taken a number of the most shocking cases to the attorney general,
nothing had been done.
While a strong national army may signal the end of the militias, many Libyans
are terrified of such an outcome – one reason some of the Zuwarans told us
they would not take part in next month’s elections. They ask: who will
control that army and therefore enjoy the monopoly of state violence? The
memory of 40 years of Gaddafi rule is appallingly fresh, and they speculate
that federalism would be a wiser solution, with some of the existing
militias remaining intact. Misurata is one model for this kind of
self-government. But this too raises dark jealousies over who will control
the oil fields, and therefore Libya’s purse strings.
There are already moves to lift the militias off the streets. The most
important of these is the decision by the NTC to create a National Guard
based in Gaddafi’s old officer training school in central Tripoli. We spent
several days patrolling the streets of the capital with one of its
commanders, a car dealer turned revolutionary named Otman Gilani. None of
Gilani’s fighters had been paid in the six months since, though he assured
us this would change as Libya’s overseas assets were unfrozen. Gilani told
us that the National Guard will accept fighters from any militia.
Rival militias say that the National Guard is merely a front for the Tripoli
Military Council (TMC), which organised many of the Tripoli militias that
played a heroic role in the final defeat of Gaddafi. But when we went to see
Abdulhakim Belhadj, the head of the TMC, he insisted that, while his TMC was
the inspiration, the National Guard was now under the authority of the
government. ‘I don’t have my own private militia,’ he said. ‘The
National Guard is now effectively and officially under the Ministry of
Defence.’ He added that ‘we are working in coordination with the Ministry of
Defence and the Ministry of the Interior trying to help them out until they
reach a point where these two ministries are well established, and by that
time there shouldn’t be any armed men on the streets.’
That point is still a long way off. And yet at the end of our stay in Libya we
felt fairly hopeful. Six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein there were
already signs that Iraq was falling into civil war. Western visitors could
travel only with heavy security; the Americans and British who had brought
about the transition of power were hated. Ethnic cleansing was under way on
a massive scale, and al-Qaeda was taking control of large parts of the
country.
In Libya, by contrast, Western visitors are made welcome, and as Britons we
were frequently thanked for our role in bringing down Gaddafi. We were able
to walk safely from the hotel where we stayed in central Tripoli to the Old
Town where the best restaurants are to be found. And after we returned to
Britain we heard the Zintan militias had indeed handed over the airport.
Al-Qaeda is not operational in Libya, and there have been none of the
suicide bombings and sectarian attacks that caused such horror in Iraq. We
were impressed by the testimony of visiting British businessmen in our
hotel. They told us that every time they returned to Tripoli, Libya had got
that little bit more stable and prosperous. The elections next month will
mark an important step in the creation of a new Libya out of the wreckage of
the old regime.
‘Unreported World: My
Week with Gunmen’ is on Channel 4 on June 1 at 7.30pm
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