Gaddafi’s loyalists facing backlash

Print Edition

User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 

Other International

Sunday, 04 September 2011

Author / Source : The guardian

TRIPOLI, Sept 3: Earlier this year, as revolution and siege ground Tripoli to a halt, Mehdi Hassan knew where to look for work. He would drive his taxi to a roundabout in the south-west of the capital and wait for foreigners who had arrived with the name of a destination, but had no idea how to get there. “The cigarette factory,” he said. “That’s all they had to say.”
Hassan drove each of the men – there were around six over a three-week period – to a warehouse behind the giant, government-run tobacco plant in western Tripoli. The site was well known: an industrial plant, protected by military guards, which had become a cash cow for the Gaddafi regime.
“I was always told to go round here,” he said as he retraced the route this week, down a long straight road inside the factory’s high wall. “There were soldiers along the way and they pointed me towards that white building. Only one of the men I took there told me why he had come. The others couldn’t speak Arabic. He said I am here to fight for Gaddafi.”
The building, like almost every other government facility in town had been ransacked and abandoned. Three huge sacks of rice sat amid broken glass, an empty weapons crate and strewn green uniforms. A sign on the wall said: “God, Muammar and Libya only.”
But there was little else left to prove this place was what many in town believe it to have been – a processing centre for mercenaries, who threw in their lot with a dictator.
Mehdi and other drivers around Tripoli are adamant. “It was very clear what it was,” he said of the scene he saw in March. “They weren’t even trying to hide it. There were around 100 men there and all of them were African. The Libyan soldiers were trying to speak to them in English.”
In the 13 days since Gaddafi’s security forces were ousted, finding out how – and by whom - this totalitarian state was held together for so long has become an obsession for Tripoli’s brutalised residents as well as the city’s new guard, which rode into town seeking vengeance as much as a new beginning.
What began early last week as a series of security sweeps to uncover the remnants of Gaddafi’s loyalists has edged towards a larger and more troubling persecution. It is not a good time to be a sub-Saharan African here. It is an especially poor time to be black and in hospital with a gunshot wound.
A tour of the capital’s overworked hospitals over the past fortnight revealed sizable numbers of such men in beds alongside soldiers from Gaddafi’s ousted army. How they got there is an issue of much conjecture. “I swear by God I was walking in the street when I was shot,” said a Senegalese man, Ali Senegal, in Mitiga hospital. A bullet had entered the right side of his neck and shattered his jaw. A Gaddafi soldier in a bed opposite spoke up. “You were a sniper and you know you were,” he said. Senegal looked horrified and alone. Even if he was telling the truth, there is little chance that he will be believed.
In the next room, a second man from Niger had just been brought in from a triage centre with a gaping wound to his right leg. “I am a mechanic,” he said angrily. “I have been working in Abu Selim for three years.” Both men had the misfortune to be injured in a battle that raged on 26 August in the staunchly loyalist neighbourhood just south of Gaddafi’s Bab al-Azazia compound.
In the eyes of the doctors treating them, they had no good reason for being in Abu Selim. But at least here, the men can expect to be fed, given water and have their wounds tended to.
The street outside is not proving as kind. Across Tripoli, thousands of black Africans no longer enjoy the status bestowed on them under Gaddafi, when hundreds of thousands were welcomed over the past 25 years and given work permits or citizenship.
At least several thousand have been detained in the past fortnight on suspicion of being mercenaries. Many thousands more have fled or are in the process of doing so.