African refugees trapped in Libya
March 6, 2011Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese Welsh YiddishPowered byTranslate
by H. Vincent Harris
Anti-Gaddafi militia members escort a man they suspect of being a mercenary. – Photo: APDutch Foreign Affairs Minister Uri Rosenthal reacted to the Libyan crisis with two goals: “Let’s get Dutch citizens out of Libya safely and make sure no more immigrants reach Europe.”Meanwhile, the Italian government’s reaction focused on the “threat of massive immigration from Libya.”
The U.N. recently published a report on racism in Libya against the 2 million Sub-Saharan migrant workers.
In that context, we read about the fate of thousands of stranded African refugees inside Libya. Adding to their hopeless situation is Gaddafi’s use of African mercenaries. The mercenary story has of course been widely published and will soon be circulating at high speed throughout the African blogosphere. Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali bloggers have already geared up in a desperate cry for help.
Yusuf Dirir Ali, a Somali blogger writes, “Many angry mobs are targeting Black Africans after reports that the government was using ‘African mercenaries’ to repress the revolt was transmitted by Western media.” Another Somali blogger, Somali for Jesus, repeated this cry for help.
Many angry mobs are targeting Black Africans after reports that the government was using ‘African mercenaries’ to repress the revolt was transmitted by Western media.
Europeans will try very hard to keep this story out of the news. They want us to see instead pictures of “our” pilots flying European and American citizens to Crete or Cyprus. Somalilandpress reported the lynching of four Somali immigrants in Libya. In all likelihood, these lynching were a response to the stories of mercenaries killing Libyans in the street of Tripoli.
Europe has a heavy responsibility for the wellbeing of refugees in Libya. I say this for obvious reasons. European governments, like the Netherlands, helped Libya to create a buffer against Southern African immigration to Europe. Who does not remember Gaddafi’s recent visit to Italy? It seemed funny to see one of the most xenophobic presidents in Europe receive Gaddafi but, in reality, the visit was in line with European policy to use Libya as a buffer zone to counter immigration.
UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, issued this statement: “UNHCR fears for the safety of refugees caught in Libya’s violence.”
Anthony Loewenstein writes that Germany trained Libyan forces: “Schroeder was fixing up a deal whereby elite German commandos would train the Libyan security services.”
I encourage my fellow bloggers and all my readers to start blogging this story, just like migrants at sea, as well as mutually sharing the story through social media.
“African refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea have told us that just being a Black face in Libya is very dangerous at the moment,” UNHCR spokeswoman Sybella Wilkes told Reuters.
H. Vincent Harris, based in The Netherlands, is a writer and new media consultant, Colored Opinions blogger and host of Colored Opinions Blog Talk Radio, a talk show about the Great Lakes Region of Africa, emphasizing Rwanda, Congo and Burundi.
Gaddafi’s Libya, African refugees and European xenophobia
by Ann Garrison
KPFA Weekend News, March 6, 2011
KPFA Weekend News Anchor David Landau: Black sub-Saharan Africans in Libya are in peril consequent to both racism and Western media reports that Muammar Gaddafi is using “African mercenaries,” meaning Black Africans, to put down the Libyan uprising. Pleas for help have gone up on blogs in North Africa, and both NGOs and multilateral organizations are seeking access, resources and the relaxation of immigration restrictions so as to evacuate those endangered. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.
Vincent Harris reports that European governments collaborated with Gaddafi to prevent migrants from making their way to Europe from Libya’s long Mediterranean coastline.
KPFA/Ann Garrison: Al Jazeera English recorded the voice of this Nigerian, who goes by the name of Courage, after he escaped an attack in Libya this week:
Courage: When I was coming from my work, I looked on my back. There were car after me, chasing me. They said I should stop. I can’t stop because they were holding cutlass and dangerous weapons with them. I was running for my life. If they had caught me, that would have been the end of my life.
KPFA: Vincent Harris, creator of the Netherlands-based blog Colored Opinions spoke with KPFA about what he calls xenophobic, anti-immigrant politics in Europe. He says European governments have a history of collaboration with Gaddafi to maintain a buffer zone meant to restrict African immigration to Europe by boat from the Libyan coast. Harris said that constraining African immigration is a high priority of most European governments and that, in exchange for his help with this goal, Gaddafi received military training for his army and acceptance in European capitals:
Vincent Harris: They needed Gaddafi to solve this perceived problem, that Africans were crossing into Europe from Libya. They worked together to make sure that no Africans go into Europe.
Harris added that North Africans are nevertheless likely to meet more xenophobia than sub-Saharan Africans in Europe because Europeans perceive North Africans as Muslims and Black Africans as Christians. He also reported that on March 3, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles urged the European Commission to appeal to EU member nations to help evacuate and offer protection to 4,000 sub-Saharan refugees who are currently trapped in Libya. Harris’s report, “Africans trapped in Libya,” can be found above and on afrobeatradio.net.
For Pacifica, KPFA and Afrobeat Radio, I’m Ann Garrison.
San Francisco writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Global Research, Colored Opinions, Black Star News, the Newsline EA (East Africa) and her own blog, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, Weekend News on KPFA and her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at ann@afrobeatradio.com. This story first appeared on her blog.
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Libya: Raw Numbers on
Foreign (Sub-Saharan African) Nationals
The ongoing discussion about sub-Saharan Africans in Libya often lacks precise numbers, terms, and categories. Libyans are by definition Africans, as are other North Africans who live in Libya. But bloggers and journalists have been talking about sub-Saharan Africans in Libya in different ways than they’ve been talking about North African populations there. The reason for making the distinction is that the experiences of some groups seem to in fact be distinct, and those particularities have political implications. It is good to make these distinctions, but we need to make them very carefully.
Put more concretely, who are the foreign workers in Libya? What are the experiences of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa? Migrants? Students? Refugees? The fuzziness of terms and categories on the one hand, and the scattered numerical data on the other, make talking about these issues difficult, and in some cases have helped set up distorted narratives about ruthless “African” mercenaries, “racist” Libyans, or “African” migrants. This post doesn’t tackle the terminology problem, but rather tries to help clarify the situation of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya by compiling some of the numbers floating around in the reporting. Examining the numbers will help identify trends and highlight differences.
Here are some of the key figures I’ve seen, arranged from largest to smallest. Some sources on this list are more reliable than others.
- 2.5 million: Estimated number of foreign workers in Libya.
- 500,000: Top estimate of Sudanese in Libya.
- 300,000: Top estimate of Chadians in Libya.
- 180,000: Total number of people who fled Libya between February 20 and March 3.
- 100,000: The total number of (sub-Saharan) Africans the UN expects to flee Libya into Niger.
- 100,000: The total number of refugees (of all nationalities) who have fled Libya into Tunisia (presumably this includes some sub-Saharan Africans).
- 50,000: Top estimate of Nigerians in Libya.
- 10,000: The number of Ghanaians estimated to live in Libya, “mainly artisans and construction workers.” The Ghanaian government has evacuated nearly 700 of its citizens, and over 1,000 more are waiting near the Libya-Egypt border.
- 3,000: Rough number of Somali refugees in Tripoli and Benghazi.
- 2,000: The number of Sudanese who have returned home so far.
- 2,000: The total number of Nigerians that the Nigerian government hopes to repatriate from Libya.
- 1,500: The number of citizens of Niger who have reportedly already left Libya (out of a total of “several thousand” Nigeriens living in Libya).
- 485: Number of Senegalese living in Libya.
- 170: Number of Ethiopians who will return home.
- Other countries with significant expatriate populations in Libya include Mali (at least 122 factory workers repatriated so far) and Mauritania (I found no numbers) and Sierra Leone, and many African countries have a few dozen or a few hundred nationals living in Libya.
This list offers a basic (though still speculative and incomplete) look at the sub-Saharan African population in Libya. Even though many of the numbers are estimates (some perhaps wildly off the mark), the size and diversity of the sub-Saharan African community in Libya is clear: it includes people from many different nations and people who came for various reasons (work, study, and asylum, seemingly in that order according to the numbers). So writers, including me, need to talk about the “African” experience in Libya with great care – and it seems better to talk about experiences, plural.
For those wishing to gain a better sense of people’s experiences in Libya and in flight from Libya, I suggest reading here, here, and here.
As for numbers of mercenaries, both the BBC and AFP cite sources claiming the number of Tuareg mercenaries in Libya is in the hundreds. I have not yet seen a definitive estimate of the total number of mercenaries in the country.
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Libya’s African Mercenaries:
History, Politics, and Controversy
Alex Thurston | February 28, 2011
As anti-Qadhafi forces in Libya take control of different parts of the country, I think it is more accurate to call the events there a civil war, rather than simply “protests.” One contentious issue in this civil war is Qadhafi’s use of mercenaries from elsewhere in Africa. As the situation in Libya rapidly evolves, determining who the mercenaries are – and who is not a mercenary – has challenged both observers and the anti-Qadhafi forces. It seems clear that there are foreign mercenaries fighting in Libya, but it also appears that some innocent sub-Saharan African migrants have found themselves in danger over false charges. This post gives some background on the situation.
Historically, Qadhafi has long used mercenaries as advisers and soldiers. African poverty has created a substantial pool of potential mercenaries, and it is likely Qadhafi is now using some of these hired guns against his own people.
Foreign mercenaries are likely to be less squeamish about shooting at local people.
“They are likely to better trained – a small unit that can be relied upon. They might also have experience of fighting battles and therefore be more capable if push comes to shove,” [said author Adam Roberts].
The view was echoed by Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch. “It’s hard to get your own people to shoot your own people,” he said. “In this kind of situation, you can see why mercenaries would be an advantage because it’s easier to get foreigners to shoot at Libyans than to get Libyans to shoot at Libyans.”
Some of the foreign fighters in Libya also seem to come from groups that have long-standing political and financial ties to the Colonel. Qadhafi’s sustained and deep involvement in African politics, especially the affairs of neighboring countries like Sudan, Chad, and Niger, has included “funding and training many fighting groups and rebel organizations in West Africa and other places.” Qadhafi’s relationship with Chad is especially intense. These ties not only affected the trajectory of conflicts outside Libya, but also shaped the composition of Libya’s security forces:
Over the years, says [Thierry] Vircoulon [of International Crisis Group], Libya has welcomed many foreign fighters from Chad, Mali, Niger, and elsewhere to naturalize, and Qaddafi has set up special units entirely composed of foreign fighters.
Other rebels, who stand to suffer if Qadhafi falls, have been willing to join the fighting in Libya:
[Peter] Bouckaert [of Human Rights Watch] described the fighters from Chad as men “who were not mercenaries specifically recruited to defend Gadhafi but members of (a Chadian) rebel movement Gadhafi has been funding and training for many years who would lose that support if he fell.”
That gives us at least three categories of foreign fighters in Libya: foreigners who are part of the formal security forces, foreigners who are fighting for Qadhafi for political reasons, and foreigners who are killing Libyans primarily for money. Let’s add two more: those were coerced into fighting, and innocent persons accused of being mercenaries.
Regarding coercion, here is the account of one young Chadian:
“A man at the bus station in Sabha offered me a job and said I would get a free flight to Tripoli,” said Mohammed, a boy of about 16 who said he had arrived looking for work in the southern Libyan town only two weeks ago from Chad, where he had earned a living as a shepherd.
Instead of Tripoli, he was flown to an airport near the scruffy seaside town of Al-Bayda and had a gun thrust into his hands on the plane.
Gaddafi’s commanders told the ragbag army they had rounded up that rebels had taken over the eastern towns. The colonel would reward them if they killed protesters. If they refused, they would be shot themselves. The result was bloody mayhem.
Finally, we have innocent victims. Reports and speculation have indicated that in some cases anti-Qadhafi Libyans have turned on African migrants that did not participate in the fighting at all.
With mercenaries and suspected mercenaries coming from so many different backgrounds, and with chaos in Libya, what will happen to Africans accused of fighting for Qadhafi? Some, currently held in jails by anti-Qadhafi forces, are “nervously await[ing] their fate.” Others will die in battle, of course, or in lynchings. Still others may escape back across the border.
What will not happen to the mercenaries, apparently, is prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
The US insisted that the UN resolution [on Libya] was worded so that no one from an outside country that is not a member of the ICC could be prosecuted for their actions in Libya.
This means that mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia – which have all been named by rebel Libyan diplomats to the UN as being among the countries involved – would escape prosecution even if they were captured, because their nations are not members of the court.
The move was seen as an attempt to prevent a precedent that could see Americans prosecuted by the ICC for alleged crimes in other conflicts.
Toppling the Colonel is obviously the foremost goal for the anti-Qadhafi forces. But the problem of dealing with captured and accused mercenaries is one the rebels will have to solve if they take power – and, given the US’s stance on the issue, one they will have to deal with primarily at the domestic level. The issue of mercenaries will also affect the tone of Libya’s relations with other African countries in the post-Qadhafi era, if indeed that era comes.