Arabische Welt im Umbruch

By: Nick Carey
When the war in Libya started, many young men now on the rebel front  line at Misrata were so interested in computer games and mobile phones  that older residents never thought they would turn into fighters.  “Before the uprising, all those young men cared about was hair gel,  clothes, music, mobile phones and hanging out in cafes,” said Mahmoud  Askutri, a businessman who has formed and funds the 1st battalion of the  Al Marsa regiment, one of the rebel units fighting here to end Muammar  Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.

“But now they fight and are willing to die for a cause.”

Amid the Arab Spring protests that swept the region early this year,  the people of Misrata and elsewhere in Libya demanded greater freedom,  so Gaddafi sent in the troops to silence their protests.

After those troops opened fire on demonstrators, the people of  Misrata rose up, initially fighting back with petrol bombs and hunting  rifles.

Since then, they have wrested control of Libya’s third largest city  from Gaddafi loyalists and, after mistakes that cost many lives, this  army of former civilians has consolidated a front line 36 km (22 miles)  west of Misrata.

They have recently encountered better trained troops and have moved  forward slowly under sustained bombardment to conserve ammunition, hold  territory and reduce casualties.

That they are around 10 km (six miles) east of Zlitan, the largest  city between here and the capital, Tripoli, is testimony to the courage  of the young men in this force.

“They treat me with great respect,” Askutri said before a visit to  the men of Al Masra on the front line. “But when I see them I do not  feel worthy of that respect. A few months ago they were civilians. Now  they are willing to die for their freedom.”

Salah is typical of many young men on the front line here. The  20-year-old was attending medical school when the uprising started. Life  was easy and he spent a lot of time playing soccer games on  Playstation.

“Fifty fifty,” he says of his record on Playstation.

Sitting with a group of other young men, he says he is a big fan of  FC Barcelona. A second young man shakes his head and says he likes Real  Madrid, while a third looks down at the Manchester United logos embossed  on his shoes and says nothing.

Salah plans to return to university after the war, as he wants to become a cardiologist.

“But first we must beat Gaddafi,” he says. “We cannot be free if we live under him.”

“THIS IS MY GUN”

Mobile phones are common at the front line, even though the city has been without mobile reception since the uprising.

Young fighters use them to take pictures of each other and videos of  battle. Some of them hand out email addresses, though again internet is  available at very few spots in Misrata.

Another sign of the times is that the Al Marsa has an amateur  videographer. Yezid, a slight 23-year-old microbiology student with  round spectacles, carries a video camera to the front.

He has been wounded twice, with a bullet in his right thigh and a  piece of shrapnel in his left knee that makes walking painful and  running impossible.

“This is my gun,” he said, holding up the camera with a smile.

Dressed in t-shirts, jeans and whatever sensible shoes they have, the  teenagers and twentysomethings here have come a long way in just a few  months. They joke when Gaddafi forces fire Grad rockets at them from  nearby because they are not very effective at close range.

But like soldiers anywhere, what they do not like are mortar attacks  where the bombs hit closer to the front line and cause more casualties.

“A Grad is no problem, but I don’t like the mortars,” said Ahmed, 21,  an engineering student sharing a bunker with two friends who jokingly  refer to it as a five-star hotel. “The small pieces of metal from the  mortar cut you.”

When the crump of a mortar is heard, many of the men in the line say  “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is Greatest”, before it lands. Muslims believe  that dying with those words on your lips brings you closer to God.

SHRAPNEL WOUND

Despite the concern about mortars, the men at the front all seem focused on their cause.

Asked what thoughts he had of a future beyond the war, one 21-year-old who gave his name as Ali shook his head.

“I don’t care about that now,” he said. “All I want to do is kill Gaddafi.”

Since speaking to Reuters, Ali has sustained a shrapnel wound in the  leg but has returned to the front line. Wounds for the “thowar” or  revolutionaries have become, as Agila Erfaida, a lecturer at the  University of Misrata’s Faculty of Medical Technology puts it, “badges  of honour.”

Certainly the young men of a unit led by Tariq Madi, a former bank employee, are keen to show off their scars.

“Most of the men here have been wounded more than once,” said Madi,  36, who managed the safety deposit boxes at BNP Paribas’ Misrata branch  before the war. Most of them are aged between 17 and 20.

Being wounded is one thing, but watching friends die is another.

Groups of weeping young men can often be seen outside Al Hekma hospital in Misrata after one of their comrades has been killed.

At the field hospital closest to the front, one young lightly injured  man wandered around shirtless, bandaged and crying inconsolably, not  for his own wounds but for the friend who died next to him.

The toll of those losses can be seen in the faces of men like Sofian, a 21-year-old engineering student.

When asked how he adapted to life in the front line, Sofian responds with a laugh “war is fun.”

But the laugh does not reach his eyes. When he looks at you, the eyes of an old man stare out of a young face.

“Now we have begun, we have to go all the way to Tripoli,” he said.  “If Gaddafi wants to get back into Misrata, he will have to come over  our dead bodies.”

Older men in the city, like Mohammed Erhyam, are impressed.

“We did not expect this from our young people, that they would fight so hard,” said the 49-year-old.

“But they are braver than we are. And braver than we thought they would be.”

Source: Reuters

With the US expanding ties – and possibly aid – to the  Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, it’s a question a lot of people  are asking. But it isn’t an easy one to answer.

By Dan Murphy
From almost the moment the embryonic Libyan Transitional National Council (TNC) began to come together in Benghazi and other eastern cities that successfully rose up against Muammar Qaddafi‘s  rule in February, a deceptively simple, hard-to-answer question began  to dominate the international conversation: “Who are these people?”

That question contains a host of subsidiary questions with implications for what the US and other foreign powers involved in the Libyan war  should do: “Are they democrats, will they be friendly to the West, do  they want an Islamist government, do they have it in them to lead Libya  towards a more open society?” One of the most common criticisms here in  the US about America’s backing for the NATO air campaign against Mr. Qaddafi is that we don’t know who it is, really, that we’re helping.

Now, with the US deepening ties with the TNC and considering  releasing some of the $30 billion of Qaddafi funds currently frozen in  US accounts to the rebels, those questions are gaining renewed urgency.  Last week, the US joined France and other nations in recognizing the TNC as the “legitimate governing authority” of Libya in a meeting with rebel representatives in Istanbul. Over the weekend, US Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz met with Qaddafi representatives in Tunisia, the first such meeting since the war began and a sign of the growing push for a managed departure of Qaddafi from power.

Libyan rebels pray at the frontline, 37 miles west of Ajdabiyah on July 18. (Reuters)

I spent six weeks in Eastern Libya in February and March and was  warmly welcomed everywhere I went. The country and its people are also,  like most places, hard to pigeon-hole. Libya is a very, very socially  conservative place. Most women cover their hair. But the first person to  great me on the “liberated” side of the Egyptian-Libyan border was a  beaming woman with short hair, a black leather jacket, and an AK-47 slung over her shoulder. A day later, I met Maj. Salma Faraj Issa, the spokeswoman for Maj. Gen. Suleiman Mahmoud, a Qaddafi officer who’d defected with his forces when ordered to fire on unarmed protesters in Tobruk in the early days of the uprising.

I was in Benghazi the night of March 18, when the UN authorized  the use of force against Qaddafi, and I mingled in the joyful crowds  waving American, French, and British flags and firing round after round of celebratory gunfire in the air. I was in town the next morning, when it looked like Qaddafi was going to overrun the  city, prompting panicked and angry complaints that “the UN has  abandoned us.” (French war planes saved the day a few hours later.)

In the weeks after the NATO air cover was put into place, I had  countless discussions with TNC members and average residents, angry and  suspicious that the foreigners weren’t doing more to defeat Qaddafi.  And I began to try to piece together, as much as I could, who exactly  the “rebels” are and what they want.

The official answers to these questions were straightforward and  designed to reassure. The TNC says it wants democratic elections, a  separation of powers, and respect for human rights. Its spokesmen have  consistently promised that while they want trials for Qaddafi and some  of those closest to his regime, which has executed and tortured  thousands of Libyans since he seized power in a 1969 coup, they will do  what they can to stop mass reprisals the day Qaddafi falls.

The vast majority of Libya’s people are also devout Sunni Muslims,  and the council and its supporters want Islamic law to be a “a source”  of legislation in the new Libya. That’s been seized on by those in the  West who think an Islamist takeover of Libya post-Qaddafi is in the  offing. But that formulation is fairly standard in the constitutions of  Muslim majority states, and one of the assertions I feel most confident  in making is that the likelihood of a strict, sharia-based order  emerging post-Qaddafi is close to nil.

Islam is probably the most powerful social force in the country, and a  free Libya will see more Islamist political organization (Qaddafi  ruthlessly repressed Islamist groups, as he did secular opponents). But  there are powerful forces that want secular law in Libya as well. Abdel  Karim Hasadi, a rebel commander and devout Muslim in the city of Derna,  is one of the Libyans whom Qaddafi officials have tried to paint as  members of Al Qaeda. He fled the country in the 1990s, and lived for a time in Afghanistan.

“What do I want?” he asked me,  a little exasperated at the latest in a string of journalists to pop  the Al Qaeda question. “Three basic rights: a constitution, freedom,  justice. No more one-man rule. Is that what Al Qaeda wants? Really,  having a beard and being a Muslim doesn’t make you Al Qaeda.”

Fatih Terbil, a human rights lawyer whose arrest in Benghazi on  February 15 spurred the uprising, has been among the leading secular  opponents of Qaddafi. He told me that he was in the front lines of  protesters outside the Italian Consulate on  Feb. 17, 2006, when a protest that was ostensibly about the publication  of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad in a Danish newspaper  quickly devolved into an attack on Qaddafi’s rule. That protest, in  hindsight, was the first glimmering that a general uprising was  possible.

“Look, we are part of the Islamic world and Islam is an expression of who we are,” Mr. Terbil said.  “But the revolution didn’t start with religious people, and it’s not  about religion. This is about basic rights, and holding elections.”

The TNC itself is largely drawn from upper middle-class  professionals, lawyers, doctors, professors, and some wealthy  businessmen, with a sprinkling of Qaddafi officials who have defected.  Many of them come from prominent families that suffered when Qaddafi  seized power, and harbor grievances about businesses and property taken  from them in the years since.

Among this core, there’s still fury at Qaddafi’s attempts to outlaw  private industry earlier in his reign, and they profess a generally  free-market outlook. Libya’s oil? They say it should be sold to the  highest bidders. There’s also a reflexive distaste for the sorts of  foreign interventions, like the war in Chad and  support for smaller African rebellions, that Qaddafi was so fond of.  After all, the blood of their sons was spilled and national wealth  squandered in those efforts.

What of the rebel military? Nominally they’re answering to the TNC,  but in practice the former Qaddafi officers who are organizing the rebel  army are pretty much calling their own shots. There have also been  signs of rivalry among their ranks. In March and April, Gen. Khalifa Hifter, a long-time US exile with CIA ties  who returned home weeks after the uprising began, insisted that he was  in charge of the rebel military — over the objections of the TNC. Their  man was recent Qaddafi defector Gen. Abdel Fattah Younes.  The dispute was quieted with Hifter receding into the background, but  it’s a reminder that strong personalities are operating without any  clear institutional frameworks.

They say Libya will be eternally grateful to the NATO members who intervened in their rebellion.

Should they be taken at their word on that? I think they sincerely  mean it when they say it, but a post-Qaddafi Libya, rightfully, is going  to look after Libyan interests first. That those interests won’t be  perfectly aligned with the US, for instance, is hardly surprising. And  given the character and culture of the country’s people (distaste for Israel,  for instance, is as high or higher than it is in any other Arab country  I’ve visited) there will be plenty that a theoretical new Libya will  disagree with foreign powers about.

The real question is how they will manage a transition when there are  so few road maps for what comes after Qaddafi. His regime is a peculiar  one in the regional context. Hosni Mubarak‘s Egyptmay  have been a dictatorship, but there were strong functioning  institutions and bureaucracies – not least the military – that provide  some structure to that country’s transition. Qaddafi was reflexively  hostile to anything that could resemble institution-building. He set up a  system through which power and favor must directly flow through him.

As a consequence, Libya’s people have next to no experience with the  sorts of coalition-building and compromise that will be needed in any  transitional period. And Libya is filled with authoritarian characters  who, given the chance, would probably be delighted to be the next  Qaddafi. The TNC insists these issues will be managed well, but the “day  after” is certain to be a fraught and difficult period.

Who are Libya’s rebels? They’re, well, Libya. Nationalistic, flawed,  proud, inexperienced in government. On balance, they’re the best hope  for a better Libya than what Qaddafi offered.

Source: CS Monitor 

By: Charles Levinson
Rebel fighters have penetrated Libya’s southwest desert and pulled  within 80 miles of Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s southern stronghold, opening a  new front and suggesting the strongman’s grip is slipping even in areas  believed firmly in his control.

The rebels captured a small village south of Sebha on Monday. The  fall of Sebha, one of Col. Gadhafi’s three regional power centers, would  be a huge symbolic and strategic blow.

The city of 130,000 is a logistics hub for the regime, channeling  food, fuel and other war supplies northward from southern farmlands and  neighboring Algeria, Chad and Niger, said rebel leaders.

With the latest offensive, rebels have now made progress on every front of the war.

Rebel fighters on Wednesday shouted slogans at the funeral in Benghazi of seven comrades killed in Brega on Tuesday.

Despite the advance, the force threatening Sebha is hundreds of miles  south of Tripoli and poses no direct threat to the capital, where Col.  Gadhafi and his family are still clinging to power.

Even if the rebels only threaten Sebha, which Col. Gadhafi has been  able to leave lightly defended until now thanks to strong tribal support  in the area, it could force him to redeploy units battling elsewhere to  defend the city, further stretching his already battered forces.

Many of Col. Gadhafi’s most loyal commanders and fighters hail from  Sebha and may feel compelled to abandon the fight on distant fronts to  protect their homes and families, rebel leaders said.

The uprising began in eastern Libya in late February and quickly  spread to other parts of the country. Col. Gadhafi moved aggressively to  crush the rebellion, but the intervention of North Atlantic Treaty  Organization powers in late March tipped the war’s tide in the rebels’  favor. The conflict appeared to be at a stalemate for months as the  ill-equipped rebels struggled to organize effective attacks on  Gadhafi-held territory.

But in recent weeks, rebels made significant inroads. In the Western  Mountains, they have advanced to within 35 miles of Tripoli.

In the besieged coastal city of Misrata, they have steadily pushed back Col. Gadhafi’s fighters.

On Wednesday, Misrata’s rebels resumed an offensive against  neighboring Zlitan. And in the east the rebels are in the midst of an  offensive to take the oil city of Brega.

On Wednesday, Libyan rebel leaders met with French President Nicolas  Sarkozy in Paris and asked him to support their plans to mount a  military offensive on Tripoli aimed at toppling Col. Gadhafi.

The delegation of rebel chiefs, which included senior officers from  Misrata and a member of Libya’s National Transitional Council, the main  opposition group to Col. Gadhafi, said they needed more weapons and  logistical assistance to oust the longtime leader.

The previous day, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the civilian head of NATO,  praised the rebels’ progress in an interview at NATO headquarters in  Brussels.

“The opposition forces are now more experienced, better trained,  better coordinated,” he said. The situation on the ground is “absolutely  not a stalemate,” he said, adding Col. Gadhafi’s forces have suffered  “a very, very clear weakening.”

Due to poor communications networks, lack of Internet and its remote  desert location, southern Libya has received scant attention during the  Libyan uprising. Reaching residents in southern Libya remains  tremendously difficult.

This account of the southern offensive has been pieced together based  on interviews with residents of southern Libya, rebel commanders on the  ground in the south and in the Western Mountains, Libyan activists with  friends and family living in southern Libya, as well as rebel officials  who represent the south.

While the details are impossible to independently confirm, those interviewed gave similar accounts.

The rebel fighting force that is now rumbling through the  southwestern desert was first mustered in late May and early June in the  southeastern oasis city of Kufra. A resident of the southern town of Al  Qatrun, which rebels took last week, estimated the force includes 60 to  65 4X4 vehicles and as many as 300 fighters.

Earlier this month, the force captured a remote desert airfield and  army outpost called Al Wigh, near Libya’s borders with Chad and Niger,  and soon after seized the Tummu border crossing with Chad.

The force began advancing north toward Sebha, and last week, the  force took the village of Qatron without a fight. On Sunday, pro-Gadhafi  fighters attacked the advancing rebels, said a resident of the village  and a rebel commander on the ground, Ramadan Al-Alakie.

The rebel fighters repulsed the attack and pressed their advance, both men said.

The retreating Gadhafi forces concentrated in Taraghin, the hometown  of Bashir Salah, Col. Gadhafi’s chief of staff, to block the rebel  advance to Sebha. The rebel force simply went around the town, and on  Monday took control of the tiny village of Umm Al-Aranib, they said.

Now, just 80 miles of empty desert and one tiny village stand between the rebels and Sebha.

Through the first months of the uprising, little information leaked  out from Sebha, where the powerful Magarha and Col. Gadhafi’s own  Gadhadfa tribes, both pillars of his regime, hold sway. It was long  thought that the city was such a fierce bastion of pro-Gadhafi support  that it was all but impregnable.

But in recent weeks, cracks have begun to show in Sebha.

The arrest in May of a small group of high school students who  displayed the rebel independence flag at school angered powerful  families in Sebha, said Khalid Al-Humeida, a Libyan Ph.D. student in  Britain who spent the past 15 years living in Sebha and has friends and  relatives still there.

The students, whose whereabouts remain unknown, hailed from families  with long histories of loyalty to Col. Gadhafi. When family elders  appealed to local security commanders to release their sons or even for  information on their whereabouts, arguing that they were simply  misguided teenagers, they were ignored, said Mr. Humeida.

Activists from Sebha say the city isn’t a pro-Gadhafi bastion  anymore. “Gadhafi’s support in the city is not as strong as people  think,” said Mr. Humeida.

Source: Wall Street Journal