CAIRO ? Torture and death in detention have become widespread problems in post-war Libya, said international humanitarian groups on Thursday, a troubling indication that some Qaddafi-era abuses continue under the fractured rule of the country?s post-war interim government and regionally organized militias.
Amnesty International said in a statement that ?several? people had been tortured to death in detention ?by officially recognized military and security entities as well as by a multitude of armed militias.?
Amnesty said its researchers in Libya met detainees in prisons in and around the cities of Tripoli, Misurata and Gheryan who bore wounds consistent with torture, including open wounds on their heads, limbs and back. Many claimed to have been suspended in stress positions and beaten, and given electric shocks.
The majority of victims were Libyans believed to have remained loyal to the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi during the nine-month conflict that led to his ouster, but some were sub-Saharan Africans. Africans from outside of Libya were often accused of being Qaddafi mercenaries during the revolution.
Doctors Without Borders, a group which specializes in providing emergency medical care in conflict zones, said Thursday that it would suspend its operations in detention centers in Misurata, saying some of the 115 detainees it has treated for torture-related injuries since August have been returned repeatedly with more wounds.
?Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for further interrogation,? said Christopher Stokes, the group?s general director, in a statement. ?This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.?
Human Rights Watch said it had documented ?ongoing torture? in Libyan detention centers in the last six months, said Sidney Kwiram, an investigator for the group, which has monitored prison conditions in Libya since last February and in the western city of Misurata since April.
?Torture is ongoing and is used to force confessions or for punishment,? said Ms. Kwiram, via telephone from Misurata.
She said the persistence of torture was not so much a reflection of policy by the transitional national authorities as of the weakness of Libya?s institutions after nine months of war and four decades of Qaddafi rule.
?In some cases, commanders here form their own fiefdoms, so it is not a matter of what the government is saying,? she said. ?What matters is who is in charge of a facility. There are dotted lines between the national and the local levels, and they need to become undotted.?
Refugees from the Libyan city of Tawergha told similar tales of torture and killing in interviews last month in an informal camp in Tripoli, the capital.
Tawergha was largely destroyed in September in revenge attacks by rebel fighters from neighboring Misurata, who accused its residents of participating in a bloody four-month siege of their town by Qaddafi forces that killed more than 1,000 people.
Almost all of Tawergha?s 30,000 resident fled, but fighters from Misurata have continued to attack, detain, torture and in some cases kill people from the town, even after they fled to other parts of the country, said refugees and activists.
Gheit Abubakr, 46, a Tawerghan at the Tripoli camp, carried his brother?s neatly folded death certificate in the pocket of his overcoat, along with a dozen photographs of his mutilated corpse, covered in dark bruises and deep cuts.
His brother, Abdulla, 36, was arrested Sept. 13 by the Misurata-based Sumoud Brigade.
The family received no information about his whereabouts for over a month, until a friend from Misurata at a checkpoint in Tripoli told them that he believed the missing man?s body was in a nearby hospital. Family members went to the hospital, where they found his corpse wrapped in a white sheet on a wet linoleum floor.
The family sought help from the police, who Mr. Abubakr accused of being ?afraid of the militia.?
?The police said ?we can?t do anything because everyone has a gun now,?�? he said. ?We can?t help you and we can?t come with you to talk to the Sumoud Brigade.?
?They beat him to death, but he didn?t do anything,? he added. ?He was not in the military and did not have a gun. He was a civilian.?
Libya?s transitional government has struggled for months to exert authority, even in the streets of the capital, which is largely controlled by a patchwork of regional militias whose members defer to their own commanders, not government security forces.
The central government set two deadlines, one in November and one in December, for out of town militias to leave the capital, both of which were ignored.
In recent weeks the transitional government has faced mounting criticism over its stewardship of the country, with many complaining that its operations and budget are too opaque and that some members are tainted by links, real or imagined, to the Qaddafi government.
On Saturday, a crowd in the eastern city of Benghazi, the former rebel capital, ransacked the transitional government?s headquarters, leading to the resignation of its deputy head and the suspension of several Benghazi delegates.
On Monday, fighters from the city of Bani Walid, a onetime stronghold of support for the fallen dictator and one of the last towns to fall to rebel forces, violently expelled fighters aligned with the transitional government. Two days later, central authorities agreed to recognize a tribally based local government for the town.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b5474c7a8acdbc3b3bf8e969291fa89d
headline news cnn world news irish news of the world newspaper james turk king world news jewish world news daily jim rickards king world news
No comments:
Post a Comment