WORK IN PROGRESS / РАБОТА В ПРОЦЕССЕ - I wrote this post in a mixture of Russian and English, and I decided to machine-translate the Russian to have a fully-English version.
Italian colonialism in Libya began when Italy invaded Libya in 1911 in the Italian-Turkish War. Before this, Libya was an Ottoman colony.
Libya is a country home to many peoples— including Arabs, Dom (Romani), Imazighen1, Tuareg, and Toubou (also spelled Tebu). The Tebu, who live largely in the southern desert parts of Libya, are racialized as Black in white-supremacist and (later) Arab nationalist contexts. Imazighen, indigenous to North Africa, speak Tamazight, a Nostratic language2 of the Afro-Asiatic branch just like Arabic; Arabic belongs to the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, while Tamazight and Tuareg (or Tamaheq) are in the Amazigh branch. The Toubou/Tebu language3, meanwhile, is not Nostratic, but believed to belong to the Nilo-Saharan macrofamily by some long-range comparitivists (I’m still not sure, and I know woefully little about Nilo-Saharan languages). The Romani/Dom language is meanwhile Indo-Aryan (itself a branch of Indo-European, which is a branch of Eurasiatic, another branch of Nostratic).
Imazighen constitute 4-10% of Libya’s population, by 2018 estimates (MRGI 2018, https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html)
Libya has one of the world's oldest Jewish communities, going back to atleast 300BC (History of the Jewish Community in Libya". https://web.archive.org/web/20130425114822/http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/libyajew/LibyanJews/thejews.html). Many Libyan Jews Arabized following the Arab migrations into North Africa, and largely were Arabs, culturally and linguistically in the early 20th century. Many Jews also were Amazigh.
Map of ethnic groups in Libya, as of 1974 (according to the CIA, which usually won’t lie about these things (i.e. a rough idea of what people live where), the CIA lies come in what they write about these peoples and their history, the justifications they provide for and/or omissions of some things. And also in their assumed homogenity of each “ethnic area”, when in reality those are majority-[insert ethnic group here] areas.)
The discussion of Amazigh languages also gets a bit complicated; the map above doesn’t acknowledge the internal diversity of dialects it terms “Berber” with orange shading (though all refer to themselves as Amazigh). Here is a more detailed map of the Amazigh dialects in Libya (excluding Tuareg, which also belongs to the Amazigh family, or Amazigh branch of Afro-Asiatic, itself according to me and other long-range comparativists, a branch of Nostratic). This map too misses the Twillult dialect spoken in Zuwāra, but it shows the Nafusa dialect, the Ghadames (ʕadēmis) dialect, the Fezzān dialect (also often called the Sokna dialect), and the Awjila dialect. The gray “other Berber dialects” region represents Tuareg.
1918-1921: the rise of fascism in Italy, while the landowners and owners of great capital saw the victories of the Bolsheviks and anarchists and the liquidation of the old bourgeois class in Russia4. The landowners and owners of great capital wanted not to lose power, so they began to support the fascist movement and its attacks against working people and left-wing organizations (including those of Antonio Gramsci and Errico Malatesta). The fascists killed many striking workers. This GIF is a sociological study of violence against labor (through text mining), in English.
In 1922, the fascist Benito Mussolini becomes the leader of Italy.
1929-1932: Libyan Genocide - 500,000 Libyans killed, many were forcibly driven into the desert by Italian soldiers
1935: Italy and France negotiated their colonial boundary between French colony Chad and Italian colony Libya in a treaty (Prunier 2011)
1938: Mussolini denounces the 1935 treaty with France and claims the Aouzou Strip (in northern Chad) but the claim is largely meaningless, soldiers barely go that far south anyway.5 It will make the claim for irredentist imperialism from Qadhāfi later on though (Prunier 2011). Below is a map of the Aouzou Strip:
1940s- Italian fascists do Holocaust in Libya, genocide of Libyan Jews and Romani, killing thousands in concentration camps
WWII- Libyan fight for freedom from fascist Italy
1945-1948: series of pogroms against Libyan Jews in Tripolitania
1949- UN plan for Libyan independence involves making Idris king of Libya. Libyans had been by this point more organized by family, clan, and tribe than by a notion of nation or kingdom, so this notion was somewhat alien, and Idris didn’t really want to be king. But the UN independence plan was followed, and in 1951, Idris became king and began a rule marked by neo-colonialism, resource exploitation and sale to the West, and strong backing from the West.
1951- King Idris seizes power, begins a fairly repressive Western-backed monarchist regime. Many would be arrested under his regime for attempts to organize Ba‘athist, to communist, or Nasserist parties (Nasser would come to power in 1952 in Egypt). The Libyan Communist Party goes underground at this point, and remains underground under Qadhāfi.
1959- Discovery of oil in Libya. The West would help Libya develop its oil industry (largely for the benefit of Western corporations, with some for the king— in some cases direct US oil company ownership of oil fields), and U.S. and U.K. troops would use military bases in Libya as bases for NATO, as a strategic launching pad for imperialist counterinsurgencies (& famously for the Six Day War in 1967).
1967- Tripoli pogrom, Jews are attacked by antisemitic mobs in retaliation for the Six Day War. Since the cycles of retributive violence by right-wing Jewish and Arab groups in Palestine, various Arab nationalist groups would begin attacks on Jewish people throughout in perceived retribution for the actions of the state of Israel. Such patterns are unfortunately common in areas with communal violence, in South Asia to this day, the news of pogroms against Muslims in India is met with pogroms against Hindus in Bangladesh.
Mu‘ammar Qadhāfi6, when he ruled, did little to help the Libyan Jews who fled the 1967 pogrom, and instead found it more useful to maintain loyalty of the same antisemitic elements in Libyan society that had encouraged the pogroms. Throughout Qadhāfi’s rule, Libyan Jews were denied the return of property, and Tripoli’s main synagogue, seized by the state, remained in a walled-off ruined state with garbage everywhere. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/03/libyas-revolutionary-jew-restore-synagogue)
[source for anything below (until 2011) that doesn’t have a citation is an article by a member of IMT (International Marxist Tendency, Trotskyists, which means at least often more left-communist historiography. Malala Yousafzai is a Trotskyist in IMT (and also frequent outspoken critic of U.S. drone strikes in Pashtunkwa).), https://www.marxist.com/nature-of-gaddafi-regime.htm]
1969 - Qadhāfi seizes power, begins a project of development and encouragement of Libyans (not Italians) to be capitalists, and as they please. A lot of people make deals with Western companies and sell oil. One of Qadhāfi’s first moves additionally is to kick out the Italian settlers, and close down the U.S. and U.K. military bases in Libya. All this he sees as his own version of anti-imperialism. His second move is Libyan irredentism: Qadhāfi restates Mussolini’s position, and claims the Aouzou Strip as Libyan territory, viewing all the Toubou people (indigenous to southern Libya, northern Chad, and northwestern Sudan) as “treacherous zurqa”, a pejorative term used by Arab Bedouins to describe Toubou (Prunier 2011). Prunier argues, based on an analysis of Qadhāfi’s political rhetoric, that at this point, his “anti-imperialist” ideology largely saw a facile dichotomy of Arab revolutionaries vs. imperialists. Black non-Arab Libyans, like Toubou people, largely fell into the latter category for Qadhāfi by this point, with Prunier calling Qadhāfi “crudely anti-Black” in the 1970s and 1980s.
1970- Qadhāfi regime ethnically cleanses thousands of Toubou in Fezzān region, southwestern Libya (Prunier 2011)
1971- Qadhāfi tries to coup François Tombalbaye’s regime in Chad, not only because his imperialist right-wing pro-Christian government was indeed heavily backed by the French and had been waging a counter-insurgency campaign since 1966 against left-wing Muslim insurgents in the north, but also because Tombalbaye was Black (Prunier 2011) The coup was more heavily supported by pro-Libyan left-wing rebels like FROLINAT in the north of Chad.
1971- Qadhāfi sends Sudanese communists to death under the Sudanese Nimeiry regime and its new crackdown on communists after a failed communist coup. In late 1971, Qadhāfi even offers Nimeiry a merger of the two countries, seeing Nimeiry’s regime as a “Arab nationalist revolutionary movement” (Prunier 2011)
1971- Qadhāfi tells Indira Gandhi to stop interfering in (meaning stop supporting resistance against) U.S.-backed Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh.
1972- Qadhāfi’s creation of the Islamic Legion, a “pan-Arabist revolutionary” army which aims to create an Arab supremacist Sahel: “In 1972 he created the Failaka al-Islamiya (Islamic Legion), which in his mind was to be a tool for the revolutionary unification and arabization of the region. In Darfur proper he supported the creation of the Tajammu al-‘Arabi (Arab Union), a militantly racist and pan-Arabist organization which stressed the “Arab” character of the province” (Prunier 2011). As Prunier (2011) notes, the Tajammu al-‘Arabi would go on to massacre Fur people in Darfur in the 1980s. Eventually parts of Tajammu al-‘Arabi would re-assemble into the leadership of the Janjaweed, which would go on to conduct the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s. The ‘Arab supremacist character of the Islamic Legion would go hand in hand with Qadhāfi’s forced displacement of Tebu in the south (discussed further a few paragraphs below) beginning in the 1970s.
1973- “France, which supported the Tombalbaye regime against all efforts at destabilization, shipped 50,000 tons of food aid to Chad in 1973, but the Southerners who stood behind the Tombalbaye regime got first pick at that relief effort, and little food reached the North. Thousands of northern Toubou and Zaghawa tribesmen fled to Darfur seeking help. These people, who were seen as zurqa on the Libyan-Chadian confines, were perceived as “Arabs” by the “real” African tribes of Darfur. And these “Arabs” were angry, hungry and armed” (Prunier 2011). Tombalbaye would later be couped in 1975 by one of his own officers.
1973-1975 - recession in the economy of the North Atlantic world system, and therefore a widening political split between working people and Libyan capitalists. In 1974, Qadhāfi decides to change the economic system to state capitalism, but some bourgeois opponents of this change try their own coup in 1975, but it is unsuccessful. Qadhāfi continues to nationalize and expand welfare. In 1975, Qadhāfi writes the Green Book, shown there:
In the Green Book, Qadhāfi’s philosophy is written "jamahiriya" (in Arabic, جماهيرية, a play on the words jumhuriya "republic" and jamahir "masses"), jamahiriya means republic of the masses. The official ideology in the Green Book, as Qadhāfi wrote, was a combination of direct democracy, socialist views, and Arab nationalism. The Green Book states that Libya must have directly democratic unions at all levels of society. But unfortunately, the Jamahiriya was not as the Green Book promised. Like Lenin, the state was simply trying to reduce the evils of capitalism, not get rid of capitalism. Lenin and Qadhāfi were simply two types of liberals or social democrats. And both just maintained bureaucrat control over factories, rather than worker control.
In 1973 Mu‘ammar Qadhāfi “launched a ‘Cultural Revolution’ under which any publications not in accordance with the principles espoused in his [to be published two years later] ‘Green Book’ were destroyed. That included those mentioning the Amazigh. According to Gaddafi, the Amazigh were of ‘Arab origin’ and their language ‘a mere dialect’. Registration of non-Arab names was forbidden, Libya's first Amazigh organization was banned and anyone involved in their cultural revival prosecuted.” (Zurutuza 2016a) Amazigh people were also “prohibited from speaking Tamazight publically, publishing literature in Tamazight, forming cultural associations, or celebrating cultural festivals” (Minority Rights Group International (MRGI) 2018 https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b9fb61e7.html). Imazighen could be arrested for researching, organizing, or promoting Amazigh culture by Libyan police (who had begun to increase in numbers during the 1970s). This repression would continue throughout Qadhāfi’s reign, which always remained anti-Amazigh, denying Amazigh people good infrastructure and political representation (MRGI 2018). Qadhāfi publicly banned Tifinagh script, and arrested & tortured Amazigh linguists & anthropologist. Under Qadhāfi’s repression of Tamazight, the Sokna dialect went extinct, and the Awjila dialect is still endangered. Amazigh schooling would continue in secret throughout the Qadhāfi years (source—wheredid i read this). (additional sources on Amazigh repression here7)
Additionally, at this time, “from 1973 onwards, Gadaffi started to push the Tebu out of the desert, declaring it a military area and establishing military bases in a number of places. This was part of a broader policy of Arabisation which Gadaffi was pursuing across the country, which included inviting Arabs from neighbouring states to move to Libya and marginalising non-Arab minorities like the Tebu. The Tebu became displaced. Some joined relatives in the cities in the North, others went to the towns of Morzuk and Al-Kufra, moved to the far South of the country along the frontier with Chad, or were displaced across the border into Chad, Niger and Sudan” (van Waas 2013).
From 1977 on, “Tebu people were commonly the victims of massive discrimination and subjected to forced evictions from their regular places of living. Large-scale displacement of the Tebu led to their dispersal across Libya and in some cases they were also pushed across the border to neighbouring countries. As well as passing a decree stripping the Tebu of Libyan citizenship, under Gadaffi’s rule the Tebu were also denied access to education, health care and other basic services” (van Waas 2013).
1979- Qadhāfi’s Libya is now a state-capitalist oil-country, all industries have been nationalized, and the government is leaning towards the Soviet Union
جماهيرية - فكرة جيدة. لكن قذافي (مثل لنين) كان انتهازي و ليبيا لم تكن جماهيرية حقيقيه
Jamahiriya is a good idea. But Qadhāfi (like Lenin) was an opportunist and Libya was not a real jamahiriya. Under Qadhāfi’s Jamahiriya, strikes and independent trade unions were banned, and Mia Wong also mentions massacres of trade unions and communist parties (when exactly were they, I need to do more research). But, under Qadhāfi, the state sold oil and provided welfare (to whom exactly? this is an important question).
Qadhāfi’s quasi-socialist public image would be accompanied by his support for various progressive movements around the world from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which pissed off the U.S. (who was allied to the fascists in Nicaragua and Israel whom the Sandinistas and PLO were fighting), who would place Libya under sanctions in the 1980s, significantly raising the import price of medicine for the state (as sanctions often do) and hurting Libyan healthcare.
From 1978-1987, Qadhāfi’s Islamic Legion would fight four wars (with Soviet backing) against Chad (backed by France) over the Aouzou strip (source- Wikipedia).
1986- Socialist leader Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, an ally of Qadhāfi, has a falling out with him, over the war in Chad. Sankara had secretly organized talks between different warring factions, which pissed off Qadhāfi. Sankara would be deposed in a Qadhāfi-backed coup by Blaise Compaoré in 1987 and Burkina Faso would proceed to have 27 years of brutal neoliberal-capitalist dictatorship under Compaoré until a 2014 uprising. (https://www.thomassankara.net/kadhafi-et-le-burkina-une-histoire-damour-et-dinterets-dabdoulaye-ly/)
1986- Ronald Reagan was pissed off about Qadhāfi's support for national liberation groups like the Irish Republican Army and Palestine Liberation Organization because, as we all know8, Ronald Reagan is maybe the closest thing the 21st century saw to the Devil incarnate. So Reagan bombed Tripoli and Benghāzi, killing 30-40 civilians in an attempt to assassinate Qadhāfi
1991 - the collapse of the Soviet Union and state capitalism, and the beginning of something much worse - the political capitalism of the mafia everywhere in the new republics... from Armenia to Tajikistan. The USA is supported by Yeltsin, shock therapy, neoliberalization and privatization (which means here “cheaply selling state-owned industrial assets to mafiosi”)
1993- Qadhāfi’s Decree No. 491 allows for the liberalization of wholesale trade (but little real movement in this direction). But this shows how Qadhāfi was also ready to privatize and sell the country
Meanwhile, here’s how things have been going for Tebu people: “The Tebu had become very dispersed across Libya. Those who had been living in the cities for some time had already been registered and received documentation under previous government initiatives, but many others had been overlooked and were undocumented. When Gadaffi took over the Aouzou strip, he decided that all Tebu would be made to re-register and that they must all do so in Aouzou. To comply with this, from around the country, Tebu went to Aouzou to register and they were issued (new) ID cards, family books and passports as Libyan citizens. Still some Tebu did not take advantage of this opportunity and remained without documents, but a great many got these Aouzou documents. Later, Chad took over the Aouzou strip and in 1994, the International Court of Justice recognised Chad’s claim to this area. There was a ceremonial hand-over as Aouzou fell under the flag of Chad, but generally there was no effort to inform the Tebu of what had happened and what the consequences would be for them.”
2000s - liberalization begins
2003- Qadhāfi appoints Shukri Ghanem "reformist"
December 2004 - 41 enterprises were privatized.
In the 2000s, Qadhāfi, with the help of a consulting firm (which is now (in 2024) owned by Deloitte), privatized the Libyan economy, entering into deals with companies such as BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Canadian, Hess. When Qadhāfi’s son Saif al-Islam, a London School of Economics graduate with a penchant for expensive suits, described the process: "We need to move from a state-run economy to an open economy, but without it getting out of control." In effect, this meant that the old ruling class of state capitalists retained their control and continued to receive a share of the privatization. (https://www.marxist.com/nature-of-gaddafi-regime.htm)
In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi and Qadhāfi made a deal for Italy to give 5 billion dollars ($5bn USD) to Libya as reparations for the genocide in 1929-1932, but at a terrible price for Libya. At that time, the European Union was starting the evil program FRONTEX. There were Migrants in Libya, some fled from wars, genocides in countries south of Libya (for example, the Central African Republic) and also “economic migrants” who wanted more money in Europe (this money was stolen from African countries by Europeans). And when Berlusconi gave 5 billion to Qadhāfi, he gave it on the condition that Qadhāfi would help Europe with FRONTEX, its border control program, and would not allow migrants to enter Europe. In this regard, Qadhāfi agrees to a deal with Sheitan and a secret program begins where, as reported by Human Rights Watch in 2009 (HRW / hrw, https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/09/21 /pushed-back-pushed-around/italys-forced-return-boat-migrants-and-asylum-seekers), some state security officers and smugglers agreed to secretly traffic migrants into prisons where these officers beat them (and there were no reports in this article of sexual violence, but note that many migrants have seen women separated, likely to be raped) until migrants pay ransom money to officers or smugglers. Many migrants who were interviewed said that it was difficult to tell the difference between officers and smugglers in prisons, and that they both worked with each other. Libyan Coast Guard also hunted down migrant boats in the Mediterranean to arrest and hand them over to these trafficking networks under Libyan state security. Moreover, most migrants were afraid to talk to Human Rights Watch workers. FRONTEX and Qadhāfi made these migrants more vulnerable to violence. After the deal was signed and migration to Europe was criminalized, some smugglers still wanted to make money somehow, and decided that even this slavery in prisons was good, and after 2011 they opened slavery markets.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2009/country-chapters/libya - о нсилием против женщин в 2008 г в Ливии, ситуация не кажется мне так хорошо
https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/01/21/no-escape-hell/eu-policies-contribute-abuse-migrants-libya
Additionally, sometime in the 2000s, the Qadhāfi regime had declared the Tebu people who live in Libya’s south to be “stateless”, and Libyan military kicked some Tebu people out of their homes. (need to find my source).
2011- Neoliberalization reached a breaking point, and in January there were protests in Benghazi against delays in the construction of houses (according to Wikipedia), protests that were met with promises of reprisals. In Benghazi and eastern Libya by the 2000s the civilian infrastructure was generally more shabby than in the west, and that Cyraenica (eastern Libya) was primarily an oil extraction site for the regime and the bureaucrat-army ruling class (Bell & Witter 2011). Protests in Benghazi continued until Qadhāfi’s forces responded with open shooting in February. This is the day of the February revolution), which quickly sent the country into civil war. During this civil war, many Amazigh, having suffered discrimination under the old regime, fought against Qadhāfi (though their relations were hostile with Arab anti-Qadhāfi militias)9, and in response Qadhāfi’s army subjected the predominantly Amazigh-inhabited Nefusa Mountains area to daily heavy machinery and cluster bomb attacks from April until August 2011 (Buzakhar et al 201410). Some Indigenous Black Libyans also took up arms against the Qadhāfi regime.11 Qadhāfi loyalists were initially able to maintain control of the western half of the country, while rebel militias took control of most of the eastern half, and fighting became intense after NATO allied with some rebel militias and launched a bombing campaign (targeted against the regime) in western Libya, which also killed many civilians. In addition, NATO allied itself with the most reactionary, racist anti-Black elements of the rebel militias, working with militia commanders who had direct links to the old system of prison extortion, which had developed into a larger network of clandestine slave markets in the chaos of the civil war. NATO-backed militias tortured and raped African migrants en masse in slave markets, and carried out massacres in predominantly Black towns such as Tawergha12.
And when David Gerbi, the “revolutionary Jew” whose family had fled to Rome in 1967, who fought alongside the rebels and was a wartime psychologist in Libya, tried to reopen the synagogue in Tripoli that had remained closed under Qadhāfi, the NTC13 rebel fighters did not allow him to open the synagogue, did not even give him protection from the violent anti-Semites who wanted to kill him (https://www.npr.org/2011/10/03/141014576/hostile-crowd-forces-libyan-jew-out-of-synagogue) Rebel fighters who promised that they would save Libya from dictators increased slavery, violence, and did not even want the return of the Libyan Jews.
For Amazigh meanwhile, who had their own Amazigh rebel groups fighting Qadhāfi, and now were finally able to openly teach the Tamazight language in schools, and partake in Amazigh New Year celebrations, the struggle would be for recognition in the new government (Buzakhar et al 2014). It’s important to note that the anti-Qadhāfi factions consisted of both progressive left-wing and racist right-wing factions (like how the Afghan mujahideen of the 1970s similarly also was composed of disillusioned leftists and later, right-wing Islamists14), and not all of the anti-Qadhāfi resistance were anti-Black pogromists. Indeed, in the cases of both Afghanistan in the 1970s-80s and Libya in the 2010s, the U.S. decided to fund the most reactionary right-wing sections of resistance against a repressive government to ensure the success of their imperialist ambitions in the country.
At first, some Tuareg militias were pro-Qadhāfi, due to good relations between the Qadhāfi regime and Tuareg people (Qadhāfi had not banned the Tuareg (Tamaheq) language, for instance, unlike Tamazight). Other Tuareg militias were anti-Qadhāfi. The result of some Tuareg militias being pro-Qadhāfi caused many ‘Arab anti-Qadhāfi militia fighters to view the entire Tuareg ethnic group as untrustworthy.15
2012-present:
In 2012, the U.S./Turkey-backed General National Congress government in Tripoli gradually came to include right-wing Islamists as well, and imposed mandatory veiling for women in universities.16 GNC officials continued to have connections to or themselves partake in bombings, kidnappings, extortion, and of course, slavery. Right-wing Islamic groups, some with connections to Al-Qaeda and ISIS, would bomb civilians throughout Libya. The GNC refused to follow the recommendation of Amazigh groups to provide further legal protections for Amazigh people and for the Tamazight language official status in the new constitution, resulting in protests in 2013 (Buzakhar et al 2014). The GNC refused to hold new elections when its mandate expired in January 201417, and in May 2014, a former CIA asset named Khalīfa Ḥaftar launched a military operation against the GNC government. This would result in a second civil war fought between U.S.-backed GNC government in Tripoli and Ḥaftar’s militias— the Libyan National Army (LNA), soon including Qadhāfi loyalists, who had their own House of Representatives government (which, due to fighting, moved to Tˤubruq in eastern Libya in autumn 2014). The geopolitics of U.S. backing allowed the racist GNC government to proclaim itself “democratic” and their enemies as undemocratic, when in reality, it appears that they are two different forms of undemocracy— the GNC had its migrant slavery, while the Tˤubruq government was fighting for its own military police state over Libya, torturing and executing suspected dissidents and their families, while fighting right-wing Islamism and, as he claimed, the migrant slave trade. As far as fighting the migrant slave trade, Ḥaftar’s LNA would largely fail on these promises, keeping alive the same system of smugglers, LNA authorities, and bribes that defined the slave trade since 2008 (Qadhāfi era). As a report on the political economy of detention concluded in 2019, “in general terms, the [detention] centres in eastern Libya are used to create the illusion of counter-smuggling, whereas those in the west are at the core of the smuggling business, particularly since the collapse of the coastal smuggling systems” (Malakooti 2019:7).
I am still learning about the second Libyan Civil War (2014-2020). It is my understanding that during the civil war, all parties did horrible things. And just like South and North Korea, over the course of the 2014-2020 war, Libya too would be effectively divided into two countries backed by different geopolitical blocs, a U.S./Turkey/NATO-backed West Libya and a Russia/China18-backed East Libya. The U.S./NATO-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in the west continued and significantly exacerbated19 the slave trade of Black people, many migrants from countries south of Libya. It cannot be understated how many people were tortured, raped, and killed by their enslavers who continued to enjoy backing from NATO, how NATO-backed militias and their support for a right-wing Islamic political project ended up facilitating the arrival of Turkish-backed terrorist group ISIS20 and al-Qā’ida21 into Libya, and how, as Libyan anarchist Saoud Salem predicted, the NATO intervention brought Libya from a hell into a real hell orders of magnitude worse (https://libcom.org/article/signs-defeat-libyan-revolution). In West Libya dissent is also heavily criminalized, with much criticism of ruling GNA labeled as tahlūb (‘algae’, a derisive term for Qadhāfi support because algae is green). If someone in West Libya is accused by GNA authorities of supporting Qadhāfi, they are sent to prisons22 where they could be tortured or executed.
West Libyan authorities had been trying to paint their regime as “safe” and “democratic” due to its U.S. backing. https://en.minbarlibya.org/2017/08/01/and-exactly-how-safe-is-tripoli/
Well-known Amazigh dissident Ben Khalifa (who had to flee to Netherlands to avoid arrest by Qadhāfi while he was living in exile in Rabat, Morocco) said of the Tripoli government in 2016: “There’s no positive attitude toward our constitutional recognition and there’s even hostility against us”. Ben Khalifa “stressed that the people in the NTC were ‘exactly the same’ as in the previous [Qadhāfi] regime.” As Ben Khalifa said, “They're trying to project an image of being liberal and open-minded but the reality is that the majority of them still stick to the same authoritarian old methods.” (Zurutuza 2016a) The GNA 60-member constituent assembly who were trying to draft a constitution also consisted of a “six-seat quota given to the country’s minorities: two for the Amazigh, two for the Touareg and two for the Tubu. The system had been designed to rule on majorities of two-thirds plus one, so non-Arab Libyans had literally no chance of achieving their rights” in a framework dominated by Arab nationalism. (Zurutuza 2016a)
In 2017 a resident of Tripoli said, “The city is a witness to numerous types of crimes every day – murder, robbery, kidnapping, harassment, shooting in the air for no reasons…If you complain and say Tripoli is not safe, you will be considered a supporter of Qaddafi regime or Libyan National Army in east of Libya and\or an opponent of 17 February Revolution.” In the same year (2017) in Sabhā, West Libya, the existence of slave markets were reported to Al Jazeera, where Black migrants were traded and sold, beaten, and raped (whose Arabic edition is one of the most right-wing news sources in the Middle East, but the existence of slave markets at that time is backed by other research I’ve seen)- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/29/african-refugees-bought-sold-and-murdered-in-libya/, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/4/11/iom-african-migrants-traded-in-libyas-slave-markets. A UN report in 2023 (also from Al Jazeera) says EU role in West Libyan slave trade is diminished. As is NATO role.
In East Libya, meanwhile, LNA forces had also seized property from, tortured, forcibly disappeared, and arrested civilians on suspicion of “supporting terrorism”.23 Despite a statement from Ḥaftar in 2018 condemning these acts and calling for a return of displaced people (the families of those arrested) back to East Libya, militias were still preventing displaced people from returning home in February 2018.24 In the city of Tarhuna, LNA executed and tortured many civilians who either opposed Ḥaftar or were suspected of opposing him, burying them in a mass grave.25
What about the political economy of East Libya? A Reuters article claimed that by 2019, most residents worked for the state.26 Is this a kind of political capitalism27 with a bureaucrat/military ruling class? Given the political capitalisms of both Russia and China, the backers of East Libya, this would make sense. And it seems backed up by the presence of Russian paramilitary Wagner Group28, a group that’s neo-Nazi (it’s even in the name, Wagner) back home in Russia, killing, torturing, and raping Ukrainians in Ukraine, and in Syria partnered with the Assad regime militarily (the same one that’s responsible for 94% of civilian death in the Syrian Civil War29), and financially too: the Wagner group’s former head (before he died in a private jet crash lol) Yevgeniy Prigozhin had a company Evro Polis which got a 2018 agreement for a share of 25% of Syrian oil profits; all of Prigozhin’s companies were earning roughly $20million USD/month off of Syrian oil that year.30 Wagner Group also took part in the torture of suspected dissidents, and left Islamophobic neo-Nazi graffiti on a mosque in ‘Ain Zāra.31 And Wagner Group had been seen also attacking and gaining control of some oil fields32, just like LNA33. It is difficult to say forsure whether or not Wagner Group’s military activities in Libya facilitate profits for Yevgeniy Prigozhin (or now, his son Pavel), or, if there is indeed a bureaucrat/military ruling class in East Libya, whether this class has made agreements to share profit with Russian political capitalists, Prigozhin or otherwise. But if something like that were going on, a kind of Russian-imperialist political capitalism in East Libya would fit the pattern of Wagner Group’s activities and the Russian political capitalist class’s need to expand (because, as Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko puts it, “one cannot extract from the same source forever”), and explain the numerous human rights organizations’ reports of atrocities carried out by the LNA, and the general pattern of militarist authoritarian rule.
In 2019, Ḥaftar’s LNA, defying expectations34, invaded West Libya and captured much of the from the GNA.35 The result was a bloody fourteen-month long war, by the end of which GNA had regained control of Tripoli and West Libyan territory. East Libyan forces conducted an airstrike on the Tajoura migrant detention center in Tripoli, killing 53 people.36 Wagner Group also executed some civilians for Ḥaftar.37 Ḥaftar claimed his invasion of West Libya was to stop the migrant slave trade.38 By 2019, an estimated 13,000 women had been victims of sex trafficking from the slave trade.39
I mentioned however that the slave trade largely continued in East Libya under Ḥaftar. The main area where much of the slave trade and the beating and rape of migrants for ransom money was occurring was in West Libya (Malakooti, other sources I’d seen say this too), allowing the east to be more overlooked— but here too, smugglers and government authorities were profitting off of the slave trade business. When LNA would take over territory with smuggling activities, they would support the activities, and LNA authorities would become the new players in the migrant slavery business (Malakooti 2019). There are still many migrant detention centers, both official and unofficial, in LNA-controlled areas (Malakooti 2019:30), and this same report (Malakooti) emphasizes that the extortions and sexual abuse are common in unofficial camps40 in both West and East Libya. In Sabhā, the smuggling of migrants was “controlled by members of the ‘Awlad Suleiman tribe” (Malakooti 2019:48), with whom Ḥaftar had allied, and after taking control of Sabhā in February 2019, LNA did not free the enslaved migrants, “one of the first things they did was to transfer migrants from the east to the south, perhaps to include in their broader plan to bring law and order the message that they wish to resolve the illegal migration issue” (Malakooti 2019:32)
The Libyan National Army and the House of Representatives government forces, under Khalīfa Ḥaftar, had also raped 6,000 women, according to Sahām Sarqīwa, a psychologist in Benghāzi who had interviewed refugees on the Tunisian and Egyptian borders. She had notably criticized all parties in the war (including Ḥaftar for his 2019 attack on Tripoli), called for a unity government involving all sides in the conflict, and herself participated as a member of East Libyan parliament, enjoying considerable support in East Libya.
In 2019, Sahām Sarqīwa was disappeared by LNA troops, after she criticized Ḥaftar’s 2019 attack on Tripoli.41 Despite a statement from East Libyan authorities that Sahām Sarqīwa had been released in 2020, her brother (who lives in the U.S.) claimed that he had still not heard from her, and the family had been worried that East Libyan authorities had kidnapped her to torture, rape, and possibly kill her.42
As for the Nafusa Mountains, by 2016, the area had become a de facto autonomous region ruled by the Amazigh Supreme Council (ASC) with representative-democratic elections, guaranteed 50% women 50% men gender representation for the pool of political candidates, Tamazigh-language education, an ideology of religious tolerance in textbooks for children, and a commitment against right-wing Islamism, according to the elected president Khaire Elhamesi: “I’m proud to say that our Tamazight language books are the only ones in which a Libyan child can come across a Libyan Jew, Muslim and a Christian”. Note that however, many Tamazigh (200,000 in fact) were living in Tripoli in 2016, not in ASC-controlled territory. Both West and East Libyan governments claim that the ASC wants to “break the country” (Zurutuza 2016b). In 2018, the ASC boycotted the constitution referendum, which had by this point refused to make Tamazight an official language, and continued the official dismissal of any attempts for Amazigh representation in the GNA government.43
Meanwhile, in 2014 in Fezzān, a group of Tebu began an alliance with Ḥaftar militias, which increased suspicion among the Tuareg in Fezzān, who then aligned themselves with West Libyan militias, and the result became a proxy war fought between West-Libya-backed Tuareg and East-Libya-backed Tebu (Stocker 2015). In Ubari, a town in southwest Libya predominantly inhabited by Tuaregs and ‘Arabs with a small Tebu minority, there was relative peace and coexistence, with the civil war largely regarded as fighting going on between faraway factions of coastal ‘Arabs. This would be the case until 2015, when support West Libya vs. support for East Libya among different ethnic groups brewed into a proxy war fought between Tebu and Tuareg militias, which saw many civilians killed by gunfire and many more lose their homes.44 Tebu and Tuareg militias later made a ceasefire in 201745, and the alliance between Tebu and the East Libyan government would begin to worsen in 2016, and got much worse when the East Libyan government made an alliance with the Awlad Suleiman militia in Sabhā, which had fought a war against the Tebu militia in spring 2017.4647
During Ḥaftar’s 2019-2020 offensive on West Libya, Tebu and Tuareg groups allied together against Ḥaftar, whose alliance with Awlad Suleiman had helped him invade Tebu and Tuareg territory in the south. East Libyan militias attacked the Tuareg Brigade 30-controlled Sharara oil field (likely to further the East Libyan capitalist project), and the resulting battle also killed many civilians. Ḥaftar’s campaign in the Tebu & Tuareg areas south/southwest of Sabhā caused some Tebu to resign from the Tˤubruq government in protest of what they perceived as incursions by East Libya into traditional Tebu territory that would kill many Tebu civilians there.48 The Amazigh Supreme Council would also fight against Ḥaftar during the invasion of West Libya (Zurutuza). ‘Aisha Mohamed, a displaced Tuareg living in ASC-controlled, largely Amazigh town of Zuwāra, said of all the coastally-based factions and governments in Libya, “I never saw Gaddafi there. I’ve never heard of anyone, before or after him, who went south and did anything for us”49 (Zurutuza 201850).
Libya will remain in a state of civil war until a ceasefire is reached in 2020. But in 2020 there were also protests against both the new governments - the Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east and the Government of National Accord (GNA) in the west. The protests were over problems of power and water outages, shortages of fuel and cooking gas, lack of funds, poor security and the COVID-19 pandemic.
^ confusing map of Libya in 2020 after the end of the war. confusing because there is the green territory of the Government of National Accord (GNA), the government of the old anti-Qadhāfi militias, and the red territory of the Libyan National Army, where Khalīfa Ḥaftar is, and also Saif al-Islām Qadhāfi, the son of Mu‘ammar Qadhāfi.
My analysis of what little I know of the Libyan Civil War & have presented in the extremely cursory history above is: U.S./western Europe/Turkey-backed West Libya was fighting for continued profits for the new West Libyan bourgeoisie in deals with western European oil companies, and also through migrant slave trade, and was more than willing to prop up right-wing Islamism, like Turkey-backed ISIS, to ensure Turkish military presence in the region, for oil extraction. The old Libyan bourgeoisie, consisting of largely Qadhāfi-era bureaucrats and armed forces, had largely been liquidated or transferred into East Libya. Russia/China-backed East Libya meanwhile was fighting for domination of the oil industry by its own army/bureaucrat bourgeoisie51 and military campaigns to secure sites of production (oil fields). Ḥaftar’s fight against right-wing Islamism was to further legitimize his own military rule, and provide easy justification for his forces seizing oil fields. Ḥaftar would at first declare himself anti-slavery52, and work to fight migrant slavery (in addition to groups like ISIS and Al-Qā’ida) but it appears his promises would not be fully delivered on: by 2021, once again a familiar picture emerged as Bangladeshi migrants were reported to be taken by smugglers to Benghāzi, where they were detained and beaten by their handlers for ransom money.53
In February 2021, a guy named ‘Abd-ul-Ḥamīd Dbeibah was appointed as ruler of the U.S./Turkey-backed West Libyan interim government. West Libyans were registered to vote, candidates announced for a December 2021 election, but elections kept being delayed by the government, and Dbeibah held on to power. They still have not yet happened.
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, meanwhile, reported in 2023 that LNA also ethnically cleansed Tebu people: https://cihrs.org/libya-haftar-forces-should-end-forced-displacement-of-tebu-families/?lang=en
As of 2023, Ḥaftar’s militiamen involved in both smuggling operations on boats, and also in pulling back some of those same boats from EU waters.54 During the summer of 2023, Italian neo-fascist PM Giorgia Meloni (as well as a Maltese delegation) asked Ḥaftar to collaborate with EU border policing55, in exchange for “supporting that part of Libya with regard to some economic development projects that General Haftar has requested”,56 aka money. I’m not sure if such a deal has yet materialized or is still being negotiated, or was dropped. East Libya really seems to following Qadhāfi as far as pursuing another deal with Shaitan goes.
Based on the reports of continued slavery in East Libya too, Ḥaftar is in no way an antifascist or a lesser evil than West Libya at this current time, and no further military action by East Libya against West Libya can be justified on claims of antifascism or “lesser evil”ism.)
As of 2023, the West Libyan government had promised no further military actions over the summer, with ASC authorities urging Imazighen to still be wary and cautious57. And this cautious attitude would prove correct—as of November 2023, ASC authorities reported Dbeibah’s “Joint Room” security forces (which are largely non-Amazigh) troop movement near Zuwāra.58
In January 2024, the Sharara oil field (at this point operated by a joint venture of the West Libyan National Oil Corp. and Spanish, French, Austrian, and Norwegian oil companies) was shut down by protestors from Ubari over high fuel prices and lack of economic opportunity.59
Some works cited
Bell & Witter 2011 -https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep07869#metadata_info_tab_contents
Gérard Prunier (2011), Darfur: a 21st century genocide
Laura van Waas 2013, “The stateless Tebu of Libya?” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/laura-van-waas-the-stateless-tebu-of-libya#toc9
Arezo Malakooti 2019, The Political Economy of Migrant Detention in Libya: Understanding the players and the business models https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Final-Report-Detention-Libya.pdf
Stocker 2015, “Libya: The Forgotten War of the Tebu and Tuareg,” https://citizenshiprightsafrica.org/libya-the-forgotten-war-of-the-tebu-and-tuareg/
Zurutuza 2016a https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/02/17/what-happened-to-the-other-libyans
Zurutuza 2016b https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/09/21/libya-needs-to-start-again-from-scratch
This is a plural. The singular and adjective form of the word, in Tamazight, is Amazigh. The Imazighen are also known historically as Berber, a term many still use today, and many don’t.
Historical linguistics & langauge families intro
Toubou is actually a language family; the southern Toubou of Niger/Chad have their own Daza language, and the northern Toubou of Niger/Chad/Libya speak Teda. Teda and Daza are the two only languages in the Toubou family, which is believed by some long-range comparativists to be a branch of the larger Nilo-Saharan macrofamily.
but the Bolsheviks, after their attack on the anarchist rural community (Mankhovshchyna) in 1920, persecuted a new bureaucratic class, and a new class structure (bureaucrats, then the proletariat, then the rural, and on the lower class itself the indigenous peoples)
this I saw in a different source
Dude is by this point in the Libyan army, and bearing the intergenerational trauma of the Libyan genocide, very incensed with Idris’s neo-imperialist rule that allows Europeans to profit off of Libya. A possibly hidden family background moment: according to some Israeli media, who spoke with Gita Boaron and other Jewish relatives of Qadhāfi (allegedly), Qadhāfi is actually Jewish by way of his maternal grandmother who converted to Islam in Libya (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/142593) Despite this, as I mention in this article, Qadhāfi’s regime was very hostile to Libyan Jews’ desire for the right of return following the 1967 pogroms.
https://www.iwgia.org/en/libya/5055-iw-2023-libya.html, https://www.middleeasteye.net/features/amazigh-libya-revive-their-previously-banned-language,%20https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/lib-docs/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session9/LY/STP_SocietyforThreatenedPeoples.pdf
To tankie Qadhafi supporters claiming MRGI is somehow "imperialist" and that actually there was no discrimination of any kind against Amazigh, Toubou, and Tebu- then why are historians, many members of the community all describing the same experiences? Like Uyghurs, and Bosnaks- too many refugees, too much actual testimonial and other evidence to corroborate the genocide narrative. And as Jihad al-Haqq notes, "There are extensive institutional networks for Holocaust remembrance—but the same doesn't exist for the Herero in Namibia, or even the Roma, the other major ethnic group targeted in the Holocaust. This is one of the major reasons why most genocides people never even hear about, and people have the impression that genocide is a relatively rare phenomenon. The reality is that most genocides and the people affected won't be remembered the way they should." This has the further result that "people are constantly asking 'Why doesn't nobody know anything about what's happening in the Congo, or the Amazigh in the Western Sahara, or Sudan, or Tigray?' It's for the same reason: they aren't worldwide social networks, organizations, and institutional recognition that are given to the Uyghurs, Tigrayans, or the people in the Congo. This isn't to say Palestinians are privileged folks, but that there exists an intellectual and social infrastructure that focuses on and supports them." Indeed, the Libyan genocides in 1929-1932, and of Jews in the 1940s, are already so little known outside of social anthropology circles. The same would thus unsurprisingly be true of any genocides that occurred under the Qadhāfi regime, and this is why we find the survivors of ethnic cleansing and language bans describing their experiences to the first parties willing to listen, mostly UN and Western human rights NGOs.
Need a more precise source and more info, but this person typically has good citations. https://nitter.net/4ksh4tr4/status/1639010725183258624#m
Buzakhar, Bouzakhar, & Abouzakhar 2014: “The Role of the Amazigh Libyan CSO in Tamazgha Spring,” https://www.academia.edu/8857199/The_Role_of_the_Amazigh_Libyan_CSO_in_Tamazgha_Spring
https://nitter.net/4ksh4tr4/status/1631564260986724353#m
https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/06/23/to-be-black-in-libya
National Transitional Council, the post-Qadhāfi Tripoli government.
https://minorityrights.org/minorities/tuareg-3/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-law-idUSBRE9B30M220131204/, https://web.archive.org/web/20180613134140/http://www.mei.edu/content/libya-congress-extends-its-mandate-until-end-2014
https://web.archive.org/web/20180613134140/http://www.mei.edu/content/libya-congress-extends-its-mandate-until-end-2014
since 2019/2020, as evidenced by plenty of media reporting on Ḥaftar buying weapons from the Chinese government. I’d also heard in 2022 that Russian and Chinese companies were helping to set up infrastructure in East Libya.
Here’s just one- https://rosaluxna.org/publications/chinas-discreet-game-in-north-africa-private-military-companies/
https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2016/06/23/to-be-black-in-libya this source talks about it, I’d seen other sources describe before in depth just how many orders of magnitude worse & widespread the NATO/EU backing has made the slavery
As David Graeber, in addition to many Kurdish activists, have pointed out, while the origins of ISIS are ultimately obscure, it is clear that Turkish state intelligence (MİT) and the state intelligences of several Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) helped to set up ISIS, and how Turkish state intelligence continued to coordinate with ISIS, sometimes some ISIS commanders who were killed would be found with Turkish state IDs in their pockets, like this one: https://www.ibtimes.co.in/former-turkish-mit-intelligence-agent-arrested-while-fighting-isis-mosul-report-634291%20 It should thus come as no surprise whatsoever that ISIS presence increased in areas controlled by the Turkish-backed governments.
This one came out of the ruling class of Saudi Arabia which in the 1980s wanted to support the U.S.’s right-wing-ification of the Afghan mujahideen resistance against the repressive Russia-backed Stalinist PDPA government. And so they created Maktab al-Khidāmat, which worked alongside the most right-wing Islamist mujahideen factions. Later Maktab al-Khidāmat would turn into Al-Qā’ida.
Some of these are the same prisons into which anti-Qadhāfi militias took old Qadhāfi regime soldiers to execute them.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/01/libya-displaced-benghazi-families-prevented-return
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/01/libya-displaced-benghazi-families-prevented-return
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/07/libya-militia-terrorized-town-leaving-mass-graves
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-economy/shopping-street-rises-from-the-ashes-of-war-in-libyas-benghazi-idUSKCN1QE1IK/
See here for an introduction to political capitalism and how it works. https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict The basic idea is that in Russia (from Yeltsin on) and China (under Xí Jìnpíng) ended up privatizing state-owned enterprises often for pennies on the dollar, and the new owners, the political capitalists, extract insider rents from anyone who wants to do business and now relies heavily on the now privately-owned enterprises. Slobodan Milošević is another example of a political capitalist. Both Milošević and Xí are ethnonationalist fascists—Xí is doing a genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in East Turkestan/Xīnjiāng, while Milošević’s forces did genocide in Bosnia i Hercegovina (1992-1995), and in Kosovo (1998-1999). See here for more details/sources on Russia/China/Yugoslavia:
How I know about Wagner Group and its neo-Nazi ideology, and semi-autonomy yet alliance with the Russian state is largely my connection with Ukrainian and Kurdish anarchists and leftists (some of whom in the latter group have connections to Syria), as well as things Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko has written about.
https://libcom.org/article/anti-imperialism-idiots-leila-al-shami, a syrian leftist, citing a syrian human rights group
https://manaramagazine.org/2023/08/syria-wagner-russia-iran/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/libya-russia-wagner-mercenaries-sprayed-bullets
The fact of the attacks have been widely reported, I’ve read them in numerous places. Here’s one https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/wagners-global-operations-war-oil-gold-2023-06-29/,
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/haftar-forces-major-operation-reclaim-libyan-oil-fields-rivals
https://rosaluxna.org/publications/wagner-in-libya-combat-and-influence/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/06/libya-threat-tripoli-fighting-raises-atrocity-concern
https://theglobepost.com/2019/07/03/migrants-massacre-libya-detention-center/, https://libcom.org/article/opec-iran-and-libyan-civil-war
For one specific case, https://www.npr.org/2023/07/31/1191034016/libyan-man-who-says-he-was-tortured-wants-to-hold-wagner-group-accountable ← Libyan Mohammed Anbees was a resident of Tripoli who, with family, fled the 2019 invasion by Ḥaftar’s forces to a rural village. Mohammed says he was watching TV when the remote broke, he went to get new batteries, was followed by Wagner militias on the way home, who kidnapped him and four of his family members, and tried to execute all of them with gunfire. Mohammed and his brother survived, while the other three family members were killed.
https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2019/05/10/Washington-looks-to-Haftar-to-end-slave-trade-in-Libya-
https://time.com/longform/african-slave-trade/, mentions 80% of 16,000
“Most female migrants in Libya are trafficked for sexual exploitation and it is not uncommon for them to be forced into prostitution by centre staff, particularly in unofficial centres, where the traffickers and the centre staff may be part of the same network. There are cases, for example, in Zintan, in which centre staff force female migrants into sexual relationships with them.” (Malakooti 2109:42)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/07/libya-abducted-politicians-fate-remains-unknown-a-year-on-amid-ongoing-disappearances/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/american-family-kidnapped-libyan-politician-pleads-her-return-n1032341, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/i-dont-believe-my-sister-alive-fears-mount-kidnapped-libyan-mp-seham-sergiwa
https://libyaobserver.ly/news/libyan-amazigh-supreme-council-boycott-constitution-referendum
https://www.vice.com/en/article/43my43/in-a-southern-libya-oasis-a-proxy-war-engulfs-two-tribes This article from Vice certainly covers the conflict from a journalist perspective, trying to synthesize local attitudes about ongoing war while reporting on this ongoing war, and from reading it, one does not immediately get a very clear picture of what exactly the different factions in the proxy war are, just that the result of fighting between U.S./Turkey-backed West Libya and Russia/China-backed East Libya has spilled over into a proxy war between ethnic militias in Ubari, consisting largely of the non-Arab peoples who were oppressed under Qadhāfi. more info in Stocker 2015.
People losing their homes due to war- (written by Zurutuza) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/libyas-tuareg-find-new-home-coastal-amazigh-enclave
https://libyaherald.com/2017/03/tebu-tuareg-and-awlad-suleiman-make-peace-in-rome/
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/feuding-tribes-unite-new-civil-war-looms-libyas-south
Zurutuza https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/libyas-tuareg-find-new-home-coastal-amazigh-enclave
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/feuding-tribes-unite-new-civil-war-looms-libyas-south
translated from Tuareg to English
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/libyas-tuareg-find-new-home-coastal-amazigh-enclave
My analysis is pretty much mirrored exactly by this LibCom article: https://libcom.org/article/opec-iran-and-libyan-civil-war
“Of course, in all cases, the losers are bound to be the Libyan working class, for whom neither the GNA’s reactionary Islamist links nor Haftar’s military dictatorship offers anything. Aided by their international imperialist partners, both forces have been responsible for major atrocities, most particularly against refugees and migrants turned away from the EU by “Fortress Europe” policies and subjected to slave-like conditions and exploitation in GNA detention centers.11 The LNA has just as much blood on its hands, and not twenty days ago was likely responsible for the devastating airstrike on a detention center in Tajoura that left 53 dead.12 Libya has endured unfathomable suffering in the past decade, and prospects remain equally grim today.”
https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2019/05/10/Washington-looks-to-Haftar-to-end-slave-trade-in-Libya-
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59528818
https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/smuggler-warlord-eu-ally/
https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/smuggler-warlord-eu-ally/
https://www.agenzianova.com/en/news/migranti-piantedosi-chiederemo-ad-haftar-piu-collaborazione-nel-fermare-le-partenze/
https://en.minbarlibya.org/2023/12/05/libya-and-the-amazigh-de-escalating-tension-and-increasing-political-representation/
https://libyaobserver.ly/news/amazigh-supreme-council-warns-military-movements-near-zuwara-city
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/libya-suspended-oil-production-largest-field-after-protesters-106170902, https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/010324-libyas-300000-bd-sharara-oil-field-shut-by-protesters-sources. The oil field has been partially operated by a Spanish oil company since the 1990s, who bought its shares from Romanian state oil company Petrom, who discovered it when Qadhāfi was in his state-capitalist phase and close to Romania’s state-capitalist Ceaușescu: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/el-sharara-oil-field/
wasnt sure where else to put this also but heres a more comprehensive (long) look at U.S. imperialism- https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/american-imperialism-in-the-20th
"What is the difference between Qadhāfi's Libya and Rojava?" is a question I am frequently asked. This question typically assumes an epistemological equivalence in Qadhāfi support and SDF support, that both are based ultimately on selective readings of texts by the loudest proponents of the system, often people "in charge". The difference is that, if we compare this with testimony from human rights groups and minority rights groups, we find countless testimony, as well as reflections in the records of ethnographers, that the Amazigh and Toubou were treated terribly under Qadhāfi, and also that there was no true jamāhiriyya-style direct-democracy being practiced, with independent workers' organizations and trade unions being routinely subject to massacres by state security forces. Additionally, a look at systems like Qadhāfi's Libya or Kim Jong-Eun's North Korea reveals that whenever tourists or officials are shown locals (e.g. in documentaries like Propaganda Game (2015)) and ask them how such a system could work, the locals usually respond with some quick articulation of the party line, often with layers of hidden sarcasm, followed by a general avoidance of whoever asked. As David Graeber pointed out of Rojava, the same is not at all true there (as I've also seen in many Rojava documentaries): when asked, locals everywhere often seem either 1) way too surprised how well their system is working for them and eager to invite tourists to come see direct-democratic sessions live, or 2) don't really care that much, think something along the lines of "it's good at least this is here, but idk it's kinda annoying isn't it to have to keep meeting all the time", an opinion which is extremely tolerated and sometimes acknowledged by those who fall into camp #1. (Attendance at meetings also isn't mandatory, as long as there's gender and ethnic representation at the council level.)
Additionally, we can compare the reports from "hit pieces" about these regimes, and apply very carefully an understanding of how Khoms'kyj's theory of "manufacturing consent" works. This theory, which points out how corporate-owned media effectively makes propaganda by subtlely writing justifications for or ignoring some atrocities, and shining the spotlight on others. Corporate media like NYTimes and Al Jazeera (whose Arabic language edition is one of the most right-wing reactionary newspapers in the Middle East) rarely fake stories of mass atrocities--and the way to tell when they do is to check in with the work of human rights organizations, which, despite their connections to NGO neoliberal capitalism (and thus the propensity of some managing directors to do some manufacturing of consent by ignoring or subtlely justifying some atrocities) are often some of the first and only actors in war zones and authoritarian regimes whom locals feel comfortable even talking to about what they experienced. If we compare various articles from NYTimes about the mass torture and mass rape of dissidents in Assad-regime-controlled parts of Syria, or the various descriptions of what life was like under Qadhāfi for Amazigh people (for instance), this is what we find, backed up with claims from human rights groups and testimonials which can only be explained in the way I did with what could effectively be termed my 'hit piece' on Qadhāfi here. But with Rojava, and reports of the alleged ethnic cleansing of Turkmens in Syria, we find various human rights groups recanting their stories or clarifying that it was another group that had been responsible for the violence, not SDF. Additionally, the few claims of confirmed SDF brutality or violence are many orders of magnitude less in scope and scale than everyone they're fighting: Erdoǧan's forces (including ISIS), Assad's forces, Free Syrian Army factions, Barzani's Kurdistan Regoinal Government in Iraq. And for the most part as far as I understand, these instances of violence (& the most important question of how to move forward in the most democratic and mutually respectful way) have been addressed by the direct-democratic councils themselves autonomously (which, as I established earlier, we have reason to believe actually do exist, unlike under Libya's jamāhiriyya). It's worth also emphasizing that the SDF is pretty much the only entity in the region I know of whose politics are explicitly feminist and anti-rape.
Oh yeah, another thing. A lot of people don't know that many ISIS commanders, after they were killed, Turkish Intelligence (MİT) IDs were found in their pockets. And that intelligence from Turkey and Gulf states helped set up ISIS, and Turkey helped to issue IDs and transportation to many ISIS fighters, and continued logistical support, which is why many Kurdish protestors in London chant, "TURKISH STATE IS ISIS, ISIS IS TURKISH STATE".