In the worst violence in occupied Western Sahara this year, ongoing clashes sparked by a soccer match have left seven dead, pitting ethnic Sahrawi supporters of the home team against Moroccan settlers who supported the visiting team from near Casablanca.
At a meeting in Benghazi to hash out the details of a new government, Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) pledged to investigate Amnesty International’s claims of human rights abuses by both sides in the conflict.
Reviving a protest movement that had become moribund in recent months, some 10,000 Moroccans marched in Casablanca, calling for a boycott of the November parliamentary elections and curbs on the power of the king.
As David Cameron and Nicloas Sarkozy make a triumphalist tour of Tripoli, tensions emerge between jihadists and secularists in the NTC ranks. EU counter-terrorism chief Gilles de Kerchove warns that al-Qaeda has capitalized on the Libya conflict.
Tuaregs in Mali and Niger report that their compatriots in Libya are being “hunted in the streets” and tortured. Black African residents of the town of Tawergha were forced from their homes by anti-Qaddafi forces, and have set up refugee camps near Tripoli.
Former US congressman Walter Fauntroy, recently returned from a “self-sanctioned peace mission” to Libya, claims much of the fighting attributed to the rebels was actually carried out by NATO special forces troopsâwho also brutalized the populace.
World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg, in the second Internet edition of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, discusses the emerging struggle for post-Qaddafi Libya and the potential for ethnic war as Arabs are pitted against Tuaregs and Berbers.
NTC forces claim to be closing in on Moammar Qaddafi at a location in the Libyan desertâbut Pepe Escobar on Asia Times warns that “the real war starts now,” predicting a new insurgency as the NTC fractures.
Tuareg fighters are said to be accompanying a convoy of Qaddafi-loyalist forces that has crossed from Libya into Niger, raising speculation that the Tuareg leaders may have brokered a deal for Qaddafi’s exile in Burkina Faso.
The de facto authorities in Tripoli should stop the arbitrary arrests of African migrant workers assumed to be mercenaries, Human Rights Watch said, calling for the NTC to “release those detained as mercenaries solely due to their dark skin color.”
Human Rights Watch reports that Abdel Hakim Belhajârecently an “al-Qaeda-linked terrorist” and now a military commander of Libya’s NATO-backed rebelsâwas actually “renditioned” by the CIA from Malaysia to Libya back in 2004.
France and the NTC deny claims in the Paris daily LibĂ©ration that they have signed a secret deal granting French companies exclusive access to 35% of Libya’s oil reserves. Qaddafi meanwhile charges imperialist designs on deep Saharan fossil aquifers.
