June 17th, 2011 by Oman Views

BENGHAZI, Libya – At first, the responses to the questionnaire about the trauma of the war in Libya were predictable, if tragic: 10,000 people suffering post-traumatic stress, 4,000 children with psychological problems. Then came the unexpected: 259 women said they had been raped by militiamen loyal to Moammar Gadhafi.

Dr. Seham Sergewa had been working with children traumatized by the fighting in Libya but soon found herself being approached by troubled mothers who felt they could trust her with their dark secret.

The first victim came forward two months ago, followed by two more. All were mothers of children the London-trained child psychologist was treating, and all described how they were raped by militiamen fighting to keep Gadhafi in power.

Sergewa decided to add a question about rape to the survey she was distributing to Libyans living in refugee camps after being driven from their homes. The main purpose was to try to determine how children were faring in the war; she suspected many were suffering from PTSD.

To her surprise, 259 women came forward with accounts of rape. They all said the same thing.

“I was really surprised when I started visiting these areas, first by the number of people suffering from PTSD, including the large number of children among them, and then by the number of women who had been raped from both the east and west of the country,” Sergewa said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Rape has been a common weapon of war throughout the ages, most recently in conflicts from the Balkans in Europe to Sri Lanka in Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa, where Congo has been described as the epicenter of sexual crimes.

Across the world, rape carries a stigma. But it can be a deadly one in conservative Muslim societies like Libya, where rape is considered a stain on the honor of the entire family. Victims can be abandoned by their families and, in some cases, left in the desert to die. Speaking to a journalist is out of the question.

Sergewa’s questionnaire was distributed to 70,000 families and drew 59,000 responses.

“We found 10,000 people with PTSD, 4,000 children suffering psychological problems and 259 raped women,” she said, adding that she believes the number of rape victims is many times higher but that woman are afraid to report the attacks.

The women said they had been raped by Gadhafi’s militias in numerous cities and towns: Benghazi, Tobruk, Brega, Bayda and Ajdabiya (where the initial three mothers hail from) and Saloum in the east; and Misrata in the west.

Some just said they had been raped. Some did not sign their names; some just used their initials. But some felt compelled to share the horrific details of their ordeals on the back of the questionnaire.

Reading from the scribbled Arabic on the back of one survey, Sergewa described one woman’s attack in Misrata in March, while it was still occupied by Gadhafi’s forces.

“First they tied my husband up,” the woman wrote. “Then they raped me in front of my husband and my husband’s brother. Then they killed my husband.”

Another woman in Misrata said she was raped in front of her four children after Gadhafi fighters burned down her home.

“She ran away with her children and tried to escape to the port, but then they started shelling the port. In the chaos, she was separated from the children,” Sergewa said.

“She was distraught when I interviewed her, not knowing if her children were dead or alive. I wish I knew the end of her story, but I don’t know what happened to her.”

Doctors at hospitals in Benghazi, the rebel bastion, said they had heard of women being raped but had not treated any. The first international airstrikes on March 19 saved the city from falling into the hands of Gadhafi forces who were advancing in columns of tanks.

However, a doctor in Ajdabiya, 100 miles (150 kilometers) south of Benghazi, said he treated three women who said they were raped by Gadhafi fighters in March when the town was invaded.

“These women were terrified their families would find out – two were married, one was single,” Dr. Suleiman Refadi said. “They only came to me because they also were terrified that they may have been infected with the AIDS virus.” He said they had tested negative but doubted they would return for follow-up tests.

Gadhafi’s fighters were forced out of Ajdabiya weeks ago and the town now is largely deserted but for the rebels.

In a highly publicized case in Libya, Iman al-Obeidi burst into the hotel housing foreign journalists in Tripoli in March and accused pro-Gadhafi militiamen of gang-raping her because she is from rebel-held eastern Libya. Her anguished disclosure was captured by Western cameras and shown around the world.

Earlier this month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno-Campo, said he has “strong evidence” of crimes against humanity committed by Gadhafi’s regime, including serious allegations of “women arrested and gang raped.”

One of Libya’s leading psychiatrists, Dr. Ali M. Elroey, told the AP that he has set up three mobile teams to treat trauma victims of the war in their homes or in temporary shelters: one for PTSD, one for other psychological problems and one for rape survivors.

Elroey said they need to reach out to people in their homes because the stigma associated with psychiatric care is leaving large numbers of patients untreated.

His outpatient clinic at Benghazi’s psychiatric hospital has treated more than 600 patients in two months, many responding to radio and newspaper advertisements offering psychiatric help for war trauma. He said most were women, though none had acknowledged being raped.

Sergewa said she has interviewed 140 of the rape survivors in various states of mental anguish, and has been unable to persuade a single victim to prosecute. None would speak to the AP about her ordeal, even with a promise to hide her identity.

“Some I diagnosed with acute psychosis; they are hallucinating,” Sergewa said. “Some are very depressed; some want to commit suicide. Some want their parents to kill them because they don’t want their families to bear the shame.”

Some already have been abandoned by their husbands and fear seeking treatment could get them ostracized or cast out of their communities. Others have kept the rapes a secret for fear of retribution from spouses. “They fear their husbands will take them out to the desert and leave them there to die,” Sergewa said.

It is likely more rapes could occur as the conflict drags on, Sergewa said.

“They are using rape not just to hurt women but to terrorize entire families and communities,” Sergewa said. “The women I spoke to say they believed they were raped because their husbands and brothers were fighting Gadhafi.

“I think it is also to put shame on the tribes or the villages, to scare people into fleeing, and to say: ‘We have raped your women,’” she said.

Sergewa says women will continue to be targets of the militiamen, and this makes it all the more urgent to finish her study and get it published.

“We must throw light on what is really happening in Libya and fight to bring justice for these women, to help heal them psychologically,” she said.

By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press. Mike Corder contributed to this report from The Hague.

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May 6th, 2011 by Oman Views

As troops loyal to Col. Muammar Gaddafi continue to pound the rebel-held city of Misratah – leading to hundreds of civilian casualties – British Foreign Secretary William Hague announced April 19 that the U.K. and France were dispatching a joint squad of military advisers to Benghazi, stronghold of the Libyan rebels in the country’s east. The team is supposedly just a support force, helping the rebel leadership, says Hague, improve its “military organizational structures, communications and logistics.”

But while officials in London and Paris are eager to play down the importance of this deployment, the move has set off new fears of “mission creep” setting into NATO’s operations in Libya – with the international community staggering into a drawn out war for regime change, invariably on land, that many in NATO had no desire to join.

Throughout, Western officials have justified their intervention into Libya on the grounds of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, which, while specifically not calling for regime change or boots on the ground, mandated the international community use any means necessary to protect civilians in Libya. A no-fly zone, arms embargos, and coalition sorties sought to stifle Gaddafi’s offensive against rebel positions and towns, and have been moderately successful.

But as the body count continues to rise in Misratah – which is “enduring a medieval siege,” according to a joint statement by President Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron – the question remains, what next? For these three Western leaders, the choice is clear: Gaddafi has to go. (Of course, they were far more circumspect about how exactly he’d be ushered out.)

But that’s not the general conclusion of many other capitals, not least those of other prominent NATO members. Only six out of the alliance’s 28 countries are participating militarily in the Libya campaign, and some of those six, such as Italy, have significantly curtailed the scope of their military commitments. Germany, ostensibly Europe’s most capable power, is averse to foreign military missions and abstained during voting in the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. has conspicuously played backseat to the more gung-ho French and British, and recently withdrew its most devastating strike craft from the arena of operations.

Turkey, possibly the actor with the most under-utilized influence on the scene, has repeatedly warned against heavy-handed meddling in what has become a full-out civil war in the North African nation. As a NATO member, it has urged for a ceasefire and negotiations to resolve the conflict. Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Erdogan repeatedly warned against creating a second Afghanistan or Iraq, “where a million have died and a civilization has as good as collapsed.”

Earlier this month, Erdogan unveiled a roadmap for peace that many imagine is the only real, practical solution: one which involves a de-escalation of tensions and a process toward democracy that is as inclusive as possible, while not forgetting the many crimes Gaddafi and his cronies may have committed.

But even though this may make sense as the conflict lurches into a stalemate, the bloody-minded stubbornness of the Gaddafi regime – and its refusal to stop imperiling the lives of its own people – is clearly spurring the intervention’s original French and British architects to raise the heat on Tripoli and boost the rebel cause. It may not be long before the current team of “advisers” sent to Benghazi is coordinating the distribution of foreign arms and military equipment to rebel forces, if that is not already underway.

For all the uncertainties ahead, the most gloomy question surrounding NATO’s current predicament is one that many have puzzled over since the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago. Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, asks it: “What is NATO for, anyway? Why does it still exist? Is it a mere symbol, a fig leaf of multinational legitimacy that members can don when they take military action for their own interests?”

Answering that riddle may not matter to the countless civilians under bombardment in Misratah and elsewhere in Libya, but it will be put to the test in the months of diplomatic handwringing and finger-pointing that are surely to come.

By ISHAAN THAROOR, Reuters

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April 27th, 2011 by Oman Views

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration plans to give the Libyan opposition $25 million in non-lethal assistance in what will be the first direct U.S. aid to the rebels after weeks of assessing their capabilities and intentions, officials said Wednesday.

Amid a debate over whether to offer the rebels broader assistance, including cash and possibly weapons and ammunition, the administration has informed Congress that President Barack Obama intends to use his so-called “drawdown authority” to give the opposition up to $25 million in surplus American goods to help protect civilians in rebel-held areas threatened by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, the officials said.

Congress was notified in writing of the plan late last week and was briefed in greater detail on Tuesday by Gene Cretz, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, the officials said.

Initially, the administration had proposed supplying the rebels with vehicles and portable fuel storage tanks but those items were dropped from the list of potential aid on Wednesday after concerns were expressed that those could be converted into offensive military assets, the officials said.

The list is still being revised but now covers items such as medical supplies, uniforms, boots, tents, personal protective gear, radios and Halal meals, the officials said. Most of the items are expected to come from Pentagon stocks, they said.

“There is an urgency in providing these commodities,” the State Department said in a notice sent last Friday to lawmakers and obtained by The Associated Press.

The assistance will be sent through groups such as the Transitional National Council, an opposition umbrella organization based in the port city of Benghazi, the officials said.

The move comes as U.S. allies step up their aid to the rebels, with Britain, France and Italy sending military advisers amid calls for the U.S. to offer direct assistance outside its participation in NATO military operations. France and Italy have both recognized the Transitional National Council as Libya’s legitimate government, something the U.S. has yet to do.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Obama was aware of the allies’ decision to send in advisers “and hopes – believes – that it will help the opposition. But it does not at all change the president’s policy on no boots on the ground for American troops.”

There has been much debate over whether to supply the rebels with weapons and the officials said that option remains on the table.

The officials said the non-lethal assistance would be monitored to ensure it is used properly, although they noted that the items to be sent present a low risk of misuse.

By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press

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