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 Former U.S. Congressman Walter Fauntroy, who recently returned from a self-sanctioned peace mission to Libya, said he went into hiding for about a month in Libya after witnessing horrifying events in Libya's bloody civil war. This noted civil rights leader has reported that he watched French and Danish troops storm small villages late at night beheading, maiming and killing rebels and loyalists to show them who was in control. We find this difficult to believe in the case of these Nato technicians, there to identify targets for the Nato bombing but certainly atrocities on a very large scale are being carried out, especially to the African labour force who are pointed out, quite wrongly, as being mercenaries of Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi. Since the anti-Gaddafi uprising began in Libya on Feb. 16, rebels have terrorized hundreds of Black migrant workers - not only robbing, beating and detaining them but also subjecting them to strip searches. Despite these actrocities, Black leaders have not come out to condemn the perpetrators or help their citizens stranded in Libya and this includes president Museveni of Uganda.
Fauntroy's account could not be immediately verified by the media and the U.S. State Department has not substantiated Fauntroy's version of events. Fauntroy was not acting as an official representative of the U.S. in Libya. He returned to Washington, D.C. on Aug. 31 and has stated: "This recent trip to Libya was part of a continuous mission that started under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he gave me orders to join four African countries on the continent with four in the African Diaspora to restore the continent to its pre-colonial status. We want Africa to be the breadbasket of the world."
Meanwhile reports from Tripoli are coming in and it seems that in the last three weeks rebel fighters have fired more bullets into the air to express their excitement than were shot during the assault on Tripoli earlier in August. But away from "jubilant" crowds we meet those who are not so pleased. We hear in Tripoli's Abu Slim district, which has historically been pro-Gaddafi, that when the rebels arrived there was mayhem, rape, looting and slaughter. There is no peace. There is no safety in the city. The people wanted change and a brighter future for the country, but not this way. People are dying on both sides. The city has been destroyed - and no one seems to care! The badly damaged buildings are matched by the rising stench of garbage and decomposing bodies. Armed youngsters roam the streets, barely old enough to understand that what they carry are weapons, not toys.
The Times on September 12th 2011 illustrates that Libya has a long way to go to be part of the "Arab Spring". The writer Anthony Loyd meets up with a famous Libyan violinist, Esam Agha and writes:
The violinist was too angry to read the list of 52 names pinned to the wall. It was Wednesday evening and Tripoli's orchestra was meeting for the first time since the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The event, at the al-Faja al-Jadid recording studio, should have been the high point of the young man's revolution. Instead he was shaking with rage. "A new orchestra boss arrived and asked me why I had played for the regime during the revolution," said Esam Agha, 25, one of the country's leading classical violinists. "The man hadn't even been here during the fighting. He was rich and had sat it out in Tunisia throughout the whole thing. I told him that I had been beaten and jailed for protesting against Gaddafi, but he just stared at me like I was part of the regime. Then they put up a list with 52 names on it of orchestra musicians who being sacked on the spot for playing for Gaddafi. I didn't even look at it."
Mr Agha's experience typifies the tensions in Tripoli where there are now regular street brawls between rebels from outside the city and residents. Rival brigades threaten each other's commanders with death, and rival claims of who supported the revolution or regime are exploited for personal interest, a toxic concoction that threatens the long-term future of the revolution.
We had met three weeks earlier, by chance, in Colonel Gaddafi's lair at Bab al-Aziziya, stormed by rebels a day before but still the scene of fighting. Mr Agha had visited the compound many times before to play his violin for Colonel Gaddafi. "There wasn't much choice," he said with a wry smile. "The boss of Libyan TV, All al-Kilani, one of Gaddafi's henchmen who controlled the state's cultural and music matters, would ring the orchestra boss who would call me and tell me where to be. I would play for Gaddafi and then go home. My family wouldn't ask anything about it and I wouldn't talk about it. It was a job, not a sign of support."
Mr Agha had returned to Bab al-Azizya on the day we met, out of curiosity, to see that the dictator had truly gone. Arrested and beaten during two days in March for taking part in an anti-Gaddafi protest, but released after the personal intervention of Mr al-Kilani, who wanted the orchestra intact, Mr Agha had a personal interest in seeing Colonel Gaddafi's downfall.
I hired him on the spot as my interpreter. In the laissez-faire style of so many Libyans in the revolution, he had travelled everywhere with me ever since, neither questioning his own safety despite once having our car written off by gunfire. "I had bad dreams last night," he told me once, glibly, a day after we had seen an especially gruesome massacre site, where the stench and mutilation had bent us double with retching. "I had never seen a dead body before I started working with you." How many had he seen since, I wondered guiltily? Scores, many of them killed in the most barbaric circumstances, but he never complained and his dry one-liners were classic understatement.
In a country where classical music is regarded as an oddity, and Arabic music is the norm, Mr Agha's journey to musical eminence had been arduous and obstacle-strewn even before the revolution. Many of his teachers at the state-run Institute for Music frowned on his ambitions, preferring him to eschew the classicists and follow the Arab styles. But he persevered and went to Sweden for a year to study the violin there, after a dispute with a teacher in Tripoli. By 2009, now with a baccalaureate in music, he was Libya's leading classical violinist.
He estimates that he played before Colonel Gaddafi between 15 and 20 times, though the ousted dictator, famously mean with money at times, never paid the orchestra, he recalled. "Of course I played during the revolution," Mr Agha said. "It was my job. We are a poor family. But we were also in opposition to the regime. I was beaten and humiliated in jail for demonstrating against Gaddafi. Now look at what has happened. Tripoli is full of religious rebels... I waited all of this time to play violin again, but now I want to get out."
Most of us have seen, or been through, these difficulties of new government where the ‘street boys' take over. There were more guns and heavy armament stored in Libya than any other country within the "Arab Spring" and they are now vanishing across the borders. These are bad times.
End
As researched by Robert Asketill.
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