The Inevitable—"Libyan Rebels Carry Out Reprisal Attacks"
08/27/2011
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From the Washington Post in "Libyan Rebels Carry Out Reprisal Attacks:"
A few minutes’ drive from the fire station, at least 15 bodies, most of them Gaddafi’s black African supporters, lay rotting in the sun at a traffic junction outside his Bab al-Aziziyah complex. Several of the dead wore green pieces of cloth wrapped around their wrists to signal loyalty to the Gaddafi regime. 
 The men may have died during Tuesday’s battle for Bab al-Aziziyah, and several were wearing military fatigues. But not all of them looked like ordinary battlefield deaths. Two dead men lay face down on the grass, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic cuffs. 
The worst treatment of Gaddafi loyalists appeared to be reserved for anyone with black skin, whether they hailed from southern Libya or from other African countries. Darker-skinned prisoners were not getting the same level of medical care in a hospital in rebel-held Zawiyah as lighter-skinned Arab Libyans, Eltahawy said. 
Rebels say Gaddafi employed gunmen from sub-Saharan Africa to shore up his army against his own people, and those fighters have elicited intense enmity from Libyans. But many of the detainees in Zawiyah told Amnesty International they were merely migrant workers  “taken at gunpoint from their homes, workplaces and the street on account of their skin color,” Eltahawy said.
I wrote about this anti-black aspect of the Libyan uprising back on February 27. Qathaafee's pro-immigration and pan-African policies were especially unpopular with his subjects, and hence the rebels have long been taking out their ire especially on the Colonel's foreign black mercenaries. Similarly, the Bahrain uprising by the Shi'ite majority had a lot to do with the Sunni regime's policy of electing a new people by importing Sunni immigrants, typically security service types from other countries. But Bahrain is closely allied with the U.S., so they didn't get any cruise missiles shot at the government while they put down their people.
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