DiManno: Libya’s rebellion born in 1996 prison revolt

The old, crazed woman can be occasionally spotted scuttling around Liberation Square.

She is one of The Mothers, long ago deranged by grief.

While people are kind to the dishevelled lady, in the Muslim charitable way, her pain had for years been largely ignored, only vaguely acknowledged, in whispers. Now everybody understands, with clarity, and there is much regret, shame even, in not having clamoured for justice earlier.

The source of the woman’s inconsolable lamenting can be found on a wall of photographs displayed inside a tent erected by the Busleem Families Association: Portraits of two young men, her lost sons.

These brothers, along with more than 1,200 other political prisoners, were killed in what’s known as The Massacre of Abu Salim — a horrific crime against humanity, where corralled detainees who’d attempted a jailhouse uprising against their guards were mowed down by military police, all slain within a matter of hours on June 28, 1996, on the orders of Moammar Gadhafi.

Abu Salim is Libya’s Abu Ghraib — a dank, miserable, hellish facility in the suburbs of Tripoli run by the Internal Security Agency. It’s where alleged terrorists, Al Qaeda extremists, Islamists and political dissidents — those Gadhafi’s surveillance apparatus has identified as annoyances for the regime — are incarcerated, usually without trial, and left to rot.

Human rights groups also claim Abu Salim is one of the “third-country” black holes where the U.S. deposited detainees from its “war on terror,” including some transferred in or out of Guantanamo Bay.

For years Gadhafi denied any massacre had ever occurred at the prison, only conceding the fact in 2004, promising an investigation would be conducted, though its scope and results haven’t been released.

In 2005, the regime began informing families of loved ones who perished in the violently repressed revolt. Some death certificates were issued, though cause of death was not filled in and dates of death apparently picked at random. The bodies were never returned to relatives.

“My brother was not an activist, he was just a religious man who prayed five times a day,’’ says Abdulmunem Swairy, 30. “Gadhafi’s militia came to his house in the middle of the night and arrested him. We never saw Adel again.’’

Another brother and sister were also taken into custody at around the same time but released four months later. About Adel, the family heard nothing for years. Neither letters nor phone calls were permitted. Abdel’s father, in despair over his son’s fate, suffered two heart attacks and died.

Only in 2009 did the family receive a certificate confirming Adel’s death. “There was no reason written for why he died and a date long after the massacre,’’ says Abdulmunem. “The certificate is obviously a fake.’’

While not acknowledging responsibility for what had befallen Adel, the regime offered his family 200,000 dinars (about $157,000) in compensation, which they rejected.

“Gadhafi gave the Lockerbie families $10 million each,’’ says Adel, referring to the compensation package negotiated for victims of Pan Am Flight 103, the passenger plane blown up mid-air over Scotland in 1988. The terrorist act was plotted by two Libyan intelligence agents, for which the regime eventually accepted responsibility. “But Libyans are only worth 200,000 Gadhafis.’’

A Gadhafi is sneering slang for the 1 dinar note with the colonel’s face on it.

Since 2008, the “1,200 Families’’ have been holding weekly protests — a word they were never allowed to use for their gatherings, women taping their mouth symbolically — in Benghazi, outside the courthouse, posting obituaries on city buildings, demanding a trial for the perpetrators of the massacre, proper compensation and return of their relatives’ bodies.

Their defiance was a rarity in Gadhafi’s Libya and even here, epicentre of long-simmering resistance to the regime, few of the uninvolved paused to pay attention, most citizens clearly worried about repercussions from supporting the families.

But it was the arrest in February of a civil rights lawyer representing the families, Fathi Terbil, which spawned the revolutionary uprising, at first initiated by Terbil’s lawyer colleagues and then seized upon by thousands of students, academics and the professional class.

Gadhafi’s 42-year dictatorship has been on the bubble ever since.

“My brother was killed (15) years ago but this revolution was given life because of him, because of all the martyrs who were massacred at Abu Salim,’’ says Abdullmunem Swairy.

For Abdelislam Al-Mshaity, the only communication with his cousin over 11 years was a note brought out from Abu Salim in the shoe of another released prisoner.

“My cousin was an educated man, an oil engineer who attended university in England,’’ says Al-Mshaity, pointing out a photo of his relative in the Busleem mourning tent. The picture shows a 30-ish fellow with the full beard of a conservative Muslim.

“He was never politically active. Was he an Islamist? If by Islamist you mean someone who prays five times a day and has memorized all of the Qur’an. That means he was religious, not radical. He never went to fight with the militants in Afghanistan or anywhere else.’’

The cousin was imprisoned at Abu Salim twice; the first time for seven years, at which point he was briefly released before being arrested again, though no charge was ever specified.

“They gave us a death certificate, too, which means nothing,’’ Al-Mshaity continues. “That was during the period when the regime was trying to calm everybody down and Gadhafi was presenting himself to the world as a reformed leader, an ally in the war on terror. We were even allowed to sue the government for compensation but all the family was offered in the beginning was 80,000 dinars (about $64,000).’’

They didn’t accept it, as indeed more than 300 families have rejected the compensation outright.

Abduhamid Mahdi calls it, bluntly, “blood money,” saying his family wanted no part of the compensation. His brother, 60-year-old civil servant Edris, disappeared in 1995, sucked into the maw of Abu Salim, leaving behind a wife and eight children.

“He was a political activist,’’ says Mahdi. “We all tried many times to persuade him to be quiet but he wouldn’t be convinced. He spoke publicly about the crimes and corruption of the Gadhafi regime and in this country, that’s more than enough to get a man in trouble.’’

Dissent was in Edris’ blood, Mahdi adds. Their grandfather had been arrested and imprisoned by Italian authorities in 1917, when Libya was an Italian colony, for promoting Libyan independence.

“In all the years he was at Abu Salim, we only had news once, from another released prisoner. He told us Edris was always kept alone in an isolated cell. We don’t believe he would have been able to participate in the revolt.’’

Almost all that’s known of the 1996 uprising came from a former inmate, Hussein Shafai, who worked in the prison kitchen and was interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2004 and 2006.

As detailed in a “legacy report’’ published by the agency, the prison rebellion began with detainees demanding better living conditions, hearings on their cases, and the right to see their families. The inmates took two guards hostage.

Senior government officials arrived to manage the crisis. Prisoners agreed to return to their cells and release the hostages (one of whom had died) in exchange for negotiations. They asked for clean clothes, outside recreation, better medical care and family visits.

But in the morning, hundreds of inmates from five cellblocks were herded into several courtyards, with security forces arrayed on the prison roof.

Shafai’s account: “At 11 a.m., a grenade was thrown into the courtyard. I did not see who threw it but I am sure it was a grenade. I heard an explosion and right after a constant shooting from heavy weapons and Kalashnikovs from the top of the roofs. The shooting continued from 11 to 1:35.

“I could not see the dead persons who were shot but I could see those who were shooting. They were a special unit wearing skaki military hats . . . and green bandanas.

“At 2 p.m., they used pistols to finish off those who were not dead.’’

Shafai estimated the dead by comparing the number of meals he was told to prepare before and after the massacre.

The next day, said Shafai, the bodies were removed in wheelbarrows. The dead were allegedly thrown into a trench 1 metre wide and 100 metres long.

Salah Mahashash, whose teenage brother was arrested in 1988, told the Star his family actually received a casket from the government three years ago.

“It was empty, of course. We’ll never get my brother’s body back. And none of the men who committed the massacre will ever stand trial for their crime.

“I pray some day Gadhafi will himself be imprisoned in Abu Salim. But even that would be too good for him.’’

Source http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/969577--dimanno-libya-s-rebellion-born-in-1996-prison-revolt