At an army checkpoint on the way into the Libyan city of Misrata, an angry police officer with a pistol tucked into his pants demands I give a blood sample before locking me in a trailer. For what should be obvious reasons, this is a deeply paranoid town. When I eventually get into the center of the city, a protest against the Tawergha—a black-skinned tribe that used to live 25 miles away in the neighboring town of the same name—is in full swing. Worked-up young men tell me they're ready to kill if they don’t get what they want.
The demonstrators want to know who I am. They want to know where I’ve come from and they want to know what I think about human rights. "So what do you think of this organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW)?" Hassan, a former English teacher, asks me.
I quietly assure Hassan that I view all human rights organizations as parasitic scum feeding on the aftermath of war and turning it into dirty money to be squirreled away into its employees’ snakeskin pockets. "They turn tragedy into PR stunts," I tell him. "They have to transform victors into villains. That’s how they make their money. It’s sad. It’s perverse. But it’s all they know."
Hassan nods slowly while other anti-Tawerghan protesters crowd around.
"Public opinion matters a great deal to us," he says, seriously. "During the revolution, Misrata withstood great pressures and made great sacrifices. It was a hero, a champion. But now people are starting to say that we are the bad guys. It’s not right."
The acid of toxic loathing that's disfiguring Misrata’s public image is its intense hatred of the Tawergha tribe. It’s one of many tribal feuds that have festered since the revolution, further destabilizing the country at a time when the government is struggling to maintain any semblance of control. The feuds have also helped to ensure that violence, guns, and explosions continue to slosh around the country, staining the reputation of free, postrevolution Libya.
Misrata was smashed to pieces during the revolution. It was besieged for months by Gaddafi troops who hammered it with tanks, artillery, Grad missiles, and mortars. And for many Misratans, the ultimate betrayal came when Tawerghan raiders ripped through the city, raping and pillaging as part of the loyalist army.
Fathi Abubreda shows where he was shot by the Tawerghans.
"This man was kidnapped by the Tawerghans along with his five sons," says Hassan, plucking a man called Fathi Abubreda from the surrounding crowd. "He was held for two days in Tawergha before being transferred to Gaddafi’s notorious Abu Salim prison. He says those two days in Tawergha were worse than spending five months in Abu Salim!"
I watch as the man dutifully takes off his shoes and socks and shows me where he was shot by the Tawerghans: once in each ankle and once in each thigh.
Eventually a series of NATO air strikes turned the tables against the Tawerghans and the rest of Gaddafi’s forces. The rebels advanced and ended up tearing their way through Tawergha, forcing its 35,000 inhabitants to run for their lives before systematically demolishing whole areas of the town.
Since the revolution, the Tawerghans have languished in refugee camps and Misrata has fiercely resisted any suggestion of their return. But keeping large numbers of black people in special camps obviously doesn’t reflect particularly well on an entire city. Month-by-month pressure has increased on the Misratans to allow their shunned neighbors to return, and month by month the Misratans have ratcheted up their resistance.
On April 8, 2012, Human Rights Watch accused Misratans of "crimes against humanity." Three days later, Misrata’s local council replied to HRW, rejecting its "threats and admonitions." On May 8 of this year, a senior prosecutor at the International Criminal Court said her office was looking at the expulsion of the Tawerghans as a possible war crime. And around the same time, Tawerghan leaders announced their intention to return en masse on June 25, marching to the city waving white flags. A couple of days later, Misrata played its trump card: announcing the discovery of a mass grave in Tawergha.
When we arrive at the site of the mass grave it doesn’t feel like the epicenter of a poisonous tribal hatred that’s helping to destabilize an entire country. It feels more like an episode of Diggers, but on a particularly lazy day, when everyone slacks off and just hangs around smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. Men wearing blue overalls and white rubber gloves chat and joke. Occasionally one or two of them climb into a large hole to hack at the ground with various digging tools while a Libyan TV news crew films from the sideline.
According to Adel Al Ruma, the Misratan police captain in charge of the operation, little is clear. The location of the bodies was given to officers by an imprisoned Tawerghan leader who's being held in a military prison in Mistrata. So far they’ve dug up 11 bodies as well as various "remains." None have been identified, but Adel says some weren't buried in line with Islamic rituals and some had tied hands and feet—indicators, he says, that suggest the bodies were the Tawerghans’ prisoners who were killed and buried.
But the Tawerghans I’ve talked to don’t see it like that. The bodies have been dug up from various sites dotted around an existing Tawerghan graveyard, and they say the Misratans are a bunch of racists who are desecrating their graves, digging up their dead, and using their remains as sham evidence to validate their own crimes and disrupt the planned June 25 return.
Standing next to the graveyard, Adel shows me a dusty child’s coat that the team has dug up and a length of rope he says was used to tie up some of the bodies. Then we pick our way through the graveyard, where he points out other possible burial sites. The graves we walk past are low budget with breeze blocks for headstones. Some are painted green, Gaddafi’s favorite color. Others are decorated with AK-47 bullets.
Beyond the graveyard is an empty school and an empty mosque. Adel points out some graffiti that says "Allah and Muammar only." Empty bullet casings, plastic caps for RPGs, and empty boxes of bullets litter the unpaved streets, and rows of empty buildings seem to stretch on for miles.
Leaving Tawergha, we pass another paranoid checkpoint manned by half a dozen tanks and some men dressed in camouflage. I decide to call the former English teacher I met at the protest to try and make sense of the situation, but he serenades me with neurotic conspiracy theories.
Senior politicians are encouraging the Tawerghans to return so that a civil war is started and they can take power, he tells me. He also says he believes Human Rights Watch is being controlled by foreign governments and the Tawerghans are using the mercenary money they earned fighting for Gaddafi to buy influence at Libyan TV stations. This is all, of course, speculation coming from some English teacher.
"There are unknown forces at work," he tells me. "It’s more than two years since the uprising, but our revolution remains mysterious."
Follow Wil on Twitter: @bilgribs
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