United Nations: Libya faces serious security threats from foreign fighters and private military companies, especially Russia’s Wagner Group, which has violated international law, UN experts said in a report obtained by The Associated Press. Told. Told.
Experts accused seven Libyan armed groups of systematically using unlawful detention to punish alleged adversaries, ignoring international and domestic civil rights laws, including laws prohibiting torture.
In particular, “migrants are extremely vulnerable to human rights abuses and are regularly subject to acts of slavery, rape and torture,” the panel said in a report obtained by the AP late Friday to the UN Security Council.
The oil-rich North African nation plunged into turmoil in 2011 following a NATO-backed insurgency, dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was later executed. It then split between rival governments – the former one, backed by military commander Khalifa Haftar, and the United Nations-backed administration in the capital of Tripoli. Each side is supported by various militias and foreign powers.
In April 2019, Haftar and his forces, backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, launched an offensive to try to capture Tripoli. His campaign collapsed after Turkey increased military support for the UN-backed government with hundreds of soldiers and thousands of Syrian mercenaries.
An October 2020 ceasefire agreement led to an agreement on a transitional government in early February 2021 and elections were to be held on 24 December last with the aim of unifying the country. But they were driven out and the country now has rival governments, with two Libyans claiming to be prime ministers.
The ceasefire agreement called for an early withdrawal of all foreign fighters and mercenaries, but the panel noted that “to date there is little evidence of any large-scale withdrawal.”
The report said Chadian opposition groups operate from Libya and that Sudanese fighters have been recruited by Haftar. Turkish-backed Syrian fighters are overseen by panels at government military camps in Tripoli, while Haftar-allied Syrian fighters work alongside Wagner group fighters in the strategic northern city of Sirte and nearby Jufra. At least 300 of these Syrians have returned home and Haftar has not been replaced, the report said.
The panel said it was continuing to investigate the transfer of weapons and related materials to assist in the deployment and operation of Wagner fighter jets.
The Wagner Group presents itself as a private military contractor and the Kremlin denies any connection to it. But the United States identifies Wagner’s financier as Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The panel said it believed a Samsung electronic tablet was left behind on a Libyan battlefield by a Wagner mercenary and obtained by the BBC in early 2021. It included maps of the locations of 35 unmarked anti-personnel mines in the Ain Zara area. South Tripoli, then an advance area under Haftar’s control, supported by Wagner.
The panel said many of the mines had never been previously reported to be in Libya and therefore their transfer violated the UN arms embargo. It said a trapped mine exploded during a mine clearance operation, killing two civilian mine cleaners.
Experts also received information about the recovery of anti-tank mines from Wagner’s occupied places, mainly in South Tripoli.
The panel said that Wagner’s failure to clearly mark anti-personnel and anti-tank mines and to issue warnings to citizens of their locations in the areas violated international humanitarian law.
The Wagner tablet also contained a list of requested items, including drones and tanks, that would violate the weapons embargo, the panel said, but did not know whether any of it was there.
The panel said it had identified 18 weapons transfers and four instances of military training between March 2021 and the end of April 2022 that violated the UN arms embargo. Among the examples cited was the Lucelo, a Comoros flag-flying ship that delivered 100 armored vehicles to Haftar in Benghazi.
Experts said four migrants faced human rights abuses in secret detention facilities controlled by human traffickers in the areas of Tazirbu in the Libyan desert and Bani Walid near the northwest coast. He said the victims were enslaved, badly beaten, deliberately starved and denied medical care.
“Two former female detainees, who were 14- and 15-year-old girls at the time, further testified to the panel that they had been repeatedly raped by multiple perpetrators, subjected to sexual slavery and sexual violence over a period of more than 18 years. “Subject to other forms. Months in a secret detention facility in Bani Walid,” the report said.
The panel said it also found that the guards responsible for protecting the most vulnerable migrants at the government-run Shara al-Zawiya detention center “participated directly or turned a blind eye to persistent acts of rape, sexual abuse and rape threats”. ” Women and girls” were detained there between January and June 2021.