Paranoia about mercenaries remains strong among the rebels, despite assurances from human-rights groups that most of the fighters among the pro-Gadhafi forces are Libyan citizens. Rebels have frequently treated dark-skinned prisoners more harshly than men of Arab ancestry.
That distinction was made brutally obvious to doctors at the intensive care unit of Al Bayda’s main hospital on Feb. 17 when they admitted two men – one black, the other with the local olive-skinned complexion – who stood accused of fighting the rebels. A crowd gathered outside the hospital, calling for blood. Some armed rebels pushed their way into the ward.
“They had guns and knives,” said Mahmoud Anass, 27, a resident on duty that night. “It was really scary. They wanted to kill the black soldier.”
Doctors managed to hold off the enraged youths until a few hours after midnight, when the rebels dragged the two patients into the street.
“An old man tried to stop them,” said Faraj Khalifa, a doctor. “He said our religion does not permit the killing of unarmed men. But the youths were very, very angry. They hanged the black man in front of the hospital.”
The patient with lighter skin was beaten, shot, and returned to the emergency room, Dr. Khalifa said.
A cellphone video later circulated among residents showing a Christian cross tattooed on a black man. Locals pronounced this as proof that the hanged man, whom they called “John,” had been a non-Muslim outsider.
Not everybody agrees that John was lynched. A female doctor claimed that the man died of his wounds before he was hanged, although she acknowledged that she did not see the incident herself.
Rebel officials deny the story, or remain vague about it. “We had no hangings,” said Uthman Suleiman, 32, who describes himself as a security chief for the rebels, sitting in a room filled with war trophies, weapons and ammunition. “No, no, no, it’s all rumours.”
The main spokesman for Al Bayda’s rebel council, Mohammed Mabrouk, said he saw John in intensive care at the hospital but did not know what happened to him.
The rebel military says it has not killed any prisoners. “I don’ know about any executions,” said Ahmad Zine Al-Abedine, chief military prosecutor, while cautioning that he could speak with confidence only about the rebels’ actions in Benghazi, not further up the coast in Al Bayda or Darna. “Maybe it’s just a rumour,” he said.
During a visit to the rebels’ main jail on Monday in Benghazi, guards said they were holding about 76 prisoners suspected of involvement with pro-Gadhafi forces – with more arriving all the time, as fighting continues.
The chief prosecutor promised that all of them would receive a fair trial, with defence lawyers, after the fall of the Gadhafi regime.
Such formal systems did not exist in the turbulent early days of the uprising, however, when justice was meted out by whomever won the argument with gunmen in the street. This produced wildly different outcomes for the various pro-Gadhafi groups captured by the rebels. More than 160 of the soldiers who fought the rebellion during several days of bloody standoff at the airport south of Darna were eventually released after ceasefire talks brokered by respected elders.
Before the ceasefire, however, a group of 22 soldiers who broke through the rebels’ barricades near the airport on Feb. 23 seem to have fared worse. Residents say the soldiers climbed into three pickup trucks and raced down the highway that winds down the cliffs toward Darna, blasting their way through a rebel encampment along the way. Two revolutionaries were killed.
