Amnesty says war crimes committed by both sides in Libyan war

Forces on both sides of the Libyan war have committed war crimes and the country risks descending into a bloody cycle of attacks and reprisals unless order can be established, human rights group Amnesty International said on Tuesday, as Muammar Qaddafi’s forces launched surprise attacks on three fronts.

Qaddafi’s actions against civilian protesters were a crime against humanity, while arbitrary detentions, torture of prisoners and widespread abductions were war crimes, the London-based charity said in a report.

Amnesty also criticized Libya’s opposition forces and said Qaddafi’s fall from power after 42 years had left a “security and institutional vacuum” that they exploited to carry out revenge killings and torture.

It urged Libya’s interim rulers, the National Transitional Council (NTC), to investigate abuses on both sides and to put human rights at the top of their agenda.

“Those responsible for the dreadful repression of the past under Gaddafi will need to be held accountable.” said Claudio Cordone, senior director at Amnesty International.

“The (NTC) must be judged according to the same standards. Without this, justice would not be done and a vicious cycle of abuses and reprisals risks being perpetuated.”

The 112-page report was compiled by an Amnesty team after visits to Libya between February and late July.
Amnesty collected evidence of indiscriminate attacks on civilians by pro-Gaddafi forces using rockets, mortars, artillery and tanks. In one incident in the northwest city of Misrata, a barrage of rockets hit a house and killed two children, aged three and one, in their bedroom.

“I heard an explosion and ran back to the children’s bedroom when a second rocket smashed into the house,” their mother, Safia Abdallah Shahit, told Amnesty, according to Reuters. “I found them buried under the rubble.”

The report also accused pro-Qaddafi fighters of hiding tanks in civilian areas to protect them from air strikes, a practice that Amnesty said breaches international humanitarian law and constitutes a war crime. It also criticized their indiscriminate use of anti-personnel mines.

Amnesty officials saw the bodies of opposition fighters who had been shot in the back of the head with their hands tied behind their backs with metal wire, the report said.

They also saw video footage – filmed on mobile phones seized from captured Gaddafi soldiers – of opposition prisoners being shot dead.

Amnesty said anti-Qaddafi soldiers were also guilty of human-rights abuses, although on a smaller scale. They have abducted, arbitrarily detained, tortured and killed Qaddafi loyalists and foreign nationals wrongly suspected of being mercenaries, the report said.

A spate of lynching and murder in the first days of the uprising had given way to organized attacks by vigilante groups who act with impunity, the report said.

Detainees said they had been tortured, threatened with rape and given electric shocks.

The NTC has been struggling to impose its authority on Libya, a sprawling desert state of 6 million people, since rebel fighters entered the capital Tripoli on Aug. 21.

Once the fighting is over, Amnesty said Libya would need new human-rights laws after decades of abuses.

On Monday, the ferocious counterattacks by the pro-Qaddafi forces were on a Ras Lanuf oil refinery, near Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, and at Bani Walid, near the capital Tripoli.

“It is not possible to give Libya to the colonists again,” Qaddafi said in a statement broadcast on Syria-based Arrai Oruba television.

“All that remains for us is the struggle until victory and the defeat of the coup,” added the former leader, who has gone underground since being ousted from Tripoli late last month.

China, which opposed the NATO campaign backing the anti-Qaddafi forces, finally recognized Libya’s interim government, according to AFP.

“China respects the choice of the Libyan people and attaches great importance to the status and role of the NTC, and has kept in close contact with it,” the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu as saying.

Washington also announced it had sent an advance team to help its officials reopen the US embassy in Tripoli.



NATO in its latest update said warplanes had hit 13 targets in and around Sirte, four around Waddan and one near Sabha.



NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the strikes would continue until the threat to civilians had been eliminated.

But forces loyal to the fugitive Qaddafi sprang a surprise deep behind enemy lines, killing at least 12 NTC soldiers in a raid on the refinery near Ras Lanuf on the central coast, an NTC military spokesman told AFP.

The oil infrastructure along the Mediterranean coast between Sidra and Brega was a key battleground of the seven-month uprising against Qaddafi, as the mainly rebel-held east and mainly government-held west fought it out.