Pat Dollard

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Washington Post:

MISURATA, Libya — Nearly 7,000 prisoners of war are packed into dingy, makeshift jails around Libya, where they have languished for weeks without charges and have faced abuse and even torture, according to human rights groups and interviews with the detainees.

The prisoners will pose an early test of the new government’s ability to rein in powerful militias and break from the cruel legacy of Moammar Gaddafi, who was killed Thursday. Human rights groups have warned that the former dictator’s death — which occurred in captivity after he was punched and kicked by swarming revolutionaries — could constitute a war crime.

Many of Libya’s makeshift prisons are run by local militia groups scarred by the eight-month war and angry at the prisoners, who include Gaddafi fighters and supporters. The new government that is to be named in the next few weeks — after a planned declaration of Libya’s liberation Sunday — will have to deal with both the militias and a crippled national justice system.

So far, the overwhelmed central government has not decided whether Gaddafi-era laws can be used to prosecute his forces.

“What we have been through is something unusual. We don’t have a court that applies for that,” said Ali Sweti, a lawyer who works with the revolutionary government in Misurata, about 130 miles east of Tripoli.

Sweti, 27, runs a prison that reflects the rough wartime justice at work in Libya. The facility was set up at a high school, and it now holds 1,000 inmates — a tenfold increase since July. They sleep on mattresses laid side by side on the floor, guarded by revolutionaries as young as 19. One recent day, two dozen detainees were lined up waiting to use one small washroom.

The interim national government is planning an amnesty for Gaddafi fighters who have not committed war crimes and who agree to cooperate with the new authorities, according to one government adviser, who was not authorized to speak on the record. But it is unclear whether that will be acceptable in places such as Misurata, where residents endured especially bloody attacks by loyalist forces.

“Some of these [pro-Gaddafi] people raped, some killed. There was vandalism. They tortured us; they killed kids,” said Abdel Gader Abu Shaallah, who oversees two other makeshift prisons in Misurata. “We are emotionally destroyed.”

Militiamen from Misurata captured Gaddafi on Thursday in his home town of Sirte. Cellphone videos show revolutionaries punching and kicking him and pulling his hair, as gunshots ring out in the background. He died in captivity during what the interim government says was an exchange of gunfire with loyalist troops but what human rights groups say could have been an intentional shot to the head. Gaddafi’s body was displayed publicly in Misurata for a second day Saturday.

Mona Rishmawi, a senior U.N. human rights official, said after visiting Libya this month that up to 7,000 prisoners were being held with no judicial process.

“This is, of course, a recipe for abuse,” she told reporters.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented numerous cases of ill treatment of detainees. Dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans, the human rights groups say, have been especially vulnerable to beatings and torture by electric shock. Many Libyans suspect those with darker skin of being African mercenaries or of otherwise supporting Gaddafi.

“Right now, you have hundreds of local armed groups that are taking law into their own hands in their own neighborhoods,” said Fred Abrahams, a special adviser at Human Rights Watch.