Posts tagged LIBYA

African migrants and refugees travelling to Libya are being frequently abducted, tortured, sexually exploited and made to engage in forced labour. The people smugglers and criminal gangs are using social media to broadcast the abuse and violence they inflict on African migrants in their captivity and to demand ransoms (ranging from US$ 8,000-10,000) from their families back home, the UN says.

Muammar Gaddafi, the slain Libyan leader, still has a big fun club in Africa. This Is Africa has been inundated with angry reactions ever since we published a piece earlier this week titled “The truth about Gaddafi: He was no friend of Africans. He only wanted to rule them” and a subsequent opinion piece titled “Take it from a Libyan, Gaddafi was terrible”. A lot of readers have not been happy with the articles. They feel with are besmirching the reputation of a “great African leader” and “hero”. Here are some of their reactions.

What kind of leader was Muammar Gaddafi to his people? Last Tuesday, This Is Africa published a piece about Gaddafi and the opinions he held about Africans. The article concluded that he was an unrepentant racist. Many This Is Africa readers reacted furiously to the piece calling it “propaganda” and “inaccurate”. One of our readers Rabab Douwa, a Libyan herself, begs to differ. Here is her response to those who are defending Gaddafi.

Many Africans consider felled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi a hero. It’s not uncommon to see people on social media people use his photo as their profile picture or even post comments about how his removal from power and murder robbed Africa of its best leader. That Gaddafi for some people shares the same exalted place in the pantheon of great African heroes as Nelson Mandela is a shame. Gaddafi only cared for Africans when he wanted something in return. Don’t take our word for it, here is the truth about what Gaddafi thought of Africans in his won words and those of the people close to him.

That the head of Libya’s optimistically named Government of National Accord (GNA) could only arrive in the country on 30 March via a military operation – and remains holed up in Tripoli’s naval dockyard – obviously did not look like a good omen.

The admission by U.S. President Barack Obama that the prevailing mess in Libya and “probably failing to plan for the day after, [the intervention]” was the “worst mistake” of his presidency raises questions on the efficacy of foreign military intervention in conflicts across Africa. Looking back, how should the Libyan crisis have been handled? Should the African Union have been given a chance to implement its roadmap for a negotiated transition?

The trajectory of instability and terrorism in Libya will determine the future of North Africa and could affect the entire Mediterranean rim; possibly for decades. Time is running out for effective preventive action.

A decade after it was adopted at the World Summit and the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2005, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine is almost universally acknowledged as a fundamental norm of international behaviour. But it’s effectively been paralysed in practice.

Lake Chad has receded by 90 percent, from a surface area of 25,000km2 in 1963, to less than 2,500km2 a result of climate change. A water refilling project requires $14.5 billion, to avert what the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has described as an “ecological catastrophe”

US Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has once again caused a stir by expressing his beliefs that the world would be a better place if Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein still ruled over their countries