The desert town of Kufra (population 15,000) brims with sheltering palms that are welcome on summer days, when the temperature can reach 116 degrees. It is the largest in Libya’s system of oases and the southernmost settlement in the country’s vast eastern Sahara Desert region. Isolated 150 miles north of the Chadian border, Kufra might be considered a dead end, but locals say it has served as a waypoint for travelers and traders since time immemorial. The border was not heavily policed under Muammar Qaddafi, but since his fall from power and death last year it has given way to total lack of control. Today it’s a thriving stop for smugglers, illegal migrants, thieves, and gangs transporting drugs, people, and weapons between Libya and Chad, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, and even Bangladesh.
Two distinct, sedentary ethnicities populate the town. The Tubu, until recently seasonal nomads, dwell in swaths along the porous border. They say that Qaddafi supported the local Zwaya, a light-skinned people more typically Arab in appearance, because the royalist Tubu took the side of King Idris during Qaddafi’s 1969 coup d’état. Under Qaddafi rule, the occasionally tense coexistence was punctuated by confrontations that sounded like large-scale fistfights. The bloodshed has escalated since last year’s civil war, when Libya’s weapons storehouses were cracked open. The entire country now is saturated with rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft and 106mm antitank artillery, and Kalashnikov assault rifles. This past February a Tubu-Zwaya clash claimed perhaps a hundred lives and displaced as much as half of Kufra’s population.
Afterward, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya published a terse report, “based on the information received on the ground from both sides,” concluding that “the situation in Kufra remains tense.” The few news articles published about the February hostilities were datelined Tripoli or Benghazi and were lacking in firsthand observation. The Associated Press did send a reporter to Kufra, but he stayed only long enough to interview some of the doctors and displaced residents who had been inter- viewed by telephone for other news stories. The accounts, bare-boned as they were, sparked my curiosity, and so I set out for Kufra with a Ukrainian colleague.
Libya’s southern desert region remains largely unknown to outsiders. Hordes of Western journalists have been in and out of Libya since the uprising began last year, but only a few have ventured beyond the Mediterranean coast, where 90 percent of the country’s 6.5 million residents live and where the fighting was concentrated. It is fair to say that until the war broke out, most of the world had heard only of Tripoli. Now Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city and the place from which we departed, is more familiar around the world, as are Misrata, Sirte, and Bani Walid.
We were concerned about safety along the 620-mile route to Kufra, not only because of the weapons proliferation but also because of the absence of civil authority. Our driver and “fixer,” Mohammed, whose extended family lives in Kufra, makes the trip frequently and prefers to do so at night. We wanted to see the road in daylight, however, and so we set out on the 12-hour trip at 5 A.M.
The last stretch into Kufra was still unpaved. Cars and trucks swerved through worn ribbons in the sands that sometimes run adjacent to the Great Man-Made River Project. Conceived in the late 1960s and begun in 1984 under Qaddafi, the water system consists of scores of wells and hundreds of miles of pipeline spreading the “sweet” water found under the desert to people throughout the country. It has kept those who live along the coastal road well supplied. But last year the war interrupted completion of the delivery system to the far south, and the massive project is suspended mid-leap. Sections of 13-foot-diameter pipeline stood like giant desert sentinels waiting to be buried in a 26-foot-deep trench. A giant crane, too big to loot, towered above. “This is what mega- lomania looks like,” my colleague remarked. Across the road, camp structures for pipeline workers stood vacant, their doors ajar and names of Kufra militias spray painted on the walls.
Since the collapse of local order when Tubu- Zwaya hostilities heated up this year, the National Army has maintained a presence in Kufra. The national soldiers work with members of the local military council (majlis askariya), but the partner- ship is uneven and uneasy. The National Army’s eastern base is Benghazi, so its fighters hail largely from there and practice a benign indifference to the tribal conflicts of the south, which they view as a holdover from a bygone era.
Our entry to Kufra was delayed in part because of these emerging political dynamics. The majlis askariya, run by Zwaya and headed by a small, beady-eyed man, detained us for a full working day. There was some question of permissions, but my companion and I had proper Libyan accredi- tation for journalists. Most likely they mistook our black-skinned, Benghazi-born driver Mohammed, a southern Libyan by ancestry, for Tubu and found our party—an international, biracial trio—suspicious. In fact, Mohammed is of the Al-Boughermawi tribe from the east, close to the Egyptian border, and his grandmother married into a Zwaya family. Eventually a National Army captain, Mahmoud Jibril (a namesake relative of the Libyan politician who served as interim prime minister during last year’s civil war), intervened and secured permission for us to stay and report— albeit with him as military escort.
Kufra is a patchwork of Tubu, Zwaya, and mixed areas linked by sandy roads through oasis palms. Zwaya militias surround one sprawling Tubu zone on three sides. Shanties there are made of cardboard, thatched leaves, corrugated tin, even bedsprings. Occupants drink water from a contaminated well, and their jerry-built electrical service has been spotty since fighting broke out. An adjacent stretch of vacant land is littered with burning trash and dead goats.
A wrinkled Tubu man in sunglasses stood in the shade of his yard and gestured toward shrapnel trails from a rocket attack that killed his mother, sister, and two children. Nearby, a toothless elder showed us a hole in the dishdash, the flowing robe he was wearing when a bullet passed between his legs. He was uninjured that day, he told us, but those in his family who were not killed fled, and now there is no one who can take him to get valid Libyan identification papers. He showed us a yellow card, still laminated but worn with age, issued in the 1950s and identifying him as a citizen of the Kingdom of Libya.
Hamid Musa, who is in charge of the 41 Tubu currently serving in Kufra’s nascent police force, put the ethnic animosity in bald terms. “The Zwaya want all the black people to disappear,” Hamid Musa told us. “They have the power to do it; they have money and hospitals. Qaddafi’s system made the Zwaya militias.” He said he believes that Kufra sits on a lake of oil and the Zwaya want to control it, but the Tubu, with their close ties to the desert and wide family-tribal network, cannot be easily dislodged. “The mind of Qaddafi continues,” he said, referring to the dead leader’s animosity toward Tubu.
Since the intense fighting began, a former veterinary clinic has served as a Tubu hospital. The building’s courtyard is neatly lined with the wreckage of war: shrapnel and launchers for rocket grenades, 106mm antitank artillery, anti-aircraft shells, and mortar fins. Frustration with the national government runs high here. “We are suffering a lot,” said Khadija Issa Lendey, a nurse in a flowered headscarf. The national politicians do not do anything for Kufra, she said. “We are part of Libya, too, and they close their eyes.”
The hospital has no full-time doctors. Pediatrician Kim Chol Yung, one of two North Korean physicians who come to the hospital for a couple of hours a day, told us that he attends as many as 70 children on each visit. There are no provisions for general medical services, much less eye or dental care, laboratories or X-ray machines, he said. Hassan Musa, a Tubu spokesman, stood in the hospital’s pharmacy, where people seeking care formed a swelling crowd. A small, dapper man with deep-black skin, he spoke in a soft voice tinged with rage: “Television shows people from Chad fighting against Libyans, and that’s not true. After the [National] Army came here, they showed the real situation.”
Another Tubu could not conceal his anger: “I want Libya to actually be free,” Abdulkareem Myhamid said. “We had nothing from the Qaddafi system. We helped the revolution, we fought for the revolution, and we also have nothing! We helped free the country and that’s their gift to us. Almost no Tubu have work.” And yet, he said, anyone who is identified as Arab gets work.
Along Kufra’s main road, the rest of the Tubu area is deserted, nearly every shop shuttered. Many fled in February and have yet to return. We observed a group of men sitting on a curb drinking tea. A couple of them wore olive uniforms, which means, Mahmoud Jibril told us, they are members of the National Army’s “secret services.” Knowing what people are saying about each other can be helpful in defusing tense situations that can get out of control, he said, and word of mouth plays a larger role in this outpost than such communication does in Libya’s cities.
On the Zwaya side of town, we observed shops, schools, and banks open for business and men sitting and drinking tea in the shade of palms. In contrast to the Tubu shantytown surrounded by Zwaya militias, here the houses are Middle Eastern multistory courtyard buildings that typically accommodate several generations of one family. From one rooftop, complete with a rusted-out satellite dish and cooing pigeons in hutches, we observed the spectacularly green area nearby and then desert sands stretching to imposing black mountains.
Unlike Tubu, Zwaya tend to be hostile to national government intervention. Some Kufrans intensely want to keep their own affairs private, especially from the nascent national government. Mjawr Ayba, who owns a stationery shop, invited us into his house, its exterior lined with columns and the sitting room elaborately decorated in blue with gold accents. A servant offered us coffee, bananas, apples, and chocolates. Ayba blamed thieves and corruption—both the result of Qaddafi’s involve- ment in the south—for the bad blood of the past 30 years and the recent deadly clashes. He insisted that neither side wanted war, and that the solution should come from within Kufra.
“We advised the National Army not to come,” he said. “There’s an interdependence to people here, and money from outside breaks the ties. Hassan Musa [the Tubu spokesman we had encountered earlier at the makeshift hospital] and I can fix the problems here.” Ayba wants to reclaim his job as the person most responsible for Kufra—a position akin to mayor—that he held for four years beginning in 1985 under Qaddafi’s government system of “popular committees.” Ayba told us that he improved Kufra’s economic standing significantly but grew disaffected by systemic corruption and quit the post in 1989.
Ayba wants to avoid publicity but covets the keys to the city. “I want a letter from the army authorizing me to be in charge. I want a letter from the national council to do it the legal way, to be the one in the town who is legally responsible for Kufra,” he said. “We don’t know who is responsible for Kufra, or for Libya. The case of Kufra needs to be solved immediately.”
However much Qaddafi favored the Zwaya, the Tubu are not uniformly poor and oppressed. Zwaya also tell stories of abductions, beatings, thefts, and arsons they’ve suffered at the hands of wealthy Tubu. Saad Abdulghazid Said, for instance, a middle-aged Zwaya, blamed the prominent Tubu spokesman Issa Abdulmejid for torching his Mercedes truck. It was the basis of his family’s business, the vehicle in which he transported people and sheep between Libya and Sudan. (Captain Jibril estimated that more than 400 trucks operate on the smuggling route to the Sudan.) When Said’s truck was destroyed, so was its payload of 35 sheep; the Sudanese driver was detained for a day and robbed of his papers, his satellite phone, and 2,000 Libyan dinars, or about $1,600. “This was … the only way for us to make money,” Said pointed out. “We tried to handle it through the military council, but there has been no action on their part.”
Another Zwaya, white-haired Mohammed Dawd, told us that 40 Chadian Tubu arrived at his house on the morning of February 12 and tried to kill his son (Dawd didn’t tell us why). The son fled unharmed but later was captured, along with Dawd’s brother, and held for nine days. “They beat them with steel bars, they blindfolded them and made them bark like dogs,” Dawd said. “They took videos [of the humiliation] and showed them around the area.” The men were released but discovered when they returned home that their car had been stolen, Dawd told us, and later their home was looted and burned. Tubu leaders promised to return the car, he said, but they have not done so. His family knows the identity of the thieves, he said, and “sooner or later we will take back the car, by any means.”
Another Zwaya blamed much of the current trouble on former exile Issa Abdulmejid, who returned to Libya once the February 17, 2011, uprising began and tried to claim all of southeastern Libya for the Tubu because they had had nothing under Qaddafi.
Cars, humans, satellite phones, sheep, cash, trafficked goods openly discussed—all these moti- vate the current conflict. However the rift between the Tubu and the Zwaya began, now it has a lot to do with who controls smuggling routes with men and weapons. The reach of the human traffic is so wide as to alter disease patterns. Bangladeshis (as many as 2,000 in just the first three months of this year) come in via Somalia, Eritrea, and Sudan and have introduced an Asian strain of malaria to the region, according to Ismail Senussi, a specialist in infectious diseases who heads medical services at the Kufra Medical Center, one of the few health service providers in the city. Senussi also blamed Africans, especially Somalis and Sudanese, for spreading HIV in southern Libya. By his reckoning, 1,000 Africans enter Libya illegally via Kufra every month, paying smugglers the equivalent of $100 to $500 for the six-hour journey from the Chadian border.
“Any problem in Kufra is a big problem in Libya and Europe,” Senussi said. “It just depends who will pay more, the government or the smuggling.”
During our three days in Kufra, we saw no violence, but fighting continues to flare up periodically, and no one can say for sure when the National Army or any other coastal Libyan institution can regain control of the southern border. At a press conference held in Tripoli in February, the French minister of defense and his Libyan counterpart announced their intent to form a partnership to improve Libya’s security. More than a few times the southern border was mentioned, but it is unlikely France cares much about the illegal migrant workers from Africa and the Bangladeshis who nest around Tripoli’s Rashid Street, working as street cleaners.
France’s several-hour suspension of the Schengen accords last spring, allowing free passage within the national borders of the European Union, gives a better clue to its interest in the deal. Although French Minister of Defense Gérard Longuet indicated that France would assist with technology, he affirmed that the Libyans’ knowledge of the desert environment would prove decisive in policing the territory. Longuet did not mention that this knowledge comes from exactly those activities France and Tripoli would seek to curtail.
Clare Morgana Gillis’s brief detention in Kufra while reporting this piece was the second time she has been detained in Libya. She spent much of April and May 2011 in Qaddafi’s prison system after Qaddafi soldiers at the front line in Brega captured her and two other journalists. A third colleague was killed in the ambush.
