At the Aruba School in the Mediterranean coastal town of Shehat, less
than a mile from a grassy hillside covered in Roman ruins, a poster
bearing Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's picture is being used as a doormat.
School is not in session. But in the current state of limbo gripping
eastern Libya, or "Free Libya," as some are calling it, the Aruba
School is serving a different function. It is a prison for
nearly 200 suspected mercenaries of the Gaddafi regime.
Libyan soldiers who have defected from Gaddafi's ranks stand guard at
the school's gates, draped in belts of ammunition and cradling machine
guns more to protect their hostages than to keep them from
escaping, some locals whisper. A group of civilians from the nearby
towns has gathered at the gates. They want to get a glimpse of
the "African mercenaries" who they say killed their families and
neighbors last week. Shouting breaks out. The guards let them into the
school's lobby and then hold them back. "They are scared that they will
hurt the Africans," says Tawfik al-Shohiby, an activist and chemical
engineer.
The soldiers have good reason to be protective. Rumors abound in this
restless region on Libya's eastern Mediterranean coast about the
identity of the forces who fought the protesters for days before
eastern Libya fell, as they say, "to the people." At the ransacked
airport of Labrak, on the road between the towns of Darna and Beida,
where clashes were fierce, Gaddafi's government flew in two planes of
foreign mercenaries on Wednesday night to fight the protesters, say the
airport employees standing amid the wreckage.
The protesters accuse Gaddafi of sending foreigners from Libya's southern neighbors of Chad and Niger because he had no one else to support him. They say the mercenaries were rounded up and paid to fight. And they have found ID cards from Niger and Chad to prove it. One activist displays a traveler's check for 15,000 Libyan dinars alongside a matching national ID card from Chad, as well as a stack of others.
At the Aruba School, contained in a series of cold, thinly insulated
classrooms, roughly 200 suspected mercenaries huddle beneath blankets on
mattresses on the floor. Captured by rebels in the streets and from
nearby army bases, some prisoners say they were moved several times
before arriving at their makeshift prison. Given their claim that there
were once 325 of them flown in from Libya's southern town
of Sabha the remaining men consider themselves lucky. Many were
captured during fierce clashes between residents and Gaddafi's forces
last week; in the ensuing chaos, a group of men from al-Baida
executed 15 of the suspected mercenaries on Feb. 18 and 19 in front
of the town's courthouse. They were hanged, says the country's former
Justice Minister Mustafa Mohamed Abd al-Jalil (who has quit and
joined the revolution). It wasn't entirely planned, but the people here
were enraged.
Most of the prisoners say they were recruited in Sabha, a town deep
in Libya's Sahara that is heavily populated by Gaddafi's tribe.
Ali Osman, head of a state-affiliated youth organization, says they
fell victim to invitations to attend a pro-Gaddafi rally in Tripoli,
only to wind up on an army base in al-Baida. In the chaotic firefights
that rattled this coastal region late last week, some of the men were
captured, others were killed and some are missing. But there
may not be a single or clear answer to who exactly the Aruba School
prisoners are.
"There are snipers among them, but they won't talk," says a guard, pointing his finger at the huddled individuals in the room, containing Ali and 75 others. Ali insists they are innocent. "We were brought to the airport in Sabha and told we were going to participate in peaceful protest in Tripoli to support Gaddafi," he says. After a 1.5-hr. flight late last week, he was surprised when the plane landed at Labrak.
The men were put on buses and taken to an army base in al-Baida.
Then, says Ali, a protest outside the base turned into an intense
firefight between those outside and those inside. At some point,
the soldiers on the base offered the men from Sabha weapons. "They told
us the people of this city want to kill you because there are rumors
that there are mercenaries among you," Ali says. By the night of Feb. 18,
soldiers began to defect, joining the revolution. And that's when soldiers turned to the men from Sabha and said they should run, or they might be killed, Ali says. He surrendered when ambulances pulled up and the people inside were informed that they wouldn't be hurt if they laid down their weapons. He and a group of other
prisoners were taken to a nearby mosque and guarded by local elders, he
says. "At the same time, there were people outside who lost their
relatives in the clashes, and they were shouting. One tried to attack us.
People at that time didn't know who's Libyan and who's a foreigner."
The notion that Gaddafi is employing foreign mercenaries to fight his
own people is an outrage, a feeling shared by al-Jalil, the former Justice
Minister as well as army officers. But it's also a tactic that, some
say, their leader has used before.
Indeed, many of the prisoners at the Aruba School are dual nationals Libyans with roots in Chad or Niger. And some are entirely foreign.
Three men, two 19-year-olds and an 18-year-old, crossed the porous
Saharan border from Chad into Libya's south just a few weeks ago,
looking for work. They wound up on the Aruba School floor, they say,
after being told by a taxi driver in Sabha that they could get a free
plane ride to Tripoli.
Other prisoners raise their hands when asked if they're members of
"Khamees' battalion" an allegation spread widely beyond the
school's walls. Khamees is one of Gaddafi's sons, and al-Jalil says that each son controls a unit of Libya's military. "Every one of Gaddafi's sons has an army and does whatever he wants with his army," he says.
The residents of Libya's east remain angry, particularly as accounts
of ongoing massacres in Tripoli spill across the spotty phone lines. But
the guards at the Aruba School say their prisoners won't be hurt. Still,
like most Libyans awaiting the collapse or survival of Gaddafi's 41-year
regime, their fate hangs in the balance.