Leaked UN Report: Torture and Lynchings in Post-Gadhafi Libya

Estimated 7,000 'Disappeared' by New Regime

NATO officials are continuing to trumpet the regime change in Libya as a great military success for the alliance. But while we wait for the current regime to collapse under an interior faction fight between the Islamists and the new NTC cabinet a leaked UN report is shedding new light on the grim side of the revolution.

The report from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, reports systematic torture of prisoners and extra-judicial detentions, as well as a number of lynchings by forces linked to the NTC.

The document, which has not been officially released to the public yet, notes that the NTC released virtually all of the political prisoners being held by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. But they followed this up by naming 7,000 new people “enemies of the state” and holding them as political prisoners instead.

Reports of the NTC’s abuse is nothing new, of course, and we already had reports of NTC forces dumping bodies en masse at “pro-Gadhafi” cemeteries as well as destroying entire towns in revenge campaigns against those seen to be on the opposite side of the civil war. Those reports however had mostly been ignored by the international community, and the UN report’s leaking is going to make it impossible for NATO to simply pretend the “new Libya” is really a dramatic change from the old Libya.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.