Black Workers Tell of Beatings by Racist Libyans

TRIPOLI?You hear it in the rumbas pulsing from tiny barbershops. You see it in the colourful turbans in the old city. You smell it in the backroom eateries that serve up dishes of West African wheat meal.

Libya is filled with immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of Africans have made their way across the vast Sahara, often on perilous, illegal journeys, in search of a better life.

The U.S. State Department estimates that sub-Saharan Africans make up one-third of Libya's workforce.

And while Libya's leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, has cast himself as the father of Africa, his people have been slow to welcome the newcomers.

Black African immigrants tell of police shakedowns, attacks by racist youth gangs, employers who refuse to pay wages and seething hatred from all quarters. In 2000, racial tensions boiled over into four days of rioting west of Tripoli that left seven dead.

"If you're black, you're still a slave in Libya," says Ali, an immigrant from Chad.

Throughout Tripoli, men line the streets, some holding light bulbs, pipes and iron bars to advertise their skills, waiting for Libyans to drive by and offer them work. Most hold nothing but are willing to do anything.

In the countryside, immigrants ply the back roads, searching for jobs that often amount to sharecropping.

In a televised speech two years ago, Gadhafi said: "Africans should pay no respect to their borders and should be able to move freely."

But many of his people have been less welcoming.

"They have done nothing good for this country," says Anis Muktar al-Ajeli, a 35-year-old chef. "They brought diseases and drugs with them. They're criminals and thieves."

Most immigrants say they came only to work ? many aiming to save enough money for the $800 (all figures U.S.) trip on a smuggler's fishing boat to Italy, them on to the rest of Europe.

Few ever make the trip. Saving, they say, is impossible with all the odds stacked against them.

Blessing Anikwenze, 32, came to Libya two years ago and opened a tiny eatery serving wheat meal and chicken in coconut milk to fellow Nigerians.

Seven months ago, she says, three Libyan youths demanded her purse. When she refused, one slashed her with a knife, lopping off her right earlobe and leaving a deep gash on her cheek. Another stabbed her in the shoulder.

"At the hospital, they told me I needed a police report," she says. "At the police station, no one listened to me because I'm black."

"There are thousands of Africans in the prisons," says Tony Chidize, 28. "Sometimes, people just disappear."

Kofi Hemas, 30, says his ordeal began with a beating by thugs soon after he arrived from Ghana two years ago.

His salvation came in the form of a brotherhood.

Six months ago, he was swimming on a Tripoli beach in the shadow of a glistening new five-star hotel, the Gate to Africa, when a company official approached him.

The Maltese-owned hotel, where rooms go for up to $960 a night, had a problem with garbage blocking the water intake of its steam turbine generator.

It needed six men to live under an overpass, picking trash from the mesh that serves as a filter.

The job was 24 hours a day, and would pay each man 50 dinars a month ? $38.

Hemas got together with five other Ghanaian immigrants. The men built a home of cardboard walls and mattresses under the bridge.

But at night, Libyan youths would come to the beach to drink ? alcohol is illegal in Libya ? and sometimes they would attack with knives. Hemas realized six men weren't enough.

They are now 12, living under strict rules set by Hemas ? no drinking, no drugs, keep clean, dress neatly, keep fit.

"The Libyans don't want to see you dirty," he says. "If we are not strong, they will kill us. We train so they will fear us.

"At first, they would come and rob us. But we have showed them who we are."

Green Charter International has repeatedly requested Libya to cooperate with the human rights organisation's international jurists in facilitating a fact-finding mission on the rights of Africans in Libya. Even though this is the only international organisation based upon the Green Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which officially is Libyan law, these requests have consistently fallen on deaf ears.