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Libya Overview
World Directory of
Minorities
Environment
Libya,
located on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, is the
continent’s fourth largest country. It borders Egypt Sudan, Chad,
Algeria and Tunisia. Most of the country’s south is a sparsely
populated desert. Libya has rich reserves of oil and natural gas.
Peoples
Main
languages: Arabic, Berber (Tamazight)
Main
religions: Islam
Main
minority groups: Berber (Amazigh) est. 236,000 to 590,000 (4-10%),
Tuareg est. 17,000 (0.3%), foreigners, 600,000 documented (10%) and
1.1-1.2 million undocumented (18-20%)
[Note:
Reliable statistics for Libya are unavailable. Estimates for the
numbers of Berber speakers vary between 4 and ten per cent. These
percentages are based on the range of estimated percentages and the
2006 CIA estimate for Libya’s total population, 5.9 million. The
number for Tuareg comes from Ethnologue, 1993. The numbers for
foreigners are Libyan government figures cited by HRW in 2006.]
Demographic data for Libya is scarce, but around 90 per cent of the
population belong to the Arabic-speaking majority of mixed
Arab–Berber ancestry. The Sunni branch of Islam is the official and
nationally dominant political, cultural and legal force. Berbers who
retain the Berber language and customs are the largest non-Arab
minority. Estimates of their numbers vary wildly, between four and
ten per cent of the population; they are concentrated in small
isolated villages in the west. Other minorities include the
Arabic-speakers of West African ancestry who inhabit the southern
oases, and the Berber-related Tuareg and Tebu (Toubou) in the south.
Tuareg
number a few thousand in Libya. Once traders on the north–south
Sahara caravan route, the ending of this and the ‘pacification’ of
the desert deprived Tuareg of their traditional way of life and
reduced many to penury. Tuareg adhere to a form of Sunni Islam
intermeshed with Sudanese and West African beliefs in sorcery and
witchcraft. Marriages are monogamous and women have a high status in
Tuareg society. Both men and women wear veils as a protection
against dust storms.
Tebu
live in the south of the country. Though converted to Islam by
Sanussi missionaries in the nineteenth century, Tebu retain many of
their earlier religious beliefs and practices. Their language is
related to a Nigerian language. Centred in the Tibesti mountains and
other parts of southern Libya, early Tebu economy was based on
pastoralism with the margins of survival widened by caravanning,
slavery and raiding. In the latter half of the nineteenth century
Tebu mobility was curtailed by conquest and policing of the southern
desert, first by colonial powers and later by the independent states
of Libya and Chad. Since the second half of the twentieth century
Tebu have been administered from centres such as Benghazi and Baida
in Libya.
There
are important numbers of Palestinian and sub-Saharan African
refugees and migrants in Libya.
History
Berbers
have lived in Libya for millennia. Parts or all of today’s Libya
were conquered by Phoenicia, Carthage, Ancient Greece, and the Roman
Empire before Arabs moved into the region in the seventh century.
Berbers and other indigenous peoples began adopting Islam and the
Arabic language. After centuries of continued foreign rule by
Ottoman Turks beginning in 1551, followed by Italy, France and
Britain, Libya gained independence in 1951 as the United Kingdom of
Libya. In 1969, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi led a military coup that
ended the monarchy and proclaimed the Libyan Arab Republic. In 1977
the country’s official name changed to Great Socialist People’s
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (state of the masses).
Governance
Since
1959 petroleum and gas have financed the transformation of Libya
from a poor nation at the time of independence to a rich one with
vast sums to spend on social, agricultural and military development.
The country is loosely governed on the basis of the Qur’an and
sharia law, as well as Gaddafi’s ‘Green Book’, published in 1975.
The book rejected western liberal democracy, arguing instead for a
form of direct democracy, institutions for which Gaddafi
subsequently created. In practice Gaddafi has ruled as an unchecked
dictator.
Gaddafi
has varyingly attempted to lead pan-Arab and pan-African movements.
He has provided support to rebellions across the Middle East and the
African continent. This included support to the African National
Congress battling Apartheid in South Africa, but more often has
involved training and sponsorship of warlords and despots, including
Charles Taylor of Liberia, Foday Sankoh—the former leader of Sierra
Leone’s brutal Revolutionary United Front, Blaise Compaore of
Burkina Faso, and recently, the widely ostracized Robert Mugabe of
Zimbabwe. In 1995 Gaddafi expelled an estimated 30,000 Palestinians
to punish the Palestine Liberation Organization for engaging in the
peace process with Israel.
Libya’s
support of international terrorism in the 1980s led to confrontation
with the United States. The US bombed Libya in 1986 in response to
alleged Libyan involvement in a terrorist attack in Germany that
killed US soldiers. In 1992, the United Nations imposed sanctions on
Libya over its involvement in the downing of PanAm Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Economic mismanagement and the
country’s foreign policy dented Gaddafi’s popularity.
More
recently, Libya has mended fences with the United States and Europe,
which covet access to Libya’s oil reserves. In 1999 Gaddafi handed
over two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. He admitted Libyan
responsibility and agreed a compensation package for the Lockerbie
victims in August 2003, paving the way for the UN Security Council
to lift sanctions against the country the following month. Gaddafi
capped the year by renouncing Libyan programmes to develop nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons. US energy companies returned to the
Libya in 2005, and Washington re-established diplomatic relations
with Tripoli in May 2006.
Widely
spread throughout Libyan society, Islamic opposition is neither
cohesive nor necessarily part of a wider movement with origins
outside Libya itself.
Current
state of minorities and indigenous peoples
In May
2005 a group of Libyan Berbers filed a complaint with the Working
Group on Minorities of the UN Commission on Human Rights, claiming
violations of their linguistic and cultural rights. The filing cited
Libyan laws that prohibit use of languages other than Arabic,
including bans on the use of non-Arab languages in education and the
media, and a prohibition on registration of newborns with Berber
names. The complaint also cited the banning of the establishment of
Berber cultural organizations and physical abuse, arbitrary
detention, and even killing of Libyan Berbers who identify publicly
with Berber identity, language, and history.
In 2006,
Human Rights Watch accused Libya of serious abuses of the rights of
migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. The report detailed abuse
in detention, squalid conditions, sexual violence, and the
repatriation of 145,000 foreigners between 2003 and 2005. Libya
makes no effort to determine whether those being deported to their
home countries face dangers there. Human Rights Watch found that
concerns about African immigration resulted in European Union and
Italian complicity with Libya’s handling of migrants and refugees in
violation of international law.
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