Libya rape victims face 'honour killings'

Mabsoot

Amir
Staff member
Libya rape victims face 'honour killings'
By Pascale Harter
BBC News, Tunisian-Libyan border

Libyan women and girls who become pregnant through rape risk being murdered by their own families in so-called "honour killings", according to aid workers.

Rape is a sensitive topic worldwide, but in this country it is even more of a taboo.

"In Libya when rape occurs, it seems to be a whole village or town which is seen to be dishonoured," says Arafat Jamal of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

Libyan charities say they are getting reports that in the west of the country, which is particularly conservative, Col Muammar Gaddafi's forces have tended to rape women and girls in front of their fathers and brothers.

"To be seen naked and violated is worse than death for them," says Hana Elgadi. "This is a region where women will not go out of the house without covering their face with a veil."

Ms Elgadi is in a group of Libyan volunteers offering medical help and HIV tests. The organisation is also offering to pay for abortions for women who have been raped in the war.

'Killing with love'
"Time is against us," says Nader Elhamessi from the Libyan aid agency, World for Libya.

Continue reading the main story

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A foreigner cannot go in there with a clipboard and a translator and get a response”

Hana Elgadi
Aid worker
"For the moment pregnancies can be disguised, but not for much longer. Many fathers will kill their own daughters if they find out they have been raped."

"It is killing done with love," says Ms Elgadi. "They believe they are saving the girl."

"That's why we are offering to pay for abortions for women who want them," says Ms Elgadi. She says fatwas - Islamic clerical rulings - have already been made, which sanction abortion in circumstances such as rape.

The charity World for Libya has engaged imams across the border in Tunisia to preach that rape is not the victim's fault.

An estimated 130,000 people have fled western Libya for Tunisia, and the Libyan NGOs which have sprung up to deal with their needs say they believe many are rape survivors who are too ashamed to come forward for help.

World for Libya is trying to reach a group of teenage girls still inside Libya whose school was attacked by forces loyal to Col Gaddafi.

"The armed men separated the girls and raped those they deemed more attractive," says Nader Elhamessi. "One of the girls cut her wrists and killed herself rather than face the shame. The rapes were only reported to us by the girls who were left alone."

One family who contacted Ms Elgadi needed medication for HIV.

"The mother, the father and the son were all raped by Col Gaddafi's forces. The mother came to us when they discovered they had contracted HIV/Aids as a result."

*!*!*!*!*!*!
Ms Elgadi says the father has gone back to Tripoli rather than get help. "The mother desperately wants anti-retrovirals for herself and her son, but is afraid to go to the hospital in Tunisia in case other Libyan refugees see her and guess that she has been raped."

“We have also seen evidence that would seem to suggest that rape has been carried out by both sides”

Arafat Jamal
UNHCR
"Rape is a crime in this war, like being shot," says Ms Elhamessi. "We are even flying in a highly respected sheikh from the Emirates so he can get this message across."

The International Criminal Court says it believes Col Gaddafi's forces are using rape as a weapon of war. The ICC says it has reason to believe orders to rape were given, and the drug *!*!*!*!*!*! was distributed to fighters.

A major in the Libyan army who has now deserted told the BBC the shipments of *!*!*!*!*!*! were widely known about, but neither he nor his colleagues saw them.

"The order to rape was not given to the regular army," says the major, who did not want his name to be used, because his family is still in Tripoli. "Col Gaddafi knew we would never accept it. It was given to the mercenaries."

Mr Jamal, the UNHCR's emergency co-ordinator for Libya, says it has not so far uncovered evidence that rape has been used as a weapon of war, although it has seen evidence of individual instances of rape throughout the country.

"We have also seen evidence that would seem to suggest that rape has been carried out by both sides, but we cannot say on what scale," he says.

Libyan volunteers are advising international agencies on how to get Libyans who have been raped to come forward.

"A foreigner cannot go in there with a clipboard and a translator and get a response," says Ms Elgadi.
 

auroran

Junior Member
:salam2:

I remember watching a lecture and the shaykh said that Protests and Demonstrations are not part of Islaam and it ends up making the situation worse, now Libya is in war and then there is this problem with women and girls getting raped. May Allaah guide Libya ameen.

:salam2:
 

Almaas

Junior Member
:wasalam:

I've just seen the most disturbing thing relating to this topic, wallah, I couldn't watch it all and certainly won't be sleeping with ease tonight. For those reasons I won't post the news link either.

I hope the Libyans, especially the women and children, are soon spared of this whole situation, Insha'Allaah. I have to bite my tongue when thinking about Gaddafi. ARGH.

Du3a's, du3a's, du3a's.
 

Just a Guy

Reinventing Myself
This is probably my Western upbringing talking here, but it doesn't make sense to me that they would kill the girls when it's not their fault that they got raped.

Forgive my ignorance here, for I mean no disrespect. Is this "honor killing" an Islamic thing or just a Libyan tribal thing?
 

Shak78

Junior Member
This is probably my Western upbringing talking here, but it doesn't make sense to me that they would kill the girls when it's not their fault that they got raped.

Forgive my ignorance here, for I mean no disrespect. Is this "honor killing" an Islamic thing or just a Libyan tribal thing?

It is not Islamic at all, its a cultural thing and not just in Libya. It happens all over the Middle East and Asia as well. It has happened in the US as well. The girl who is raped, in a relationship, ect is seen to shame the parents and village so in thier minds the only way to regain the honor lost is to kill the offender. I have never heard of an honor killing of a man who got a woman pregnant or a man who raped anyone, it only seems to be women who are victims.
 

Just a Guy

Reinventing Myself
It is not Islamic at all, its a cultural thing and not just in Libya. It happens all over the Middle East and Asia as well. It has happened in the US as well. The girl who is raped, in a relationship, ect is seen to shame the parents and village so in thier minds the only way to regain the honor lost is to kill the offender. I have never heard of an honor killing of a man who got a woman pregnant or a man who raped anyone, it only seems to be women who are victims.

That's a good point. Now that you mention it, it's always the women who get blamed for it. It seems totally unfair to me.
 

Seeker-of-truth

Junior Member
Wallahi after reading that post i feel scared, Imagine a country where both sides are out to kill you, your parents, your neighbours, your village and even the government, and who is supplying the drugs?
I don't know what I'd do, even tho im not a woman it must be tough, I'm scared as a man imagine how they feel as vulnerable women

May Allah bring torment upon Gaddafi

I was listening to a lecture earlier where the guy was telling of a debate between Gadaffi and King Abdullah

Gaddafi started off with "I am the king of the kings of Africa, I am also the Imam of the Muslims"
I forgot the rest
 

msmoorad

mommys boy
salaams to all

i have my doubts
even if they give "proof"
its not like they would lie to us, right?

heres a good article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25249

It is a troubled Time for NATO’s campaign against Libya. President Obama has seen a near-revolt in Congress against the costly war, while Defense Secretary Gates in Brussels has warned his European allies that their tepid response “is putting the Libya mission and the alliance's very future at risk.”1 Back home, according to the London Daily Mail, “Mr Gates has requested extra funds for Libya operations, but has been rebuffed by the White House.”2

The past history of American wars tells us that, when the war-going begins to get tough, the professional p.r. campaigns get going, often with wholly invented stories. For example, when in 1990 Defense Secretary Colin Powell was expressing doubts that the United States should attack Kuwait, stories appeared that, as revealed by classified satellite photos, Saddam had amassed 265,000 troops and 1500 tanks at the edge of the Saudi Arabian border. Powell then changed his mind, and the attack proceeded. But after the invasion a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times viewed satellite photos from a commercial satellite, and “she saw no sign of a quarter of a million troops or their tanks.”3

Hawks in Congress, notably Tom Lantos and Stephen Solarz, secured support for the attack on Iraq with a story from a 15-year-old girl, that she had seen Kuwaiti infants snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The story was discredited when it was learned that the girl, the daughter of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, might not have visited the hospital at all. She had been prepped on her story by the p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton, which had a contract for $11.5 million from the Kuwaiti government.4

The history of American foreign interventions is littered with such false stories, from the “Remember the Maine” campaign of the Hearst press in 1898, to the false stories of a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. destroyers in the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf incident of August 4, 1964. We know furthermore that in their Operation Northwoods documents, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 proposed a series of ways, some of them lethal, to deceive the American people in order to engineer a war against Cuba.5

Since the fiasco of the false Iraqi stories in 1990-91, these stories have tended to be floated by foreign sources, usually European. This was conspicuously the case with the forged yellowcake documents from Italy underlying Bush’s misleading reference to Iraq in his 2003 State of the Union address.6 But it was true also of the false stories linking Saddam Hussein to the celebrated anthrax letters of 2001. (Their anthrax was later determined to have come from a U.S. biowarfare laboratory.)7

This recurring history of falsified stories to justify interventions should be on our minds as we now face the allegations, as yet neither proven nor disproven, that Gaddafi has been using rape as a method to fight insurrection, and may have been guilty of raping victims himself. These charges were made on June 8 by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who claimed (according to Time Magazine

there were indications that Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered the rape of hundreds of women during his violent crackdown on the rebels and that he had even provided his soldiers with *!*!*!*!*!*! to stimulate the potential for attacks.8

According to Time, the rape stories are being circulated by doctors who claim to have met and treated patients but do not have patients' permission to reveal their identities. Earlier, according to a Libyan doctor interviewed in an Al Jazeera video, “many doctors have found *!*!*!*!*!*! and condoms in the pockets of dead pro-Gaddafi fighters, as well as treated female rape survivors. The doctor insists this clearly indicates the Gaddafi regime is using rape as a weapon of war.”9

But what of Moreno’s charge that “Now we are getting some information that Gaddafi himself decided to rape, and this is new.”10 This is a sensational charge: until we learn there is a reliable source for it, one can suspect it was made to grab headlines.

One problem in investigating these charges is that Libyan culture is so unkind to rape victims that they are reluctant to come forward. Researchers for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were unable to find one woman who said she had been raped. A U.N. human rights investigator, Cherif Bassiouni, told Agence France-Presse that the rape and *!*!*!*!*!*! stories were being circulated by the Benghazi authorities as “part of a ‘massive hysteria.’” In fact he had discovered only three cases.11

Military conflict of course is normally accompanied by rape. What might constitute a war crime would be whether (to quote Time) Gaddafi “had provided his soldiers with *!*!*!*!*!*!.” Moreno actually said, according to the Associated Press, that “some witnesses confirmed that the [Libyan] government was buying containers of *!*!*!*!*!*!-type drugs ‘to enhance the possibility to rape.’"

Others have objected that the purchase of *!*!*!*!*!*!-type drugs falls far short of indicating a war crime. Former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, in Tripoli on an investigative mission, has pointed out in her emails that to date the one army known to have distributed *!*!*!*!*!*! as part of its war operations is the U.S. Army – as a bribe to entice information from aging tribal leaders in Afghanistan.12

Time’s subtle enhancement of Moreno’s claim – from purchasing *!*!*!*!*!*! to providing it to soldiers, reminds us of the sorry record of the U.S. mainstream media in circulating past false stories to justify war. It is painful to say this, but virtually every major U.S. military intervention since Korea has been accompanied by false stories. Mr. Moreno-Ocampo should be pressed to come forward quickly with the supporting evidence for his charges, which should be based on more than the testimony of doctors working for the Benghazi regime.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).


and Allah ta'ala knows best
jazakallah
 

Almaas

Junior Member
I have never heard of an honor killing of a man who got a woman pregnant or a man who raped anyone, it only seems to be women who are victims.

Not exactly sister, the men who impregnate or 'go' with the girl are usually treated the same way, if caught.

May Allah bring torment upon Gaddafi

Ameen.

salaams to all

i have my doubts
even if they give "proof"
its not like they would lie to us, right?

Wa'alaykum asalaam.

I understand you have your doubts, but bro I can gladly put those to an end. Obviously you can't believe everything you hear in the news, but they do have evidence fo these disgusting crimes.

I could post the link if you like, but think carefully. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's very, very disturbing. I wouldn't want to encourage a brother to hear it and I wouldn't want to subject another sister to the emotional stress of it.

However, if it's proof you really want..
 

ShahnazZ

Striving2BeAStranger
May Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala grant all of those innocent rape victims al Firdaus.

May the perpetrators rot in Jahannam for eternity.

Qaddafi will answer for every single atrocity he had committed and I hope his victims will finally be satisfied on the Last Day when Rabb al-Alameen will exact the greatest justice for them.
 

Idris16

Junior Member
This cultural thing must be stopped.... they should think about it islamically... Honour killings is not from Islâm.
 
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