What Hillary Knew About Libya's SLAVE Auctions And African Genocide

from Zero Hedge:

A new CNN investigation has uncovered a network of slave markets operating in warehouses in various cities across Libya six years after NATO-led intervention in the country toppled the government of Muammar Gaddafi in support of US and UK backed rebels. And not only did CNN confirm the presence of slave auctions where human beings are being sold for as little as $400 in “liberated” Libya, but CNN’s crew was actually able to film a live auction in progress, while also gathering the testimonies of multiple victims.

Though CNN’s footage and accompanying report is shocking, such practices have been quietly documented for years, and clear warnings were issued starting in early 2011 that Libya’s black as well as migrant population would be the first to fall victim at the hands of the Islamist Libyan rebels that NATO’s war empowered. From the outset critics of Western intervention in Libya loudly sounded the alarm of a genocide against black Libyans in progress committed by the very rebels the US, UK, France, and Gulf allies were arming - a fact so well-known that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was personally briefed and warned on the matter.

Screenshot of CNN’s investigative video uncovering modern day slave auctions in post-Gaddafi Libya.

The Dangerous Myth of Gaddafi’s “African Mercenaries” 

Among the foremost of these early critics at the time, Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, published a 2012 book which exhaustively documented racially motivated crimes which came early and often during the armed uprising. His book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, contains essential summary context laying out the role that international media played in 2011 and after, including CNN itself, in fueling the xenophobic campaign to scapegoat Libya’s over one million strong black population as “pro-Gaddafi mercenaries”.

According to Professor Forte:

Racial fear and xenophobia were at the very crux of the first public calls for Western military intervention, and were the basis for the first utterance of the need for a “no-fly zone” … The myth of the “African mercenary” was useful for the Libyan opposition, the NTC [National Transitional Council] and the militias, to insist that this was a war between “Gaddafi and the Libyan people,” as if he had no domestic support at all…

 

As Patrick Cockburn explained, the insurgents’ “explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money.”

Gaddafi’s ‘pan-Africanist’ policies such as aggressive support for the creation of the African Union (in 2002), and a relatively open immigration policy allowing for the influx of sub-Saharan African migrants to work on Gaddafi’s massive building projects, stirred resentment and discontent within broader Arab Libyan society in the decade leading up to the 2011 war. This was the historical background which set the stage for the anti-Gaddafi rebels’ extraordinary claim that sub-Saharan “foreign mercenaries” were being used en masse by Gaddafi to target protesters (later proven false).

And these historic ethnic and racial dynamics were well understood by the US government long before official support to Libyan militant groups began - militants which were not only shown to have al-Qaeda links, but which declared “open season” on all black Libyans and migrant workers during the revolution. As the CIA’s own historical analysis of Libya’s internal dynamics spells out:

QADHAFI in 1998 adopted a decade-long pan-African policy that enabled large numbers of sub-Saharan migrants to enter Libya without visas to work in the construction and agricultural industries. Although sub-Saharan Africans provided a cheap labor source, they were poorly treated and were subjected to periodic mass expulsions. By the mid-2000s, domestic animosity toward African migrants…

Similar to later developments in Syria, the media would uncritically echo whatever the “freedom fighting” rebels would feed it, thus this black foreign mercenary trope became an unquestioned reality spread from rebel propagandists to the Western public. Libyan opposition members even began claiming to be victims of wild attacks by roving bands of machete-wielding pro-Gaddafi blacks wearing tell-tale yellow hard hats – a symbol which also falsely began to be associated with “Gaddafi’s savage mercenaries” - resulting in subsequent mass arrests and executions of innocent black migrant construction workers.

CNN Spread the “Black Mercenary” Lie

The end result would of course be the widespread targeting and scapegoating of an entire ethnic population within Libya. This is demonstrated, for example, in the most well-known example of Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and “dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011 after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan brigades

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