Abdularazag Al-Dahesh, a Libyan journalist and writer
The Deputy head of the Presidential Council, Musa Al-Koni, did not open the Tarhuna file, but rather reopened a deep wound that had not been mended.
Every time there was new news about the discovery of another mass grave, like paying loans in installments.
Al-Koni put us in a photo of a retrospective, in which Libya is shown in a taxi, while a passenger asks: Have we arrived in Rwanda?
Nobody knows how many mass graves, nor how many victims? Because the truth is also buried in a mass grave, which is not the last.
The killers were not only in military uniforms, as many wore white rags, wiping knives with a handkerchief to ward off sedition.
As a result of this catastrophe, the victims died, suffocating our silence, our indifference, and even pretending to be in a deep sleep.
Thus we need the truth, and the whole truth, even if it is buried in Jupiter, and not the city of The Hague.
Justice is not revenge, tolerance is not impunity, and humanitarian issues are not the Joker in playing political cards.
We must track down the perpetrators of the Tarhuna Holocaust so that Tarhuna does not chase us, as the worst death is to live with a crisis of conscience.
Shall we take another flight back to Rwanda on the restorative justice boat, where there are no more serious and no victims?
The massacres and “Kill the Cockroaches” speech no longer have a place except as photographs in the Genocide Museum in the capital, Kigali.
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Background
Tarhuna city former stronghold for warlord Khalifa Haftar
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor welcomed the efforts of the Research and Identification of Missing Persons after discovering two new mass graves that contain corpses of people who have not been identified yet, in the city of Tarhuna, in the agricultural zone known as “Mashro’a Al-Rabet”.
In a brief press release on Saturday, Euro-Med Monitor stated that the Government of National Accord have discovered about 27 mass graves in Tarhuna, 93 kilometers southeast of the capital Tripoli, after expelling the Kaniyat militia, accused of killing, kidnapping, arresting, and torturing hundreds of the town’s citizens.
Since the Kaniyat militia took control over the city of Tarhuna, the residents of the city reported about 338 cases of disappeared persons, which the militia carried out against its opponents. Most of them were disappeared during the battles that took place in the period between April 2019 to June 2020.
Since last June, the Research and Identification of Missing Persons discovered about 120 corpses, including those of children and women. Some of the discovered graves contained whole bodies while some others contained body parts, most of which were found in the agricultural zone.
The crimes the Kaniyat militia committed in Tarhuna, including murder and enforced disappearance, are crimes against humanity, which fall within the duties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and require prosecuting and holding the perpetrators accountable under the principle of command responsibility.
Euro-Med Monitor calls on the United Nations to provide forensic experts to identify the bodies of the missing, to assist the Government of National Accord in its investigation, and to make the necessary efforts to reveal the fate of the perpetrators and bring them to a fair trial.
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