UNITED NATIONS: A New York-based rights group is urging NATO to investigate civilian deaths it may have caused during its eight-month military operation in Libya that helped bring about the ouster and death of Muammar Gaddafi.
Libya’s new interim government, which has been in control of the oil-producing OPEC member since former leader Gaddafi was forced to flee Tripoli in August, estimates that more than 40,000 Libyans were killed during the country’s civil war, Libyan UN envoy Ibrahim Dabbashi told Reuters.
“Gaddafi was responsible for these deaths,” Dabbashi told Reuters on Thursday.
Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a rights advocacy group, is in Libya and has been investigating several dozen civilian casualties allegedly caused by NATO. During the war, Gaddafi’s forces were eager to show journalists, HRW and other rights groups what it claimed were sites of civilian massacres caused by NATO airstrikes.
Many of the corpses displayed for reporters were clearly military personnel, not civilians. Nor were the civilians necessarily victims of NATO attacks.
Abrahams has been investigating the matter to determine as precisely as possible how many civilians were killed by the NATO airstrikes, which began in March and ceased in October.
“By our count, up to 50 civilians died in the (NATO) campaign, perhaps more,” Abrahams told Reuters.
“We’re not alleging unlawful attacks, let alone war crimes,” he said. “We believe the onus is on NATO to investigate these cases thoroughly so they can identify and correct the mistakes.”
Western diplomats from NATO members say the alliance never targeted civilians, which would constitute a war crime, though they fear critics of the NATO’s handling of the war will seize on estimates of civilian deaths to accuse NATO of war crimes.
The alliance has been highly criticized for civilian casualties in Afghanistan, though the estimated death tolls are far higher than what HRW alleges NATO caused in Libya. (Reuters)