A war between a Libyan woman and a tribe with a thousand cubits
"We are tribal by nature. Tribes today are not like tribes thousands of years ago: they are not just religious tribes, or ethnic tribes. They are sports enthusiasts. They are communities. They are geography." This is how the American businessman, Howard Peter Jooper, describes the tribe in its modern concept. Humans By nature, they always find themselves belonging to a tribe, in one way or another. As all forms of life of human societies developed, the concept of the tribe, based on ancestry, evolved to take less visible and specific forms, as it became possible for one to belong to more than one tribe at the same time.
However, in Libya, the tribe still takes its simple, primitive form that imprisons the individual and prevents him from obtaining a place more powerful than it, above it, or taking a stand against it. The tribe in Libya was and still is present before and after independence. Gaddafi used it to survive and she used it to overthrow him, and the tribe used the state to impose its existence above the state itself, so the Libyans returned to the first pre-state circle, so that each of them would barricade himself behind his tribe. Tribes victorious against defeated tribes, and revenges and alliances are revived after dormancy for more than a hundred years, to resurface in all forms of life and war as well.
A tribe, by its very nature, puts itself first above everything, including the rights, choices, and even lives of its members. The group has the right to everything, and the individual is subject to these rights that he must submit to even if it costs him himself. The intensity of the tribe's cruelty in forcing its members to follow its choices varies according to class, power, and gender.
This was a necessary introduction to talking about the story of the tribe's oppression of a woman who found herself a victim without a voice, in a state without law, and a society without conscience. The Libyan citizen h. A., from a Libyan city on the fringes of Libya's coastal desert, a victim of a story she tells Raseef22 herself. She owns half of her voice, which she lost when her husband tried to kill her by suffocation, after she confronted him by discovering that he had molested their teenage daughter, and his son, who had not reached the age of two decades, and who stabbed his father as he tried to escape from his hands with which he tried to remove his pants, before he reached checkpoint to tell them that he killed his father.
A tribe, by its very nature, puts itself first above everything, including the rights, choices, and even lives of its members.
The husband did not die, and the boy was unable to reach the police station to report the incident, as the checkpoint personnel, after contacting the father's brothers, went to the farm where the child told them that he had stabbed his father, only to find him covered in blood. Waiting for his father to return to punish him for the crime of self-defense.
All this happened simply, because the policemen were from the husband's tribe, and the head of the center as well, but the incident came to life after a full year, after the wife made sure that her husband was harassing their daughter, so that a confrontation occurred that almost cost her her life, and her son found himself wrestling with his father for the second time. , preventing him from strangling his mother, but he failed to wrestle him, so that his mother fell unconscious, and the son went to the neighbor's house to tell them this time that his father had killed his mother.
The wife is not dead. Her brothers, accompanied by policemen, came to arrest the husband and give her aid, and the story ends with the husband escaping from prison. The report's disappearance, not being presented to the Public Prosecution, and other matters, occurred because it was his tribe that ran the police station in the city, with a thousand cubits.
After the wife was discharged from the hospital, she decided not to return to the marital home. And because the husband’s tribe controls all institutions of the judicial police, criminal investigation, and the Directorate of Security and Crime Prevention, it found no choice but to go to Internal Security, which is a higher institution than other local institutions, and outside the control of the husband’s tribe, to present them with a bag full of documents and photos, which leads to Imprisonment of the husband as long as possible, on charges of attempted murder, harassment, forgery, and fraud. Here the declared war began between the victim and her five children, and the tribe and its thousand arms.
After the husband was investigated, confronted with facts and documents, and after appointing a lawyer to represent H. A., and her children, the woman found herself confronting her tribe and her husband's tribe, so that everyone asked her to drop the case, in order to preserve the reputation and honor of the tribe, then the lawyer stopped attending the Public Prosecution sessions, and received H. A., a call from the contract notary who wrote the case form, during which he asks her to waive it, and her brothers also ask her to do the same. And because the Libyan state has been asleep in the absence of an authority to implement the law for ten years, the tribe was able to convince the wife that the state had waived her general right, and that she had no choice but to waive her right and the right of her children as well.
h says A.: "I went to the court to give up after my husband agreed to divorce me, and while we were in court, my daughter refused to give up her right, my husband refused to divorce me, and my son gave up after they convinced him that I was not his mother." And this is another story, as according to the custom of the tribe, the most used and influential string is the honor string; They convinced the son that his mother had affairs with other men, and that he and his brothers should do an analysis to find out who their father was. The tribe turned the mother into an adulteress in the eyes of the immature son, who gave up his right and forgot the horror of his sword fight with his father, and went to beat his older sister because she insisted on her position, and went out on social media telling her story to the whole world.
Fearing that the matter would turn into a public opinion issue - which is a rare occurrence in Libya, where Libyans do not have a memory that guarantees not to forget their tragedies, and to take an interest in resolving each other's problems - the sheikh of the H tribe decided. A., to intervene and promise her to take her rights, but inside the tribe's house, and after she obtained the divorce papers, and to leave the wedlock to a rented house far from him, the husband refused to pay the alimony for his children because the daughter refused to concede, so that h. A., for months, had a hard life. She says: "My children and I slept without dinner, after the tribe accused us of bringing shame upon it, and the tribe's sheikh forgot his promise, and everyone forgot our existence, but my husband did not, as he began sending threatening messages, and kept coming to the door of the building in which I live, to make me I see him through the iron bars with which he closes the doors and windows of the apartment.He stands and shouts my name in the worst obscene language, only to find myself fleeing to another city, about a thousand kilometers away, where no one from the tribe can reach me, to cut my neck or my daughter's neck." . This happened after the uncles of the children tried to attack the house and snatch the children from their mother, and after the daughter attempted suicide after she heard a rumor that her father had been acquitted of all cases against him, to flee from the hands of the thousand tribe, towards another place, in the fourth largest country in the continent , the only possible option.
I lost h. A., her son, who decided to return to his father, with whom he exchanged stab wounds months ago, and the rest of the children lost the right to go to school after the tribe refused to give her their school files so that they could enroll in the new al-Farar city school, and her daughter’s case remained suspended in the void after the lawyers refused In the city pick it up.
This story briefly recounts the influence of the tribe on the individual and the state, and it is the story of its victim always, the woman who, when she stands against the customs of the tribe and its patriarchal characteristics, to try to transform from a dependent being deprived of will, to an independent person with rights independent of the desires of the tribe itself, becomes an enemy that represents shame even if she is a victim Hard-to-bear violence, such as the one H. was subjected to. A., with her children along the journey of a bloody marriage that spanned more than nineteen years.
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