Guededfa

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The Guededfa ( Arabic القذاذفة al-Qadhadhifa , DMG al-Qaḏāḏifa , also: al-Gaddadfa , Gaddafa or Kadhafa ) are a Libyan tribe of originally nomadic Arabs or Arabized Berbers . With around 170,000 members, it is one of the smaller tribes in Libya. Originally immigrated from Morocco to the Sirte region, the main settlement area today is the desert of Fessan and especially the area around Sabha .

influence

The Guededfa are best known for the fact that the former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi was a member of the tribe, as well as for the role that members of the tribe played in the overthrow of Gaddafi's predecessor King Idris in 1969. But Wanis al-Qaddhafi , the last royal prime minister, who was also overthrown by the coup, was from the Guededfa.

The Guededfa formed Gaddafi's real home power in Libya, which was exercised locally in Sabha by Massoud Abdelhafid , the governor of the region, former commander of the Libyan expeditionary forces in Chad and cousin Gaddafi.

The Guededfa were privileged by Gaddafi, occupied numerous management positions in Libya and profited considerably from the Sahara trade, especially with Niger. The Tubu , who live on the border between Libya, Niger and Chad, act as intermediaries in this trade . Subsidized food is exported from Libya and female dromedaries , American cigarettes from Cotonou in Benin and illegal immigrants are imported. The resulting income is substantial: every truck loaded with cigarettes (about a dozen per week) brings about € 165,000 in profit and every illegal immigrant (about 5,000 per month) pays € 110 for the trip to Tripoli.

It was Gaddafi's policy to sharply reduce the equipment and pay for the regular army and to invest resources in the "Revolutionary Guards" that he directly controls. These included the Libyan Revolutionary Guard , whose members were exclusively Guededfa.

Civil War in Libya

On April 27, 2011, Bernard-Henri Lévy published a statement in Paris in which leaders or representatives of 61 tribes, including the Guededfa tribe, advocate a unified, democratic Libya without al-Gaddafi. Lévy noted that although there were conflicts on the subject in some groups, the basic stance was correct.

literature

  • Jean-François Bayart: Global subjects: a political critique of globalization. Polity Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-7456-3668-9 , pp. 56 f.
  • Dirk Vandewalle (Ed.): Libya since 1969: Qadhafi's revolution revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2008, ISBN 0-230-60765-9 , p. 72 ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Rudolph Chimelli: Die Macht der Stämme In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 31, 2011, p. 7.
  2. ↑ Current biography. Yearbook. Vol. 53 (1992) Wilson, New York 1992, p. 457
  3. ^ Lothar Rathmann : History of the Arabs - from the beginnings to the present , Volume 6 (The struggle for the development path in the Arab world), page 185. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1983
  4. ↑ Bayart: Global Subjects. Cambridge 2007, p. 56.
  5. ↑ Christoph Ehrhardt and Thomas Gutschker: Loyal to the tribe, not to the regime. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 23, 2011, accessed February 24, 2011 .
  6. ↑ Libyan tribal representatives turn away from Al-Gaddafi. In: ORF . April 27, 2011, accessed April 27, 2011 .