Talk:Haddad people

Large numbers of Haddad people were in the close past, and in many cases still are treated as slaves or feudal land laborors, doing the work in agriculture and manual labour for Toubu in Chad, Sudan and Libya. Only in Libya, under al-Gaddafi, they were emancipated almost fully through education and through many quick promotions in the army.

In the 2011 Libyan civil war they are blamed by many coastal people for fighting for al-Gaddafi, and hence in many places where rebels took over, Haddad (and Tuareg) have been subject to arbitrary plunder, expulsions, rape and persecution. (see recent Human Rights Watch publications on Libya) Coastal Libyans often argue that these people are foreign mercenaries, while from a historic perspective one could argue that most likely their ancestors have been in Libya before the Arabs arrived.

I think the Haddad people deserve to be explained as a people of at best ex-slaves, whose emancipation is not getting anywhere, or in trouble.

To my guess, the gains that they made only in Libya are now under threat, because blame for al-Gaddafi's violence is in many cases shifted to them (and the southern Berbers, many of whom still today believe they collectively own the Haddad.)

I have very few sources for this, other then the interviews I did myself in Darfur, northern Mali, eastern Mauritania and Tunesia. Should we put it in anyway? Pieter Felix Smit (talk) 07:14, 22 August 2011 (UTC)