In the courtyard of the Palais de Justice in Paris. Photo Credit: Dave Ciskowski

PARIS — In the dark early hours of an October morning in 2009, acting on an anonymous tip, police officers in the French city of Mulhouse picked up an elderly German doctor who had been left — bound, beaten and bleeding — in a street near the municipal courthouse. The man, Dieter Krombach, had been kidnapped outside his home in Germany and secreted across the border into France, where there was a warrant for his arrest in connection with the death of a French girl nearly three decades ago.

Earlier that morning, near Toulouse, André Bamberski lifted a ringing telephone. A voice informed him that the doctor was in Mulhouse. Mr. Bamberski gathered his things and left immediately. He took with him the 20,000 euros (then about $29,800) he had promised the abductors.

Mr. Bamberski, 74, will soon be tried for his involvement in the kidnapping. But the events of that morning were a victory for him, the culmination of nearly 30 years spent in obsessive pursuit of Dr. Krombach, the man who seduced and married his former wife, split his family and, Mr. Bamberski and the French authorities contend, raped and killed his 14-year-old daughter, Kalinka, in 1982.

In the years after the girl’s death, the doctor came to be known in Germany as a sexual predator; in 1997 he was convicted of drugging and raping a teenage patient. Dr. Krombach, now 76, had nonetheless lived largely untroubled in Germany, safe behind a German refusal to extradite him for trial in France.

Now on French soil, however, he is being tried on a murder charge in Paris, where he and his accuser, both weak with age, face each other in a windowless courtroom. Mr. Bamberski, who has joined himself to the state’s case, as is his right under French law, sits before a panel of robed judges, flanked by his lawyers and stacks of bulging files, the accumulation of decades of investigation, occasionally raising a shaky index finger in a request to intervene.

Mr. Bamberski has devoted half a lifetime to seeing Dr. Krombach brought before a court, drawing broad popular admiration in France. In recent years, he made regular visits to Germany to be sure the doctor had not vanished; more than once, he said, he confronted Dr. Krombach at his door, vowing never to leave him in peace.

Mr. Bamberski has believed that the German doctor raped and killed his daughter since first reading an initial autopsy report, in 1982.

“I do not ‘suspect,’ I do not ‘imagine,’ ” Mr. Bamberski, a retired accountant, said in an interview. “I am certain.”

He explained his thinking. “It is not possible that a young girl of less than 15, in excellent health, in great physical shape, and who, in addition, was splendid and very smart, should die, just like that, without anyone knowing about it — that we should forget her,” he said.

On the morning of July 10, 1982, the body of Kalinka Bamberski was found in her bed at the home of her stepfather, Dr. Krombach, in the lakeside town of Lindau, Germany. An initial autopsy established no cause of death.

But investigators found damage to the girl’s vagina, which also contained a whitish substance that was never tested or identified. Examiners noted an injection mark on her right forearm; Dr. Krombach explained that he had injected her with an iron supplement, Kobalt-Ferrlecit, on the evening of her death, to help her tan more quickly in the sun. Only later did he admit to giving the girl a tranquilizer pill, as well. He now says the iron injection was meant to treat an anemic condition.

No blood tests were conducted at the autopsy. And Dr. Krombach, a local notable, was present during the examination, according to the coroner’s report.

Later medical reports found that Kalinka had died after inhaling her own vomit. Mr. Bamberski believes that the iron injection caused a drop in blood pressure and the vomiting that probably killed her.

French judicial investigators summoned Dr. Krombach for questioning in 1984, but he refused to travel to France. A German court ruled in 1987 that there was not sufficient evidence to support charges — which German officials say essentially constitutes an acquittal — and Germany has refused to extradite him, arguing that a European double jeopardy principle precluded a French trial. In 1995, a Paris court convicted Dr. Krombach in absentia on wrongful death charges, though that conviction has since been annulled on procedural grounds.

German diplomats have quietly urged that the current case be thrown out, as well. German officials have declined to assist in locating witnesses for the French trial, and have denied access to some evidence, including medical records for Kalinka.

Mr. Bamberski and his lawyers have sought to cast the German doctor as a sexual deviant, a Lothario who forced himself on young girls after injecting them with Kobalt-Ferrlecit, the iron supplement prescribed for anemia that Dr. Krombach administered to many patients and family members as a restorative.

In the 1997 trial in Germany, Dr. Krombach pleaded guilty to charges that he drugged and raped a 16-year-old patient at his office. He received a two-year suspended sentence and was barred from practicing medicine for two years. Since that trial, several other women have accused Dr. Krombach of similar attacks in the 1980s and ’90s.

Stripped of his medical license, Dr. Krombach nonetheless continued to see patients, according to the German authorities, frequently changing addresses, apparently to avoid detection. He was discovered in 2006 and sentenced to 28 months in prison for fraud and illegal medical practice. He was released in 2008.

“Everything that’s not permitted used to attract him,” said Danièle Gonnin, Mr. Bamberski’s former wife, in court testimony. Ms. Gonnin left Mr. Bamberski for Dr. Krombach in 1975 and would leave the doctor in 1984, exasperated by his infidelities.

In parting, Ms. Gonnin said, Dr. Krombach gave her figurines of the Three Wise Monkeys, symbols of the proverb “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“For 28 years, I would have sworn on my life he was innocent,” Ms. Gonnin said. But she has been shaken by her recent discovery that, during their marriage, Dr. Krombach repeatedly drugged her in order to bring a local teenage girl to their home for sex.

Still a trim, handsome man, Dr. Krombach is, however, diminished mentally, his lawyers say, and he frequently contradicts himself in testimony. His slender hands tremble and he stands shakily. He walks with a cane.

Asked what he might do if released, he told the court he would seek treatment for his eye and knee, both injured during his kidnapping.

“I do not have a wife who is waiting for me,” he added. “That is over with, unfortunately.”

The trial is to close on Friday.

After Mr. Bamberski’s coming trial on kidnapping charges, Mr. Bamberski said, he hopes to take up “a normal life.” Still, he takes pride in his long struggle.

“My life would have been much easier if I had had what I call the cowardice to say, ‘Well, she’s dead,’ and then start over,” he said.

Still, if Dr. Krombach is acquitted, he will not pursue him further, Mr. Bamberski said.

He will return to his home in a small village near Toulouse, to the house he has owned for more than three decades, in which his daughter once slept. She is buried nearby.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on October 21, 2011.

UPDATE: Father’s Quest for Justice Ends in Paris Guilty Verdict, The New York Times, October 23, 2011.

LA COURNEUVE, France — At the foot of the dilapidated Balzac housing tower, an 11-year-old boy bled to death here on a summer afternoon in 2005, stray bullets in his heart and neck. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time and is now president, arrived the next day in this hard-luck Paris suburb, famously pledging to “clean” the area with a Kärcher, a brand of high-pressure hose.

Six years later, the drugs and violence have not gone from this neighborhood, called the “4000,” a massive gray complex of housing projects that have for decades been an emblem of the troubles of France’s poor suburbs.

The Balzac housing tower, emptied, in 2010. Photo Credit: Petit Louis

Balzac has now been emptied, though, and a spidery mechanical arm tears away at it each day. The towering wall of stained concrete and tile, once 600 feet long and 16 stories high, is to be replaced by a cluster of smaller units, part of a $60 billion nationwide plan to refurbish France’s roughest neighborhoods.

It is hardly the first time such efforts have come to the 4000. Governments have been razing and rebuilding in this neighborhood for 25 years, hopeful that new architecture and new theories about how best to house the poor will solve the problems here. Residents and local officials, though, have few expectations that new walls and fresh pavement, whatever their configuration, can drive a deeper renewal.

“They’re not building shopping centers, they’re not creating jobs for young people,” said Soraya, 42, who was raised in Balzac and now lives nearby, requesting that her last name be withheld for fear of retribution by local thugs. “This will solve none of our problems.”

Balzac will be the fifth tower she has seen fall. Her current residence sits on what was once the site of the Renoir tower, destroyed in 2000. Ravel and Presov came down in 2004. A first tower, Debussy, was dynamited in 1986; the event was broadcast on national television and heralded as the start of a broad urban renewal.

Erected in the 1960s, the 4000 was meant as a utopia, an experiment in social engineering that would rationalize the lives of the immigrant workers it would house.

The theory of the day, drawing on the architectural philosophy of Le Corbusier, held that residential areas ought to remain separate from roads and the workplace, and so the cluster was built as a sort of island; residents trudged across a muddy field to reach the adjacent train station. Each airy apartment was equipped with a bathroom, a relative rarity in Paris at the time. The complex was deemed revolutionary.

A model of the 4000 was exhibited at the Grand Palais in 1961.

Government after government has since pledged to undo the damage they say these structures have done. In 1973, an official directive halted the construction of such housing clusters, deploring their “homogeneity” and “monotony,” and the “social segregation” they imposed.

And yet, while the particular philosophy underlying the 4000 has been disavowed, few French officials have jettisoned a belief in the primacy of architecture in shaping social outcomes, said Marie-Christine Vatov, the editor in chief at Innovapresse, a media group specializing in architecture and urban planning.

“Mixing” and “openness” have replaced “separation” and “uniformity” as the watchwords of the day. But the central lesson of the past decades, Ms. Vatov said, has been the error of such faith in the power of architecture.

“It’s not enough to build in a certain way,” she said, especially without more pointed efforts to improve education and employment.

There are political considerations, too. Buildings, thrown up or torn down, are visible markers of action, Ms. Vatov noted.

Balzac was once a “magnificent” and “convivial” place, said Soraya, the former resident, where neighbors left their doors open and competed to outdo one another with balcony flower arrangements.

But it fell into disrepair within a decade. Built cheaply, the units leaked and crumbled. More recently, the elevators seldom ran. The rats moved in.

The drug trade — mostly hashish and marijuana — arrived in earnest in the 1980s. At Balzac, a string of black arrows ran across the length of the ground floor wall, meant to lead buyers to an entryway widely known as a drug hub and marked plainly with the word “ici”: “here.”

When the building was cordoned off for destruction, the slump-shouldered young men who operated there simply relocated to nearby buildings, residents and local officials say.

La Courneuve, a city of 37,000, counts only 150 permanent police officers. Local dealers, who once kept the drugs at the edges of the neighborhood out of concern for younger siblings, now recruit schoolchildren as lookouts, residents say.

The banks, the shoe stores, the florist, the fishmonger and the cafe all departed as the area declined. Today, there is a discount supermarket, a butcher, a bakery and little else.

In neighborhoods like the 4000, classified as “Sensitive Urban Zones,” youth unemployment hovers near 40 percent, official statistics show, nearly twice the national average.

Parents worry about conditions in local schools, as well. Nora, 46, who grew up in Balzac and now lives in a housing unit nearby, has three children under the age of 14.

“There aren’t enough teachers,” she said, seated in her sparse and tidy four-room apartment. “When they don’t come in, no one fills in for them. There are kids who don’t go to school because there’s no one to look after them, so they hang out in the street. And that’s how it is.”

No more than six toddlers are enrolled in a public early education program in La Courneuve, according to Jean-Luc Vienne, the mayoral chief of staff. There are 185 children on the waiting list. Officials also estimate that as much as 10 percent of the city’s adult population does not speak French.

La Courneuve needs more teachers and police officers, Mr. Vienne said. But because education and law enforcement are essentially the domain of the central government, he argued, the city has little power to direct resources to those areas.

There is money for renovation, though. The work at the 4000 is mostly financed by the state and various regional administrations; begun in 2006, it will cost over $400 million, more than five times the city budget.

“We try to take advantage of the urban renovation to deal with the social question,” Mr. Vienne said. Recent rebuilding at the 4000 has included the construction of a school and a work space for local entrepreneurs, for instance, and the refurbishment of a sports complex. Many of the units that will replace Balzac will be more expensive semiprivate residences, a deliberate effort to change the makeup of the population.

The very choice to demolish Balzac speaks to the failure of earlier demolitions to solve the problems here, officials concede. Original plans did not call for Balzac to be torn down, but the drugs had become unmanageable, said Vanessa Fiévet, the urban planner overseeing the project.

The building is being demolished by crane and not dynamite, she added, in part because the police balked at the notion of bringing high explosives into the neighborhood. They feared they might be stolen.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on September 7, 2011.

Activists gather near the Israeli port of Ashdod in support of the flotilla, in 2010. Photo Credit: Edo Medicks

ATHENS — With the propeller shafts of two ships mysteriously damaged, the Greek authorities holding other vessels in port on government orders and an American boat turned back by the Greek coast guard on Friday just 20 minutes off the coast, the international flotilla to Gaza has stalled.

Organizers say they see the long arm of Israel behind their improbable woes, and while Israeli officials have dismissed such accusations as so much conspiracy mongering, they have declined to deny them outright.

One year after Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara during another flotilla, organizers had hoped once again to challenge the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip off its coast. It appears increasingly unlikely, however, that the eight boats now preparing to sail will ever be able or allowed to leave port.

Echoing a majority view among participants here, Johnny Leo Johansen, a ponytailed Norwegian photographer and activist, put it this way: “It’s like they’ve moved the blockade from Gaza to Greece.” On Friday the coast guard stopped the American boat in the flotilla, The Audacity of Hope, about one mile out to sea, quashing the initial excitement of the passengers, who were surprised to have been allowed to leave the harbor at all.

“We could see the handwriting on the wall, that they were going to try to shut down all the ports across the Mediterranean,” said Ann Wright, the lead organizer of the American boat.

After a complaint about improper documentation filed by an Israeli advocacy group, the boat had been held in port outside Athens on police orders. Inspectors visited it a week ago Friday, but the results of their inspection had yet to be provided. Without them, the ship could not legally set sail.

The Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection decreed Friday that all vessels in Greek ports were prohibited from sailing toward “the maritime area of Gaza.” No explanation was given, and ministry officials could not be reached for further comment.

The Americans decided to leave just the same. After chasing them down, a smiling, youthful coast guard captain leaned out his window and requested the ship’s inspection papers. Passengers leaned over the upper-deck railing of the American boat, chanting, “Let us sail to Gaza!” Others held a cardboard sign asking, “Is it Poseidon or Netanyahu?” (That is, a passenger explained, “Who is the king of the Aegean?”)

“The probability that the Greek government has already made a decision to not let us out of the port is probably quite high, I would think,” Ms. Wright said earlier this week. “It’s not surprising, in a way, that the Greek government has succumbed to the pressure.”

The Israeli government, she noted, has held cabinet meetings on the subject of the flotilla, and several rounds of military exercises have been conducted in preparation for a confrontation. “I’m shocked that they would be spending so much time, money, energy,” Ms. Wright added, but in some ways, she has been pleased by the Israeli attention. “We couldn’t have dreamed for a better thing. Usually, governments don’t cooperate with us this way!”

On Thursday, Irish organizers announced that they had pulled their Turkish-docked ship from the flotilla after the crew discovered damage to the propeller shaft, the result of what they assume to have been sabotage by divers. Organizers said that the damage was discovered on a trial run, but that otherwise the vessel might have sunk at sea.

Activists discovered nearly identical damage to a Greek-Swedish-Norwegian passenger boat this week. That boat is now grounded for repairs.

Three boats with passengers principally from Canada, Spain and the Netherlands were awaiting clearance to sail Friday. All of the ships have ostensibly met the requirements of the Greek authorities, according to Adam Shapiro, a flotilla organizer and spokesman. But on Thursday, harbor officials barred a French boat from refueling, he said, an indication that Greek officials might find justifications for retaining the other ships in port.

As of Friday morning, after more than a week in ports across Greece, not a single ship had explicit clearance from the Greek authorities to set sail, and it remains unclear when more ships might sail, or what an eventual flotilla might resemble. “We’re going to do something,” Mr. Shapiro vowed. Still, he added, “It seems we’re already doing something, given the kind of response we’ve gotten.”

Asked about activists’ suggestions that Israel was behind the apparent sabotage, Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “These activists are not renowned for being an objective source of information.” He added: “These people have a tendency to blame Israel, to see Israel’s hand behind every calamity. And of course that cannot be true.” But when asked to deny their claims more categorically, he declined.

Israeli officials acknowledge that they have been seeking to head off the flotilla, not just because they consider it an attempt to besmirch the country’s name and policies but because they believe the entire endeavor is largely organized and inspired by radical Islamists behind the scenes who are seeking a violent encounter with Israeli forces.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech, “Sometimes, we not only need to deflect our enemies’ physical attacks, but also deflect the attack on our right to protect ourselves.” Speaking at the Israeli Air Force flight school graduation ceremony, Mr. Netanyahu thanked world leaders who in recent days had spoken out and acted “against the provocation flotilla.” He commended the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, who he said had been closely cooperating with Israel in coordinating moves related to the flotilla.

On Friday, the Israeli Army told journalists that Tarek Hamud, 32, a son-in-law of Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas, was with the flotilla in Athens, playing a leading role in its organization. Mr. Hamud leads the Palestinian Association of Hamas, according to Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman.

Flotilla activists denied any links to radical or terrorist organizations and said they had never even heard of Mr. Hamud. Izzat al-Risheq, a spokesman for Hamas in Damascus, said Mr. Hamud “has nothing to do with the flotilla in any way. He is in his house right now in Damascus. This is a lie by the Israeli Army aimed at getting people to oppose this humane mission.”

Hamas denies having any role in the flotilla.

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on July 2, 2011.

TUNIS — Accused as subversives or terrorists, they bore the repressive brunt of the Tunisian dictator’s reign — two decades of torture, prison or exile.

But since the dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in January, the Islamists of the once-banned Ennahda Party have emerged from obscurity, returned from abroad and established themselves as perhaps the most powerful political force in post-revolution Tunisia.

Despite repeated assurances of their tolerance and moderation, their rise has touched off frenzied rumors of attacks on unveiled women and artists, of bars and brothels sacked by party goons, of plots to turn the country into a caliphate. With crucial elections scheduled for July 24, Ennahda’s popularity and organizational strength are of growing concern to many activists and politicians, who worry that the secular revolution in this moderate state — the revolt that galvanized the Arab Spring — might see the birth of a conservative Islamic government.

And just as the protests in Tunis heralded the revolt in Cairo, analysts are looking to Tunisia as a bellwether for the more broadly influential developments to come in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys similar advantages and has stirred similar misgivings.

“How do you want us to go up against Ennahda?” asked an exasperated strategist for the Republican Alliance, a secular party. “They’re prepared to do anything.”

With years of organizational experience, a vast membership and decades of credibility as a sworn enemy of Mr. Ben Ali, Ennahda has proved to be better-equipped than any other party — most have existed only for a matter of weeks — to step into the political void. The Republican Alliance strategist called for the elections to be delayed.

“July 24 is a favor to Ennahda,” he said, requesting anonymity for fear of attacks by the party’s supporters. “It’s suicide.”

With Ennahda in power, he said, “It would be Iran.”

The party says such fears are unfounded. “We aspire to a free, open, moderate society, where each citizen will have the same rights,” said Abdallah Zouari, a member of Ennahda’s executive committee and a party spokesman, adding that the party called for equal rights for men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims.

“We are not in agreement with the secularists who want to force others to be secular,” he said, “the same way we are against the Salafists who want to force others to be Muslim.”

He spoke with a visitor at a modest new party branch on the third floor of a shabby Tunis office building, the rooms still echoing and empty but for some tables and chairs, the white walls dirty and scuffed.

Mr. Zouari — who bears the dark callus on his forehead caused by frequent bowed prayer, common among the devout — was himself imprisoned for more than a decade as a party member.

“The religious sentiment of the Tunisian people is so deep that certain people cannot understand,” he said.

Polling suggests that Ennahda — the renaissance, in Arabic — enjoys broader support than any of the country’s other 60-odd authorized political parties. The party’s weekly newspaper, The Dawn, resumed publication in April after a 20-year hiatus and now sells about 70,000 copies per week, party officials say.

The July vote will create an assembly assigned the task of rewriting the Constitution. In anticipation of the elections, the party has opened dozens of local offices, and imams are said to be promoting Ennahda in mosques across the country.

But mistrust of the party remains widespread. “They’re doing doublespeak, and everyone knows it,” said Ibrahim Letaief, a radio host at Mosaique FM, a popular station where he offers withering criticism of the Islamists. Ennahda, he said, has only tempered its rhetoric in a bid to win votes, but in power would impose strict Islamic law.

It is a common refrain here, despite having first been popularized by the reviled Mr. Ben Ali. Opponents have made similar claims, anti-Ennahda Facebook groups have drawn tens of thousands of supporters, and protesters have denounced the party throughout Tunisia. Some of the fear seems to stem from uncertainty about who, exactly, will lead the party; the group’s longtime leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has said he will not seek office.

A democratic Tunisia depends on the banning of Ennahda, Mr. Letaief said, though he acknowledged, “I’m not going to seem democratic, here.” Still, he said, “Islam is very much anchored in society.”

The first article of the now-suspended Tunisian Constitution decreed Islam the national faith, and 98 percent of the country’s 10.6 million inhabitants are Muslim. Public schools dispense religious instruction. Yet religious leaders have never played a role in government.

Habib Bourguiba, the father of Tunisian independence and the country’s first president, was a staunch secularist who banned polygamy, legalized abortion and once sipped orange juice on television during the Ramadan fast in an affront to the faithful.

Ennahda has pledged to maintain Mr. Bourguiba’s social reforms, and voted in favor of a rule requiring equal numbers of men and women on electoral lists in July. Party leaders compare Ennahda to Turkey’s tolerant Islamic ruling party. Other Tunisian Islamist groups have rejected Ennahda as being too secular, and many analysts consider the party to be distinctly moderate.

Still, Ennahda worries that many Tunisians have renounced an “Arab-Muslim identity,” said Mr. Zouari, the party leader, noting that high school math and science are often taught in French, not Arabic. Ennahda would not force women to veil themselves, Mr. Zouari said, nor would it immediately seek to ban alcohol, which Islam forbids. He admitted that a ban might be a goal in years to come. Asked about widespread accusations that Ennahda supporters had attacked unveiled women, he replied hotly: “When? Where? What names?”

Ennahda is strong in the impoverished interior, a reflection of the cultural gulf between the “very Westernized elite” in Tunis and other coastal cities — many of whom lived well under Mr. Ben Ali — and much of the rest of the country, said Kader Abderrahim, a researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris.

“The question,” Mr. Abderrahim said, is whether the elite “are ready to accept that there is a part of the population that lives in a different way, and that has other convictions.” Political stability “will not happen without the Islamists,” he said.

Nour Ayari, 19, said she would back Ennahda in the elections. Ms. Ayari, who sells traditional silver marriage boxes from her family’s stall at the Blaghjia souk in Tunis, wore a diaphanous white hijab, a veil banned under Mr. Ben Ali but legalized since his departure. Women may now also appear veiled in official identification photographs, she noted.

“It’s thanks to this party,” she said, referring to Ennahda.

She dismissed concerns that the party might be cloaking fundamentalist intentions behind a moderate front. “Why would they change their tune afterward?” she asked. Ennahda’s opponents, she said, still have a “reflex of fear” instilled under Mr. Ben Ali.

Mr. Abderrahim, the researcher, called it “paranoia.”

TATAOUINE, Tunisia — A century ago, fleeing Italian colonizers, the inhabitants of Libya’s remote western mountains descended upon this wind-whipped Tunisian outpost, many to stay permanently.

With those desert plateaus once again under siege, this time by the armies of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, about 30,000 Libyans have repeated their ancestors’ flight. Astonishingly, to aid workers, hundreds upon hundreds of Tunisians, some of them the descendants of those earlier refugees, have opened their homes to these Libyan families since early April, when Colonel Qaddafi’s forces went on the attack.

In Tataouine, a boy holds the flags of the Libyan rebels and Tunisia. Photo Credit: Magharebia

There are no sprawling refugee camps at the border, just two modest clusters of tents housing around 2,500 people. The vast majority of the newcomers are now living with Tunisian families here and in neighboring villages, an area that in normal times counts just 150,000 residents.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen such an impressive response,” said Firas Kayal, a spokesman in Tunisia for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. That generosity is all the more remarkable, he added, given the challenges Tunisia faces in the wake of its own revolution — which in January ended 23 years of kleptocratic rule by President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali — and previous waves of Libyan refugees this year in the north.

Even some of the refugees seem baffled by it.

“Would you give your house to someone you didn’t know, from another country?” asked Maren Abouzakhar, 22, who fled the besieged Libyan city of Yafran early this month. She spoke in the airy drawing room of the house she and 10 relatives now shared with a local family; the owner had moved himself, his wife and their three children into the unfinished ground floor, leaving the comfortable, perfumed second story for their guests.

“We don’t even know how to thank them for something like this,” Ms. Abouzakhar said.

Abdallah Awaye, 35, a thin, sun-darkened man and the owner of the house, described his gesture as a matter of obligation and pride. “This is how it is, these are our customs,” he said. “If there is something to eat, we will eat it together. If there is nothing to eat, we will have nothing together.”

Most of the refugees arrived at the border with little more than the clothes on their backs and fears for the sons they left behind to fight the Qaddafi militias, and were rapidly taken in by local residents whose compassion and good cheer have drawn the admiration of Libyans and international aid workers alike.

Mr. Kayal also praised the generosity of the Tunisian government, which has kept the country’s borders open from the start of the Libyan conflict. As many 276,000 people — most of them foreign workers — have fled Libya for Tunisia, according to United Nations estimates.

Asked about their willingness to provide shelter to strangers, residents of Tataouine like to cite an apt local proverb: Travelers cry upon arriving in this desolate place, but leave with tears in their eyes.

Despite the abundance of good intentions, though, the city and surrounding areas are feeling the strain of so many refugees. The afterglow of January’s jubilant revolution has largely given way to old frustrations, with people complaining of a stagnant economy, inadequate infrastructure and widespread unemployment.

The police, the lackeys of the deposed government, are largely absent from the streets, having gone into hiding after the revolution. And many worry that the country’s transitional government has failed to break with what they call decades of neglect for the arid Tunisian south.

“Generosity and fraternity have been taking precedence over the problems,” said Ali Mourou, the mayor of Tataouine.

Nevertheless, he said, in response to appeals from the city, truckloads of aid have flowed in from as far as Tunis, the capital, 300 miles to the north.

Young men at one of Tataouine's many shabby cafés.

Three local coordinating centers have been opened, placing Libyan families in homes and distributing donated couscous, macaroni, milk and tomatoes, as well as mattresses and blankets. Libyan children have been placed in local schools, and doctors and nurses have opened a clinic offering free medical care.

“We’ve taken the thing as a human obligation, a religious obligation, an obligation of fraternity,” Mr. Mourou said, and the Libyans have been “truly appreciative.”

He added, “They ought to be.”

He worries, though.

Thousands of young men who work in Europe — the economy here depends heavily on remittances — are expected home soon for traditional summer weddings, to vote in July’s historic legislative elections and for the holy month of Ramadan, which this year falls in August. The summer heat is also sure to make tensions rise, he added.

Food, too, is becoming a problem: local bakeries, unable to meet the rising demand, have begun closing early, after selling the last of their baguettes.

To the displeasure of many conservative locals, Mr. Mourou noted, a number of Libyan refugees have made prodigious use of their newfound access to liquor, scarce in Libya. At the Hôtel Sangho, one of just three establishments in Tataouine licensed to sell alcohol, nightly sales of Celtia, the local beer, have risen almost eightfold, to 180 bottles.

“They ought to be over there fighting, not here drinking,” said Dab Abdel-Kader, 28, who works the night shift at the bar at the Sangho. Libyan men brought four prostitutes to the bar last week, he said, and fights broke out. Nevertheless, he said he was pleased to be in a position to help. His family is hosting 22 Libyans in Tataouine, he said.

In a way, it is the region’s economic plight that has allowed for such hospitality. The coordinating centers established to manage the crisis are staffed by 40 unemployed university graduates, just a few of the thousands who populate the city’s shabby cafes in the afternoons. Scores of Libyan families are being housed in the empty homes of local men gone off to work in Europe.

Mohamed Zouari, 60, is lodging six Libyan families in his cafe on the outskirts of Tataouine, vacant since he closed it two years ago for financial reasons. “They’re our brothers, our neighbors,” said Mr. Zouari, a retired municipal bus driver. “We’re happy to do them a service.”

Asked if he worried that the situation might become untenable, with the expected arrival of thousands of expatriates in the coming months, he only laughed and called himself an “optimistic” man.

He admitted that Tunisians had often looked down on Libyans, considering them a nation of oil-rich indolents. But he pledged to house the refugees as long as necessary.

“We want to show the world that we’re capable, that we’re making an effort,” he said, “that we’re proud of it.”

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on April 29, 2011.

At the border crossing in Dhiba, where the hazy plateaus of the Nafusah rise out of the desert.

DHIBA BORDER CROSSING, Tunisia — For decades, the remote mountains of western Libya have simmered with resentment. An enclave of the Berber minority, mistrusted and neglected by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Arab nationalist government, the region’s isolated hamlets were among the first to join the uprising, raising the rebel flag on the first day of the revolt.

But the Nafusah Mountain range, which rises out of the desert at the Tunisian border as a sudden, hazy shadow and runs several hundred miles east in a narrow chain, is hardly a rebel stronghold. Rebel fighters in the region estimate their ranks at just a few hundred ill-equipped and untrained young men.

It came as a shock, then, when they captured a border crossing near Wazen last week, a strategic victory for the beleaguered rebel forces that thrust the desert region under the world’s gaze. Colonel Qaddafi has also turned his attention to the region, escalating a low-grade war of attrition into what may prove an important battlefront.

Having put down more serious challenges to his rule in Zawiyah and Zawarah, on the northern coast between Tripoli and Tunisia, and pulled troops out of Misurata, the second largest western city, on Saturday, Colonel Qaddafi has massed troops along the mountains and launched missiles on its towns, according to residents and rebel fighters.

The fighting has driven about 30,000 Libyans into Tunisia, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Libyans there said they had been under siege weeks before the recent escalation. Government troops have held the desert plains below the mountains since mid-March, they said, cutting off supplies of food, gasoline and medicine, and, several witnesses said, poisoning the wells of at least one town.

“He has been trying to starve us,” said Jamal Maharouk, 47, a gaunt, weathered former soldier of Colonel Qaddafi’s army, now a rebel fighter. He had driven to a Tunisian hospital in Tataouine, about 50 miles northwest of the Libyan border, to visit a young cousin wounded in battle outside the town of Zintan and secreted across the border for treatment.

Like other fighters, Mr. Maharouk insisted that rebel actions in the area were purely defensive. “By my god, these are peaceful people fighting against an evil regime,” he said.

The government denies that it has cut off food and utilities, poisoned wells or even that the refugees in Tunisia are really refugees.

Moussa Ibrahim, a spokesman for the Qaddafi government, said the refugees were lying in order to win support from NATO. He said the government had intercepted and recorded phone calls among rebels planning to stage a bogus refugee crisis by forcing members of their families to cross the border into Tunisia and report atrocities.

“They are fake refugee camps,” he said. “Qatar is paying for them.”

Before the rebels captured the border crossing at Wazen, the region seemed to hold little strategic value, raising questions about why the government would divert resources from more pressing battles elsewhere. The border crossing, which now gives the rebels a supply route in the west, may be part of the explanation.

But Colonel Qaddafi has long harbored antagonism toward the Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic group of mostly Ibadi Muslims in a country that is majority Sunni. He has accused them of being Zionists and agents of the C.I.A., said Mansouria Mokhefi, the director of the Middle East and Maghreb program at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.

Berbers and the region in general have been largely excluded from the distribution of oil revenues, she said, and residents complain of little government investment in schools or infrastructure. “Development never came all the way to them,” she said. “They have truly lived in a sort of exclusion.”

Beyond neglect, Colonel Qaddafi has forbidden citizens from giving their children Berber names, disallowed the teaching of the Berber language in schools and banned Berber festivals and holidays. Protests in the 1990s demanding the right to practice their culture openly were put down forcibly by the police and followed by a series of public hangings, instilling a profound animosity toward the government.

Shortly after the uprising began in mid-February, Colonel Qaddafi offered the families of Zintan and other towns across the Nafusah range a bribe, residents said, a onetime payment of about $1,200 in exchange for their allegiance. Most declined.

The missile strikes began soon after.

Salim Issa, 50, an electrician, fled the town of Nalut on Friday after what he called heavy missile strikes the night before. He arrived in Medenine, Tunisia, with his wife, sister and nine of his children. Fearing for the two sons he left behind, he declined to give his full name.

He said there were rumors that loyalist forces had orders to kill everyone in the city, and that soldiers had been given Viagra and explicit orders to rape.

The town of Yafren, about 100 miles east of Nalut, was reported to have been captured by government forces over the weekend. But by then the town was all but deserted. Just a handful of rebel fighters and elderly residents, too weak to flee, were thought to remain, hiding in basements.

Salim, 32, a nurse’s assistant, said Yafren had been surrounded by Qaddafi forces and under fire for about a month, leaving it with no water, food or electricity. “No nothing,” he said, adding that the only food had been smuggled in across the desert.

Perhaps even more than on the eastern front, the rebels in the Nafusah Mountains are outmatched.

Mounir Ramdan, 25, a youthful fighter from Nalut who was visiting his family in Tataouine, said about 40 government pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns and rocket launchers were stationed near the road between Nalut and Zintan, to the east. Mr. Ramdan, who has no gun, has been acting as a scout.

For each rebel fighter with a weapon, “you find 50 without guns,” said Fathi, a rebel being treated at the hospital in Tataouine.

He had been operating a machine gun mounted in the back of pickup when he was tossed from the vehicle during a skirmish near Zintan, breaking his left femur and dislocating his right hip. At the time of his injury, the rebels in Zintan had four or five 14.5-millimeter machine guns, stolen from government troops, he said, but most were armed with antique Italian rifles, knives or home-forged iron swords.

The government forces have been ordered to “clean” Zintan, he said, and he had little doubt about their ability to do so. Without heavier NATO airstrikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s armor and more weapons, he said, it will be “90 percent impossible” for the rebels to hold their ground in the western mountains.

Colonel Qaddafi, he warned, “will kill us all.”

Other fighters were less bleak. Puffing on the stub of a cigarette at the Tunisian border, a tall, bearded fighter named Toufik guessed that the rebels in the region were outnumbered by loyalist troops five to one.

Asked how they had succeeded in capturing the border post last week, he grinned and pointed an index finger to the sky.

“God gave us a victory,” he said.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on April 25, 2011.

CHOUCHA TRANSIT CAMP, Tunisia — Europe fears Abdou Dirisu Minimu Aliu.

A towering, square-jawed Nigerian, his forearms swollen from years of building furniture in Libya, Mr. Aliu, 26, arrived at this sprawling camp on the Tunisian border after fleeing the violence in Tripoli. Destitute, his $2,600 in savings stolen by Libyan fighters, he now hopes desperately to reach a stable, prosperous country. Europe beckons.

Migrants waiting in Lampedusa. Photo Credit: Sara Prestianni

There are thousands like him here, on the northern coast of Africa, and almost certainly tens of thousands more trapped in Libya. They had left their home countries for an oil-wealthy nation offering abundant employment and higher wages. They shrink from the prospect of returning penniless to the corrupt governments and stagnant economies they first fled.

“There is something I want you to know,” Mr. Aliu told a United Nations aid worker. “I’d have preferred to die in the war zone in Libya than to go back to Nigeria.”

“Do you know what it’s like to be a man who has lost everything?” he asked, plaintive, staring blankly at the ground. The aid worker, David Welin, moved close to Mr. Aliu.

“I’m sure that what you lived in Libya, what’s awaiting you in Nigeria, is not good,” he replied. But the United Nations would probably not be able to help, Mr. Welin said. For the time being, Mr. Aliu and thousands like him, principally from sub-Saharan Africa, are left to contemplate the 70 miles of sea that separate Tunisia from the Italian island of Lampedusa, and the European continent beyond. Some have begun to make arrangements with Tunisian traffickers for an illegal crossing.

“So many Nigerians are wanting to go over,” said Stanley Tawaris, 42, a slender Nigerian welder who lived for a decade in a two-room cinder-block lean-to in Zawiyah, west of Tripoli. “We struggled in Libya and acquired nothing. The best thing for us is to go forward, and not to go back to our country.”

His three children live in Nigeria; he sent $200 or $300 most months, he said, and worries he would never be able to provide so much if he returned to Nigeria. He hopes to join relatives in Germany, France or the Netherlands, Mr. Tawaris said, and find work.

“Anything,” he said. “Even if it is labor work, I don’t care.”

He hopes the winds that have whipped through this dusty camp will soon ease, and leave the Mediterranean calm; a friend has been arranging for a boat.

There are currently 15,000 migrants here, but there are provisions to accommodate as many as 30,000, organizers say. Bulldozers are clearing ground for an additional two camps nearby, and humanitarian groups continue to stockpile food and supplies in anticipation of thousands upon thousands more fleeing migrants, as Libya descends further into civil conflict.

About 1.5 million foreign laborers were thought to reside in Libya before the outbreak of violence last month; about 200,000 have since fled the country.

What little they had to lose was often lost in their flight out of Libya.

It is perhaps a measure of their desperation that they had chosen to stay in Libya at all. Workers here offer accounts of harassment and violence directed against the foreign laborers who worked on Libyan oil platforms, kneaded Libyan bread and built Libyan houses.

In Libya, “dogs are treated better than black Africans,” said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. Because many of them enter the country illegally, he said, they “have no official status, no visibility.” They have come to constitute a sort of abusable underclass.

“This country is racist, there’s no other word for it,” said Mansouria Mokhefi, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations. “There is a hierarchy of races.”

Blacks are widely referred to as “Abd,” or slaves. Bangladeshis are viewed as little better, and even Arab Egyptians and Tunisians are considered to have limited rights.

Migrant workers tell of the “gangsters” who hold foreigners at knifepoint in the Libyan streets, stealing their money and telephones with impunity.

At night, said Francis Appiah, 35, a Ghanaian mason who fled the western Libyan city of Zuwarah, “you weren’t able to go out to buy anything,” for fear of attacks. He added that thieves had once stolen a DVD player, a television and speakers from his home.

“I didn’t go to the police, because sometimes they arrest black people for no reason,” he said. His landlord once had Mr. Appiah arrested, he said, because he had requested payment for plastering the interior of the man’s house.

A small, broad-smiling man with angular cheeks and no front teeth, wearing a faded Levi’s denim jacket, Mr. Appiah said he had come to Libya two years ago hoping to move on to Europe. Now, he said, perhaps he will. “I’m here with nothing,” he said. “Where there is money, where there is work, I will go.”

“If Africans were not poor, they would not be in Libya,” said Mr. Tawaris, the Nigerian, who was once stabbed repeatedly in the thigh by a thief who attacked him in the street. Though he found a Libyan doctor willing to stitch up a black man’s wound, he could not find a doctor willing to remove the sutures; he removed them himself. “If you are not strong, you cannot live there,” he said.

He has been languishing in his tent here, drawing slowly on cigarettes sold at the edge of the camp by local Tunisians, hoping for a boat.

“If our country was a very nice place to be,” said Mr. Tawaris, his face stern, “we would not have gone to a place like Libya.”

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on March 10, 2011.

Zarzis, a low-slung city hard on the Mediterranean coast. Photo Credit: Quentin Scouflaire

ZARZIS, Tunisia — The revolution has changed much in this low-slung, whitewashed city, hard on the Mediterranean coast. Residents no longer live in fear of the secret police, and speak openly of politics. Devout Muslims say they feel a new freedom to practice their faith. The red national flags that hang almost everywhere are no longer joined by the portrait of the ousted president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

But scores of unemployed young men still slouch in the cafes in the afternoons, smoking water pipes, playing cards and sipping coffee. And at night, the fishing boats still ferry thousands of desperate workers across the Mediterranean to Europe.

“If I could swim to Lampedusa, I’d do it,” said Walid Bourwina, 23, referring to the Italian island to which thousands of Tunisians have recently fled. A small red satchel, stretched tight with all his belongings, leaned against his foot.

“I don’t want to spend a minute more here,” he said.

He had come to Zarzis, long a major port of departure for Tunisians leaving for Europe, two weeks earlier from a village farther north. He was waiting — like dozens and dozens of other young men, their faces tired and drawn, wandering this city with their own small bags — to be approached by local people who quietly offer passage to Lampedusa for about $1,450.

Tunisians young and old tell of their pride at felling a dictator and touching off the uprisings that have spread across the Arab world. But the exaltation of mid-January has begun to give way to more sober realities. The revolution has not solved chronic youth unemployment, and the unrest has battered the economy with the flight of tourists and capital. The government is in upheaval, and many also fear it will be years before a pre-revolution culture of mistrust and corruption fades.

“It’s an entire country that needs to be remade,” said Ahmed Faouzi Khenissi, the mayor of Zarzis, a city of 70,000. “It’s not going to be one year, or two years, or three years. It’s going to be an entire generation.”

“If I were their age,” he said of the young men who flee to Europe, “I would have emigrated.”

A fishing boat, at Lampedusa. Photo Credit: Antonio Amendola

With the border police suddenly absent after the departure of Mr. Ben Ali on Jan. 14, more than 15,000 Tunisians have left in boats for Europe, according to the United Nations, most setting off from the beaches of Zarzis. In response, Italy’s various regions agreed Tuesday to temporarily share the responsibility of taking in as many as 50,000 migrants leaving North Africa.

“I don’t want to wait, unemployed, for another year, before things start getting better,” Mr. Bourwina said.

The eldest son of a day laborer, he dropped out of high school because his family could no longer afford to pay for his schooling, he said. He had been out of work for the past year, though earlier he had been a painter in Tunis, the capital, earning 300 dinars each month. It was more than the minimum wage, but far from enough to pay for the home and car he covets, let alone the European lifestyle — discovered through Facebook, he said — to which he aspires, like many Tunisian youths.

For years, the unemployment rate here has hovered near 13 percent, according to official statistics. And in a nation where more than half the population is under 30, youth unemployment is at 30 percent, and even higher among university graduates.

Tunisia’s interim prime minister, Béji Caïd Essebsi, has said that reducing unemployment will very likely prove “arduous,” and would require an improbable economic growth rate of 8 or 9 percent.

“Tunisia is capable of this,” Mr. Essebsi vowed in an interview this month with Le Monde.

It would have been an ambitious goal even for pre-revolutionary Tunisia, where in the past decade annual growth only once exceeded 6 percent, in 2007. And it is a task made harder by the social and political unrest that has continued since mid-January. Planned elections remain several months away, and a number of interim ministers have resigned or been forced out of office. Several people have died in continuing street protests.

The tensions have sapped investor confidence, and agencies have downgraded Tunisia’s credit rating to near junk status.

The country’s economy weathered the global downturn with relative poise — growing 3 percent in 2009 — but it was dealt a harsh blow by the revolution. The upheaval crippled the critical tourism sector, which typically employs 400,000 of the country’s 3.3 million workers and accounts for 7 percent of gross domestic product. Tourism revenues have dropped 40 percent in the months since Mr. Ben Ali’s ouster. (The government has, however, started a promotional campaign with the cheeky tag line, “Finally free to tan.”)

Mr. Essebsi, the prime minister, told Le Monde that he predicted that political stability would be achieved by midsummer; he offered no guess as to when the economy might recover, nor when unemployment might begin to fall.

“We don’t know if things are going to be fixed,” said one young man who left Zarzis just three weeks after the revolution. Now in Paris, he has yet to find work, but said he did not regret his departure.

“There’s no hope in Tunisia,” said the man, 27, who gave his name only as Walid, fearing deportation. He noted that many regional governments remained controlled by members of Mr. Ben Ali’s now defunct political party.

He had found occasional work in Zarzis as a laborer, he said, living with his family and earning less than 100 dinars each month. Earlier, he had studied computing in Tunis, but said he left his degree unfinished after repeated beatings by the secret police. Vocally antigovernment, he said even his professors had begun to fail him, at the government’s behest.

“They made me hate my country,” he said, though he plans to return to Zarzis to build a house once he has earned 20,000 euros in France.

Tunisians have been leaving Zarzis with similar hopes for generations. Walid’s own father worked in a Renault automobile plant in France for 23 years, he said. Local lore holds that there are 25,000 Zarzisian families living in France, many sending money home each month.

“Without that income, Zarzis could not survive,” said Mr. Khenissi, the mayor. Emigration from the city “is not a new phenomenon,” he said. “It will never stop.”

The recent exodus is unprecedented in scale, though. It has devastated the local fishing fleet, the largest source of boats used to ferry migrants across the Mediterranean. Italian border authorities have seized 70 percent of the Zarzis fishing fleet in Lampedusa, Mr. Khenissi said. He estimated it would take a full year to rebuild it.

With so many young men suddenly gone — about 2,500 Zarzis residents are thought to have left since mid-January — businesses here have also reportedly been finding themselves short-handed.

“But on the other hand,” Mr. Khenissi noted wryly, “we have less unemployment.”

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on March 24, 2011.

Fleeing foreign workers, at the Choucha Transit Camp.

CHOUCHA TRANSIT CAMP, Tunisia – Paul Eke’s body bears the marks of a history of Libyan violence. Several years ago, Mr. Eke, a Nigerian who spent a decade in Libya as an electrical technician, arrived at a central Tripoli hospital with a badly broken left arm, his elbow and finger inflated with blood. Libyan doctors refused to treat him.

Speaking with a visitor recently, he drew up his sleeve to show a left arm that hangs awkwardly, the elbow joint all but locked. He lifted his cap to show his scalp, scarred from a beating by a Libyan thief, whom police refused to pursue.

“Even if someone stabs you with a knife and you go to the police to report it, they won’t do anything about it,” said Mr. Eke, 34, kneeling on the floor of his tent in this sprawling camp of foreigners fleeing the violence in Libya. “In the hospitals, no one will care to you.”

“They just don’t like blacks,” he said.

Most all the migrant workers who have massed here have offered accounts of a culture of impunity, harassment and violence toward the hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers that man Libyan oil platforms, knead Libyan bread, and build Libyan houses. Sub-Saharan Africans and Bangladeshis, drawn to Libya by ready employment – and often unaware of the local population’s apparent disdain for them – are reported to have suffered the brunt of what experts describe as a widespread institutionalized racism, not unlike the rigid class structures found in some Persian Gulf states.

As Libya burns with a civil conflict that has been widely portrayed as a struggle led by democrats opposing the oppressive regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, refugees here have denounced their treatment by Libyans on both sides of the fighting.

In Libya, “dogs are treated better than black Africans,” said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. Because many of them enter the country illegally, he said, they “have no official status, no visibility,” and so make easy targets for abuse.

About 1.5 million foreign laborers were thought to reside in Libya before the outbreak of violence last month; approximately 200,000 foreigners have since fled the country, which counts a total population of only about 6.5 million, according to U.S. government estimates.

With the discovery of the country’s vast oil reserves in the 1950s, and the nationalization of the oil industry by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in the 1970s, Libya embarked upon a still ongoing period of massive development. But with Libyan citizens made suddenly affluent through the redistribution of oil revenues, the country was obliged to call in a great mass of poor foreign labor; newly prosperous Libyans soon came to treat them as an abusable underclass.

Migrant workers at this transit camp tell of the “gangsters” and malicious youth, often called the “bad boys,” who hold foreigners at knifepoint in the Libyan streets, stealing their money and telephones with the assurance that the authorities are all but sure not to react.

“You can’t walk outside at night,” said Kenneth Osaigu, 25, a soft-spoken Nigerian plaster worker who had been based in the western town of Zuwarah. “You can’t do anything,” he said, “because you’re not a citizen of their country.”

The police are little help. If a foreigner complains of mistreatment, Mr. Osaigu said, “They’ll arrest you, or kill you.”

“Black over there is not easy,” said Yedaly Jabbi, a smiling, round-faced 22 year-old from the Gambia. Before fleeing Libya, he had spent three years in Tripoli as a construction worker, two of them with a company that promised to pay him a monthly salary of 450 Libyan dinars, or $370; he said he was paid for just nine months’ work.

“They saw me as a slave,” he said. “If I’d told the police, they’d have lugged me off to jail.”

Mr. Jabbi told of groups of young men throwing stones at foreigners in the streets, shouting, “Hey, slave, what are you doing here in our country?”

His home was once ransacked by pillaging youth, who stole 800 dinars, he said: “If they know that there are only blacks in a house, they’ll come there at night, three, four in the morning.”

Once, on his way to a telephone center to phone his family in the Gambia, he was accosted by two teenage boys. One pulled a switchblade, and Mr. Jabbi raised his hands in the air; the boys stuffed their hands in his pockets and left with 150 dinars. “You can’t go out with money over there,” he noted. It is a common refrain among the migrants here.

“He held a knife up to me, I couldn’t do anything,” said Mohammed Arif, 35, describing the thief who took his mobile phone and 400 dinars, in the street. Sweating in the sun on the roadside outside this camp, Mr. Arif, a Bangladeshi who had worked for a construction company in Tiji, in the west, added that he had not been paid for several months.

“This country is racist, there’s no other word for it,” said Mansouria Mokhefi, the director of the Middle East and Maghreb program at the Paris-based French Institute of International Relations. “There is a hierarchy of races.”

Blacks, she said, are widely referred to as “Abd,” or slaves. Bangladeshis are viewed as little better, and even Arab Egyptians and Tunisians are considered to have limited rights. As in other oil-rich nations, Libyan nationals enjoy legal rights that foreigners do not, including steep discounts on many consumer products.

But the widespread disdain for outsiders likely stems from Libya’s tradition of deep tribal loyalties, Ms. Mokhefi said.  “Relations are really confined to the family, to the clan,” she said, and many Libyans harbor a fundamental mistrust and distaste for those from the outside.

The current uprisings, which “we’d like to see as a democratic revolution,” might well prove less aligned with values of tolerance than Western nations hope, Ms. Mokhefi said. Libyan attitudes are “not going to change from one day to the next because Qaddafi leaves,” she added.

Tents provided by the United Nations, at the Choucha Transit Camp.

Many migrants here assumed the same, and said they would never return to the country, should Col. Qaddafi fall or not. Most said they had come to Libya with little notion of the discrimination with which they would be treated.

“Initially, we never knew,” said Mr. Eke, the Nigerian electrical technician. And having arrived in Libya, often at great cost and physical struggle, few have typically chosen to leave.

“You don’t want to go back to your country empty-handed,” said Mr. Eke, the eldest of nine children, and his family’s primary breadwinner. Most months, he sent between $200 and $300 back to Nigeria from Libya. As was the case for many others, he said, his only choice was to stay.

“What else can we do?” he said.

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in the The New York Times on March 8, 2011.

The no-man's land between Tunisia and Libya, at Ras Ajdir.

RAS AJDIR BORDER CROSSING, Tunisia — There is no civil war in Libya, they say, no bombs, no fighting, no fear.

“There are no revolutionaries,” said Fouzi Ali Khalefa Lagerebi, 22, a trim, newly minted Libyan policeman. “I recommend you watch the national Libyan channel. Everyone is with Qaddafi.”

Such is one of the surreal mantras of the Libyans who cross in and out of Tunisia every day at this dusty, dilapidated border station. They enter alongside the thousands of migrant workers who continue to flee the violence the Libyans often deny. “Mia, mia!” many Libyans say — “Everything is fine!” — on their way to the nearby towns where they sell Libyan clothes and gasoline, and buy the food and medicine they cannot find on their side of the border.

Most refuse to speak to reporters, peeling off in battered Mercedes sedans and low-slung Toyota Hiluxes. Those who are willing to describe the situation in western Libya typically tell of a state of total calm, or else, like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, assert that what little violence is occurring is carried out by Al Qaeda fighters and drugged youths. There are rumors of spies recording license plate numbers, and reports of detention of Libyans who stop to speak to journalists.

Some of the muddled accounts are testament, experts suggest, to the climate of fear that still pervades the west of Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya, where rebels and loyalist forces continue to battle for control. Other accounts seem to reflect a wholesale denial of reality, a remarkable willingness to take Colonel Qaddafi at his every hyperbolic word, or at least a decided taste for conspiracy narratives.

Mr. Lagerebi had come from the small northwestern city of Zaltan to fill prescriptions for his family. A strip of green cotton hung from the rearview mirror of his car, a symbol of his support for the Qaddafi government.

“He is the guide of the revolution, a true leader,” Mr. Lagerebi said, and “he subsidizes everything.”

Foreign reporters have concocted lies about violence in cities across Libya, he said, though he could not suggest why. “There’s nothing happening,” he insisted. “They’re faking it.”

“That is not my Libya,” he said.

The 230,000 migrant workers who have left Libya since mid-February did so at the behest of the Libyan people, Mr. Lagerebi went on. “We don’t want them here anymore,” he explained, saying they brought sickness and filth into the country.

Many appear less certain than Mr. Lagerebi of the narrative they ought to offer to outsiders. Hussein Aead Alaffe, 36, had come to Tunisia from the embattled city of Zawiyah to escape the “stress” of the fighting there, he said.

“I don’t go outside at all; I’m scared of the rebels,” he said, explaining that the fighters were “people taking drugs, and Al Qaeda, or something else.”

“In Zawiyah,” said Mr. Alaffe, wearing a worn leather jacket and seated behind the wheel of a new black Mazda S.U.V., “if you raise the green flag of Muammar el-Qaddafi, the rebels will shoot you.”

Moments earlier, though, he was describing the calm that he said reigned in the city. He had neither seen nor heard small-arms or artillery fire, he said, despite widespread reports of heavy shelling and fighting in the streets before loyalist forces took control in recent days. What little fighting there was had been confined to the city center, he said, and was wildly exaggerated by the news media.

“Praise be to God, everything in Zawiyah is quite good,” he said. “It’s odd what I see on television.”

Mr. Alaffe drove off as a dozen Tunisian men crowded the driver’s side window of his car, shouting, “You are telling lies!”

A lanky young man from Zuwarah said Libyans seen speaking with journalists were being detained by the police. “Everything there is possible,” said the man, 21, sweating nervously in a Mercedes jalopy.

His heart seemed to race beneath a thin sweater. He declined to give his name, fearing repercussions.

There has long been an ingrained culture of fearful obedience and paranoia in Libya, as under other similar governments, experts and former residents say.

“Libyans are accustomed to not speaking about Qaddafi,” said Luis Martinez, the director of the Center for Research on Africa and the Mediterranean, in Rabat, Morocco. After 42 years under Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, he said, “They have assimilated the notion that one doesn’t speak about all of this.”

He judged Libyan concerns about spies unsurprising, and perhaps well founded. “The power of this regime has been in making people believe it is everywhere,” Mr. Martinez said, adding that the secret police had long been a widely felt presence in Libya and that critics of the government had long been known to “disappear.”

“They don’t have the culture of expressing themselves,” said Mounia Kaddour, 23, a Tunisian student who lived with her family in Zawiyah until she was 20. Libyans are “crazy” with fear and paranoia, she said, though she acknowledged that their concerns were probably legitimate. Asked what became of Libyans who spoke against the government, she grimly drew her thumb across her neck.

Lazhar Taieb, 45, a craggy Tunisian selling cigarettes and chewing gum from a wooden box on the pavement of this border station, claimed to know several Tunisians paid by Colonel Qaddafi’s government to spy on Libyans here.

“Tunisia is full of Qaddafi’s spies,” he exclaimed. He said he understood the hesitance of many Libyans here to speak of the violence in Libya.

“They know the trouble that would be coming for them in Libya,” he said, but added, “When they feel the regime is going to fall, then you’ll begin to hear many stories.”

A small number of people have described the fighting in Libya, with caution.

Behind the lonely cafe and general store at the border crossing, one Libyan man dressed in black spoke in hushed tones as he siphoned Libyan gasoline out of a black late-model Chevrolet into plastic canisters for sale in Tunisia, at a 1,000 percent markup.

“There are Libyans here who are listening,” explained the man, 28, from Zawiyah. “This is normal, it’s Qaddafi’s regime.” He repeatedly asked a visitor to hide a notebook, burying his chin inside a raised jacket collar, his eyes following passing Libyan cars and trucks. He said Libyan customs officials kept a list of citizens not to be permitted out of the country.

Libyans “want to speak out,” he said, “but they can’t.” He declined to give his name. “If I were in Benghazi, I would,” he said, smiling, referring to the rebel stronghold in eastern Libya.

How could he be sure a reporter was not a spy for Colonel Qaddafi’s government?

“That,” he replied, laughing, “I leave in God’s hands.”

And why had he chosen to speak? He threw up his hands and grinned.

“I haven’t spoken,” he said.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on March 15, 2011.