Libya's ex-justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Ajleil has led the formation of an interim government based in the eastern city of Benghazi, the online edition of the Libya's Quryna newspaper reported on Saturday.
Quryna quoted him as saying that Muammar Gadhafi "alone" bore responsibility "for the crimes that have occurred" in Libya and that his tribe, Gaddadfa, were forgiven.
"Abud Ajleil insisted on the unity of the homeland's territory, and that Libya is free and its capital is Tripoli," Quryna quoted him as saying in a telephone conversation.
Much of eastern Libya, including Benghazi, is in opposition forces' hands. Benghazi has been the center of the Libyan uprising, inspired by Egypt and Tunisia and frustrated by Gadhafi's more than 40 years of authoritarian rule.
"Abud Ajleil insisted on the unity of the homeland's territory, and that Libya is free and its capital is Tripoli," Quryna quoted him as saying in a telephone conversation.
Much of eastern Libya, including Benghazi, is in opposition forces' hands. Benghazi has been the center of the Libyan uprising, inspired by Egypt and Tunisia and frustrated by Gadhafi's more than 40 years of authoritarian rule.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Gadhafi's strongest European ally, said Saturday that the Libyan leader does not seem to be in control of his country anymore, and German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Saturday that he believes Gadhafi's rule is over in Libya.
The Gadhafi government, who has been carrying out a violent crackdown on anti-Gadhafi protests, was arming civilian supporters on Saturday to set up checkpoints and roving patrols around the Libyan capital to control movement and quash dissent, residents said.
Moreover on Saturday, the UN Security Council met for the second time in two days to discuss ways to punish the Gadhafi government for the deadly crackdown against anti-government demonstrators in Libya.
During the meeting, UN Security Council envoys clashed over a proposal to refer Libya to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
It was unclear whether the call for an immediate ICC referral would be cut to get unanimous agreement on the other draft's other punitive measures.
BY EDWARD WYATT
February 27, 2011
The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday night to impose sanctions on Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his inner circle of advisers, and called for an international war crimes investigation into “widespread and systemic attacks” against Libyan citizens who have protested against the government over the last two weeks.
The vote, only the second time the Security Council has referred a member state to the International Criminal Court, comes after a week of bloody crackdowns in Libya in which Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces have fired on protesters, killing hundreds.
Also on Saturday, President Obama said that Colonel Qaddafi had lost the legitimacy to rule and should step down. His statement, which the White House said was made during a telephone call with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, was the strongest yet from any American official against Colonel Qaddafi.
The Security Council resolution also imposes an arms embargo against Libya and an international travel ban on 16 Libyan leaders, and freezes the assets of Colonel Qaddafi and members of his family, including four sons and a daughter. Also included in the sanctions were measures against defense and intelligence officials who are believed to have played a role in the violence against civilians in Libya.
Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The U.N. Security Council called for an international war crimes investigation into “widespread and systemic attacks” against Libyan citizens.
BY EDWARD WYATT
February 27, 2011
The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday night to impose sanctions on Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his inner circle of advisers, and called for an international war crimes investigation into “widespread and systemic attacks” against Libyan citizens who have protested against the government over the last two weeks.
The vote, only the second time the Security Council has referred a member state to the International Criminal Court, comes after a week of bloody crackdowns in Libya in which Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces have fired on protesters, killing hundreds.
Also on Saturday, President Obama said that Colonel Qaddafi had lost the legitimacy to rule and should step down. His statement, which the White House said was made during a telephone call with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, was the strongest yet from any American official against Colonel Qaddafi.
The Security Council resolution also imposes an arms embargo against Libya and an international travel ban on 16 Libyan leaders, and freezes the assets of Colonel Qaddafi and members of his family, including four sons and a daughter. Also included in the sanctions were measures against defense and intelligence officials who are believed to have played a role in the violence against civilians in Libya.
The sanctions did not include imposing a no-fly zone over Libya, a possibility that had been discussed by officials from the United States and its allies in recent days.
The resolution also prohibited all United Nations member nations from providing any kind of arms to Libya or allowing the transportation of mercenaries, who are believed to have played a part in the recent violence. Suspected shipments of arms should be halted and inspected, the resolution said.
While the sanctions are likely to take weeks to have an effect, they reflected widespread condemnation of Colonel Qaddafi’s tactics, by far the most brutal crackdown in the region since antigovernment demonstrations began.
Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, called the resolution “a clear warning to the Libyan government that it must stop the killing.”
But Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, warned Saturday that sanctions would do more harm to Libya’s people than to Colonel Qaddafi.
The attacks by Libya’s security forces on the protesters led the United States to close its embassy in Tripoli on Friday and Britain and France to close theirs on Saturday.
The United States on Friday imposed unilateral sanctions against Libya. It also froze billions of dollars of Libyan government assets and announced that it would do the same
with the assets of high-ranking Libyan officials who took part in the violent crackdown.
At the United Nations, Security Council members initially disagreed during deliberations Saturday whether to approve the resolution, circulated by France, Germany, Britain and the United States, that would refer Colonel Qaddafi and his top aides to the International Criminal Court for prosecution, according to a senior United States official who observed the negotiations.
Libya’s own delegation to the United Nations had renounced Colonel Qaddafi on Monday, and later sent a letter to the Security Council president, Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti of Brazil, supporting such a referral. That statement, the official said, went far to persuade reluctant Council members that they should go ahead with the referral.
After the resolution was approved, Libya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdurrahman Shalgam, who was once a close confidant of Colonel Qaddafi, said it would “help put an end to this fascist regime, which is still in existence in Tripoli.”
While some other details of the resolution were haggled over, the measure was remarkable for how quickly it came together, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve the confidentiality of the discussions. The official said the mood in the chamber was focused, with representatives of several countries expressing concern about the well-being of their citizens and generally exhibiting “astrong sense of urgency.”
Much uncertainty remained throughout the afternoon about how China, one of the Security Council’s five permanent members, would vote after having expressed doubt about the referral to the international court. After the Chinese delegation consulted with Beijing, it signaled it would vote to approve the measure.
The Security Council cast a similar vote before, in 2005 when it called for an investigation of violence and crimes against humanity in the Darfur region of Sudan, the American official said. The United States abstained from that vote, which the official attributed to “a different administration.” The court has indicted Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on charges of genocide.
The United Nations resolution on Saturday also established a committee to consider whether additional, targeted sanctions should be imposed on other individuals and entities “who commit serious human rights abuses, including ordering attacks and aerial bombardments on civilian populations or facilities.”
In Washington, a White House account of Saturday’s telephone call between Mr. Obama and Chancellor Merkel of Germany said the president told Mrs. Merkel that “when a leader’s only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now.”
Such abhorrence for a dictator who has ruled oil-rich Libya since 1969 would have been unimaginable even two months ago. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi may have been regarded as slightly odd, even a potentially dangerous madcap with intellectual pretensions, in the smug world of international politics—only the irrepressible Oriana Fallaci was audacious enough to describe him as "clinically stupid", a view that is now conventional wisdom after his bizarre TV address last week. But this did not stop sundry ex-prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, heads of reputable academic institutions and sundry left-wing 'revolutionaries' from descending on Tripoli to confer respectability on the "Green Book" and the so-called Third Universal Theory.
Like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez—the man most likely to offer 'Brother Leader' sanctuary in case he opts for a one-way ticket out of Tripoli—Gaddafi sought to buy his way into the league table of erudition and greatness. His Zurich-registered Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation lavishly patronized apparently good causes. The London School of Economics, where his son Saif al-Islam was taught democracy and good governance, was a big beneficiary of his largesse. As a 'thank you' gesture, it hosted Gaddafi at Houghton Street and invited Saif to deliver the Ralph Miliband lecture for 2010.
Great centres of learning, it is said, are amoral about the colour of donations—there is no stigma attached to the munificence of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. Unfortunately, the pursuit of scholarship was only a small part of Gaddafi's foreign policy megalomania. When it suited him, he was equally generous in his funding of terrorism and armed struggle. Libya's role in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque and the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie has been established. Less well-known are its sponsorship of the massacre of Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics and its arms supplies to the Irish Republican Army. The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya also gave asylum to two army officers responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Sheikh Mujib-ur Rehman.
The hospitality Gaddafi showered on Mujib's killers stemmed partly from his distaste for a country created by "Soviet imperialist designs" and partly from his partiality to Islamic populism. Gaddafi hero-worshipped President Nasser of Egypt but, unlike Nasser, he was no secularist—he even enthused over an Islamic Europe in the near future. This may account for his wariness of India. He was openly supportive of Pakistan in the Bangladesh war of 1971 and abused Indira Gandhi in a language unacceptable in international diplomacy; and in his only appearance at the UN General Assembly in 2009, he called for the creation of an independent state in Jammu and Kashmir. Gaddafi also opposed India's claim for a permanent seat in the Security Council and provided covert assistance to Pakistan's nuclear programme. His support for Pakistan was, however, tempered by his deep anger over the execution of his 'friend' Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, an anger that has persisted.
Gaddafi's eccentric ways are well known. What is, however, perplexing is the willingness of the Indian foreign policy establishment to walk the extra mile to court him. In 1984, for example, Indira Gandhi was persuaded to go to Libya on a state visit. The visit proved a disaster after the Libyan authorities insisted that the Prime Minister cover her forearms.
Part of this desperation to oblige may have been dictated by energy security. But there was a political subtext to the prevailing fascination for Arab and African dictators. Since Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed his unwavering commitment to all "anti-colonial" struggles, India was inclined to overlook post-colonial tyranny for the sake of being on the right side of history. Delhi even turned a blind eye to the harassment and expulsion of Indians in Burma, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Uganda. Every disreputable Third World tyrant was routinely invited as chief guest on Republic Day and honoured with state-sponsored 'peace' prizes. If Gaddafi and, for that matter, Robert Mugabe haven't been specially hosted, it is not on account of their unsuitability.
The West kowtowed to dictators for either strategic or economic reasons. India flattered them even when it hurt its self-interests. The details of Saddam Hussein's oil-for-food payoffs have provided some rationale to apparent acts of irrationality. If the files from Gaddafi's foreign ministry ever come into public view—as it should—India will be a little more knowledgeable about why a vibrant democracy hasn't been more discerning in its foreign policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment