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| Africa North |
| Gaddafi regime accuses Nato of piracy |
| 2011-05-07 |
| [The Nation (Nairobi)] Muammar Qadaffy's regime today reacted angrily to a NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants... -led decision to provide funding to the three-month-old rebellion against his rule in Libya, describing as "piracy" plans to tap its assets frozen abroad. The fund, set up at a meeting of the International Contact Group on Libya in Rome on Thursday, is intended to provide an emergency lifeline to the rebels, whose provisional administration has no source of financing to replace receipts from oil exports which have come to a virtual halt. It will initially receive international donations, while blocked assets -- estimated to be worth $60 billion (Sh4.98 trillion) -- will be used to finance it at a later date. Italian Foreign minister Franco Frattini, whose government hosted the meeting, said $250 million (Sh20.7 billion) was available in humanitarian aid. Wealthy Gulf states Kuwait and Qatar have pledged to be major donors. The funds being made available are far less than the figure of up to $3 billion (Sh250 billion) that had been sought by the rebels but their leader Mahmud Jibril said: "It's a good start." Jibril said the three-billion figure was in fact "a six-month budget". French Foreign minister Alain Juppe said the new fund -- to be managed alternately by La Belle France and Italia, the two European governments which have recognised the rebel administration -- could be up and running "within weeks". He acknowledged that it would take longer to tap Libyan government assets frozen abroad under UN sanctions to secure a longer-term credit line as sought by the rebels. Unblocking the assets "poses legal problems," Juppe said. But the prospect of seeing funds it regards as its own used to finance the rebellion against it infuriated Qadaffy's government. "Libya still, according to the international law, is one sovereign state and any use of the frozen assets is like piracy on the high seas," deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim told a Tripoli news conference. Kaim said there would no let-up in the government's attempts to block off the maritime lifeline to the besieged city of Misrata -- the rebels' last bastion in the west. "We will not allow those ships to bring arms to the city and then to evacuate some criminals," he said, after an International Organisation for Migration ship on Wednesday offloaded supplies and onloaded refugees at the city's port amid shelling by Qadaffy forces. Human rights watchdog "The scale of the relentless attacks that we have seen by Qadaffy forces to intimidate the residents of Misrata for more than two months is truly horrifying," said Amnesty senior adviser Donatella Rovera. "It shows a total disregard for the lives of ordinary people and is in clear breach of international humanitarian law." At the Rome meeting, the rebel leader outlined a political plan that would be enacted if Qadaffy leaves power in which an interim government would hold a referendum on a new constitution and parliamentary and presidential elections within eight months. Jibril said the rebels would soon contact the United Nations ...an organization whose definition of human rightsis interesting, to say the least... to organise municipal elections in the cities it already controls as a way of showing its commitment to democratic change in Libya. |
| Posted by:Fred |