TRIPOLI: The president of Libya’s highest political authority yesterday called off plans to assault rebels blockading oil terminals, giving them two weeks to stand down voluntarily or again face military action.
On Monday, General National Congress (GNC) head Nuri Abu Sahmein ordered an assault on rebels demanding regional autonomy in the east and who began exporting oil this week in defiance of the central government.
But yesterday, he said “we have decided to give an ultimatum of two weeks at the most” to lift the blockade.
He added that military action was being suspended for the moment.
But if the ultimatum is not respected, he said “the decision of the chief of the armed forces (Abu Sahmein himself) will be put into action by the Libyan army”.
The developments came as Islamists, buoyed by parliament’s ouster of liberal-backed premier Ali Zeidan on Tuesday, moved to consolidate their new-found power.
Zeidan fled Libya via Malta to Germany, government sources in Valletta said.
The GNC named Defence Minister Abdullah Al Thani caretaker premier for the two weeks it now has to agree on a permanent successor.
But as Zeidan complained repeatedly while in office, real power over the armed forces lies not with the defence minister but with Abu Sahmein.
In the absence of a large enough regular army force to take on the heavily armed rebels, the advance guard of the task force is composed largely of militia loyal to the GNC.
Rebels of the Cyrenaica Defence Force withdrew to the eastern region’s historic border late on Tuesday after Libya Shield Force militiamen pushed them out of the central coastal city of Sirte, a rebel commander said.
He warned that the offensive by the fighters, mostly from Libya’s third city Misrata, risked plunging the North African country back into civil war.
The advancing force was “a tribal militia, not a regular army unit”, he said, asking not to be identified.
“Our forces have pulled back to Wadi Lahmar,” some 90 kilometres east of Sirte, he added.
The town lies on the historic border between Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica region, whose pre-1963 autonomy the rebels want restored.
The opposing forces were allies during the Nato-backed uprising of 2011 which ended the 42-year dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, who made his last stand in Sirte, his home town.
But the Cyrenaicans’ weekend move to load oil onto a North Korean-flagged tanker in a deal not sanctioned by the state-run National Oil Corp prompted the GNC chief to authorise military action.
The rebels had been blockading the main eastern oil export terminals since July, but loading the Morning Glory was a major escalation and triggered Zeidan’s ouster.
Just hours after the GNC vote, the Islamist-controlled Tripoli military council ordered the “withdrawal of all forces occupying strategic positions, particularly inside Tripoli international airport and on the airport road”.
That was a clear reference to the Zintan militia, which has been deployed at the airport since the 2011 uprising in which it played a major role in capturing Tripoli from Gaddafi’s forces.
AFP
