Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A defiant Muammar Gadhafi vowed Tuesday to die “a martyr” in Libya and said he would crush a revolt which has seen eastern regions break free from four decades of his rule and has claimed the lives of 300 people, according to the first official figures.

But media reports put the number of casualties at 3,000, including those wounded in the unrest. The reports said the figure included 700 fatalities in Tripoli alone.
Gadhafi’s government said the 300, including 58 soldiers, had been killed in the protests, which began on Feb. 15. A partial count by the Human Rights Watch put the death toll at nearly 300 people. It said 62 people had died in clashes in Tripoli in the past two days. The International Federation for Human Rights put the toll at between 300 and 400.

Libya’s Interior Minister Abdel Fattah Younis announced his support for the “Feb. 17” revolution, becoming the latest Libyan official to defect, news channel Al-Jazeera reported Tuesday.
Swathed in brown robes, Gadhafi seethed with anger and banged the podium outside one of his residences that was damaged in a 1986 U.S. bombing raid that attempted to kill him. Next to him stood a monument of a fist crushing a U.S. fighter jet.

“I am not going to leave this land. I will die here as a martyr,” Gadhafi said on state television, refusing to bow to calls from his own diplomats, soldiers and protesters who braved a fierce crackdown to clamor in streets for him to go. “Moammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution, I am not a president to step down … This is my country. Moammar is not a president to leave his post, Moammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.”
“I shall remain here defiant,” said Gadhafi, who has ruled the mainly desert country with a mixture of populism and tight control since taking power in a military coup in 1969.

“Libya wants glory, Libya wants to be at the pinnacle, at the pinnacle of the world,” he said.
Anti-government protesters were “rats and mercenaries” who deserved the death penalty, he said in the rambling, 75-minute speech. Gadhafi said he would call upon the people to “cleanse Libya house by house” unless protesters surrendered.

He urged Libyans to take to the streets to show their loyalty. “All of you who love Moammar Gadhafi, go out on the streets, secure the streets, don’t be afraid of them … Chase them, arrest them, hand them over,” he said. “You are millions while they are only 100.”
He said the regime has “not used any force yet.”
“If it gets to the point where we need to use force, we will use it according to international law and the Libyan Constitution and laws,” he said.

Gadhafi accused the Arab media, which “serve the devil,” of “distorting” the image of the protesters.
Trying to discredit the protesters, he said “no sound person has taken part in these actions, they are all children.” He added that “peaceful protest is one thing but armed rebellion is another.”
“They are turning Libya into an [Islamic] emirate of Zawahri and Bin Laden, a new Afghanistan,” he said, of the rebels. 

“Do you want America to occupy you, like Afghanistan and Iraq?”
“Forward, forward, forward!” he barked at the speech’s conclusion.
In a sign of the extent of the breakdown in Gadhafi’s regime, one of his closest associates, Younis, his interior minister and commander of the powerful Thunderbolt commando brigade, announced in Benghazi that he was
defecting and other armed forces should join the revolt.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya aired video footage showing Younis at his desk reading a statement urging the Libyan Army to join the people and their “legitimate demands.”
Several hundred people held a pro-Gadhafi rally in Tripoli’s central Green Square Tuesday, a Reuters reporter there said. “Our leader!” and “We follow your path!” they chanted, waving green Libyan flags and holding aloft portraits of Gadhafi.

“There are several hundred [Gadhafi] supporters making their way into the city centre. They are in cars, making lots of noise and carrying his portrait,” said a resident of the Mediterranean coastal city of 2 million, which is key to controlling Libya. “They fired shots in the air to celebrate.”

In Sabratah, 80 kilometers west of the capital, the Libyan Army had deployed a “large number” of soldiers after protesters destroyed almost all the security services offices, the online Quryna newspaper said.
Tripoli residents Tuesday were recovering from a night of rampage through multiple neighborhoods that began the night before and lasted until dawn. Some residents ventured out to find stores open for food, wary of militia attacks.

Refugees streaming across Libya’s eastern border into Egypt said Gadhafi was using tanks, warplanes and foreign mercenaries to fight the growing rebellion.
Eastern Libya is no longer under Gadhafi’s control, rebel soldiers in the city of Tobruk told a Reuters reporter there.
Tobruk residents said the city had been in the hands of the people for three days. They said smoke rising above the city was from a munitions depot bombed by troops loyal to one of Gadhafi’s sons. There was the occasional explosion.

“All the eastern regions are out of Gadhafi’s control … The people and the army are hand-in-hand here,” said former army Major Hany Saad Marjaa.
The Libyan side of the Egyptian border was controlled by armed anti-Gadhafi rebels who welcomed visitors from Egypt.

Protesters also claimed control of the city of Ajdabiya, about 450 miles farther west along the Mediterranean coast, said Tawfiq al-Shahbi, a protest organizer in the eastern city of Tobruk.

Ajdabiya is a key city near the oil fields of central and eastern Libya. Protesters and local tribesmen were protecting several of the fields and facilities around the city, said one resident, Ahmad al-Zawi.

A committee was set up to organize and distribute the use of weapons confiscated from government warehouses, recruiting policemen and officers to carry the weapons for city protection, fearing a new attack. – Agencies