Thursday, March 24, 2011

PARIS: Representatives of the Libyan opposition’s National Libyan Council said in Paris that a post-Gadhafi regime would be “democratic and secular.”

They also predicted late Tuesday that the embattled Libyan leader would fall in 10 days if the coalition of Western powers continued its U.N.-mandated strikes.
“The future Libya will be democratic and secular,” said Mansour Saif al-Nasr, the opposition council’s European Union spokesman.

“The Libyan people are a moderate people, and the state will not be led by clerics,” he told a large gathering of writers, ex-ministers and reporters assembled by Bernard Henry-Levy, a French intellectual who helped to facilitate France’s recognition of the rebel authority.
Once Libyan territory is “liberated,” the council would give way to a constituent assembly that would draft a constitution and establish a democratic and secular state, the 60-year-old former diplomat turned businessman said.
There is no shortage of qualified people to participate, within Libya and abroad, he said. There are some 30,000 Libyans with doctoral degrees living in Europe, the United States or in the Gulf region, he indicated.

Nasr, who has been in exile since Gadhafi’s 1969 revolution, said elections would be “free and transparent.”
The NLC has 31 members, but the identities of only eight have been revealed because most still live in zones held by forces loyal to Gadhafi.
“They are mainly lawyers and professors. All regions of Libya are represented, and there are members from all the tribes,” including Gadhafi’s, Nasr said.

Ali Zeidan, one of INC’s members, told reporters the conflict could be over “in 10 days if the airstrikes continue with the same intensity to take out armored cars and heavy artillery. We have enough men to march on Tripoli, we are sure of victory.”

“We want the elimination of the Gadhafi regime to be done by the Libyans themselves,” Zeidan said, adding that he wanted the international community to train and arm the rebel fighters.
“The wish of all the Libyan people is that Gadhafi stays alive and is then arrested and tried for all his crimes against humanity,” he told reporters. “We have the men. What we are asking for is the arms.”

Foreign oil companies have billions of dollars worth of assets at stake in Libya and Zeidan promised those contracts would be honored if power changed hands.
“We will respect the agreements that were signed with other countries, but certainly in the future, we will consider the countries that helped us,” he said. 

Nasr rejected the idea that Libya was in the midst of a civil war. “It’s a people who are fed up after 42 years of dictatorship. There is no risk of Libya breaking up,” he said.

France was the first nation to recognize the rebel-led authority, which it did on March 10 following a meeting in Paris between NLC members and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Britain quickly followed suit, identifying the opposition body as its “valid interlocutor.”

In Benghazi, the head of a rebel training camp echoed Zeidan’s call on the West to arm the anti-Gadhafi fighters.
“We are waiting for support. We need ammunition. We need weapons. Because we don’t have enough to move toward the west, to Tripoli and Sirte,” said Fawzi Buktif, an oil project engineer who now runs a training base outside Benghazi.

“We would like Western trainers. We don’t want forces, [but] trainers and the weapons that will come from them,” Buktif told Reuters in an interview Tuesday outside a former Gadhafi military camp, now dubbed the “Feb. 17 Martyrs Training Camp”.

Buktif did not give details about numbers of fighters who are being trained at the base or say who was doing the training. But he said rebels were fighting Gadhafi’s forces with weapons from “the old regime” but that this was not enough to form an army. – Reuters, AFP