FRI 29 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Apr 7, 2011
Source: The Daily Star
Gadhafi using human shields, says NATO as U.S. rejects cease-fire plea

Thursday, April 07, 2011


BENGHAZI: Moammar Gadhafi is using human shields to foil airstrikes on his forces, NATO said Wednesday, as Washington dismissed a letter by the Libyan leader in which he appealed directly to President Barack Obama to halt military strikes.


Three days of attacks by Gadhafi’s forces have halted oil production in rebel-held fields in the country’s east, a rebel spokesman said Wednesday as anti-Gadhafi fighters regained ground in a new advance on an oil port.
Asked about the letter, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Gadhafi needs to carry out a cease-fire, withdraw forces from cities taken by force, give up power and leave Libya.


“With respect to the letter you referred to, I think that Mr. Gadhdafi knows what he must do,” Clinton told a news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini.
“There needs to be a cease-fire, his forces need to withdraw from the cities that they have forcibly taken at great violence and human cost. There needs to be a decision made about his departure from power and … his departure from Libya,” Clinton told reporters.


“I don’t think there is any mystery about what is expected from Mr. Gadhafi at this time,” she added.
Addressing Obama as “our son” and “Excellency,” Gadhafi implored him to stop the NATO-led air campaign, which he called an “unjust war against a small people of a developing country.”


“You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action,” Gadhafi wrote.
Clinton also defended NATO’s performance after the alliance found itself on the defensive against rebel complaints that airstrikes had subsided since it took over the mission from a U.S.-British-French coalition last week.


Spokeswoman Carmen Romero maintained Wednesday that “the pace of our operations continues unabated. The ambition and the position of our strikes has not changed.”
She said relieving the siege of Misrata, a rebel enclave in the west, remained the priority but conceded that Gadhafi’s army was proving a resourceful, elusive target.


“The situation on the ground is constantly evolving. Gadhafi’s forces are changing tactics, using civilian vehicles, hiding tanks in cities such as Misrata and using human shields to hide behind,” Romero said in Brussels.


French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said NATO operations were at risk of getting “bogged down” because Gadhafi’s forces were making it harder for alliance pilots to distinguish them from civilians by hunkering down in populated areas. He told France Info radio that he would address the issue shortly with the head of NATO, adding that Misrata’s ordeal “cannot go on” but that “the situation is unclear.”

 

Admiral Edouard Guillaud, France’s armed forces chief, told Europe 1 radio: “I would like things to go faster but … protecting civilians means not firing anywhere near them. That is precisely the difficulty.”


Meanwhile, production at rebel-held oilfields in eastern Libya has stopped after they came under attack from forces loyal to Gadhafi, spokesman Hafiz Ghoga told reporters in Benghazi.
Oilfields in Misla and the Waha area were hit by Gadhafi’s artillery Tuesday and Wednesday, he said.
“These oilfields are the ones that pump oil to Tobruk,” said Ghoga. “They stopped pumping today.”


Both fields are in the desert, hundreds of kilometers south of the rebel-held town of Ajdabiya. Rebels have been trying to resume exports to raise revenue for their uprising.
Ghoga said Gadhafi’s forces hit Waha’s field 103 Wednesday and Misla Tuesday after a previous attack there at the weekend.


In their eastern heartland, rebels thrust back westward toward the contested oil port of Brega, recovering mostly desert terrain lost in a pell-mell retreat from Gadhafi’s superior firepower the day before.
Rebels returning to the tiny outpost of Al-Arbaeen, midway between Brega and their frontline town of Ajdabiya, spoke of rocket duels close to Brega’s port as both sides strived to end a ragged stalemate in the oil-producing state’s civil war.


There were reports of mortar and rocket battles near the town on Libya’s desolate Mediterranean highway 80 kilometers west of Ajdabiya. Fighting had resumed at daybreak after government forces were resupplied with ammunition and swung east from Brega, rebel officer Mohammad al-Masrafy told Reuters.


Masrafy told Reuters that the front line was about 20 kilometers east of Brega, the focus of a weeklong to-and-fro battle. A sustained government assault Tuesday drove rebels about halfway back to Ajdabiya, gateway to their Benghazi powerbase. – Reuters, AP



 
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