PRESS RELEASE
Libya’s Tripoli ‘Government’ Demonstrates Weakness, Sentences Qaddafi’s Son to Death
July 29, 2015 (EIRNS)—Four years after the Obama-Sarkozy-Cameron war against Libya, the country is in a state of anarchy and a growing proportion of the population would like to have Qaddafi back. Muammar Qaddafi is dead, but his son Saif al-Islam Qaddafi is alive, although jailed. In a sign of weakness, the so-called Tripoli government, run by the Libyan Dawn coalition, handed down a death sentence against Saif. The sentence is a farce, because Saif is jailed in Zintan, in the hands of anti-Tripoli militias in Tobruk.
Indeed, a report from Libya by Corriere della Sera senior foreign policy editor Lorenzo Cremonesi indicates that increasing sections of the population are nostalgic of Qaddafi and regret the overthrowing of the regime. This includes not only former Qaddafi supporters, but also his enemies and people who actively participated in the revolution.
The most widespread comment in Tripoli is: "End of sovereignty, collapse of the state, triumph of chaos," Cremonesi reports.
Issam Zuber, a political commentator who has been repeatedly arrested by the militias, tells Cremonesi that the European effort of a "national unity" is an illusion. "Until spring last year, many of us believed that Libya would rise up; the future seemed better than the four decades of Qaddafi’s dictatorship. Our illusions have been swept away by the fighting in July-August 2014. The militias split: Misurata against Zintan, to control the Tripoli airport. We hoped they would find an agreement, but at the end hate prevailed and those madmen decided to destroy [the airport]. Afterwards, the abyss. And today, European leaders are wrong on the possibility of a UN-mediated agreement between the governments in Tobruk and Tripoli. There is no agreement, there is total war among anarchist militias, dominated by more and more radical elements."
Although the report is not explicit, the conclusion for insiders is that Italy and the West should definitively scrap the UN initiative. There are not many alternatives, except the Egyptian-Russian option.
