A British fighter jet bombed the Libyan city of Sirte on May 8, 2011. The imperialists have been bombing the North African state since March 19., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
ICC Envoys Visit Detained Colleagues In Libya
6/13/2012 2:51 AM ET
(RTTNews) - A delegation from the International Criminal Court (ICC) has visited their colleagues held by a local militia in Libya last week on charges of smuggling documents to Moammar Qadhafi's detained son, media reports citing officials said late on Tuesday.
An ICC delegation was detained in the town of Zintan last Thursday after they met with Saif al-Islam, the son of former Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi. They have since been placed in preventive detention for 45 days.
Libyan officials said later that the delegation was detained after Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor passed some coded documents from former Qadhafi regime henchman Mohammed Ismail, who is currently Libya's most wanted man, to Saif during their meeting.
Melinda was appointed by the ICC to represent Saif in the case brought against him. Saif has been under detention in Zintan after being captured by the rebel forces in Libya's southern desert in November. The ICC wants to try Saif in connection with his role in attacks on protesters and rebels during Libya's pro-democracy uprising last year. But the Libyans want Saif to be tried in the north African nation itself.
Apart from Taylor, the detained ICC officials include her Lebanese translator Helene Assaf, Russian Alexander Khodakov and Spaniard Esteban Peralta Losilla. Only Taylor and Assaf are accused of passing the documents to Saif. It is not yet clear whether the Russian and the Spaniard are being held against their will or are staying willfully out of solidarity for their detained colleagues.
"I can confirm that the ICC delegation entered Zintan and visited their colleagues," Ahmed al-Jehani, Libya's ICC envoy, said on Tuesday, adding that the delegation was allowed to visit their colleagues despite being halted initially at the entrance to the town by militia members.
Jehani said the ICC delegation was accompanied by the national ambassadors to Libya for each of those in custody, and insisted that the detained ICC officials were not being held in a prison but a guest house.
His claims were later confirmed by Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, who said the Australian envoy to Libya had informed him after Tuesday's meeting that the detainees were "under no duress, they are enjoying air conditioning and television and fridges with fruit and yoghurt."
Earlier in the week, the Hague-based ICC had appealed to the Libyan transitional government to immediately release four of its detained staff members, and said the U.N.-backed court was communicating with the relevant authorities in Libya to ensure their release.
"We are very concerned about the safety of our staff in the absence of any contact with them. These four international civil servants have immunity when on an official ICC mission," ICC President, Judge Sang-Hyun Song, said in a news release over the weekend.
The ICC insisted that its staff members had traveled to Libya last week to meet with Saif in Zintan in line with an earlier pre-trial chamber decision. It stressed the trip marked a privileged visit by the Office of Public Counsel for the defense.
According to the ICC, Libya had earlier made a submission to the pre-trial chamber assuring that it would facilitate access to Saif by his lawyers. It added that the U.N. Security Council resolution that authorized it to look into the Libyan situation requires Libya to cooperate fully with the international court, and respect the legal regime imposed by the Rome Statute which emphasizes the rights of the suspects to have privileged contacts with their lawyers.
The ICC was established in 2002 as the world's first permanent war crimes court to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It is authorized to try cases involving individuals charged with war crimes committed since July 2002.
Red Cross says attack on Libya office wounds 1
CAIRO (AP) — In the second attack in two days on an international mission in Libya, the International Committee of the Red Cross said its offices in the city of Misrata were rocked by a dawn explosion Tuesday that wounded the landowner's son and seriously damaged the building.
The attack came one day after the British ambassador's vehicle was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades in the eastern city of Benghazi. Two of the ambassador's bodyguards were injured in the Monday attack, according to Britain's Foreign Office.
Days earlier, a bomb went off just outside the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. No one was injured in that attack.
The attacks were reminders of how chaotic, insecure and fragmented Libya remains eight months after an armed rebellion toppled longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The transitional leadership based in the capital of Tripoli has failed to impose its authority on much of the oil-rich North African nation. Instability has increased as cities, towns, regions, militias and tribes all act on their own, setting up independent and often conflicting power centers.
There are also concerns about the proliferation of thousands of weapons, including rockets, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Libya in the aftermath of the civil war last year.
Tuesday's explosion at the Red Cross building in Misrata, Libya's third-largest city, was the second time the body has come under attack. In May its offices in Benghazi were attacked by RPGs.
Red Cross spokeswoman Beltifa Soumaya said investigators are looking into who was behind the attack. She said the Red Cross, with four offices in Libya, has had a presence in the country since February, 2011, to assist refugees and those in need of aid after the country's civil war.
A Libyan jihadist group claimed responsibility for the attack on the U.S. consulate and for the May attack on the offices of the Red Cross in Benghazi.
The group, calling itself "Brigades of imprisoned Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman" posted a message on jihadist forums in late May saying the Red Cross in Benghazi was a target as "one of the strongholds of Christian missionary activity."
According to the SITE monitoring group, the brigade later released a three-minute video of the attack, showing a fighter preparing the RPG and firing it at the building at night.
It also released a statement on Monday, saying the attack on the U.S. consulate was a response to the drone strike that killed al-Qaida's second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi in North Waziristan, Pakistan, on June 4 and to U.S. drones flying in Libyan skies.
NATO halted its airborne missions over Libya with the end of the civil war last year.
The group is named after the blind Egyptian cleric who is serving a life sentence in the U.S. and was the spiritual leader of men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the claims, and the group had not been heard from before.
In The New Libya, Lots Of Guns And Calls For Shariah
Wednesday, 06/13/12 7:21am
Morning Edition
Steve Inskeep
Islamists with weapons stage a rally in favor of Islamic law along the corniche in Benghazi, in eastern Libya, the birthplace of the Libyan uprising that ousted Moammar Gadhafi.
NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is taking a Revolutionary Road Trip across North Africa to see how the countries that staged revolutions last year are remaking themselves. Steve and his team are traveling some 2,000 miles from Tunisia's ancient city of Carthage, across the deserts of Libya and on to Egypt's megacity of Cairo. In the Libyan towns of Benghazi and Derna, he talks to Islamists about their desire to see a new Libya ruled by Shariah law.
The other day in Benghazi, Libya, we found our vehicle surrounded by truckloads of men with machine guns.
They were waving black flags, which are associated here with radical Islam, and they were shouting "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great."
At the time, we were driving to see a protest — but it seemed the protest had found us.
These gunmen were the protesters, so we continued on, surrounded by scores of honking pickup trucks with anti-aircraft guns welded to the beds.
The rebel fighters from Libya's revolution had brought their weapons along while demanding that their country impose Shariah, or Islamic law.
The protesters came from several cities in eastern Libya.
Some drove 180 miles from Derna, a Libyan city known for producing radicals.
When several trucks pulled over, we did, too, and chatted with a gunman. He told us he was marching to demand Shariah and "to kill the infidels."
He walked away before we could get his name, a youth with a Kalashnikov rifle strapped over his shoulder and a black flag on a stick attached to his back.
It's worth keeping this rhetoric in perspective: The young man did not take the opportunity to kill the non-Muslim right in front of him.
Yearning For Rule By Peace, Not Gun
Still, some Libyans were stunned to see so large an arsenal at a political demonstration.
As we drove along, a man on the street recognized our Libyan interpreter.
He came running to catch up with us and leaped in the front seat, ranting about the armed Islamists.
"If you want to rule by Islam, it's not like that," the man says. "Even our Prophet Muhammad is not behaving like that. It's written in our Quran ... if you want to rule by religion, you have to rule by peace, not by gun, or something like that."
This man is famous in Libya: Massoud Bouisser, a singer who played in the rebels' front lines during the revolution.
He remembers religious conservatives harassing him then.
"These people, even in the front line, when I play with my guitar, always they come to make problem with me; they don't want me to sing in the front line," he says. "Always."
Bouisser did not want U.S. ground troops to come to Libya during the uprising. But he's so upset by the Islamist demonstration that he is ready for international intervention now.
"But now I agree, to see these people now, I agree to America comes to make Libya safe for at least two years, three years," he says.
That's not likely to happen anytime soon, but American officials are watching closely for signs of radical activity in eastern Libya.
Derna's Long History Of Insurgency
So we decided to drive eastward, to the city where many of those armed protesters live.
The question that's of concern to Libyan and American officials is not whether people are Islamist: This is an overwhelmingly Muslim and conservative country that's supposed to become a democracy. The question is whether some people go outside the political process, and use violence to achieve their ends.
And to learn more about the possibilities of that we've come to Derna, an old port city by the Mediterranean Sea, where a wonderful sea breeze is blowing the new Libyan flags on a row of flagpoles.
Derna is a city with a long history of insurgent movements. People here resisted Moammar Gadhafi's regime, and a few years ago, a number of people from Derna volunteered to serve as suicide bombers in Iraq.
Many men from Derna also volunteered for Libya's revolution, and the government is now trying to bring them all under a central command.
We sat down with the president of the local security committee — in effect, the commander of all Derna's gunmen — Fathi El Ajib — and asked him whether he thought it was appropriate for the men under his command to take their weapons to a political demonstration in the middle of a city.
This is wrong, he says. I don't agree with this. Libya doesn't need weapons to follow Islam.
El Ajib is well aware that there are radicals in his city.
And that led to one more question: Is there al-Qaida is Derna?
There's no al-Qaida, he says, but the thought of al-Qaida, the mentality, is here.
We began talking of one such local man with strong connection to the terrorist group.
According to a WikiLeaks document, the man spent time working for Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan.
The U.S. captured him, took him to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later sent him, without due process of law, to a prison in Gadhafi's Libya.
Now he's free, and under the name Sufiyan Qumu, he has been leading a local group of gunmen.
He had been with al-Qaida, but as for whether the Libyan gunman is still with al-Qaida, the local security chief replies: How can I know? There's no country of al-Qaida, there are no people of al-Qaida, there's no military of al-Qaida.
Moderates Vs. Radicals?
Minutes after we arrived in Derna, we heard gunfire on the streets.
But it was apparently just a wedding celebration — a sign of a town that's well armed, but fairly calm.
People kept right on shopping on the main street, and bargaining for cars at a waterfront auto market.
Residents of this city insisted to us that Derna is actually a moderate place.
Abdul Karim ben Tahir, a well-connected university professor, says he's no fan of extremists.
"Here, people don't like [extremists] at all. I don't deny that there are some. But here they are not liked," he says. "At the very beginning maybe some people took part in the revolution, they fought Gadhafi at the very beginning. And they were patriotic, but they don't want any law at all to govern the country. And if they take power, the country will be in a chaos."
Some Derna residents have already demonstrated their view of Sufiyan Qumu, the man who's worked for al-Qaida in the past.
At least two bombs have exploded in the city. People blamed Qumu, and the public outcry was fierce enough that he was forced to announce he was giving up command of his band of fighters.
Soon the city will have another chance to clarify where it stands. Derna, like the rest of Libya, is about to elect representatives to an assembly that will write a new constitution.
Those elections may show what Libyans think when they speak with votes rather than guns.
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