Father is fine and the Libyan leadership is fine

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi vowed to carry on fighting Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of fugitive Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's sons, has vowed to carry on fighting.In an audio message broadcast on Al-Ray TV, he said his father was fine and the Libyan leadership was fine. He said he was speaking from the outskirts of Tripoli.The message came minutes after a message form another son, Saadi, who said he was authorised to negotiate with the Transitional National Council (NTC) to end the fighting in Libya.
But in his message, Saif al-Islam warned against any attack on the city of Sirte, his father's birthplace.Rebel commanders say they are moving to encircle the city of Sirte, one of the few areas of Libya still under the control of Gaddafi loyalists.
"I am talking to you from a suburb of Tripoli," Saif al-Islam told Al-Ray, a Damascus-based station.
"The resistance continues and victory is near."
Muammar Qaddafi’s son, Saadi, told Al Arabiya TV that his father has no objection to handing power over to the interim National Transitional Council (NTC) and called for talks and a truce to end the bloodshed.
“As far as I am concerned, I will not carry guns against any Libyan person, and I urge the warring parties to lay down their weapons,” Saadi told Al Arabiya in telephone call from an undisclosed location in Libya.
“If surrendering myself will end the bloodshed, I am ready to do so, but I do not represent only myself, and in order to reach a peaceful resolution to the crisis we should sit down with each other and negotiate.”
Saadi said he had contacted a commander of the Libyan National Transitional Council in Tripoli with authorization from his father as part of efforts to stop the bloodshed in Libya.
“We were talking about negotiations based on ending bloodshed,” Saadi said referring to his telephone call with Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the chief of anti-Qaddafi forces in Tripoli, adding he was officially empowered to negotiate with the NTC.
“We acknowledge that they (the NTC) represent a legal party, but we are also the government and a legal negotiating party,” he said.
Meanwhile, Seif al-Islam Qaddafi vowed in a separate statement broadcast on an Arab TV channels that his family would fight to the death and said nobody will surrender. He also said he was speaking from the suburbs outside Tripoli and insisted his father is fine.
“We are coming soon to liberate the green square.”
Seif said there were 20,000 armed young men in the Mediterranean city of Sirte and are ready to repel the rebels preparing to take it if Qaddafi loyalists do not surrender.
NTC leader and former Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalqam told Al Arabiya that nearly instantaneous media appearance of two of Qaddafi’s sons shows “desperation” for a solution that would give them protection against prosecution.
Shalqam said courts will begin trials of former regime figures in Benghazi and Tripoli within days, adding the priority has been given to restoring order and the rule of law.
Libyan rebels on Wednesday arrested foreign minister Abdelati al-Obeidi, a key figure of Colonel Qaddafi’s regime, a senior rebel commander said.
“Yes, Abdelati al-Obeidi was arrested today,” Mahdi al-Harati, vice chairman of the rebel military council, told journalists in the capital without giving further details.
Toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's foreign minister, Abdelati Obeidi, has been arrested, Reuters news agency has reported.He was said to have been arrested  from his farm in Janzour, a suburb west of Tripoli, on Tuesday.
Libyan fighers opposed to Gaddafi shouted "Allahu Akbar" or "God is greatest" as they arrested him, the report said.
Abdallah al-Hijazi, a close associate of Gaddafi, was also arrested in Tripoli, National Transitional Council sources told Reuters.
Gaddafi's entourage has been hit by numerous high-profile defections, arrests and killings since the uprising that has ended his 42-year rule of the country.
The NTC said on Monday it believed its fighters had killed Gaddafi's son Khamis and his intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi in clashes.
The RAF is flying £950m of Libyan cash to Libya after an assets freeze aimed at Col Muammar Gaddafi was lifted.Notes, amounting to 1.86 billion Libyan dinars that were printed in the UK, will be handed to Libya's Central Bank.A Whitehall official said the money should be available to load into cash machines and distribute to banks in Libya very quickly.
The currency was released following a decision by the United Nations sanctions committee in New York.
The official said the cash delivery, worth $1.55bn, should make it possible to pay many public sector workers over the Eid holiday.
Many of those dependent on government salaries have not been paid for many weeks.
The move comes on the eve of a major international conference on the future of Libya to be held in Paris on Thursday, chaired jointly by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and UK Prime Minister David Cameron.
The funds were frozen in February when the uprising in Libya started.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has said this latest move represented another "major step forward" in getting necessary assistance to the Libyan people.
Mr Hague said: "These banknotes, which were frozen in the UK under UN sanctions, will help address urgent humanitarian needs, instil confidence in the banking sector, pay salaries of key public sector workers and free up liquidity in the economy."
Germany has also asked to release about 1bn euros (£900m) in seized assets while France wants to unfreeze about 5bn euros (£4.4bn) to help pay for humanitarian aid and keep essential services going in Libya.
Last week, the UN agreed to a US request to unblock $1.5bn (£1bn) in frozen Libyan assets.
In March, a ship carrying Libyan currency worth £100m (200m Libyan dinars) was impounded.
The Home Office said the ship was intercepted by UK authorities after heading back to British waters following an aborted attempt to dock at Libya's capital, Tripoli.
The money, which was printed in north-east England, was held at Harwich in Essex.
In the heart of Tripoli lays Libya's intelligence headquarters, much of it was destroyed by NATO airstrikes which transformed the building that struck fear into the hearts of millions of Libyans for over four decades, into a symbol of how Gaddafi's regime has been all but destroyed.
Guarding the compound are a couple of dozen armed rebel fighters, some of them tell me their friends and families went missing as a direct result of "intelligence" gathered by those who worked in the building.
It's fair to assume that among the rubble and ransacked offices, lay some of the darkest, deepest secrets of Gaddafi's regime. I'm looking for files entitled "Lockerbie" or "IRA", but unfortunately the place is a mess.
I'm taken to the office of Abdullah Alsinnousi, he was head of Libya's intelligence service and one of the Gaddafi regime's most notorious and feared strong men.
Scattered on his desk are dozens of documents branded "top secret", but the rebels accompanying me aren't keen on me taking anything away. I find a folder titled "Moussa Alsadr", he was the former head of Hezbollah who went missing in Libya over thirty years ago. Within seconds, the folder is taken by my minder who says none of these documents can leave the compound.
In the room adjacent to Sinnousi's office is a bedroom with an ensuite bathroom kitted with a plush jacuzzi, an indication of the lush lifestyle led by the heads of the former regime. Sprawled on the bed lays a rebel fighter taking an afternoon nap. The scene is almost surreal, "gosh how times change", I whisper.
I managed to smuggle away some documents, among them some that indicate the Gaddafi regime, despite its constant anti-American rhetoric – maintained direct communications with influential figures in the US.
I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, the former assistant secretary of state who served under George W Bush and the man who brokered the deal which restored diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008.
Welch now works for Bechtel, a multinational American company with billion dollar construction deals across the Middle East. The documents record that, on August 2, 2011, David Welch met with Gaddafi's officials at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo, just a few blocks from the US embassy there.
During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi's team on how to win the propaganda war – suggesting several "confidence building measures", the documents said. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO.
Minutes of this meeting note his advice on how to undermine Libya's rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel. "Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It's better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries..."
The papers also document that Welch advised Gaddafi's regime to take advantage of the current unrest in Syria, pointing out: "The importance of taking advantage of the Syrian situation particularly regarding the double-standard policy adopted by Washington… the Syrians were never your friends and you would loose nothing from exploiting the situation there in order to embarrass the West."
Despite this apparent encouragement to Gaddafi of going on a propaganda campaign at the expense of Syria, the documents claim Welch attacked Qatar, describing Doha's actions as "cynical" and an attempt to divert attention from the unrest in Bahrain.
The documents claims that Welch went on to propose the following solution to the crisis which he said many would support in the US administration; Gaddafi "should step aside" but "not necessarily relinquish all his powers". This advice is a clear contradiction to public demands from the White House that Gaddafi must be removed.
According to the document, as the meeting closed, Welch promised: "To convey everything to the American administration, the congress and other influential figures." But it appears that David Welch was not the only prominent American giving help to Gaddafi as NATO and the rebel army were locked in battle with his regime.
On the floor of the intelligence chief's office lay an envelope addressed to Gaddafi's son Saif Al-Islam. Inside, I found what appears to be a summary of a conversation between US congressman Denis Kucinich, who publicly opposed US policy on Libya, and an intermediary for the Libyan leader's son.
It details a request by the congressman for information he needed to lobby American lawmakers to suspend their support for the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) and to put an end to NATO airstrikes. According to the document, Kucinich wanted evidence of corruption within the NTC and, like his fellow countryman Welch, any possible links within rebel ranks to al-Qaeda.
The document also lists specific information needed to defend Saif Al-Islam, who is currently on the International Criminal Court's most wanted list.
Scattered across the headquarters were smashed frames holding "the brother leader's" pictures, powerful images which depict Gaddafi's sudden fall from grace. It took six months to topple Gaddafi's regime, but the colonel did rule for over forty years During his reign thousands of people went missing, planes were blown up, and billion dollar deals were struck in the most dubious of circumstances. Finding out the true story behind all this will take a long time, and even then, there are some things that will never be known.
There is so much spin surrounding the Transitional National Council (TNC) victory in Libya that it is difficult to interpret the outcome, and perhaps premature to do so at this point, considering that the fighting continues and the African Union has withheld diplomatic recognition on principled grounds. Almost everything about the future of Libya has been left unresolved beyond the victory of the rebel forces, who were hugely assisted by NATO air strikes as well as by a variety of forms of covert assistance given to the anti-regime Libyans on the battlefield.
Of course, in the foreground is the overthrow of a hated and abusive dictator who seemed more like the outgrowth of a surrealist imagination than a normal political leader who managed to rule his country for more than 42 years, and raised the material standards of the Libyan people beyond that of other societies in the region.
It does seem that the great majority of the Libyan people shared a thirst for political freedom with others in the region. The initial uprising seems definitely inspired by the Arab Spring. But unlike the other populist challenges to authoritarian Arab states, in Libya the anti-regime forces abandoned nonviolent tactics at an early stage and became an armed uprising. This raised some doubts and widespread fears about the onset of a civil war in the country, but it also brought forth a variety of explanations about the murderous behaviour of the regime that left its opponents no alternative.
Now with Gaddafi gone as leader, a new central concern emerges. What will the morning after bring to Libya? At the moment, it is a matter of wildly divergent speculation because there are so many unknown factors. There are a few observations that clarify the main alternatives. More favourably than in Egypt or Tunisia, this populist uprising possesses a revolutionary potential. It seems poised to dismantle the old order altogether and start the work of building new structures of governance from the ground up.
The fact that the TNC resisted many calls for reaching an accommodation or compromise with the Gaddafi regime gives the new leadership what appears to be a clean slate with which to enact a reform agenda that will be shaped to benefit the people of the country, rather than foreign patrons.
This opportunity contrasts with the messy morning after in Egypt and Tunisia, where the remnants of the old order remain in place. In Cairo numerous demonstrators were sent to jail, and reportedly tortured, after new demonstrations were held in Tahrir Square. These demonstrations were led by people who were fearful that their political aspirations were being destroyed by the same old bureaucracy that had provided Mubarak with his oppressive structures of authority that made the country safe for neoliberal exploitation, and unsafe for constitutional democracy.
Let’s hope that the TNC can sustain Libyan unity and commit itself to the building of a democratic constitutional order and an equitable economy step by step. It will not be easy, because Libya has no constitutional experience with citizen participation, an independent judiciary, or the rule of law. Beyond this, political parties, non-state-controlled media, and civil society were absent from Libya during the Gaddafi era.
And then there is the big possible problem of NATO’s undefined post-Gaddafi role. The air war inflicted widespread damage throughout the country, and NATO entrepreneurial interests are already staking their claims. TNC spokespersons have indicated that those who lent their cause support will be rewarded in appreciation.
Fortunately, NATO does not purport to be an occupying force, but the United States and the principal European countries that took part in the war are pulling strings to release billions of dollars of assets of the Libyan state that were frozen in compliance with Security Council Resolution 1973 and various national directives, and may well be playing a major advising role behind the scenes.
Will enabling the new Libyan leadership to embark upon financial recovery and reconstruction come as part of a package containing undisclosed political conditions and economic expectations? There are signs that oil companies and their government sponsors are scrambling to get an inside track in the current fluid situation. It does not require paranoia about imperialist geopolitics to take note of the fact that the two major military interventions in the Arab world within the last decade were both situated in significant oil-producing countries whose leaderships rejected integration into a world order in which global energy policy was under the firm control of the market interests of international capital.
And oh, yes, the other likely target of major Western military action is Iran, and it too "happens" to be a major oil producer. Let us recall that the UN failed to respond in oil-free Rwanda in 1994 when a small expansion of a peacekeeping presence already in the country might have saved hundreds of thousands from an unfolding genocidal onslaught.
In the realm of world politics, it may be worth noting that coincidences rarely happen.
There are also significant unresolved issues associated with the precedent set by the UN in authorising a limited protective intervention that, when acted upon, ignored the guidelines set forth by the drafters of the Security Council resolution. The actual scope and ill-disguised purpose of the intervention shortly after it became an operational reality in Libya was to tip the balance in a civil war and achieve regime change.
Such goals were never acknowledged by the pro-intervening governments in the course of the extensive and sharp Security Council debate, and had they been, it is almost certain that two permanent members, China and Russia, given their reluctance to approve the use of any force in the Libyan situation, would have blocked UN action with a veto.
The UN is faced with a dilemma. Either it refuses to succumb to geopolitical pressures, as was the case when it withheld approval from the United States plan to attack Iraq in 2003, and steps aside when a so-called "coalition of the willing" is hastily formed to carry out an attack; or it grants some kind of limited authority that is cynically overridden by the far more expansive goals of the intervening governments, as has been the case in Libya. Either way, respect for the authority of the UN is eroded, and the historical agency of geopolitics is confirmed.
In the Libyan case, the evaluation of the UN role is likely to depend on what happens in the country during the weeks and months ahead. If a humane and orderly transition takes place in the country, and national resources are used to benefit the people of Libya and not foreign economic interests, the intervention will be effectively marketed as a victory for humane governance and a demonstration that the international community can engage in humanitarian intervention in an effective and principled manner.