Qaddafi Says He’ll Stay in Libya as His Forces Step Up Attacks
April 29, 2011, 11:15 PM EDT By Patrick Donahue and Maram Mazen
(See EXTRA and MET for more on Middle East unrest.) April 30 (Bloomberg) -- (Bloomberg) -- Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi said he’ll stay in the North African nation where his people want “martyrdom or victory” in the face of a rebel insurgency that began in mid-February.
“I don’t have a post to leave,” Qaddafi said in a speech on Libyan state television broadcast by Al Arabiya television early today. “If I had a post I would have ended like Mubarak or Ben Ali,” he said in a reference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who were forced to step down in the face of popular protests earlier this year.
Qaddafi’s forces yesterday fought rebels for control of a key border crossing with Tunisia and mined the harbor of Misrata to block the only outside access to that besieged coastal city.
More than two months of clashes in Libya have killed thousands of people. The Libyan leader, in his speech, blamed terrorists for leading the fight against his regime and said he would agree to a cease-fire if the extremists can be convinced to introduce a truce.
The insurgency has helped push oil prices up more than 30 percent. Crude oil for June delivery rose $1.07 to settle at $113.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures are up 6.8 percent this month. Qaddafi said no one can force him to leave Libya and said outsiders won’t control the nation’s oil, Africa’s biggest proven crude reserves.
Border Town
Fifteen trucks with Qaddafi’s troops entered Tunisia’s border town of Dehiba early yesterday during a clash with rebels in which “dozens” were killed, state-run Tunis Afrique Presse said. The Libyan soldiers were disarmed and released by Tunisian forces, Al Jazeera television reported. Rebels regained control of the border post on the Libyan side, Al Arabiya said.
“The Tunisian authorities informed the Libyans of their extreme indignation and asked them to take immediate measures to stop these violations,” the Foreign Ministry said in a faxed statement April 28, after cross-border shelling began.
Much of the fighting in Libya has centered on Misrata, where opposition forces this week pushed Qaddafi loyalists out of the city center. Qaddafi’s forces continue to shell civilian areas in the city and attempted to block ships by placing floating mines near the harbor entryway, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said yesterday.
Laying Mines
“Some vessels, which we assume were pro-Qaddafi, were laying mines in the area of the harbor, indiscriminately,” British Army Brigadier Rob Weighill, an alliance spokesman, told reporters yesterday from NATO’s command center in Naples, Italy.
The port was temporarily closed, delaying the arrival of two ships carrying humanitarian aid, NATO said in a later statement.
While rebels have gained “significant” ground against Qaddafi’s forces, the regime has damaged Misrata’s sewer system and a desalination plant. Suggestions that the opposition is “winning” are “over-optimistic,” Weighill said.
NATO is stepping up its air campaign after hitting ammunition depots and command centers, Weighill said, and “will now shift to hit more pro-Qaddafi troops pressuring civilian centers.”
“You will see the results in the next few days,” he said.
Mountain Region
The alliance also will focus more on the Nafusah Mountains in western Libya near the border clash. NATO has already struck regime forces near the rebel towns of Zintan and Yefren, southwest of Tripoli, Weighill said.
Alliance jets targeted 19 ammunition storage bunkers near Sirte and Mizdah, as well as rocket launchers, artillery vehicles and an armored personnel carrier in strikes carried out on April 27, NATO said in a statement yesterday. So far, NATO’s strikes have destroyed 220 tanks, 70 surface-to-air missile systems, and 200 ammunition facilities, he said, eroding the capabilities of Qaddafi’s forces.
“While these efforts may not always be visible, as they are often far from urban centers, their impact is obvious near the front where the regime’s troops are having a harder time fighting,” he said.
Gene Cretz, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, told reporters at the State Department April 27 that Qaddafi’s forces “have been especially brutal” in the western mountains “where there has always been a suspicion on the part of Qaddafi toward the Berber groups.” Berbers are a non-Arab indigenous minority.
Cretz said officials have seen estimates of as many as 30,000 people killed in the Libyan conflict since mid-February.
Civilians Flee
The United Nations refugee agency is “very concerned that people fleeing Libya could be caught in the crossfire as government and opposition forces battle for control in the border area,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said on the website of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
In the past month, more than 30,000 people have fled the fighting in the western mountains and crossed into Tunisia at Dehiba, according to the UNHCR. More than 3,100 people, including many Berbers, crossed the border on April 27 alone, according to UNHCR staff.
The flare-up in violence in the west contrasts with the front in the east, where clashes with loyalists on the coastal road between the dictator’s hometown of Sirte and rebel-held Benghazi have ground to a standstill.
Qaddafi forces seized the town of Al-Kufrah in the country’s southeastern desert region, in a province that’s home to some of Libya’s richest oil fields. About 250 Libyan soldiers in trucks descended on the town April 28 and drove out rebels, Agence France-Presse reported at the time, citing rebels.
--With assistant from Jihen Laghmari in Tunis and Nadeem Hamid in Washington. Editors: Paul Tighe, Jim McDonaldTo contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net; Maram Mazen in Khartoum at mmazen@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net; Paul Tighe at ptighe@bloomberg.net
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