Violence continues: Fear stalks Tripoli, while Benghazi celebrates

Thousands of Libyans celebrate liberation of the eastern city of Benghazi from the rule of Muammar Qaddafi.

BENGHAZI: Thousands of Libyans celebrated the liberation of the eastern city of Benghazi from the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, who was reported to have sent a plane to bomb them on Wednesday as he clung to power.

The crew bailed out of the aircraft after it took off from the capital Tripoli. It then came down south-west of Benghazi, Libya’s Quryna newspaper cited a military source as saying, averting a fresh bloodshed in almost a week of violence.

Tripoli, along with western Libya, is still under Qaddafi’s control and people there said they were too afraid of pro-government militia to go out after  Qaddafi threatened violence against protesters in a speech on Tuesday night.

As many as 1,000 people have been killed since the revolt began around a week ago, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said as world leaders scrambled to evacuate their citizens and disagreed on how to end the turmoil.

Also abandoning Qaddafi’s realm have been officials and diplomats previously loyal to the veteran leader. A small Libyan airliner that turned away from Malta on Wednesday was carrying a daughter of Qaddafi, Al Jazeera said from the European island.

As the violence continued, the United States said it was looking at imposing sanctions on Libya to punish it for a violent crackdown on protesters, balancing tougher rhetoric with efforts to safely evacuate Americans.

“We’re looking at a full range of tools and options,” State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley said. “That certainly includes looking at sanctions that could be imposed,” he said.

Crowley said Washington was looking at the possibility of freezing Libyan assets, including those of Muammar Qaddafi, but no decision had been made yet.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for Europe to suspend all economic ties with Libya and to adopt sanctions. But diplomats and analysts say getting international agreement on sanctions would be protracted and possibly unsuccessful, making it more likely that countries such as the US would have to go it alone.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council condemned the use of violence and called for those responsible for attacks on civilians to be held to account.

Earlier on Wednesday, countries with strong business ties to Libya scrambled to evacuate thousands of citizens from Libya. An estimated 1.5 million foreign nationals are working or travelling in Libya and a third of the population of seven million are immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

The unrest in Africa’s third largest oil producing country has also caused oil prices to climb to above $110 a barrel amid fears chaos could spread to other oil-producing nations and choke supplies.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2011.