Libya ex-rebels demand role in interim govt

TRIPOLI, Friday

Former rebel fighters in Libya are raising the stakes by demanding a role in the interim government that is currently being formed, amid rising tensions over the naming of an army chief of staff.

Abdelhakim Belhaj, the former jihadist who heads the military council in the Libyan capital, said on Thursday that a deal had been reached with the ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) for civilian ex-rebels to sit in the new Cabinet.

The NTC has said a new government led by interim premier Abdel Rahim al-Kib is expected to be announced on Sunday.

Kib has said the new government will be formed of technocrats, but pressures from Libya’s ethnic groups and from the various armed factions make his promise a difficult one to keep.

“We have reached an agreement that candidates from the thwar (civilian rebels) will receive certain very specific portfolios,” Belhaj said at a military parade, without elaborating.

“We hope that these promises will be kept,” added the man Libyan media have spotlighted as a leading candidate for the defence portfolio.

Belhaj, who led the anti-Muammar Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, spent years in prison and has a small army at his disposal. He called for a “strong government with the collaboration of the thwar”.

“It is dangerous to say that the work of the thwar is done” now that the Gaddafi regime has fallen, he added.

“We must be aware of the danger of the next phase ... We won the battle on the ground and we are now ready to join the battle for the state, a civil and modern state.”

Belhaj rival Abdullah Naker, who also heads several thousand fighters, on Thursday met regional commanders to denounce the nomination of Khalifa Haftar as chief of staff of the army, which has yet to be officially reconstituted.
Gathering under the banner of “The Union of Thwar in Libya”, they demanded the postponement of a chief of staff being nominated until after the interim government is formed.

“We were not consulted about the nomination of a chief of staff. We are competent, but they did not give us the chance to put forward our own candidates” for the post, Naker said.

Earlier on Thursday, some 150 officers and sub-officers in the eastern city of Al-Baida unanimously approved Haftar’s appointment and announced the army’s reactivation.

Haftar, who comes from the ranks of Benghazi’s military academy and trained in the former Soviet Union, defected from the Gaddafi regime in the 1990s after the Libya-Chad conflict and went to the United States.

He returned in March to join the military campaign to unsea Gaddafi. Naker, who hails from the Nafusa mountains in the west, also demanded a say in the new government for former rebels.