Retreating Libyan rebels win Arab League boost

Libyan rebels beat a further retreat yesterday under air strikes and shellfire from Muammar Gaddafi’s forces, even as an Arab League decision to back a no-fly zone boosted their uprising.

Having abandoned an operation to recapture the oil town of Ras Lanuf, the outgunned anti-regime fighters struggled to set up a new defensive line 30 kilometres further east along a coastal road towards Brega.

Brega is the last main town before Ajdabiya, gateway to eastern Libya on the roads to the main rebel cities of Benghazi and Tobruk. Diplomats in Cairo said the Arab League in crisis talks came out in support of plans to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and decided to make contact with the rebels’ provisional national council.

Arab League foreign ministers “have agreed to invite the (UN) Security Council to assume its responsibilities and impose an air-exclusion zone to protect the people of Libya,” one diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The decision was adopted by nine of the 11 foreign ministers attending the meeting at the organisation’s headquarters in the Egyptian capital from which Libyan envoys were excluded, with Algeria and Syria voting against, he said.

“The ministers also decided to open channels to contact the transitional national council in Libya in order to help the Libyan people,” the diplomat added.

The rebels’ 30-member council had urged the Arab League to recognise it as representing Libya instead of Gaddafi’s regime and to back a no-fly zone to curb attacks on its fighters, in a letter to the League’s chief, Amr Mussa.

Mussa himself called for a no-fly zone as proposed by Western countries and said he wanted the pan-Arab organisation to play a role in imposing it, in an interview published yesterday.

“The United Nations, the Arab League, the African Union, the Europeans – everyone should participate,” Mussa told German weekly Der Spiegel.

“I am talking about a humanitarian action. It consists, with a no-fly zone, of supporting the Libyan people in their fight for freedom against a regime that is more and more disdainful.”

EU leaders agreed at an emergency summit last Friday to talk to Gaddafi’s opponents and protect Libyan civilians “by all necessary means” while stopping short of an outright military threat.

They demanded Gaddafi “relinquish power immediately” and deemed the opposition council based in Benghazi “a political interlocutor”.

However, there was no mention of calls from Britain and France for a no-fly zone, and strident demands from French President Nicolas Sarkozy for “targeted action” against Gaddafi went unheeded.

Seif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, said in Italian newsaper interviews published yesterday that he was confident government troops would defeat the rebels, adding they had already retaken control over “90 per cent of the country”.

He swore there would be no negotiations, branding the rebels terrorists and saying there would be a “war to the end”.

A UN mission was due in Libya yesterday to evaluate the country’s humanitarian needs, after Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaaim said the team would tour hospitals to check on food and medicine supplies.