Libya to hold polls in months – rebels

A council tasked with drafting a constitution for Libya should be elected within eight months ahead of presidential and legislative polls in early 2013, a rebel leadership official said yesterday.

“We have outlined a clear road plan, a transition period of about 20 months,” Guma al-Gamaty, the National Transitional Council’s representative in Britain, told BBC radio.

He said the process of transition was already under way and the NTC leadership would complete their move to Tripoli within a few days.

For the first eight months, the council will lead Libya, at the end of which time a council of about 200 people should have been directly elected, Mr Gamaty said.

“This council... will take over and oversee the drafting of a democratic constitution, that should be debated and then brought to a referendum,” he said.

Within a year of the council being put in place, parliamentary and presidential elections should take place, he said.

“So we have eight months and a year that will take us to final elections with both parliamentary and presidential elections,” said Mr Gamaty.

“And then hopefully by the end of about 20 months, the Libyan people will have elected the leaders they want to lead their country.”

Mr Gamaty added the fact that toppled leader Muammar Gaddafi was still at large in Libya was no obstacle to starting the transition.

“As long as Tripoli is stabilised and secure and safe, which is almost now, and the overwhelming majority of other cities and towns, Libyans can get on with the process of transition and stabilisation and the new political process,” he said.

“Gaddafi is still at large but he is hiding, he is isolated, surrounded.

“We think it’s a matter of time before he is either apprehended or if he resists, he might be killed.”

Meanwhile Libya’s new leaders have called on fighters from elsewhere in the country to leave the capital and go home, interim interior minister Ahmed Darrad said yesterday. “Tripoli is free and everyone should leave this town and go back to their own towns,” he said.

“Starting Saturday (today) there will be a large number of security personnel and policemen who will go back to work,” said Mr Darrad.

“Now the revolutionaries of Tripoli are able to protect their own city.”

The demand represents a first effort to defuse possible tensions between Tripoli’s freshly-emerged revolutionaries and the scores of hardened fighters who poured in from other surrounding towns to topple Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Across the capital, brigades from the Berber-dominated mountains to the south of Tripoli and from Misrata to the east form multiple checkpoints and often parade the city’s main square.

“The responsibility for securing Tripoli should be in the hands of the sons of Tripoli,” Abdullah Naqir, head of the newly formed military council of Tripoli also said yesterday.