[attach id=256626 size="medium"]Soldiers rappel down a wall during a military graduation parade for trainees from the Libyan Army “Thunderbolt” Special Forces unit, in Benghazi earlier this month. Photo: Reuters[/attach]
The head of Libya’s national assembly is set to resign today, sources close to him said, following the passing of a law banning anyone who held a senior post under the late Muammar Gaddafi from government.
The legislation was adopted at the demand of armed factions who helped end Gaddafi’s 42-year rule in 2011 but critics and diplomats fear it could strip government of experienced leaders, further complicating the transition to an orderly democracy.
Armed violence and lawlessness caused in part by militia groups who often do as they please has hobbled governance in wide areas of the oil-producing North African state.
An adviser to General National Congress President Mohammed Magarief yesterday said he was expected to announce his resignation in a speech to the body today.
Holding the vote under duress undermines its legitimacy
The adviser did not elaborate. A spokesman for Magarief confirmed only that he would speak to the congress.
The move would come as no surprise given the assembly’s passage on May 5 of legislation banning officials who served under Gaddafi from September 1969 – when he seized power in a coup – and the fall of his regime in October 2011.
Although Magarief, an economist, served as ambassador to India under Colonel Gaddafi, he lived in exile from the 1980s and became a leading figure in Libya’s oldest opposition movement, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.
Born in 1940 in eastern Libya, where the 2011 uprising broke out, Magarief was elected head of the National Congress after Libya’s first free elections for decades last July.
The new law, which comes into effect on June 5, does not make provisions for those Libyans who spent decades in exile and actually became instrumental in top-pling Gaddafi.
Congress members say the law could be applied to more than 20 people in the congress of around 200 members. Politicians debated it for months but the issue came to a head when armed groups took control of two ministries in late April and stormed institutions including the state broadcaster, demanding immediate enactment of the legislation.
Diplomats in Tripoli said holding the vote under duress undermined its legitimacy.
Later yesterday Libya dismissed Niger’s assertion that the Islamist insurgents who attacked an army base and a uranium mine there last week had come from its desert south, an area many countries fear has become a safe haven for militants.
Thursday’s attacks killed 24 soldiers and one civilian and damaged machinery at an Areva mine that supplies uranium to France’s nuclear power programme.
Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou said the attackers had come from southern Libya, which has become a smuggling route for weapons reaching al-Qaeda militants deeper in the Sahara since Muammar Gaddafi’s fall in late 2011.
“I would like to confirm those (claims) are groundless and do not relate to reality,” Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said.