International powers agreed yesterday on a new fund to aid Libya’s rebels and promised to tap frozen assets of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, as the opposition outlined a plan for elections if the regime falls.
The fund will initially receive donations and loans from the international community, while the assets – estimated at €20 billion for the US alone – will be used to finance it at a later date.
The news came as hundreds of migrant workers and wounded people arrived in the rebel-held eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Their ship had come under fire from Col Gaddafi’s troops before escaping from the besieged city of Misurata on Wednesday.
France and Italy said they would take turns managing the rebel fund, and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the new body could be up and running “within weeks”, but added that the unblocking of assets “poses legal problems”.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, host of the International Contact Group in Rome, said Rome and Paris had urged the European Union “to seek a solution” on the assets, adding: “That money belongs to the Libyan people.”
Mr Frattini said $250 million (€170 million) were already available in immediate humanitarian aid – far less than the figure of up to $3 billion in desperately needed credit wanted by the rebels.
Kuwait pledged $180 million for the fund and Qatar up to $500 million.
“It’s a good start,” Mahmud Jibril, prime minister of the opposition’s National Transitional Council (NTC), told reporters after the high-level meeting of the International Contact Group for Libya held in Rome.
Mr Jibril said the $3 billion figure was in fact “a six-month budget”.
Expressing some impatience over the frozen assets, he added: “This process should be expedited, because having this money soon would help us come up with what we call a roadmap to realise our developmental vision.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington had “decided to pursue legislation that would enable the US to tap some portion of those assets”.
Mrs Clinton said Washington was also working on easing oil sales by the rebels, while senior US officials said unfreezing the money could take several weeks.