Operation Oil Theft: Month 17, Week 4, Day 4.

Today (3/7/12) Libyan ex-pats living in Canada, Germany, Jordan, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK and the USA have begun voting in the election for the General National Congress (GNC). On Saturday (7/7/12) registered voters in Libya itself will go to the polls in the nation's first real election to decide the make-up of the body that will replace the National Transitional Council (NTC) and appoint the panel that will re-write the nation's constitution. I will try and prepare a post specifically covering that election before Saturday. However for now I will concentrate on some of the other events that have been taking place in Libya.

Yesterday (2/7/12) Melinda Taylor - an International Criminal Court (ICC) lawyer representing Saif al-Islam Qaddafi was released by the Zintan Brigade militia. You may remember that on June 7th (7/6/12) Ms Taylor and her Lebanese interpreter Helene Assaf were arrested by the Zintan Brigade over an ever changing list of allegations including passing letters to Saif al-Islam, concealing the location of Mohammed Ismail and possessing a spy camera (cellphone). Due to the lack of consistency in the allegations and the lack of evidence to support them the arrests seemed to be nothing more then a kidnapping on the part of the Zintan Brigade in order to force themselves into negotiations between the NTC and the ICC over the Saif al-Islam case. They certainly succeeded in creating a large and high level negotiation with the President of the ICC Sang-Hyun Song travelling to Libya to handle the negotiation personally. However the Zintan Brigade don't seem to have achieved anything more then that with Ms' Taylor and Assaf being released with no admission of wrongdoing by the ICC because they don't appear to have done anything wrong by any accepted international standard. Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdul Aziz has declared though that the pair will be tried in absentia on July 23rd (23/7/12). As the pair won't be present at their trial they will be unable to mount an effective defence so when they are inevitably convicted the only penalty will be that they'll be unable to visit Libya again. All things considered this latest incident has left people more convinced that Libya is not yet able to give Saif al-Islam anything resembling a fair trial.

The purpose of announcing this phantom trial seems to be an attempt to appease the Zintan Brigade who seem more intent then ever to use violence and bully-boy tactics to get what they want. Four days after they arrested Ms Taylor the Zintan Brigade claimed that some of their members had been killed by members of Mashasha tribe in the Nafusa mountains in the north-west of the country on June 11th (11/6/12). They responded by attacking the Mashasha tribe with heavy weapons triggering 9 days of fierce fighting that left 105 people dead and 500 wounded. The fighting got so bad that the NTC were forced to declare the area a military zone on June 16th (16/6/12) and send in the Libyan National Army (LNA) to keep the two factions apart and negotiate a peace deal. Therefore the whole incident seems to have been contrived by the Zintan Brigade in order to open another channel of negotiation with the NTC over Saif al-Islam and send the message that they're prepared to continue fighting and killing until the get exactly what they want. If Libya is going to become a stable and prosperous nation that sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable.

There has also been significant violence in the Kufra region in the south-east of the country. The conflict there has been taking place on and off since February-2012 and stems from tensions between the predominately Black Tebu/Toubou tribe that fought alongside Qaddafi and the predominately Arab Zway tribe who fought against Qaddafi. This latest round of fighting that began on June 24th (24/6/12) and has so far killed an estimated 100 people has been between the Tebu and the Libya Shield militia. This was formed out of half a dozen other militias in response to fighting between the Tebu and the Abu Seif tribe in Sebha in May-2012. The presence of this militia made up of men who spent most of last year fighting Qaddafi's "Black mercenaries" coupled with recent decisions to exclude thousands of Tebu from the upcoming election seem to have created a belief amongst the Tebu that the Shield militia is trying to racially purge the Tebu out of Libya. Therefore it would probably be better to send the more disciplined LNA to deal with the situation in Kufra and have the Shield militia deal with any problems in the less racially diverse north of the country.