Thursday 24 January 2013

Libya Boosts Oil-Field Security


Libya is boosting security at its oil fields to avoid a repeat of the deadly terrorist attack last week in neighboring Algeria, the Libyan deputy oil minister said, as the hostage crisis reverberates through the global energy industry.
Libya will also send more troops to police its border with Algeria, which runs close to the gas field attacked by the Islamist militants, Libyan Deputy Oil Minister Omar Shakmak told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
image
Kyodo/Reuters
Algerian workers stood at the In Amenas gas plant near the Libyan border on Jan. 16, in a photo secretly taken by one of the hostages.
Mr. Shakmak said he had no knowledge of a particular threat to Libya, but said Tripoli was sending more troops to the border and to desert oil fields, and boosting communications capacity, as a precautionary measure in response to the Algeria attack. "We have a concern since last week," he said.
The assault on the In Amenas field, which is operated by BP BP.LN +0.90%PLC, Statoil ASA STL.OS +0.48% and Algerian state oil company Sonatrach, left at least 37 foreign workers dead and exposed a formidable new threat for oil companies operating in the Sahara region.
Several regional experts have highlighted Libya's oil industry—where many international companies including U.S.-based ConocoPhillipsCOP -0.72% Italy's EniSpA ENI.MI -0.31% and France's Total SA FP.FR -0.01% operate—as one of the most likely targets of a terrorist attack following the Algerian incident.
Many of the country's oil and gas exploration and production sites are located in the sparsely populated deserts of western Libya, not far from the Algerian border. Following the toppling of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, experts said, Libya also suffers from lax security.
"The government is weak and the early signs indicate [Libya] will take longer than anticipated" to stabilize the security situation, said Tarek Alwan, head of SOC Libya Ltd., which advises oil companies on the North African nation.
There is evidence that heavily armed militias, some tied to al Qaeda, are operating in the country. In September, terrorists attacked the U.S. Consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, killing four Americans including the U.S. ambassador.
Algerian authorities believe the Islamist terrorists attacked the In Amenas complex after crossing over from the Libyan side of the border, which is about 20 miles from the site, a senior Algerian security official said. The weapons they used were also thought to have originated in Libya, the security official said.
Algerian authorities believe the terrorist group was led by an Algerian national and included citizens from many North African countries.
—Sarah Kent contributed to this article.

Benghazi aspires to become Libya's business capital


* Eastern city wants to restore status as business centre
* Residents say marginalised for decades under Gaddafi
* Benghazi wants return of oil body to city
By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
BENGHAZI, Libya, Jan 23 (Reuters) - At a construction site on Benghazi's waterfront, engineer Seraj Bushada proudly points to a giant hole in the ground that will make way for a 48-floor office tower that city officials hope will help transform part of this port city into a modern business district.
Unlike the capital Tripoli, Benghazi, Libya's second-biggest city, has few modern high-rise developments.
Construction of the $300 million Three Towers project, which will include two smaller blocks housing luxury apartments and a hotel, was delayed due to the uprising against former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which began here nearly two years ago.
The project is now due for completion in 2015 and is being promoted in Benghazi's bid to regain its former status as the country's business capital and end what residents see as decades of marginalisation under Gaddafi.
"We have to work together to realise this dream," Bushada said.
Turning that dream into reality will be a challenge. Security is a major concern for foreign investors in the city, highlighted by the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in September in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed.
Only last week a car bomb killed a Benghazi police officer, the second such attack in as many days and the government is considering imposing a night time curfew on the city.
Many Benghazans, however, are calling for the country's new constitution - due to be drafted in coming months - to give the city powers to manage its own affairs and a share of the eastern region's resources.
While the revolution succeeded in overthrowing Gaddafi, they argue, it has failed to spread wealth more evenly in Libya. Benghazi is the main city in eastern Libya, which provides around 80 percent of the country's oil wealth, yet the city is still dependent on the government in Tripoli for funding.
Some residents and officials are calling for the constitution to officially restore Benghazi as Libya's business capital, a status it held under King Idris until his overthrow by Gaddafi in a coup in 1969. With an estimated population of nearly 1 million, it is roughly half the size of Tripoli.
"Everything was here before, Benghazi is the best place to be the economic capital," said businessman Kais el-Bakshishi of the "Benghazi Economic Capital" campaign, which counts about 700 members including local businessmen, activists and academics.
"The main reasons are its strategic location - a gateway to Africa and Egypt and historically the people of Benghazi are traders. A lot of businessmen in Tripoli are from Benghazi."
STRIKING A BALANCE
Perched on the Mediterranean sea, Benghazi was the first city to revolt against Gaddafi and later became the rebels' main base before Tripoli, some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) away, fell in August 2011.
City officials' first priority is to push the central government to move state companies such as the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and Libyan Airlines, which were based here under King Idris but later moved to Tripoli, back.
"If we can get these back to Benghazi, we can make it the economic capital," said Abdelhamid Elhadad, head of the industrial and oil committee of the Benghazi local council.
"We are trying to restore Benghazi to what it once was," he said, sitting in the council's new offices - where posters claiming "Together we will build our city" hang next to signs banning weapons.
The NOC was formerly the Libyan General Petroleum Company, which was founded in Benghazi in 1968. After the NOC was established in 1970 it relocated to Tripoli.
"The objection is that it is like before - everything is controlled by Tripoli; this is not why the revolution took place," said Tahani Mohammed Ben Ali, head of the Benghazi workers' union at Libya's biggest oil firm Arabian Gulf Oil Company (Agoco).
"There are infrastructure, health, education needs here."
With the country still volatile, Libya's new rulers - led by Prime Minister Ali Zeidan's cabinet and the general national congress - know they have to strike a careful balance to appease regional rivalries.
That plays in Benghazi's favour and the oil ministry has proposed splitting the NOC into an exploration and production company based in Tripoli and a refining and petrochemicals company in Benghazi. Residents in eastern Libya as well as activists and oil workers vehemently oppose the plan, however, and say the whole company should relocate to Benghazi.
"If someone steals something from you, you want it back," Ben Ali said.
Other plans for enhancing Benghazi as a business hub include improving its infrastructure.
Its port is outdated while the airport, which has just one cramped hall, had been slated for an upgrade when the war began.
"The plan before was for 5 million passengers a year, now we want 15 million passengers a year," Bakshishi said.
South Korean company Nemo Partners is building a temporary passenger terminal at the airport. But progress on expanding the airport has been slow as the central government is reviewing previous foreign investment deals in the country before it approves new ones.
Benghazi officials are also considering building a free trade zone and have proposed public works projects to provide jobs, namely for the former rebel fighters who have yet to lay down their weapons.
"We want to look after the factories around Benghazi, we need to boost manufacturing," Elhadad said. "We have an industrial area of around 1,000 hectares, we want to have a real industry here, we want to build more hotels."
Elhadad wants Benghazi to be twinned with cities like Istanbul or Marseille to promote ties and plans to write to the mayor of New York, seeking to attract U.S. interest.
Industry in the area focuses on cement, and cable and steel pipe factories, as well as oil services, but badly needed foreign investment is only trickling in.
The International Monetary Fund forecast Libya's economy shrank 60 percent in 2011 due to the conflict but expected it to expand by 122 percent in 2012 and 17 percent this year.
TRADE PICKS UP
Benghazi still faces many of the same problems as the rest of Libya. Rubbish is piled up on its streets and beaches; jobs are in short supply; and weapons are everywhere as the government has failed to control rival armed factions since the end of the uprising.
However, it has seen more commercial activity in the past year and dozens of new clothing, food and consumer goods shops have sprung up.
"Things are getting better, lots of new businesses were established after the revolution," an Egyptian worker at a supermarket in the city, said. "And people are spending."
One local businessman said retail business in Benghazi had tripled since before the war, but did not cite a source for the figure: "The former fighters have money so they are spending."
At a conference this week, businessmen and campaigners laid out plans for Benghazi's economic revival, but many acknowledged security remained a priority.
Last week Italy - the former colonial power - suspended activity at its consulate in Benghazi and withdrew staff for security reasons after unidentified gunmen opened fire on its consul's armoured car.
The consul was unhurt but the incident recalled the attack on the U.S. mission, in which American intelligence officials say Islamist militants with ties to al Qaeda affiliates were most likely involved. Last week's hostage crisis in Algeria has added to security concerns in North Africa.
"How can you turn Benghazi into an economic capital when there isn't even any security?" Khaled Al-Nomi, a shop assistant, said. "Things are getting worse here, not better."
Many Western businessmen are adopting a wait and see approach towards Libya, keen to see whether the interim government can get a grip on security. Arab and Turkish businessmen are more prominent.
Local Benghazans stress that the violence is more against security officials than civilians, but the attack on the U.S. mission has been a setback.
"Some companies up until last year visited Benghazi," Tarek Alwan, managing director of London-based consulting firm SOC Libya, said.
"Some were actually progressing towards establishing local agents, but since the security is not fully stable in the city, I think many pulled out." (Additional reporting by Ghaith Shennib; Editing by Andrew Torchia and Susan Fenton)

UK HM Treasury lifts asset freeze on Libyan govt agency ODAC (Organisation for Development of Administrative Centres)


Financial Sanctions Notice
                                                                                            23/01/2013
Libya

Council Implementing Regulation (EU) No 50/2013

This notice is issued in respect of the asset freezing measures relating to Libya.

1. With the publication of  Council  Implementing Regulation  (EU) No  50/2013 of  22 January
2013 in the Official Journal of the European Union (O.J. L20,  23.01.2013, p.29) on  23
January 2013, the Council of the European Union has amended Annexes II and III to Council 
Regulation (EU) No 204/2011 [“Regulation 204/2011”], with effect from 23 January 2013.

2. Those persons, groups and entities listed in Annexes II and III are subject to the freezing of 
funds and economic resources provisions contained in Regulation 204/2011.

3. Annex II to Regulation 204/2011 lists the persons, groups and entities identified in United 
Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 or designated by the competent UN Sanctions 
Committee.

4. Annex III to Regulation  204/2011  lists the persons, groups and entities identified by the 
Council of the European Union.

5. The amendments take the form of the removal of one entity from Annex III and amendments 
to the identifying information of a number of existing entries in Annexes II and III.

6. The entity removed from Annex III is no longer subject to the asset freeze imposed by 
Regulation 204/2011.

7. Details of the changes are set out in the Annex to this notice.

8. The Treasury’s Consolidated List of persons subject to financial sanctions in effect in the UK, 
which is maintained on the Treasury website, has been updated to reflect the removal and 
amendments.2
Reporting requirements 

9. Relevant institutions and other persons are requested to check whether they maintain any 
accounts or otherwise hold any funds or economic resources for the persons set out in the 
Annex to this notice whose details have been amended. If so, they must freeze such accounts 
or other funds and, unless licensed by the Treasury, refrain from dealing with the funds or 
making them available to such persons. 
10.Relevant institutions must report their findings to the Treasury, together with any additional 
information that would facilitate compliance with Regulation 204/2011. 
11. Where a relevant institution has already reported details of accounts, other funds or 
economic resources held frozen for designated persons, they are not required to report these 
details again.
Other information

12. A copy of Council Implementing Regulation (EU) No 50/2013 can be obtained from the 
Official Journal of the European Union website at:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:020:0029:0032:EN:PDF

13. Copies of relevant Releases, certain EU Regulations, UNSC Resolutions and UK legislation can 
be obtained from the Libya regime page on the  Financial  Sanctions pages of the Treasury 
website:  http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/fin_sanctions_libya.htm.
Enquiries

14. Non-media enquiries, reports and licence applications should be addressed to:
Sanctions and Illicit Finance

Asset Freezing Unit
HM Treasury
1 Horse Guards Road
London SW1A 2HQ
E-mail: AFU@hmtreasury.gsi.gov.uk

15.Media enquiries should be addressed to the Treasury Press Office on 020 7270 5238.
HM Treasury
23/01/201323/01/2013

ANNEX

FINANCIAL SANCTIONS: LIBYA
COUNCIL IMPLEMENTING REGULATION (EU) NO 50/2013
AMENDING ANNEXES II AND III TO COUNCIL REGULATION (EU) NO 204/2011
DELETION

Entity

1. ORGANISATION FOR DEVELOPMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE CENTRES (ODAC)
Other Information: EU listing. Not UN. Entity acting on behalf of or at the direction of the
Qadhafi Regime and a potential source of funding for the regime. ODAC has facilitated
thousands of government funded infrastructure projects. www.odac-libya.com
Group ID: 12034.
AMENDMENTS
Individuals

1. AL KUNI, Amid, Husain
Title: Colonel  
Position: Governor of Ghat (South Libya)
Other Information: EU listing. Not UN. Directly involved in recruiting mercenaries.
Believed to be in South Libya

2. AL-BAGHDADI, Abdulqader, Mohammed
Title: Dr
DOB: 01/07/1950
Passport Details: B010574
Position: Head of the Liaison Office of the Revolutionary Committees
Other Information: EU listing. Not UN. Revolutionary Committees involved in violence
against demonstrators.
Group ID: 11773.
Believed to be in jail in Tunisia

3. AL-BARASSI, Safia, Farkash
DOB: --/--/1952
POB: Al Bayda, Libya
Other Information: UN listing. Wife of Muammar Qadhafi
Group ID: 11655.
since 1970. Closeness of
association with regime. Significant personal wealth. Believed to be in Algeria. Her sister
Fatima Farkash is married to Abdallah Sanussi.

4. JABIR, Abu Bakr, Yunis
Title: Major General
Group ID: 11642. 2
DOB: --/--/1952
POB: Jalo, Libya
Position: Defence Minister
Other Information: UN listing. Believed deceased

5. MATUQ, Matuq, Mohammed
DOB: --/--/1956
POB: Khoms, Libya
Position: Secretary for Utilities
Other Information: UN listing.
Group ID: 11658.
Status/location unknown, believed captured

6. QADHAFI, Aisha, Muammar
DOB: --/--/1978
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Other Information: UN listing. Daughter of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association
with regime.
Group ID: 11659.
Believed to be in Algeria

7. QADHAFI, Hannibal, Muammar
DOB: 20/09/1975
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Passport Details: B/002210
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime.
Group ID: 11635
Believed to be in Algeria

8. QADHAFI, Khamis, Muammar
DOB: --/--/1978
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime. Command of military units involved in repression of demonstrations.
Group ID: 11636.
Believed
deceased.

9. QADHAFI, Mohammed, Muammar
DOB: --/--/1970
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime.
Group ID: 11637.
Believed to be in Algeria

10. QADHAFI, Muammar, Mohammed, Abu Minyar
DOB: --/--/1942
POB: Sirte, Libya
Position: Leader of the Revolution. Supreme Commander of Armed Forces
Other Information: UN listing. Responsibility for ordering repression of demonstrations,
human rights abuses.
Group ID: 11647.
Believed deceased.
Group ID: 11638. 3

11. QADHAFI, Mutassim
DOB: --/--/1976
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Position: National Security Adviser
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime. Believed deceased.

12. QADHAFI, Saadi
DOB:
Group ID: 11639.
(1) 27/05/1973
          (2) 01/01/1975
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Passport Details: (1) 014797
                             (2) 524521
Position: Commander Special Forces
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime. Command of military units involved in repression of demonstrations. Believed to
be in Niger

13. QADHAFI, Saif, Al-Arab
DOB: --/--/1982
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime.
Group ID: 11648.
Believed deceased

14. QADHAFI, Saif Al-Islam
DOB: 25/06/1972
POB: Tripoli, Libya
Passport Details: B014995
Position: Director Qadhafi Foundation
Other Information: UN listing. Son of Muammar Qadhafi. Closeness of association with
regime. Inflammatory public statements encouraging violence against demonstrators.
Group ID: 11649.
Believed in custody in Libya
Group ID: 11640.

HM Treasury
23/01/2013

Tuesday 15 January 2013

New Old Libya For decades Libyans lived under a dictator who twisted their past. Now they must imagine their future.

Picture of amphitheater ruins


By Robert Draper
Photograph by George Steinmetz
The bronze likeness of Muammar Qaddafi’s nemesis was lying on his back in a wooden crate shrouded in the darkness of a museum warehouse. His name was Septimius Severus. Like Qaddafi, he was from what is now Libya, and for 18 years bridging the second and third centuries A.D. he ruled the Roman Empire. His birthplace, Leptis Magna—a commercial city 80 miles east of what the Phoenicians once called Oea, or present-day Tripoli—became, in every meaningful way, a second Rome. More than 1,700 years after the emperor’s death, Libya’s Italian colonizers honored him by erecting a statue of the imposing, bearded leader with a torch aloft in his right hand. They installed the statue in Tripoli’s main square (now Martyrs’ Square) in 1933—where it remained for a half century, until another Libyan ruler took umbrage.
“The statue became the mouthpiece of the opposition, because he was the only thing Qaddafi couldn’t punish,” says Hafed Walda, a native Libyan and professor of archaeology at King’s College London. “Every day people would ask, ‘What did Septimius Severus say today?’ He became a figure of annoyance to the regime. So Qaddafi banished him to a rubbish heap. The people of Leptis Magna rescued him and brought him back home.” And that is where I found him, reposing in a wooden box amid gardening tools and discarded window frames, awaiting whatever destination the new Libya might have in store for him.
Qaddafi correctly viewed the statue as a threat. For Septimius Severus stood as a wistful reminder of what Libya had once been: a Mediterranean region of immense cultural and economic wealth, anything but isolated from the world beyond the sea. Spreading over 1,100 miles of coastline, bracketed by highlands that recede into semiarid wadis and finally into the copper vacuum of the desert, Libya had long been a corridor for commerce and art and irrepressible social aspiration. The tri-city region of Tripolitania—Leptis Magna, Sabratah, and Oea—had once provided wheat and olives to the Romans.
Yet Qaddafi squandered the country’s advantages: its location just south of Italy and Greece, which made it one of Africa’s gateways to Europe; its manageable population (fewer than seven million inhabiting a landmass six times the size of Italy); its vast oil reserves. He quashed innovation and free expression. To schoolchildren, who memorized Qaddafi’s tangled philosophy as inscribed in his Green Book, the story of their country consisted of two chapters: the dark days under the West’s imperialist bootheel, and then the glory days of the Brother Leader.
Today the dictator and his warped vision for Libya are dead, and the nation is undergoing the spasmlike throes of reinvention. As Walda says, “The journey of discovery has just begun. In many ways this moment is more dangerous than wartime.” Temporary prisons are overstuffed with thousands of Qaddafi loyalists awaiting their fate as laws and court procedures are reformed. Militias control whole swaths of the country. Guns are less visible than they were during the war, but that only means the hundreds of thousands who possess them have learned to keep them out of sight. Highways in rural areas remain thoroughly unpoliced (not counting the checkpoints manned by former rebels, or thuwwar). Immigrants pour into Libya from its western and southern borders. Key Qaddafi associates, as well as his wife and some of his children, remain at large. Several new ministers are already on the take.
Last September’s terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi left the unmistakable impression of a country teetering on a knife-edge. Yet despite its struggles, Libya is hardly on the brink of anarchy. The democratically elected General National Congress is commissioning a new constitution. Tripoli is for the most part calm. In its nerve center of Martyrs’ Square—a jungle land of gunfire during the revolution—a couple of motorcyclists zigzag loudly around newly installed children’s rides. The city center is alive with purpose. On the south end of the square, vendors sell many of the new publications that have sprung up since the uprising began. To the east, dozens of Libyans congregate on the patio of a jazzy café beneath an Ottoman-era clock tower, chattering over lattes and croissants. Banners and graffiti depicting the red-black-and-green Libyan flag, banned by Qaddafi for 42 years because of its association with the deposed King Idris, now adorn every building in sight. Billboards and posters bear the images of Libya’s many fallen rebels, with inscriptions like: “We died for a free Libya—please keep it free!” “Collect all the weapons!” On the street passersby exclaim in English, “Welcome to new Libya!”
Beneath the roiling uncertainties is a nation possessed by an almost adolescent eagerness to rejoin the free world. Salaheddin Sury, a professor at the Centre for National Archives and Historical Studies in his 80s, told me, “When we got our independence in 1951, it was something we got almost for free. This time the young people paid for it in blood. I didn’t bother with the national anthem back then. Now for the first time,” he declared with a proud grin, “I’ve memorized it by heart.”
Yet on the desert slog to rediscovery, flag-waving offers only the mirage of a shortcut. As Sury acknowledged, Libya’s rebuilding “starts at zero.” The terrorist attack last September casts a dark shadow over Libya’s attempts to increase stability and rebuild its government. Whether the 30,000 Libyans who protested against militias ten days later constitute a better predictor of Libya’s future, it is too early to say. In ways both obvious and insidious, Libya remains half-blinded by its former dictator’s heavy hand. Now, like the statue in the wooden box, it awaits its future in an unforgiving light.
When the revolution came to the commercial hub of Misratah in February of 2011, Omar Albera went to his family and declared, “I’m going to take off my uniform and fight Qaddafi.”
“You are one of Qaddafi’s policemen,” his wife exclaimed. “The others will be suspicious of you. And what if the revolution fails? What then?”
His younger son also voiced fears. Only the police colonel’s eldest son praised his decision—subsequently fighting by his father’s side and dying in battle at the age of 23. The young rebels the police colonel helped command were newcomers to warfare. Having no weapons at their disposal early on, they threw stones and Molotov cocktails. Once the rebels had begun to amass the firearms of dead soldiers, the police colonel taught some how to shoot. A few were criminals he’d once locked up. They were tougher than the others; he was glad to have them in his ranks, and they in turn came to view him as a fellow rebel.
After Misratah at last beat back a ferocious three-month siege by Qaddafi’s troops—a small-scale Battle of Leningrad that would prove decisive in the revolution, though at a terrible cost to Libya’s third largest city—Albera again put on the police uniform he had worn through 34 years of the Qaddafi regime. He is now Misratah’s chief of police. His goal is to introduce the people of his city to a different concept of police work—namely, that a man who wears his uniform is not a thief or a thug but a protector, that boys should one day aspire to wear such a uniform, to regard it as an emblem of dignity rather than of criminality. The new chief is no sunny idealist. He is 58, with the pensive equanimity of a much older man. He suffers no illusion that credibility can be won overnight when historically as many as three-quarters of Libya’s policemen have been corrupt.
Further compounding the chief’s challenge is that he is not, in the final analysis, the head law enforcement authority in Misratah. “The thuwwar are the real power in the city,” he admits. The police department’s equipment was destroyed during the war; the young men he helped train to fight in the revolution are now the ones with the weapons. “Even though they were brave, they were not trained to be leaders,” he says. “Many are honest. Some are impressionable. This makes for a very delicate situation.”
The delicate situation has vast implications. The Davids who felled Goliath with slingshots now run the kingdom and are not about to give it back to some new giant. Nor do they intend to hand over all of the giant’s weaponry. Nor, for that matter, are they eager to forgive and forget. Qaddafi’s supporters remain in their midst. Some are neighbors. In Misratah’s case that neighbor is Tawurgha, a working-class town 25 miles away, from which government forces launched a ferocious assault on Misratah.
Central to Qaddafi’s vision for Libya was a bellicose populism designed to undermine the urban centers that threatened his power base. Toward that end, he lavished the Tawurghans—almost exclusively dark-skinned Africans of sub-Saharan descent—with jobs and housing in return for their unswerving loyalty. This divide-and-conquer strategy pitted towns and ethnic and tribal groups against each other all over Libya. The revolution turned those divisions into battle lines. Overnight, towns like Riqdalin and Al Jumayl became bases for loyalist attacks on their bigger neighbor Zuwarah. The city of Az Zintan was suddenly besieged by the neighboring tribal Mashashiya town of Al Awaniya. A Qaddafi-backed Tuareg militia suppressed a rebel uprising in Ghadames. And Tawurgha volunteers joined Qaddafi’s soldiers, marched on Misratah, killed their neighbors, and in some cases raped their neighbors’ women.
The reports of assaults on women have left the Misratans blind with rage. Wild exaggerations (was it 50 rapes? 400? 1,080? 8,600?) are countered in turn by Tawurgha sympathizers (no rapes at all occurred, hostility toward Tawurghans is racially motivated). One fact is inarguable: Tawurgha is now a ghost town. The Misratans evacuated the town by force and razed most of its buildings. Nearly all 30,000 Tawurghans now live in displacement camps, mainly in Benghazi and Tripoli. When I visited the bullet-riddled carcass that was once Tawurgha, its streets were empty except for artillery shells, a few ragged garments, and a half-starved cat. The roads to the town were heavily guarded by Misratan militia. No one may return to Tawurgha.
The Misratans stubbornly refuse to make peace. As one prominent local merchant, Mabrouk Misurati, told me in a loud and trembling voice, “You cannot accept those who have raped and killed our sisters living among us again! This is not easy! Reconciliation is what we are asking the new government to do—to take those who committed those crimes to justice. Then we’ll talk about letting them come back.”
This appetite for vengeance worries Misratah’s new police chief. “We can’t put all of the people of Tawurgha on the same playing field,” Albera says. “We can’t do mass punishments the way Qaddafi did. We must act according to the law. This is what we’re trying to achieve in a new Libya.”
For now, achievements come in increments. The chief has succeeded in forming a security council of the more levelheaded militia members and persuading them to inventory their weapons. “We need to get everything back under control,” he says. Too many shootings are taking place—some by accident, like two horsemen killed by celebratory gunfire at a wedding, and some the result of macho vendettas. Too many cars on the streets lack license plates. Too many criminals freed in the chaos of the revolution remain on the streets. Then again, the chief says, they fought valiantly beside him. So what should he do with them?
And too many young people are taking drugs. This, at least, he can understand. “Keeping in mind what they’ve recently been through, many of them need psychological treatment,” the chief says. “Maybe we all do, to be honest. My 17-year-old son—he watched his older brother fall to the ground right next to him.”
But how does a nation go about cleansing its soul? Today in Misratah schoolchildren who once were made to recite The Green Book are expected to completely forget its author, the man who killed their fathers and sisters. “All of the Qaddafi period has been erased from the textbooks,” a local teacher told me. “We do not mention his name. He has been buried.”
The ghosts of Libya’s greatness past remain plainly visible by the grace of a dry climate, a paucity of urban sprawl, tribal beliefs against tampering with the ruins of the dead, and an abundance of sand as an optimal preservative. On the western coast stands Leptis Magna, among the world’s most spectacular Roman archaeological sites, its triumphal arch and sprawling forum and colonnaded streets evoking a pinnacle of urban dynamism. Its splendor becomes even more evident when imagining the marble later stripped by the French for use at Versailles and when viewing the monumental imperial sculptures—of Claudius, Germanicus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius—that once graced the city and now reside in Tripoli’s museum.
Farther west lies the former seaside mercantile center of Sabratah, dominated by a majestic sandstone theater erected at the close of the second century A.D. Directly behind the Corinthian pillars looming over the theater’s elevated stage shimmers the curtain of the sea. Seeing Sabratah as an exquisite representation of Roman might, Mussolini ordered that the theater, which had lain in ruins since the earthquake ofA.D. 365, be restored. Il Duce attended its reopening in 1937, when Oedipus Rex was performed and, it is said, the locals were ordered by Italian soldiers to applaud with such vigor that their hands bled.
To the east resides Libya’s most enduring archaeological rival to the Roman sites: the ancient Greek stronghold of Cyrene, a crucial breadbasket where the ruins of an amphitheater and a brawny 2,500-year-old Temple of Zeus suggest an era of fecundity and wealth. Following centuries of foreign rule, Bedouin tribes invaded Libya in the seventh century. With them came Islam, a spiritual culture that persisted through each and every subsequent external force: the Ottomans, the Italian occupiers, the British and American military, the foreign oil companies, and a monarchy supported by the West. After the military overthrow of King Idris in 1969, Qaddafi immediately set to work rewriting Libya’s history. He spurned North Africa’s indigenous Berber, or Amazigh, people and held up Arabs as the true Libyans. In doing so he thrust himself, the son of an Arab Bedouin nomad, into the center of Libyan identity.
The ancient Greek and Roman sites of Libya meant nothing to him. He equated the ruins with the Italian occupiers. Although the archaeology at Leptis Magna and Sabratah and Cyrene went largely untended, Tripoli’s museum featured whole exhibits devoted to the Brother Leader, including his Jeep and Volkswagen Beetle.
Famous for sleeping in a tent even on state visits to Paris and other European capitals, Qaddafi espoused an outmoded version of the Bedouin ethic, says Mohammed Jerary, the director of Libya’s national archives. “Being a Bedouin, his goal was to emphasize Bedouin values over settled values, the tent conquering the palace. He wanted us to forget about organized cities and highly sophisticated things—even culture and the economy. But the Bedouin themselves didn’t remain primitive. They learned that it wasn’t proper to invade someplace every time their camels ran out of food. They learned to believe in systems and government. Qaddafi insisted on accentuating only the bad values of Bedouin life.”
His rule was one of orchestrated chaos. “There was no routine—things could change in a minute, destabilizing everything,” Walda told me. “Suddenly you cannot own a second house. You cannot travel overseas. You cannot play for a sports team. You cannot study a foreign language.” Many of the country’s most prominent thinkers were carted off to the dreaded Abu Salim prison, where some 1,200 were massacred by their jailers in 1996. Muslim clerics found themselves imprisoned for the offense of seeming more loyal to Islam than to their leader. Qaddafi loyalists belonging to the revolutionary committees kept watch in classrooms and workplaces. Government payrolls swelled with hundreds of thousands of workers who were paid subsistence wages to do nothing. Flunkies reaped lavish lifestyles, while the regime’s mildest critics were, as some Libyans would lyrically put it, “taken behind the sun.”
Even Libya’s geography was not spared. “He pushed back the sea from Tripoli, filling the floor with sand and planting palm trees there—to show that Libya had turned her face away from the Mediterranean,” says Mustafa Turjman, an archaeological specialist at the Department of Antiquities since 1979. “He was the god of ugliness!”
In a single practical gesture to the outside world, Qaddafi in 2004 completed a new lifeline: an undersea pipeline to deliver natural gas to Sicily. All other connections the god of ugliness severed.
Shortly after the first gunshot-wound cases were carted into the emergency room of Benghazi’s Al Jala Hospital on the afternoon of February 17, 2011, the surgeon began shouting out directions. Then she stopped herself. Her ex-husband had always told her, “Maryam, the woman shouldn’t be the decision-maker. Let the man speak his opinion first.” Was he right?
But civilians were being gunned down in the streets of Benghazi by the government’s soldiers. Qaddafi’s men had ordered the hospital director not to treat the rebels. When the director defied their edict, government thugs began roaming the hospital, taking down the names of doctors who were continuing their work. But 31-year-old Maryam Eshtiwy did not take off her white coat and go home—not until the third day, and then only to breast-feed her six-month-old daughter, who was staying with her grandparents. After that the surgeon returned to the hundreds of wounded young men stretched across every available inch of the hospital.
In a single day the social order dictating that Libyan women should defer to men had undergone a jolting tectonic shift. Or had it? Libya has long been a moderate Islamic nation. Qaddafi had encouraged women’s participation in education and the workplace. It remains to be seen, however, whether a country seeking to reconnect with its European neighbors across the Mediterranean will further embrace women’s rights—or lose out on the talents of half its population.
It may well be that years of battling ingrained Arab traditions helped steel Eshtiwy for those gory first days of the Libyan revolution. “Let’s be honest. I’m working in a man’s medium,” she says. Her parents wished for her the stress-free life of a pharmacist or ophthalmologist. The head of surgery—a man, of course—was hard on her. She could not help but notice that during the rounds the males were never criticized, but whenever she presented a case to him, he argued every single point, as if pushing her to leave. Eshtiwy made it clear that she had no intention of doing so.
She had made it equally clear to her ex-husband, a chemist, before their wedding: “I’m a surgeon, and I’m working in the hospital, and I’m driving my own car.” He professed to be fine with that. Theirs was a semi-arranged marriage: an introduction by his sister, followed by two months of courtship, engagement, and then a traditional three-day wedding attended by 700, culminating in vows in front of an all-female audience while every man except the groom killed time somewhere outside the wedding hall.
Overnight his attitude toward her profession seemed to change. “Forgive me for saying this, but men don’t like their wives to be better than them,” Eshtiwy says. He telephoned her one morning to say he was divorcing her. Under Libya’s Islamic law, the woman has no recourse—not even a woman three months pregnant, as she was at the time. When war broke out nearly a year later, some of her family and friends urged her, “Go back to him—maybe he’s learned his lesson. If you are killed in the hospital, your daughter will have no mother.”
The injured rebels, for their part, did not recoil at the surgeon’s gender. Some seemed to prefer her bedside manner, her emotional accessibility. And today at Al Jala Hospital many husbands express relief that she, rather than a man, will be examining their wives. Eshtiwy feels relatively secure in her place. She points to other Benghazi women—professors, lawyers, judges, engineers, politicians—and says, “The Libyan women are very strong, very clever. We’re managing by ourselves without any external help.”
If only she could say the same about the country as a whole. “I’m worried about everything,” she confesses. She prefers to see Libya as one fully unified country, but others in her city, mindful of the east’s disproportionately minor political influence under Qaddafi despite providing most of the nation’s oil revenues, have demanded that the new Libya yield far more autonomy to the regions south and east of Tripoli. The airwaves and streets are alight with edgy rhetoric—“a war now, a war of words,” Eshtiwy says, and she does not know whom or what to believe. Her dismay over the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in her city was matched only by her outrage at accusations that the Ansar al-Sharia brigade guarding her hospital was responsible. “They are peaceful and respectful people,” she maintains. “They are just rumors from outsiders who are trying to destroy the relationship that we’ve just restored with the U.S.”
Eshtiwy remains a devout Muslim who embraces arranged marriages and who has never traveled outside Benghazi. Yet her straitjacketed but steady world has been thrown into tumult. “The picture,” she says, “is distorted to me.”
She believes there is cause for hope. The experience in the hospital during the revolution—everyone working as a team, round the clock, treating rebels and Qaddafi loyalists alike without discrimination, while fellow citizens brought the staff food and blankets—has told her something about Libyans. “During the time of Qaddafi we thought that we were bad people, that no one could love us,” she says. “We see now the beauty of our country.”
But Eshtiwy also senses a gnawing post-traumatic stress pervading the city. It grips her as well. There are videos of her hospital heroics. She cannot watch them. “No way.” She can’t even watch the news. “It’s depressing, you see,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like, why did all these people die? Did we have to be paid with their precious blood for all this chaos?”
The worst is this: There is still more blood. Too much of it. Before the revolution Al Jala Hospital saw maybe three or four gunshot-wound cases every year. With firearms widespread throughout the new Libya, she treats three or four such cases every day.
“Now we are so expert at dealing with these,” the surgeon says, sighing.
When I consider the future of Libya, a flailing man-child of a nation, my mind returns to a 61-year-old man I met in one of Benghazi’s old souks. His name was Mustafa Gargoum, and he made a small living by selling vintage photographs of the city. Since 1996 he had occupied a street corner just a few hundred yards from the Mediterranean coast, where he used to fish as a child. The photo collector’s makeshift exhibit was the first of its kind in Benghazi and possibly in all of Libya. Small crowds would gather to ponder the images from a banished yesteryear: mules clattering down alleys bearing jugs of olive oil; the luminous Ottoman-era Hadada Square, currently overtaken by jewelry vendors; the Italianate parliament building, destroyed at Qaddafi’s orders and now a parking lot. Old men crouched in front of Gargoum’s photographs and stared for a very long time. Their eyes said what their mouths could not. Some of the photos included forbidden visuals, such as the old Libyan flag, which is the new Libyan flag.
Gargoum’s streetside gallery also included posters on which he would write deliberately provocative passages such as: “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” “Free minds of America and Europe, you have always disappointed us.” “The Libyan people are more important.” Unsurprisingly, these dissident musings earned Gargoum ongoing harassment. Every September, coinciding with the anniversary of the Brother Leader’s ascension to power, Ministry of Interior officials would escort Gargoum to a police station and make him stay overnight. “We know what you’re trying to do,” they would tell him, though they always let him go. He continued to display his images and his messages. But the photographs he had collected of Qaddafi’s sworn enemies he kept hidden in his home office, where he wrote on the walls sentiments that he did not dare display on the streets of Benghazi—bitter laments like, “The ceiling of the regime is too low for me to stand!”
When the first peaceful protests began in mid-February, Gargoum closed his gallery and joined the demonstrations, but soon retreated to his house. Eight months later, on the day that Qaddafi was killed, he returned to the souk with his photographs—not just the usual images, but also those of artists and intellectuals and soldiers who had once defied the dictator and been executed as a result. Included in this more expansive exhibit was a painting he had made in 1996, the first year that he had offered up his photographs and sly slogans to the jittery public of Benghazi. The painting consisted of a single monumental figure engulfed by darkness—his back turned, his hand holding a torch aloft. Though Gargoum had intended it to be a self-portrait, he had unconsciously reproduced the exiled statue of Septimius Severus.
On this new day of freedom Gargoum placed the painting on an easel and took out his paintbrush. With careful strokes he added a crowd of wispy figures to the background. He then nodded with satisfaction at the finished product, a portrait of an unfinished nation, its people standing together the evening after the revolution—momentarily blinded by torchlight, waiting for a new vision to pierce the darkness.

Dubai private sector trade with Libya, Iraq soars


Dubai Chamber director general Hamad Buamim.
Dubai Chamber director general Hamad Buamim.


















After a topsy-turvy year in which trade was largely dictated by geopolitics, Dubai’s overall exports and re-exports from the private sector rose by 9 percent in 2012, according to data for the Dubai Chamber. 
The biggest losers were Iran and Syria, both of which saw their trade with the emirate dip by more than 50 percent. 
More than making up the shortfall were Iraq, where exports and re-exports from Dubai rose by more 350 percent to value US$11.4bn; Libya, where the increase was 300 percent; and Turkey, where trade doubled.
The overall value of private-sector trade out of Dubai amounted to US$73bn, up 9 percent on last year, and 26 percent higher than the peak year of 2008.
Membership of the Dubai Chamber – which is mandatory for all private-sector firms based in the emirate – also rose by 9 percent to 140,000, with more than 12,700 new companies moving to the emirate last year.
Dubai accounts for 75 percent of the UAE’s private-sector trade, added Hamad Buamim, the Dubai Chamber’s director general. Around 70 percent of goods imported into the emirate are re-exported.
“ We've seen more of a focus on services, healthcare, trade and commerce – these are all still major sectors,” Buamim told reporters. “Real estate is coming back, and there are more lawyers too.”
“We are seeing a big spillover from the Saudi budgets [which reached a record US$223bn for 2013] and that’s going into tourism, business and real estate. The Saudis are coming, enjoying their time, spending more and doing a good job.”
While 2012 official GDP figures have not yet been released, Dubai announced at the end of December that it was raising its budgetary spending by almost 6 percent this year, to US$9.3bn. Revenues are projected to increase by nearly 8 percent to $8.9bn. 

 Business Arabia 

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Oil Ministry plans to split NOC in two; “unlikely” to placate Benghazi



Oil refinery in Brega. The NOC’s refining activities would be headquartered from Benghazi under the proposal.

The Ministry of Oil is proposing to separate the National Oil Corporation’s exploration and production activities from refining, establishing two separate bodies to be respectively headquartered in Tripoli and Benghazi.
The initiative comes a little under two months after a plan to give Benghazi effective responsibility for exploration, production and refining services in eastern Libya was put on hold following protests in Tripoli.
It is believed that the revised proposal is designed to placate oil workers and activists in eastern Libya who want Benghazi to have a greater say in the running of the country’s oil industry.
“In the oil and gas ministry, we have a near-term plan with respect to the [eastern] region,” new Oil Minister Abdelbari Al-Arusi said in a statement on the NOC’s website.
“[The body] will be called the ‘National Corporation for Oil Refining and Petrochemicals Industry’ and will oversee all companies operating in this area. It will launch projects and secure funding for them.”
In Tripoli would be headquartered the ‘National Corporation for the Exploration and Production of Oil and Gas’. The two departments would also have branches in Tripoli and Benghazi respectively, and would be under the Ministry of Oil.
According to the head of the NOC’s oilfield services arm, however, the proposal is unlikely to placate eastern discontent as currently conceived.
“I don’t think Benghazi will accept it”, Mohammed Albadaly, CEO of Jowfe, told the Libya Herald. “They want exploration and production, not refining. There are far fewer commercial activities in downstream, whereas upstream you have drilling, exploration, production, pipelines and so on”.
Albadaly said that the proposal would more likely be accepted by Benghazi if reversed, to give exploration and production responsibility to the east and leave refining in Tripoli, but that fierce resistance is likely to be encountered in the capital either way.
“A lot of the NOC’s employees are older; they have families and they have roots. They don’t want to move and they don’t want to lose their jobs. That’s why there was so much resistance to Decree 100”.
Under Decree 100, the proposal that was previously shelved, the NOC’s hitherto inconsequential Benghazi branch would have been given de factocontrol over the oil industry in eastern Libya, home to some 80 per cent of the country’s oil fields.
Five departments were to have been established, in the fields of petro-chemicals and refining, exploration and production, human resources, administration and finance. Having only been signed off on 4 October, NOC Resolution 100 was in force for less than a week before being suspended in the face of fierce opposition from staff in Tripoli.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency, Deputy Oil Minister Omar Shakmak described the latest plan as “a matter of reorganisation. We will receive feedback from experts within the oil sector and civil organisations … and upon that, a proposal will be submitted to the government,” he said.

Source: Libya Herald

Thursday 22 November 2012

Canoel Announces Expansion Into Libya




Canoel International Energy Ltd. ("Canoel" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:CIL) is pleased to announce that it is opening a representative office in Libya and is processing the opening of a local company registered under local Libyan laws.
Canoel has identified Libya as a country in which it will in the future seek to identify opportunities to conduct business and purchase exploration or production assets.

In Africa, Canoel already owns a small stake in Mafula Energy Ltd., a Zambia registered company, which has been awarded an exploration permit.
Andrea Cattaneo, the company's CEO, states "We are excited to start a settlement into Libya. We trust that this fast developing country will be a promising area where to deploy our exploration and & production skills."
Canoel's business plan is to grow through international acquisitions and exploration and to increase the production and reserves from its international inventory of oil and gas projects.
Libya's 2012 total oil and gas revenues are expected to be $54.9 Billion US Dollars.
(source: Libyan National Oil Corporation, NOC)
Earnings from oil exports account for more than 90% of Libya's National Income.

Wednesday 14 November 2012

IMF generally positive on Libya, with caveats


The International Monetary Fund has expressed generally positive views about the direction of the Libyan economy.
Though working from June figures, which made the Washington-based economists think that Libya would not return to its pre-revolution hydrocarbon output until next year, when in fact the country hit that 1.6 million barrels daily this September, the report is generally upbeat.
As part of its biannual regional economic outlook, the IMF predicts a record-breaking 2012 GDP growth of 120 percent for Libya, coming after last year’s radical 60 percent contraction. If the security situation improves as predicted, the IMF believes that economy will remain robust, with growth for next year of 17 percent, easing thereafter to seven percent from 2014-2017.
Given no radical change in oil prices,  it says, Libya can expect a fiscal surplus this year, equivalent to 19 percent of GDP, while the current account surplus rises to 22 percent of GDP.  Inflation, which the IMF estimates was running at 16 percent last year, will, it expects, ease back to ten percent this year and drop to just one percent next year.  This sharp decline willF come about, “ despite upward pressure on domestic prices arising from supply bottleneck in housing and transportation.”
It warns however that if the global economy continues to struggle with recovery, oil and gas prices could fall, which would present the hydrocarbon-dependent Lbyan economy with challenges.
The IMF speaks of concern over security and political stability, but majors on the government’s need  to  exercise fiscal discipline, while maintain macroeconomic stability.
“As a short-term response to the aspirations of the revolution, the interim government raised wages and subsidies. “notes the report, “Although Libya can afford elevated levels of current expenditure during a transitional period, the increase in wages and subsidies is eroding the country’s fiscal buffers and undermining prospects for fiscal sustainability”.
The IMF also warns that Libya must tackle a whole range of pressing issues from improved education, rebuilding infrastructure, developing a financial market, cutting economic dependence on oil and gas production and putting in place an efficient social security net.
To this end, it says: “The country will need to establish a governance framework to improve transparency and accountability, to better manage its resource wealth, and help promote private sector-led economic development.”

By Hadi Fornaji " Libya Herald"