Events are unfolding in Libya with great rapidity and a large amount of blood.
Hundreds are dead, some 300 in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, alone. Credible reports mount that the Libyan state has brought in mercenaries to attack protesters. Reports of heavy weaponry and sniper teams deployed against protesters are numerous. Other reports are coming in of military defections in Benghazi as well as the decisive defeat of Libyan security forces in that city. The mood is celebratory in Benghazi over having driven out and/or brought over to the protesters’ side security forces, according to a doctor talking to Al Jazeera English (“Benghazi no longer belongs to Qaddafi,” she says).
There are reports of take-overs of military barracks and armories in other towns and cities in the east. Thousands of protesters, the latest reports say, have retaken Green Square in Tripoli after having been driven away a couple days ago and security forces for the moment have melted away. I’m not sure how important the tribes are, but a number of tribal leaders of some of the larger tribes have been giving vocal support to the protesters and there are reports of tribal-based attacks on governmental buildings in the the south of the country.
Al Jazeera carried an interview with another tribal leader, this time in the east, I think, threatening to disrupt oil exports unless violence against the protesters stopped. Sketchy reports of protesters in cities just outside Tripoli preparing to descent on the capitol have also come in. Issandr El Amrani is reporting that airports have been sabotaged in order to impede the arrival of mercenaries, that oil companies are preparing evacuations, and that at least one major oil port has been shut down.
In the midst of all that, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, feted here in the NYT in an article of the “pro-western reformer” genre in which that publication specializes, appeared on Libyan state television in a rambling speech in which he blamed the protests on: outside Libyans in Europe and America hoping to spark a civil war so they can come in and rule the country, Islamist forces hoping to set up independent emirates, drugs, conspiracies by outside “Arab brethren” and Africans, and “mistakes on both sides” (namely protesters attacking security forces and security forces unprepared to deal with attacks) which had led to unfortunate deaths.
He raised the specters of the break-up of the country, civil war, imperialist intervention, the disappearance of the social benefits of oil wealth (I imagine that many Libyans found this particularly risible) and called for a general assembly for national dialogue the General People’s Congress to discuss reform tomorrow, which I can’t imagine could possibly be anything more than theater that will fail to convince to protesters, while promising constitutional reform, democracy, etc. etc., which in any case, he says, the Libyan government had already been in the process of implementing.
Embedded throughout the address were barely veiled threats of greater bloodshed–“We all have guns” he said at one point.
And switching focus to Bahrain for a brief moment: protesters have retaken Pearl Square in Manama and in the current absence of security forces have begun to set up a tent city similar to what we saw in Tahrir, calls for the fall of the monarchy appear to have solidified, and strikes have begun that have affected “some companies and some government facilities,” according to Al Jazeera’s James Bays, and have led to school closures.
