Loyalists of ex-general invade the parliament
TRIPOLI, Libya — Heavily armed men stormed Libya’s parliament yesterday and demanded its suspension while claiming loyalty to a renegade army general who has vowed to purge the country of Islamist militants.
Smoke rose over parliament after gunmen attacked and then withdrew. Gunfire erupted across Tripoli, where rival militias clashed in some of the worst violence in the city since the end of the 2011 war against Moammar Gadhafi.
Details of who was involved in yesterday’s chaotic attack were unclear, but loyalists of retired Gen. Khalifa Hifter said his forces and militia allies had planned the parliament assault in a campaign to rid Libya of Islamist hardliners.
Any alliance of militias lining up against Islamist groups threatens to deepen chaos in the OPEC oil producer, where a fragile government already struggles to gain legitimacy and impose authority over brigades of former fighters.
“We announce the freezing of the GNC,” Col. Mukhtar Fernana, a former military police officer from the Zintan region, read in a statement on al-Ahrar TV.
Hifter’s spokesman, Mohamed al-Hejazi, said Fernana’s group is allied to the former general.
Fernana said the movement was not a coup, but he said the parliament has no legitimacy and should hand over power to a 60-member body that was recently elected to rewrite Libya’s constitution.
It was not clear how much backing Hifter’s men have within Libya’s nascent regular armed forces and the country’s powerful brigades of former rebels, or whether the parliament was fully under government control after the attack.
Justice Minister Saleh al-Mergani condemned the assault on parliament and rejected the group’s demands.
“The government demands an immediate stop to military action and use of force to express political opinion,” he told a news conference calling for dialog.
The attackers kidnapped about 10 employees from the GNC, an official said. At least two people were killed and another 55 wounded in the violence, officials said.
Hifter, once a Gadhafi ally who turned against him over a 1980s war in Chad, fueled rumors of a coup in February when he appeared on television in uniform calling for a caretaker government to end Libya’s crisis.
Since the end of Gadhafi’s one-man rule, militias of ex-rebels have become de-facto powerbrokers in the vacuum of Libya’s political chaos, carving out fiefdoms and exercising their military muscle to make demands on the state.
But the most powerful, heavily armed brigades are rivals— the Zintans and the Misratans— loosely allied with competing political factions battling to define what kind of state Libya should become three years after Gadhafi’s fall.
Compounding the chaos, another former rebel commander, Ibrahim Jathran, who occupied eastern oil ports last summer, said he supported suspending parliament and handing over legislative power to the constitutional-drafting body.
His protest to demand more federal autonomy and a greater share of oil wealth for his eastern region has helped cut Libya’s crude output to around 200,000 barrels per day from 1.4 million before the summer.
On Saturday, parliamentary speaker and military commander-inchief Nuri Abu Sahmain accused Hifter of trying to stage a coup. Several reports said Sahmain had been kidnapped after yesterday’s attack, but he denied that.
Hifter had already sent his fighters into Benghazi on Friday against Islamist militants based there, claiming Libya’s government had failed to halt violence in the eastern city.
At least 40 people were killed in those clashes, which involved some air force helicopters.
Clashes broke out in two areas of Benghazi last night between Hifter’s forces and Islamist militants, and unknown attackers fired Grad rockets at the city’s airport, a security source said. There was no immediate report of casualties.