Libyan Leader Qaddafi Vows Fight to ‘Last Man’

NEW YORK TIMES
BENGHAZI, Libya — With new fighting reported for a key oil center, Libya’s Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi denied on Wednesday that an uprising against him started with demonstrations against his four decades in power, renewing accusations that Islamist forces outside Libya were responsible.

In a rambling speech lasting over 90 minutes, he challenged the United Nations to send a fact-finding mission to confirm his version of events, the opposite of what much of the world believes about the latest outbreak of Arab discontent that has toppled the leaders of neighboring Tunisia and Egypt and threatened others in Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere.

“There were no demonstrations” in the eastern towns where the uprising started last month, Colonel Qaddafi told an indoor rally of loyalists to mark the 34th anniversary of the inception of what he called “people’s power” — part of his idiosyncratic prescription for government. “People came from outside Libya. Al Qaeda and the whole world knows that Al Qaeda does not take part in demonstrations.”

He called the rebels holding some cities “terrorists” and said loyalist forces would not surrender. “We will fight until the last man, the last woman, for Libya, from north, south, east and west,” he said.

Colonel Qaddafi was speaking in Tripoli as news reports said his forces had carried out bombing raids and were poised for counterattacks in areas held by his opponents.

The reports said government forces in trucks had overrun the lightly-defended rebel-held town of Brega, an oil-exporting terminal on the Libyan coast around 500 miles east of Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in the capital, Tripoli. But, in the confusion of the fighting, there were also reports that rebels were trying to retake the town.

The reports — supported by television images — spoke of an aerial attack on the town of Ajdabiyah, around 50 miles from Brega, where rebels have taken control of a large ammunition dump. The town lies on the western approaches to Benghazi, the rebel bastion, where dozens of semi-trained young volunteers stormed out of a military base on Wednesday, clambered onto a truck and said they were heading — unarmed — to the frontline. Other rebel fighters said they were hoping to load tanks on to transport vehicles to join the battle to the south of Benghazi.

At the Tripoli rally, Libyan state television showed Colonel Qaddafi exchanging clenched fist salutes with his supporters.

“It is the people who rule,” he said, repeating his assertion, disputed by many outsiders, that he wields no formal political power. “There is nothing else but people’s power,” he said. “There is no room for a king or guardian or master to replace people’s power,” he said.

After introducing the system in 1977, Colonel Qaddafi said, “I went back to my tent” — a reference to a favored form of accommodation reflecting his Bedouin roots. Scores of people attending the event, however, chanted an apparently choreographed slogan calling him their leader.

The developments on the ground came against a backdrop of debate in Western capitals about how to maintain pressure on Colonel Qaddafi to leave. Two American warships were reported to be sailing through the Suez Canal on their way to the Mediterranean on Wednesday while, on Libya’s western frontier with Tunisia, an exodus of migrant workers from Libya has reached “crisis point,” with tens of thousands of migrants, many of them Egyptians, unable to travel home.

The notion of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya has failed to draw support from either the United States or Russia and Libyan rebels say they are opposed to foreign intervention in a home-grown uprising against more than four decades of iron-handed rule by Colonel Qaddafi and, increasingly, his sons.