Libyan Unrest Spreads to More Citie

17 February 2011
By Alan Cowell

Exiled opponents of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said on Thursday that protests mirroring the turmoil in the Arab world had broken out in several parts of the country on a so-called Day of Rage to challenge his 41-year-old iron rule — the region’s longest.

But the state media in Libya offered a counter-narrative, showing Libyans waving green flags and shouting in support of Colonel Qaddafi, ignoring the exiles’ claims of a crackdown by security forces deploying snipers and helicopters against protesters.

The official JANA news agency said the government supporters wanted to affirm their “eternal unity with the brother leader of the revolution.”

There was little verifiable information about the protests, which began late on Tuesday in Benghazi, Libya’s restive second city, and spread to other areas. The scale of the protests was unclear, but in a land where any display of dissent or opposition is rapidly quashed the violence seemed to present a highly unusual open challenge to Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.

“Today the Libyans broke the barrier of fear, it is a new dawn,” Faiz Jibril, an opposition leader in exile told The Associated Press. But that assessment had yet to be tested against Colonel Qaddafi’s repressive internal security apparatus. Several opposition Web sites and exiled leaders said the authorities had deployed military snipers and commandos to suppress the unrest.

In the initial protests at least 14 people were injured and one killed, the Human Rights Watch advocacy group said on Thursday. But as the confrontation spread to the city of Al Beyda east of Benghazi, a Web site opposing Colonel Qaddafi said four protesters had been killed by government forces. Other accounts put the death toll higher.

Quryna, a privately owned newspaper in Benghazi, reported the firing of a local security chief over the violent crackdown in Al Beyda.

On Thursday, according to news reports from Tripoli, traffic moved freely on Omar al-Mokhtar street, the capital’s main thoroughfare, banks and shops were open and there was no increased security presence.

But Mohammad Ali Abdellah, the deputy leader of an exiled opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, said in a telephone interview from London that roads leading to Tripoli’s central Green Square had been closed off and that people living nearby had been warned in text messages from the authorities not to join any protests.

In Al Beyda, he said, hospital authorities had appealed for international help to cope with an influx of around 30 or 40 people with gunshot wounds after security forces opened fire on protests that erupted on Wednesday night and continued into early Thursday.

His account could not be immediately verified.

Mr. Abdellah also said separate protests broke out again on Thursday in Benghazi, Misratah, east of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, and Al-Kurah in the southeast. Other reports from opposition Web sites spoke of protests in several other places including Zentan, Rijban, southwest of Tripoli, and Shahat, southwest of Benghazi.

Video provided by an opposition leader showed marchers in Zentan chanting: “Down with Qaddafi. Down with the regime,” The A.P. said.

Colonel Qaddafi has sought to defuse the protests, doubling the salaries of state employees and releasing 110 accused Islamic militants. But some of the protests appear to draw on much older grievances. They were first set off on Tuesday night when the police arrested a human rights lawyer representing families of 1,000 detainees massacred in 1996 at the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Colonel Qaddafi took power in a bloodless coup in 1969 and has built his rule on a cult of personality and a network of family and tribal alliances supported by largess from Libya’s oil revenues.