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By Ashraf Abdul Wahab
Tripoli, 18 June 2014:
Former prime minister Ali Zeidan, sacked by the GNC in March, has appeared in . . .[restrict]Beida and insisted in a TV interview today that that he was still Libya’s legitimate prime minister.
Zeidan, who has not been back since he fled the country on the day of his sacking, announced in a broadcast on Libya Al-Ahrar TV that he wanted the courts to rule that Congress’s decision to fire him had been illegal. He added that he had complete trust in Libyan justice. He made no comment on the premiership of Abdullah Al-Thinni who served in his own government as Minister of Defence.
His call on the courts to reinstate him is seen as an attempt to capitalise on the Supreme Court’s annulment of Congress’s decision appointing Ahmed Maetig as prime minister.
“I want to expose the corruption of Congress against the Libyan people,” he also told the TV interviewer. He declined to say what plans he had.
Shortly after he arrived, he met political activists and elders from the Jebel Akhdar in Shahat.
It is reported that this evening he was to meet Ali Tarhouni, the head of the Constitutional Assembly, which is based in Beida. Tarhouni was a minister in the National Transitional Council for which Zeidan served as ambassador to the European Union.
Zeidan flew in around noon today from Egypt where it is said that he met President Abdel-Fattah Sisi. He said that he would be staying in Beida for the moment.
His choice of Beida to return to Libya after some three months of self-imposed exile is ironic. Beida is viewed by many as the the real capital of Cyrenaica. When he was prime minister, Zeidan, who comes from Hun, was probably at his least safe in Cyrenaica.
He was so unpopular in the east that he rarely visited it. On one visit he was reported to have been effectively ordered out of Benghazi by Saiqa Commander Wanis Bukhamada.
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