Libya’s man at UN lambasts Libya Dawn

By Hadi Fornaji.

Tripoli, 11 November 2014:

Libya’s UN ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi has delivered a blistering attack on Libya Dawn in a speech . . .[restrict]to the Security Council, saying that under the cloak of religion it was paying young people to die in fighting against their brothers.

Dabbashi, whose protest resignation as Libya’s deputy head of UN mission when the Qaddafi began to try and crush the revolution in Benghazi,  proved an early signal of the regime’s collapse, was addressing the Security Council today after meetings with members of the International Criminal Court, including chief prosecutor Ms. Fatou Bensouda.

The ICC is still demanding that Qaddafi’s son Saif Islam, currently held in Zintan, be handed over for trial in the Hague on human rights and war crimes charges. Libya maintains that it is capable of trying Saif itself. The ICC has accepted that Qaddafi’s former security chief Abdullah Senussi, for whom it once issued an arrest warrant, can receive a fair trial in Libya.

Dabbashi said that Libya was committed to the pursuit of justice. “But as you know, in any country justice is linked to security and security is linked to the authority of the state … over all its territory. Unfortunately that is not the case in Libya today”.

The Libyan government was not disclaiming its obligations in terms of justice, he said, but the international community needed to be alert to the difficulties it faced in meeting those obligations, especially in the parts of the country that it did not control.

Libya, he said, was  the victim of armed groups that were “ravaging the body of the state”, destroying resources and spreading despair and hatred in the hearts of Libyan.

Rebel leaders “taking cover under the cloak of religion, are paying young people to die in the fighting against their brothers, and the destruction of their property and the property of the state”.

He maintained rebel politicians were really interested in money and were using plundered funds to buy properties in Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, sending their families overseas and educating their children abroad at public expense.

“Unfortunately, they are a group of hypocrites, luring our children with money to be fuel for the war”.  Their real aim, he said was “to continue the fighting to frustrate the government and obstruct the preparation and adoption of the new constitution, so that they could perpetuate the chaos and continue looting state resources”. [/restrict]