Fearing Libya vacuum, ex-PM urges rapid vote

TRIPOLI: Libya's wartime rebel prime minister said his country faces a lengthy and dangerous power vacuum where foreign powers may exploit rival militias on the streets and he called for a dramatic acceleration in plans for full elections.
In an interview with , Mahmoud Jibril said he wanted a current timetable for drafting a constitution by mid-2013 to be scrapped in favor of a stripped-down process to produce a basic law and a government with full powers in just six months.
"I just want to shorten the period of this political vacuum," he said on Tuesday evening at the heavily guarded college campus on the outskirts of Tripoli that houses the interim leadership, the National Transitional Council.
"The more we prolong this period, it's very dangerous for the national unity of this country. Too many actors started to intervene in Libyan politics," added Jibril, who stepped down from the NTC executive two weeks ago after the country was declared "liberated" following the killing of Muammar Qaddafi.
"This is a political vacuum which can be filled by any power, whether a foreign power or an internal power which has weapons in its hands ... It's not healthy for the security of this country," Jibril said.
He declined to be specific about where he saw external or internal threats. But Jibril, a US-trained planning consultant who abandoned a post in the Qaddafi administration and became the face of the Libyan revolt as he traveled the world drumming up support, has been critical especially of backing given by the emir of Qatar to one armed Islamist group.
"Any foreign power," he said, "whether it's allied with any internal actors or not, which has its own agenda, might utilize and exploit this political vacuum to start shaping the future of this country and this is totally unacceptable."
He also said he feared that Qaddafi's son and heir apparent Seif Al-Islam and intelligence chief Abdullah Al-Senussi, both on the run from international war crimes prosecutors and possibly hiding in the Sahara, still posed a threat.
Describing the delay in capturing them as "not healthy at all," he said: "They are very capable of fomenting every kind of instability that you can think of."
Election timetable
At present, a timetable agreed by the NTC in August, before its motley forces overran the capital, sets a timetable for full democracy that would not see a constitution drafted for another year or more and a parliament and government with a full popular mandate elected only in 2013. First, the 51-member NTC is expected to approve an interim cabinet chosen by incoming premier Abdurrahim El-Keib by next week. That administration has until June to hold an election to an interim assembly that must oversee the drafting of a constitution, put it to a referendum and then run elections.
Jibril wants instead a truncated process that would cut out the stage of elections before drafting a constitution. Rather than elect a 200-strong assembly next year, he said, the unelected NTC should be expanded to some 130-140 members by drafting in more women, young people and, crucially, the heads of the varied militia organizations set up in Libya's cities. This body, which would include those who now wield the power of the gun in the aftermath of the war, would then, Jibril argued, choose a panel to draft a constitution, put it to a plebiscite and stage full elections much faster. "Just in a period of six months, you can have a parliament," he said. (Agencies)


2011-11-16



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