Brega, March 03: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and the president of the Arab League agreed to a peace plan from Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to end the crisis in the North African country, a news network said on Thursday.
Chavez spoke to Gadhafi on Tuesday and laid out his proposal to seek a negotiated solution to the violence in Libya, Venezuela’s Information Minister Andres Izarra said, without giving more details.
A senior government official contacted by Reuters said he did not know what Gadhafi had said about Chavez’s idea to send representatives from several countries to Libya.
However, news network Al Jazeera said in a broadcast that during the call Gadhafi had accepted the plan, which would involve a commission from Latin America, Europe and the Middle East trying to reach a negotiated outcome between the Libyan leader and rebel forces.
Citing senior government sources, Al Jazeera’s Caracas Correspondent Dima Khatib said via her Twitter feed that Venezuela’s foreign minister had spoken with Arab League President Amr Moussa, who also agreed to the plan.
Earlier in the day Moussa took a tough line on Libya, saying the Arab League could impose a “no-fly zone” there to stop blood being spilled.
Chavez said the international community should seek a non-military solution to the conflict and accused the United States of exaggerating Libya’s problems to justify an invasion.
A former soldier who survived massive protests and a coup against him in 2002, Chavez is a close friend of Gaddafi and has visited him several times.
Despite the report, oil prices held near 2-year highs on Thursday due to fears unrest could spread to other OPEC producers.
U.S. crude rose 0.2 percent to $102.47 a barrel, not far from the recent peak at $103.41, while Brent crude was also 0.2 percent higher at $116.63, closing in on the Feb. 24 high near $120.
Rebel forces routed troops loyal to Gadhafi in a fierce, topsy-turvy battle over an oil port, scrambling over the dunes of a Mediterranean beach through shelling and an airstrike to corner their attackers. The daylong fighting blunted the regime’s first counteroffensive against opposition-held eastern Libya.
At least 10 anti-Gadhafi fighters were killed and 18 wounded in the battle over Brega, Libya’s second largest petroleum facility, which the opposition has held since last week. Citizen militias flowed in from a nearby city and from the opposition stronghold of Benghazi hours away to reinforce the defense, finally repelling the regime loyalists.
In Tripoli Wednesday, Gadhafi vowed that “we will fight until the last man and woman.” In a long, rambling speech he also warned that thousands of Libyans would die if U.S. and NATO forces intervened.
“We will not accept an intervention like that of the Italians that lasted decades,” Gadhafi said, referring to Italy’s colonial rule early in the 20th Century. “This will lead to a bloody war and thousands of Libyans will die if America and NATO enter Libya.”
The attack on Brega began just after dawn, when several hundred pro-Gadhafi forces in 50 trucks and SUVs mounted with machine guns descended on the port, driving out a small opposition contingent and seizing control of the oil facilities, port and airstrip.
But by afternoon, they had lost it all and had retreated to a university campus 5 miles away.
There, opposition fighters besieged them, clambering from the beach up a hill to the campus as mortars and heavy machine gun fire blasted around them, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. They took cover behind grassy dunes, firing back with assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. At one point a warplane struck in the dunes to try to disperse them, but it caused no casualties and the siege continued.
“The dogs have fled,” one middle-aged fighter shouted, waving his Kalashnikov over his head in victory after the Gadhafi forces withdrew from the town before nightfall. Cars honked their horns and many people fired assault rifles in the air in celebration.
Brega is the second-largest hydrocarbon complex in OPEC-member Libya. Amid the turmoil, exports from its ports have all but stopped with no ships coming to load up with crude and natural gas. Crude production in the southeastern oil fields that feed into the facility has been scaled back because storage facilities at Brega were filling up. General Manager Fathi Eissa said last week the facility has had to scale back production dramatically from 90,000 barrels of crude a day to just 11,000.
The unrest in Libya — which ranks about 17th among world oil producers and has Africa’s largest proven oil reserves — has sparked a major spike in world oil prices. Overall crude production has dropped from 1.6 million barrels per day to 850,000.
Gadhafi’s regime has been left in control of Libya’s northwest corner, centered on Tripoli, but even there several cities have fallen into rebel hands after residents rose up in protests, backed by mutinous army units and drove out Gadhafi loyalists.
In recent days, loyalists succeeded in regaining two of those towns — Gharyan, a strategic town in the Nafusa mountains south of Tripoli, and Sabratha, a small town west of the capital.
But NATO has already said that any such move would require a clear mandate from the U.N. Security Council, and that is unlikely because Russia, which has veto power in the council, has already rejected the idea.
Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate hearing that imposing a no-fly zone would be a “challenging” operation. “You would have to remove air defense capability in order to establish a no-fly zone, so no illusions here,” he said. “It would be a military operation.”
However, Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged consideration of a no-fly zone and said Gadhafi must go.
“The people of Libya do not ask for or need foreign troops on the ground. They are committed to doing what is necessary, but they do need the tools to prevent the slaughter of innocents on Libyan streets and I believe the global community cannot be on the sidelines while airplanes are allowed to bomb and strafe,” he said.
“A no fly-zone is not a long-term proposition and we should be ready to implement it as necessary,” he added.
–Agencies