Gaddafi angry over NATO funding for Libyan rebels

MUAMMAR GADDAFI’S regime reacted angrily to a NATO-led decision to provide funding to the three-month-old rebellion against his rule in Libya, describing as “piracy” plans to tap its assets frozen abroad.

The fund, set up at a meeting of the International Contact Group on Libya in Rome, is intended to provide an emergency lifeline to the rebels, whose provisional administration has no source of financing to replace receipts from oil exports which have come to a virtual halt.

It will initially receive international donations, while blocked assets — estimated to be worth €40 billion in Europe and the United States — will be used to finance it at a later date.

Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini said €172 million was already available in immediate humanitarian aid. Wealthy Gulf states Kuwait and Qatar have pledged to be major donors.

The funds being made available are far less than the €2bn that had been sought by the rebels but their leader, Mahmud Jibril, said: “It’s a good start,” adding that it is “a six-month budget”.

French foreign minister Alain Juppe said the new fund — to be managed alternately by France and Italy, the two European governments which have recognised the rebel administration — could be up and running “within weeks”.

He acknowledged that it would take longer to tap Libyan government assets frozen abroad under UN sanctions to secure a longer-term credit line as sought by the rebels. Unblocking the assets “poses legal problems”, Juppe said.

The prospect of seeing funds it regards as its own used to finance the rebellion against it has infuriated Gaddafi’s government.

“Libya still, according to the international law, is one sovereign state and any use of the frozen assets, it’s like piracy on the high seas,” deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaim said.

He claimed there would be no let-up in their attempts to block off the maritime lifeline to the besieged city of Misrata — the rebels’ last bastion in the west.

“We will not allow those ships to bring arms to the city and then to evacuate some criminals,” he said, after an International Organisation for Migration ship offloaded supplies and onloaded refugees at the city’s port amid shelling by Gaddafi forces on Wednesday.

Amnesty International said the government’s two-month siege of Misrata might amount to a war crime.